BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 578: The Secret Sauce Behind Short-Term Rental Success (Part 1) w/Rob Abasolo
Episode Date: March 3, 2022Short-term rentals have taken the world by storm. Over the past two decades, the bed and breakfast type business has fallen prey to the more scalable short-term rental model. Real estate investors qui...ckly realized that they could capitalize on the long-term equity gain of rental properties with the cash flow of hotels in one highly-lucrative asset class. Thus, the rise of the short-term rental, VRBO, and Airbnb investor was born. Arguably the most notable short-term rental investor in the space today is good friend of the show, Rob Abasolo. Rob is such a pioneer in the short-term rental investing area, that veteran agent, broker, and investor David Greene, has partnered up with him to collectively build their cash-flowing, equity-increasing empire together. With dozens of deals under both of their belts, Rob and David walk through the five steps that it takes to find success in the short-term rental space. This episode is split up into two sections, with the latter coming out right after this one. In this show, Rob dives deep into finding a short-term rental market that fits your needs and goals, choosing a location that specifically benefits you as the investor, the different types of short-term rentals, and how to build a vacation rental strategy that will match your goals for financial independence. Whether you’re thinking of buying a snowy chateau or a desert domicile, Rob and David will help you put the pieces together so you can build a strong portfolio that will benefit you for decades to come. In This Episode We Cover: Choosing a short-term rental market and what aspects to look for Cash flow vs. appreciation and which matters more when it comes to STR investing The four types of short-term rental markets and which have the best chance of success Seasonality and factoring it into your revenue and profit calculations The risks of investing in vacation rental markets and how to scale your portfolio faster And So Much More! Links from the Show: BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Youtube Channel Airbnb Brian Chesky's Linkedn profile Julian (San Diego, California) town profile Eureka Springs City (Arkansas) profile Waco City (Texas) profile Chip and Joanna Gaines HGTV profile Copperopolis Town (Calaveras County, California) profile AirDNA Destin City (Florida) profile Gatlinburg City (Tennessee) profile Great Smoky Mountains Zillow Redfin Robuilt YouTube Channel: HOW MUCH MONEY MY TINY HOUSES MAKE and why Airbnb is the best way to make passive income Robuilt YouTube Channel: This is exactly how much your property will make on Airbnb Check the full show notes here: https://biggerpockets.com/blog/biggerpockets-podcast-578 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This is the Bigger Pockets podcast, show 578.
When I built my tiny house, I was like, hey, if I can just build this cool tiny house
and break even, like, hey, all good news over here, right?
But then it actually ended up being a cash cow, and that was just a bonus for me, you know?
And I was like, this is great.
Like, I get this house that I can enjoy, or theoretically I can enjoy, and it pays for itself
and I make money on it.
What's going on?
Everyone, it is David Green, your host of the Bigger Pockets podcast, here with a very special
episode for you today. But before we get into that, I want to let you know that if you are looking
for a way to build financial freedom through real estate, if you want to have more control and autonomy
over your life, if you value the time that has been given to you and you want to use it in ways
that you feel our best for you and your family, this is a place to be. Bigger pockets is a community
of over 2 million members on a journey exactly like the one that you are on, trying to
accomplish the same things you are. And our goal here is to bring you as many resources, support,
as we possibly can to help you meet that goal. One way we do that is with this podcast, where we bring
in different guests, where we bring in different speakers, where we bring in different experts to
share with you what they did to accomplish exactly what you're trying to do, the niche, the strategy,
the style that they use to get where they're going. We also have an amazing website with forums
where you can ask questions that people will answer, with blog articles where you can read and
gain other people's wisdom, and with a lot of support like real estate agents or different
support pieces that will help you achieve your goal that you can find through the website.
Now, on today's podcast episode, I am here with my good friend and co-host, Rob Olasolo.
Oh, close.
Rob Abas Solo.
There we go.
There we go.
That was a thing.
When Brandon did this show, he always messed up people's last names.
And I think that curse has been given to me.
I just messed that up.
Hey, for you, I will go by Rob Ola Solo.
Don't worry.
That's funny.
I wonder where Abba solo, why I couldn't get.
Maybe it's because of the band Abba.
It just feels wrong.
So today will be a solo show with Aba Solo himself.
We are going to be bringing you more episodes where we dive deep into a specific strategy,
property niche, giving you more detailed and nuanced information so that you can follow in the footsteps.
And today I'm being joined by Rob because he and I are actually partnering on buying short-term rentals.
And we are going to break down, this is going to be the first of a three-part series,
the process that we are using to put them under contract and manage them.
So today we're going to be focusing on choosing a location, a strategy, and a property
type specifically for short-term rentals.
And I couldn't think of a better person to join me than Rob.
Rob, welcome to the show.
Hello, hello, hello.
Man, I am really excited to do this because there are so many questions and apprehensions,
I think, about getting into short-term rentals.
It's kind of all the new rage for a lot of people right now.
And this episode, we get into some pretty nitty-gritty stuff.
I mean, we really talk about the concepts that we abide by ourselves when choosing a market,
proximity to locations, availability of vendors, boots on the ground, all that kind of stuff.
So I think people are going to have a pretty good understanding of where to get started after listening to today's episode.
Yeah, and we can get into it right now.
Basically, what we're going to be sharing with everybody is how to choose a location, a strategy, and a property type.
So this is where it starts when you're trying to say, hey, I want to get into short-term rentals.
What do I do?
this is what Rob and I believe is where you should start. We have a five-step system that we're
going to be sharing with you today. And step number one is going to be looking into the strengths
of different markets. So, Rob, in your experience, what is the way that you sort of categorize
different markets? Like, there tends to be different. Listen, I'd love to tell you all about it,
my friend. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick
coverage check can be fast, easy, and one of these smartest ways to
protect and even improve your property's cash flow. As the months get colder, frozen pipes,
icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims. And
traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly. That's
why more real estate investors are turning to steadily. They focus exclusively on landlords,
whether it's a single-family rental, a Burr Builders Risk Policy, or midterm holiday guests.
You get fast quotes, flexible coverage, and protection for property damage, liability, and
and even loss of rental income.
Now is the perfect time to review your rates and coverage.
Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance.
Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor.
Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance.
But a quick coverage check can be fast, easy,
and one of these smartest ways to protect and even improve your property's cash flow.
As the months get colder, frozen pipes, icy walkways,
and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood
of claims. And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly
or smoothly. That's why more real estate investors are turning too steadily. They focus exclusively
on landlords, whether it's a single-family rental, a burr-builders risk policy, or midterm holiday
guests. You get fast quotes, flexible coverage, and protection for property damage, liability,
and even loss of rental income. Now is the perfect time to review your rates and coverage.
Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance.
Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor.
Okay, we're going to shift gears for a minute to cover something important, especially for new landlords.
The shows often talk about getting stuck doing everything ourselves and the cost of sweat equity.
The key question is simple. Is my time better spent elsewhere?
I use a tool that cuts down on a lot of landlord hassles.
And the wild part is, it's just $12 a month.
It handles rental screenings, rent collection, maintenance requests, and accounting, all in one platform via a mobile app or desktop.
It saves me time in tenant communication and keeps me organized for tax season.
It's called Rent Ready, and you can sign up for a six-month plan for just $1 with promo code BP 2025.
Pro users get it for free because we believe in it.
Just sign in through your pro account to get started.
Rent Ready helps ensure on-time rent with auto reminders, keeps communication professional,
and lets you post listings to multiple sites.
Check it out at RentReady.com slash Bigger Pockets.
That's RentR-E-D-I-com slash Bigger Pockets.
And now we will get into today's show.
Rob, as you were.
Yeah, so there are a lot of things for me that I've really taken into consideration when I'm
starting to narrow down my markets.
Obviously, there are certain markets that are very vacationer friendly, I suppose you
could say.
And this would be places like national parks where people are always visiting a beach town,
ski towns, all that kind of stuff.
But also one of the things that I like to consider is, is it not necessarily an up-and-coming
market, but is it a market that is getting a lot of.
of appreciation kind of year over year. And that's kind of one of the happy accidents of a lot of my
portfolio over the last couple of years for me personally is a lot of my portfolio has really
grown pretty significantly, specifically in the last two years, not really something that I
had anticipated because I was really aiming for just having high cash flowing units. But, you know,
that's always like the upside of real estate, right? The appreciation, the compounding interest,
as you were in the real estate industry. Very nice. So if I'm hearing you right, you're looking
at why are people visiting the area and is it likely to appreciate? So what are some of the factors
that you feel lead to markets appreciating? Well, one of the things for me is like, I think for the
most part right now we're in a travel surge. And so a lot of people are traveling like never before.
If you look at a lot of the data, if you look at even Brian Teske, the CEO of Airbnb,
he said that this year alone, they were going to need millions of new hosts in this upcoming year
because they can't keep up with demand.
So for me, I'm starting to look at very specifically where are people starting to travel the most.
And honestly, it's like a tried and trued method for me, but I'm always looking at national parks
because a lot of people have really been sleeping on National Park for a long time, I think.
And it wasn't really up until the whole pandemic and everything where people stopped
really traveling to some of the more known places like, you know, the Disney Worlds, right?
And they started hopping in their car and driving to the Gatlinburg.
or the, well, what are the national parks?
The arches or the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Zion, Joshua Tree,
all of those different places now are seeing such a surge in visitation right now.
I think the Smoky Mountains specifically saw like 1 to 2 million more visitors in the last
year than ever before, which is like huge.
So just in general right there, now that the amount of traffic that's going to those
different places means that there's way more demand.
And because there's way more demand, well, now investors are starting to catch on and get
into those markets, and that right there starts driving up prices quite a bit.
That's a really good point. So we typically break it down into three types of places or three
types of ways people will visit an area. The first is they get in a plane and fly there.
That would probably be Disney World. You're going to go to Disney World. You got to go to
Orlando to get there. You're going to fly there. You need a place to stay. You look for a short-term
rental. The next would be a place you would drive for like a weekend vacation. These would be
national parks a lot of the time, like what Rob is mentioning. If you live in Tennessee, you're going to go
of the Smoky Mountains. You live in Southern California, you're going to go to Joshua Tree.
So those are places where people also look to find a place to stay while they're there.
The stays might be a little bit shorter, but they're typically frequented by people who live
somewhat close to that, at least within driving proximity. And then the third would be like
career-related reasons or occupational-related reasons where you're traveling for work, maybe you're
a traveling nurse or you're going for a business meeting somewhere. You're going to attend a conference
and you have to stay somewhere and you don't want to stay in a hotel. So just, just
understanding that from a kind of a high level, like which of these areas your tenants are going to be
coming from will help. We also look at, is this a market that is stronger at cash flowing right now?
Or is this a market that we think has future growth? We think that there's going to be equity that's
built in both the revenue that comes in in the future, as well as the value of the property
itself that you're going to be buying. So, Rob, what are some of the things you look for in both of
those two different strategies to try to maximize your efficiency? Well, you know, if I'm being
honest, like when I got started in short-term rentals in general, like my M.O. was cash flow. That's really
all I cared about, right? Because, you know, a lot of the people getting started in short-term rentals,
they see this opportunity to, well, and just real estate in general, we all want to leave that
W-2 so that we can focus on being a real estate investor. And so for me, my whole strategy was buying a
place at a very fair price, right? And then having a huge cash on cash return. That was always the gold
standard. But really, it hasn't been until recently where, you know, once you're going to be a lot of
kind of settle that up. And once you establish like a pretty good lifestyle and you've got a good
budget and you stick into it, then that's when appreciation really starts being a lot more important.
So I've really kind of shifted my mentality a little bit. Like it's not that I don't like cash flow,
obviously, like we all do. But now I'm really starting to target places that I think have a little
bit more appreciation. And so, you know, obviously you want both. There's like a balance, right? But
for the most part, I am looking for, I'm trying to like look at like where people are going, right?
So if you keep up with like a lot of the trends, obviously one of the big one right now,
a lot of people are leaving California and they're going to a bunch of different places.
They're going to Arizona.
They're going to Texas.
They're going to Florida and so many other places.
So for me, I start asking myself questions like, well, where are they going?
And like what are the different locations that I can really start to capitalize?
And one of those for me was like Arizona.
That's where I've started putting a lot of emphasis on it because it's really close to California.
Right.
like that's like the one of the logical steps but obviously Texas is like a really big place too right now
so for me I'm looking at not just travel trends but like overall trends in like where people are
migrating to in and around the U.S. So what type of investors should be looking for a more
cash flow heavy opportunity and what type of investors should be looking a little bit more for
like future growth and appreciation? The people that are starting out like they're going to be a lot
more focused, I think, on the cash flow side of things. And I get it. Like, I have a couple students who
they're so focused on the cash on cash metric. Obviously, that's the metric, right? But I'm like,
guys, there's a little bit more to real estate investing than your cash on cash return. There's
tax deductions. There's appreciation. There's paydown and all that kind of stuff. So, and again,
as someone that was there and like not too long ago, like I understand that cash flow is really
important. So I think it's important when you're first starting out for like a newbie investor to
kind of aim for that because it helps you just build up your amount of cash that you can then put
into the next investment. And obviously there's like an argument for focusing on appreciation first too,
but for me as someone that kind of did that at the very beginning of their portfolio career,
like I think that newbie investors are a little bit more prone to take that cash flow side of
things. Okay. And probably also, I would say people that don't have as much cash, right? Cash flow is more
important when you don't have a lot of cash flow in other parts of your life. But maybe if you're a little
more financially successful or comfortable, that isn't as important to you. And that's typically
why the wealthier people tend to look at appreciation. The last little, I'll leave a little cherry on
top of the Sunday of step number one by saying that the thing that a lot of people don't consider is the
time they're going to put into the property and the energy they're going to put into the property.
So that's another thing.
If you have 90 cashrolling properties, what you've done is created another job.
You have to manage 90 properties.
And if you're not managing it, you're managing the person who's managing it.
So there is a point of diminishing returns where if you just continue chasing after the same type of property,
it starts to have a negative effect on your life and you lose the freedom that you were trying to gain in the first place by getting these deals.
Anything you want to add on that?
Yeah.
So I kind of want to turn it back over to you because, you know, this is something that you and I have talked about quite a bit in like this first deal.
And obviously you, you're a big fan of appreciation.
So I'm kind of curious, just hearing it from you, when do you think an investor or what kind of investors should really be focusing on appreciation versus cash flow?
The first thing I want to address is the belief that appreciation is not guaranteed.
It's speculative, but cash flow is guaranteed.
If you're looking at it from that prism, no matter what I say, you're just going to throw it off to the side and say that's heresy.
Cash flow is not guaranteed.
If you are a investor who owns a lot of properties and you try to live off the cash flow,
you know how difficult it is, how many things go wrong that make cash flow wildly inconsiderate,
or inconsistent, I should say.
And then the other thing I've noticed is my best cash-willing properties got there through
appreciation of the rent.
What it was renting for when I bought it is not what it's renting for now.
And that's why I'm getting a lot more cash flow.
So you had to break yourself out of the cycle of looking at an investment like it's a one-year
decision.
It's not.
It's a many-year decision.
And so if you look at a property and how it's going to perform over a long period of time,
properties that appreciate more are going to make you more money.
Now, it's not the concept of appreciation that I'm saying that you chase.
It's the area or the asset type that is going to increase in demand.
If more people want the type of asset that you own, it will naturally appreciate.
And in that sense, it's not speculative.
Like buying a very reliable thing that everyone's going to want is not a speculative move
that you're just, oh, I hope it appreciates because if it doesn't, I'm going to lose it.
You make sure you can afford it.
You make sure it cash flow is enough so that it can support you.
But you don't get rich off of cash flow.
Making $100 or $200 a unit is not going to make anybody wealthy.
It's just a lot of work.
So I started off chasing after properties only looking at ROI just like everyone else did
because I was in a job and I wanted to have enough cash flow coming in that I could leave
the job.
It wasn't the cash flow to make me wealthy.
It was a cash flow to support me breaking the sort of connection between needing that job.
And once I did, and I became a real estate agent, I didn't have a consistent income that I
always knew would be the same.
I started to shift a little bit more into more long-term investments, delaying gratification.
And then as I became more successful as a real estate agent, I built a team and then I built
a loan company and some of the other businesses I have, I shifted even more into delaying
gratification.
So maybe a better way than saying appreciation, which has a stigma of speculation, is how long can you
delay gratification?
If you're going to get cash flow right off the bat and it's going to stay that way for the rest
the time you own the property, you won't do as well as if the property becomes a little more desirable
every year than it was the year before. A hundred percent, man, you know, for me, really the big light bulb
moment here was like one of my first true Airbnbs and short-term rentals was the house that I bought in
L.A. I moved to L.A. I bought this house. It was really expensive. It was $624,000. And I really,
you know, I was spread thin when I bought that. I probably shouldn't have, but I was taking a bit of a
risk because I was like, I think, I think this is going to work out. So this.
house had a little 279 square foot studio apartment under it. And I was like, if I put this on Airbnb,
I think I can make $2,000 to $3,000 a month. And so it was like a house hack, if you will. And then I was
renting a guest room to my best friend. And I was making $800 a month off of that. And then I built
a tiny house in my backyard. And I was, you know, making, now I make like two, three, $3,000 a month on
Airbnb with that as well. So I've added all that up. And just in the past, like, since I've owned that
house in the past three, four years, the cash flow on it has been between $180,000 to $200,000,
which is awesome. Like, that's nothing to complain about. But when it hit me, I was like,
whoa, that property has doubled in value. It is now worth between $1.25 and $1.3 million.
And so just that appreciation right there is three times more than I've made in cash flow.
And that's when I was like, oh, David, you're making a lot of sense now, man.
Yeah, and here's the part that you start to see when you get deeper into investing.
When you take that appreciation, that's three times more than the cash flow and you reinvest
it into a different cash flow and property, you increase your cash flow by three times.
That is way, way faster than if you were just to save up money and keep buying cash flowing
properties to try to build it up to where your cash will be three times as much.
So it's not, I don't like people looking at like cash flow or appreciation.
They work together, right?
Like they each bet as you get more appreciation, you exchange it for more.
cash flow. When your cash flow starts to get stagnant because it's gone up too much, you can then sell it and you can
upgrade. That's kind of how real estate is designed. So it typically, when you start off, you're asking
yourself, am I going to buy a property that skews more towards cash flow or skews more to more depreciation?
But your portfolio isn't, shouldn't be determined by only one thing. So that being said, let's move on to
number two, which might be the most important part of our entire process. Step two is choosing your location,
the location that's right for you individually. We've got quite a few steps here. So I'm going to let you
run with that, Rob, and you can just tap me in for backup when you think you need it.
What I need to breathe a little bit? Sure thing, man. Well, okay, so obviously the world is your
oyster when you want to get started in Airbnb. I'm genuinely a believer that pretty much any
market you'll find success in the short-term rental industry. But when you're starting out,
obviously, it's a little bit more daunting to just like throw a dart at the U.S. map, right?
And just pick something that's long distance. So for me, you know, what I typically preach to a lot
of people is I want to see people starting out, if it's possible, in their backyard. Now, I don't
necessarily mean literally in your backyard, although I did actually literally start in my backyard,
but what I mean by this is I want people to be like two to three hours away from the actual
place that they're investing. And there are a couple of reasons for that. Two to three hours away
when you're at home and you're working a full-time job, that's still enough for you to get to that
property if something happens. If there's something major or catastrophic, if there's a fire,
if there's a roof leak or whatever there is, you can feasibly get there in a night.
And then also like during the weekend, you could also just go and visit. And you can go and
spruce things up. You can go and replace furniture. You can go and like do touch up cleanups,
all that kind of stuff. Right. So I think there's a lot of benefits to starting in your backyard
because you're in close proximity. So I think it makes you feel better. It feels a little less risky
that you can actually go and get there.
Whereas I still think it's far enough
to where you're not going to be dependent
on having to go there.
And I'll give you an example
of what I mean by this.
When I first started on Airbnb,
I was doing what's called rental arbitrage
and I lived 10 minutes away
from the apartment
that I was subleasing on Airbnb.
And every time something small happened,
I would go.
I felt obliged to go.
I felt like I had to go and take care of it.
If it was battery,
by the way, it was always batteries,
But if those batteries down in the remote, I would go and replace it.
If it was like the thermostat wasn't working, I would go and like click it up or down for the
guest or whatever it is.
And you just kind of feel this certain obligation to say like, well, it's not worth me hiring
someone for 20 bucks off a task grab to go and figure this out.
Yeah.
But obviously that's not going to be as feasible like, you know, my other property in Joshua
tree, two and a half hours away from L.A.
It's not really feasible or realistic for me to go and do that.
It forces me to take the crutch.
away and let my team step it.
Jordan Peterson has a quote that at one point I thought was kind of offensive, but then as I
listened to it more, it made more sense.
And as a parent, you might understand this.
He said, never let your kids do something that will make you dislike them.
So his argument was that when your children are acting in a certain way that just really,
really bothers you and you start to despise them, what we think we're doing is loving our kids
by just like holding it inside.
But what happens is that resentment leaks out.
They sense it.
and then they're damaged by the fact that mom or dad does not like me.
There must be something wrong with me.
It's a much more big problem than if you step in and say,
stop banging that pot.
I'm taking it away from you, right?
Like that little momentary sting that the kid feels from getting admonished
is better than the resentment that flows out of,
I just can't stand you because you keep doing this thing.
And I feel like that translates pretty nice into real estate
because what I've learned is that if I do any of the job that I don't like,
I take it out passive aggressively on real estate.
I have a relationship with real estate.
Okay.
So if I have to do too many of the things that cause David to be burned out,
take away my energy,
which for me would be driving to the house to change out the batteries or the thermostat
or dealing with like,
kind of like minutia is what I would call them.
Those are just challenging for me.
I will subconsciously stop putting my time into real estate.
I will stop respecting it.
I will stop cherishing it.
I will not honor that relationship like I should.
Whereas if I say,
this is really bugging me.
I need to find someone else to do it.
My relationship gets better.
I treat it better.
I'm happier with real estate and then I put more into it.
So I just want to encourage everybody.
If you like doing those things, keep doing them.
Like Brandon and I have gone back and forth.
And the ultimate conclusion I came to is there are certain things he likes doing in his
house, right?
He likes fixing stuff.
If it energizes you, do it because then you're going to want to buy more real estate.
But if you don't like doing that stuff like me, hire the person on TaskRabbit and let them do it
because that energizes me and then I will buy more real estate.
man that's so true and also let me just say i didn't even have to tap you in man that was like very seamless
that was a good back and forth right there but that's so true man like that first apartment was really
a life-changing apartment for me it really paved the way for financial freedom but i've got PTSD i got
PTSD from going there and you know my guest saying the remote's not working and i'm like are you
sure and they were like yes i'm sure and then i went and i was like well it seems to be working and they said
and oh, I was using the other remote.
And I was like, yeah.
So there are so many moments like that that happened.
And it's because I live so close to it that I just felt beholden to that apartment.
But the moment I started really assembling my team and my Airbnb Avengers, as we'll call it,
and we'll get to that later.
But the moment I started doing that and not being so in the weeds of my business,
that was the moment that I was like, oh, okay.
So it's out of grind, actually.
It's actually really quite fun.
It's a puzzle that you have to figure out.
So I think for me, being two to three hours away,
is that distance where you're like, okay, I'm not going to drive there after work. I'm not going to
go and fix that. I'm going to just find someone that can help me with that. So that's sort of why I
I really dive head first into. Like, if you can be close, that's great. But obviously, there are
going to be instances where investing long distance makes sense. So what are some of those
instances? Let's move on to number two there. When would you see that is making sense? Yeah. So this would
be in an instance where, for example, there are a lot of turnkey markets out there. So,
So, and what I mean by turnkey is like you buy the property and it already comes fully furnished.
So a couple examples of this would be the Smoky Mountains, Blue Ridge, Destin.
A lot of beach places that are like very popular STR locations.
Typically, people are selling those Airbnbs as a turnkey rental.
And so really, you do have to fly in to go and, you know, make sure that the place is actually what you bought and like the furniture is nice.
And you'll have to go and spruce the place up and replace furniture.
here and there, but it's so much easier. And I mean, so much easier than buying an empty house
in the middle of wherever, Chattanooga, Tennessee, driving out there, going, finding all the
furniture places, setting it up. I mean, that's a real hustle. That's a real grind to go out
and furnish a long-distance unit. Because A, like, if you're like me, I buy in areas where there
are national parks, there aren't necessarily like furniture stores or anything like that around.
So it's like very tough to find furniture for different Airbnb.
So I think if you're looking to start long distance and you don't necessarily want to start close to you,
I would try to identify some of those turnkey markets where short-term rentals are encouraged.
They're welcome.
They feed the economy.
And like I said, the Smoky Mountains is like a really great one that would do that.
Another instance in which I might consider investing in a long distance place, especially if I'm just starting out,
is if we have what we call boots on the ground.
And that just would mean that you have some kind of connection or someone that you know in the city that can help you out if stuff happens, right?
And so like this would mean if you have an aunt or an uncle that lives in the same city or a best friend or an old college roommate that you keep up with, anything like that where you can say, hey, I'm thinking about opening up this Airbnb in Akron, Ohio, for example.
I'll need someone to help me occasionally.
I'll try not to call you.
But would you be interested in helping me out anytime that, you know, someone burns down my house?
or something like that. And usually if I have some kind of connection like that, that immediately
mitigates a lot of risk for me because I know that I can call on someone if anything ever happens.
So I think that's kind of when you should start maybe considering doing the long distance thing,
although it's not particularly necessary. You know, that's actually in long distance real estate
investing, that concept. I call it a competitive advantage or sometimes we call it an unfair advantage,
but it's when you have a person local that has a skill set or at least that you can trust that gives you
advantage over the other people that are trying to buy in that market. When I wrote that book,
a lot of people's questions were, how do I find the market that has the highest ROI? I just want to
know the best one, and I'll figure it out from there. What I learned, at least from the way I did it,
was that if you're trying to find the best market, you end up just following the crowd, and you're
always in a super competitive area that everybody else is trying to get into. I could go back over the
10 years I've been investing and remember when Phoenix was the hot market, and then it moved into
Memphis was the hot market, and then Atlanta became the hot market, and then it moved into Tennessee
and Nashville was the hot. Like everyone just followed the same. Huntsville, Alabama had its moment.
Madison, Wisconsin had its moment. Austin, Texas had its moment. Now, like South Florida is kind of
having its moment. It's super challenging when you just throw yourself in the mix of every other
investor that's all converging on these market like locusts at one time. Instead, what I recommended
people do is find the market that you could be the most successful in and make it work there instead
that following the crowd. So that's definitely something I'd encourage people to do.
If you own a short-term rental, here's something worth knowing. Not all landlord policies
are built for your type of property. And with holiday bookings, chilly weather, and higher
guest turnover, having the right coverage is more important than ever. Steadily offers insurance
designed specifically for short-term rentals, covering property damage, liability, lost rental
income, and even unexpected issues like bedbugs. Steadily works exclusively with real estate investors. So
they understand the details that make short-term rentals unique,
and they build coverage to match it.
A quick review of your rates and coverage every year
can help you protect your property and your cash flow.
Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance.
Steadily, rental property insurance for the modern investor.
Most investors spend more time chasing deals
than reviewing their insurance.
But a quick coverage check can be fast, easy,
and one of these smartest ways to protect
and even improve your property's cash flow.
As the months get colder, frozen pipes,
icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims.
And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly.
That's why more real estate investors are turning to steadily.
They focus exclusively on landlords, whether it's a single-family rental, a burr-builder's risk policy, or midterm holiday guests.
You get fast quotes, flexible coverage, and protection for property damage, liability, and even loss of rental income.
Now is the perfect time to review your rates and coverage.
Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance.
Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor.
The rise of the tech savvy investors here.
You don't need a huge team or tons of overhead to manage rental properties.
Just the right tools.
So I want to tell you about how I use rent-ready to get ahead.
For landlords who treat their time like capital and recognize the cost of sweat equity,
this tool gives you everything you need to scale.
Rent collection, tenant screening, maintenance accounting,
so that you're organized come tax season,
and you can run numbers in preparation for future deals and more.
All in one platform via a mobile app or desktop.
Modern landlords don't just own property.
They optimize it.
Rent Ready will keep you organized, running leaner, and ready to grow.
Start with RentReady.com slash Bigger Pockets.
That's RentR-E-D-I.com slash Bigger Pockets.
And use code BP 2025 to get Rent Ready's six-month plan for a dollar.
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday.
How can you find amazing candidates fast?
Easy.
Just use Indeed.
When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need.
That means you can stop struggling to get your job notice on other job sites.
Indeed, sponsored job posts help you stand out and hire the right people quickly.
Your job post jumps straight to the top of the page where your ideal candidates are looking.
And it works.
Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored post.
The best part, no monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts.
you only pay for results.
And speaking of results,
in the minute I've been talking to you,
23 people just got hired through Indeed worldwide.
There's no need to wait any longer.
Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.
And listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit
to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash rookie.
Just go to Indeed.com slash rookie right now
and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.
That's indeed.com.
slash rookie. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, indeed is all you need. Now, we also have four categories
that we consider when looking into short-term rentals. You want to go over those. You mentioned them briefly,
but we'll cover them again before we move on. Yeah, let's officially state the POV here. So four categories
here. And again, there's no right or wrong here, but this is just a very concise way of explaining
where in the country I'm looking at. Of all that, it helps me kind of locate, like, it sets some
kind of beginning parameters, right? So number one is going to be national.
parks. Number two is going to be state parks. Number three is going to be eclectic towns. And number
four is going to be vacation destinations. So what I mean by all of this here would be national parks.
I think we know what that is. That would be like your Grand Canyon, Smoky Mountains, Zion,
Yosemite, all that kind of stuff. State parks would be smaller, but they still receive a decent
amount of visitation from the actual state itself. And then we get into eclectic towns. And so what I
mean by eclectic towns is like small towns that have some kind of draw or,
some reason that people go to. So if you think of places like outside of San Diego, there's
a area called Julian. A lot of people love going there, apple picking, they've got good pies.
There's just a drop. People love it. It's an adorable little town, right? Waco in between
Austin and Dallas, that's in between two very big cities. It's been popularized by-
Joanna Gaines. Yeah, exactly. So everyone, you know, it's a pit stop in between those two cities.
There are a bunch of like Eureka Springs is another one.
That's like there's cute shops and everywhere.
And like one shop is like, you know, vintage Italian sodas and then one's like vintage candy and, you know, that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
We've got a couple out here in California.
Like I think Copropolis is one.
They have this like old Western like fake city where you can go in through swinging doors.
And I remember as a kid we'd go there and there'd be like rock candy and you had these like fake horses you can sit on.
So there are people that do like to visit those places.
I think like a little bonus quick tip we should throw in here is look for places that kids want to go.
Like if as I grow, if I ever move out of real estate, what I will get into is either selling something involved with nostalgia or selling something that kids want.
Because I believe those are the two things that drive people to make decisions more than anything else.
Like when the first Transformers movie was shown, you might have been too young Rob to even remember that.
But I remember seeing that big transformer leg come down to be like, oh my God, they are doing Transformers.
performers. And I knew at that point I would pay anything to go see it because of the nostalgia factor. And then
the other one is kids. Kids just beat down their parents will just asking for the same thing over
and over and over. And when you finally let a kid have what they want, everybody feels so good
that finding properties in areas near where kids want to visit. That's why Disney World's so popular
Disneyland, some of these things. So I definitely think those are things to consider. Moving on,
the next thing you have is a place that you would want to visit occasionally. Tell me more about
why you think that's a good factor. So it's a
very important to have some kind of like draw or something that you like about a market,
A, because you have to go there, you know, like you're going to have to go there and actually
visit it and at least once or twice every couple of years, right? And so you want to have a reason
to go there. But ideally for me, like, if you follow a lot of the trends and a lot of the
investors in the space, a lot of them aren't necessarily full-time investors. They are just people
that want a short-term rental. Maybe they can't justify the expense of a second home, right? And
they'll go through a second home or a vacation home loan and put down 10% to get into a property.
And they'll be there for maybe one or two months a year, but they can't justify paying for the other
10 months, right? And so these are the types of investors that are really getting into the game right now.
And so if you're buying a second home because you want to use it, ideally, like, aside from the
actual investment part of it, it is nice if you could actually go visit, stay and enjoy it as a guest.
I don't do this enough, admittedly. When I built my tiny house and Joshua tree,
I was like, I've built the ultimate tiny house. I'm going to go and stay there all the time. And I've
really only stayed there like once or twice. It's fully booked. I love it. It's really great.
If I could, I have kids now. So a tiny house makes it a little bit tougher. But if I could,
I would. I have probably 14 Airbnbs or so. There might be 15 right now. But we have 14.
I've visited seven of them. The other seven I still actually haven't visited. They are long
distance. But I have aspirations to. I've picked out locations that I was like, I would like to go here
one day because I genuinely just, I hear good things and like I want the option to go and enjoy my
own property. Here's another reason that I like that. I feel like it mitigates risk. Now hear me out.
If you're buying a property solely for cash flow, you are only buying a business. You're putting a lot
of pressure on that property and yourself to perform having maximum vacancy. And then you're going to
spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect property. Then when you find the right, when you're
going to have to spend a lot of money to fix it up, it's just making your job hard, the higher your
expectations are what you expect of that. Kind of like, I'm going back to the real estate
relationships thing. If you have very high expectations of what you need from a partner,
it's going to be very difficult to find someone that can meet those needs. If you're a relatively
stable person that just wants someone to share life with, it's not that much pressure on your
partner and they're going to perform better, right? Like, I don't like putting a lot of pressure on
real estate to change our lives to meet all of our needs. And that's when people have the problem
where they're saying, I want a property, the 40% cash on cash return, 70% of ARV in grade A schools,
and they go through this list that they're never going to find. If you're finding a property that
you want to use and then the fact you can rent it out at the same time is sort of like,
I can't think of the word I'm trying to lick at here, but basically handle some of the responsibility
for your mortgage. There's a lot less pressure that's on you, right? You're going to buy it.
it because you want to use it and then you're going to have the mortgage offset by other people.
So it's like a super cheap vacation home or maybe it even pays for itself.
Even if it just broke even over 30 years of it going up in value and you paying out that
mortgage, you're going to make a buttload of money even if it never cash flowed.
And so I like maybe having at least one property or your first property sort of being that
vacation home.
You can get 10% down if it's a vacation home.
You're going to use it.
You can have family events there.
And then when you're not using it, you can rent it out.
That's my ultimate goal for what I'm doing for myself.
is to have probably 10 to 15 short-term rentals throughout the country in all the places that I want to
live. And I will just bounce around from place to place wherever I want to go. And when I'm not using
it, I rent it out. I mean, that's one of the most beautiful things about the short-term models.
You have that flexibility. It's hard when you try to take that model and force it to only be a cash-flowing
cow that also gives you passive income. Would you agree? Oh, yeah, 100%. When I built my tiny house,
I was like, hey, if I can just build this cool tiny house and break even, like, hey, all good
news over here, right? But then it actually ended up being a cash cow, and that was just a bonus for me,
you know? And I was like, this is great. Like, I get this house that I can enjoy, or theoretically,
I can enjoy, and it pays for itself and I make money on it. But I agree. I think that if you're getting
into it, and this is like, you just want to step into it. You want to derisk it a bit,
buying it as a second home where it breaks even. It's still a great investment over 30 years.
There's no question about it. And you will develop the skills to get cash cows, like what
Rob and I are looking at now. But, dude, you can't do that in your very first try. It just doesn't make sense.
You have to lower your own barrier to entry.
All right.
Next one, we have proximity to you.
We've kind of covered that.
I like this next one, availability of vendors.
Can you briefly cover why having available vendors close to a short term rental is so important?
Yeah, so you're not going to be the one that's actually necessarily managing it.
I mean, there's a couple schools of thoughts here.
I'm big into self-managing, so let me clarify what I mean.
The person that's actually going to be managing your property for the most part is going to be your cleaner.
They're going to be the ones that are reporting back to you.
They're going to say, hey, Rob, your toilet, you know, wax ring is not good.
It's leaking.
Your sink is leaking.
Your light bulbs are out, whatever, right?
So they are effectively like a pseudo property manager, but you still need to be in a market
where there are cleaners available.
You know, you need to be in a market that's relatively populated.
That's something that I look at quite a bit is like, can I find a handyman?
Can I find a contractor?
Can I find a pool service, a lawn service, a cleaner?
To me, this is so important because these are the people that are going to be managing
your house, like maintaining it, making sure that it's up to par. And if you have a tough time finding
a cleaner or a handy person, it's going to be really tough for you to ever actually run a business
because what's going to happen whenever something breaks. You can't fly there, right?
There's two components that I see to a business. One is the customers, and they have to be the
focus. And that would be that your tenants that are going to rent it from you in this case.
The other would be your employees. And that would be your handymen, your cleaners, your boots on
the ground people that are needed. You got to have both components. Did you agree to make a business
work?
especially in the short-term rental space.
Awesome. So the next one we have is boots on the ground.
We've sort of covered a little bit earlier as to why that helps having a competitive
advantage. So we've got five steps to go. I'm trying to get through here.
I like your statement here of how competitive is the market. Rob, you and I look at this
very frequently that, hey, how competitive is this market? We want to try to go where other
people aren't. I think I probably covered that a little bit earlier as well, talking about
how you don't want to follow the flock. The next one would be year-over-year projections of the
market. Can you share what you're looking for and why we are looking for the
those things. So this kind of goes back to the to the cash flow versus appreciation conversation that
we had earlier. But theoretically, it's kind of similar to what you're saying with like long-term
investing. You want your rents to theoretically follow appreciation, right? You want to raise rents
slowly over 30 years. Same thing is really going to be true for short-term rentals.
And I just want to make sure that year over year that I'm making more money. Now, right now in
2022, it's going to be a little tough to follow up 2020 and 2020.
2021 because of the COVID spikes that we had and all the travel surging. But theoretically,
that's going to be the case for us for the next couple of years. People are going to just
be traveling more and more and more because we've just realized as a nation that, oh, we miss
traveling. Like, let's get back to the ancient art of migrating across the country, if you will.
So I want to see that like a property that I buy is going to make more money like from a gross
revenue standpoint. And there are a couple tools that you can use for this. I use the air DNA has a
a little chart in there that will show you year over year over the past, I think over the past
two years, how much money a certain property has made and how much it's growing every single
month. And so that's been a really helpful way for me to analyze properties. Beautiful. And we do
look at that. It actually is very helpful, especially when we're trying to take a way to take two
properties and make them apples to apples. I find that in my investing career. Much of what I'm doing
is that as I'm saying, all right, we have all these options. How do we find a way to reduce all the
variables and try to draw them down to where they have all these things in common.
And from that point, see which one stands out as the best.
And that's where some of those tools help.
The last one that we have here under choosing your location is going to be seasonality.
Can you tell me what you mean by that?
Certain markets have highs and lows.
A really good example of this would be a lot of like destination markets.
When I say vacation destinations, I was talking about things like beach towns,
lake towns, ski towns, mountain towns, everything in between those, right?
And so if you look at a beach town, for example, one of the markets I was recently looking at was Destin.
Destin is on fire, basically, from like March to August.
But then, you know, it really slows down pretty significantly, especially November through March, for the most part.
And so if you're a new investor, seasonality is something that I really want you to keep in mind because it happens all the time where I'll have a student at buys a really great Airbnb that comes out.
But they close in January in the Smoky Mountains, for example.
and then they're like, Rob, the bookings aren't coming.
Like, did I make a bad investment?
What do I do? What do I do?
And I'm like, no, no, it's fine.
You just bought a place in the Smoky Mountains in January when no one is traveling
to the Smoky Mountains.
And so I really encourage people to look at what the seasonality is and really predict how much
they're going to make every single month and say, okay, if January and February are slow months,
let's take advantage of that.
Let's use that as an opportunity to renovate our cabin or whatever we have.
We're actually doing that right now in Gatlinburg.
we shut down our listing for January, February, and March.
And we're just going to do all of our renovations now.
I mean, we could have made some money in March, but not as much.
And so I said, well, hey, since it's going to be a dead zone anyways, why don't we go ahead
and get in there, remodel the kitchen, change out floors, paint everything.
So my partners are like, okay, sounds good.
And then that way, once the hot season comes...
It's going to be even hotter.
Yeah, exactly.
We're going to make more money.
So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
And just so you're not stressing out when you're not booking.
Yes, two things I'll add on that.
It's very similar in other businesses.
to have similar patterns. So in my real estate sales business, spring and summer is what I call
the hunger games, especially in the Bay Area. It is brutal. People are sacrificing their grandmothers
to get into a property. It is so, so hard to build a buy. So we are all hands on deck. Every person
that we have, we're trying to keep this thing going to go as far as we can. Then wintertime comes,
and it becomes much slower, much more manageable. We spend more time lead generating. That's always where I
work on improving the business. That's where we get better systems, better training, better curriculum. I get
most of my book writing done at that time. I pour into the employees at that time so that they are
ready when springtime comes and summertime comes to be better. So that's a great business tip that
you just shared. The other is when you're buying a property that will have fluctuations and
seasonality, it's only a problem if you're pulling out cash flow. This is actually a cash flow
problem. And when I say cash flow, I'm not meaning the ROI or near return. I mean literally like a business,
how cash flow is in and out. Construction companies have this problem where they have profitable
businesses, but at any given time, they might have all their cash out on a project and then they can't
pay their guys. They can't meet payroll. This happens all the time. Learning to manage your cash flow,
money coming in and out of your bank account is crucial if you're going to be in the short-term
rental game because you will have seasons that are very slow and seasons that are red-hot. What I find
humans tend to do is take a red-hot time and say, that's normal. That's what I expect all the time.
And then when they have a normal month, they say, well, this is terrible. Things aren't going well.
not so. This is why when we evaluate short-term rentals, we always use the metric of yearly revenue,
not monthly revenue like a long-term rental where the lease specifies the same amount is paid every
single month. So beware of that and then seasonality won't be a problem. Okay, moving on to step three here,
location is probably the most important one to start with and that's why we spent so much time covering that.
But this next one's important too, and this is strategy. They've chosen their location. Now they want to
find a strategy within that location. What are some of the things they should be looking at?
Well, when you're starting out, you really aren't necessarily going to be the best manager of your money.
And so I think this is where we need to really kind of get into the nitty-gritty of cash flow and like, how do we want to spend that cash?
Do we want to take a paycheck from this?
Do we want to let it stack up?
Do we want to reinvest it?
And for a lot of new investors, I really do encourage most Airbnb investors not to spend their money for the first year because it's a learning process and it's the ebbs and flows of seasonality.
and you're still figuring out how much a property is going to make.
And so if, for example, seasonality, if you're not really attuned to this kind of thing,
and you're like, oh, hey, man, I just made 15 grand last month in Destin.
And then you spend it all.
And then the next month you don't make any money.
Then now you still have to pay all of your bills and everything like that.
So I think you need to really start diving into how do you want to actually allot your money?
Do you want to keep it invested anywhere?
Do you want to keep it in your bank account?
You want to have reserves.
What about you, Dave?
Are you usually putting any kind of reserves on any of the types of properties?
that you're acquiring? I started that way. Then I got so many properties. I just like literally the
bookkeeping of trying to keep up with that cost more money than it was worth to do. So I moved from a
specific strategy of X amount of money for every property into a general principle. So now the way that I
have things set up is that all the cash flow from every property is going to go into the same account.
And out of that account is where I make repairs on specific properties. And then throughout the year,
I track which properties are profitable and which ones are not through the accounting. And I
I trim off the ones that aren't doing well, and I 1031 or I sell and move into bigger areas.
And the ones that are doing well, I ask myself, how could I make it do better?
So you and I have talked about this many, many times, like, hey, this property here would do
this much money at this time if we first buy it.
Let's look into pursuing this one, make it profitable, keep buying.
And then when we hit a slow season, like, this is that pattern where you're talking about of fluctuations.
Let's say that there's just nothing to buy because everyone knows that's going on kind of right now.
It's hard to get deals, right?
that's when we put our time towards, well, let's take what we already have and make it work better.
Where could we invest into it, rehab it, do the backyard, do some landscaping, add some fun things to it.
We've talked about ideas of adding a car that someone can rent on Turo when they go there.
Like, that's where the creative stuff comes out.
How do we make what we already have better?
That's kind of how I run my portfolio.
When it's green light, time to buy, that's the most important thing is you do everything you can
and put stuff in contract and grow.
And when you can't do that, just like with my real estate team, that's where I focus on
improving the efficiency of my agents, I do the same thing with my properties.
That makes sense because all of that basically comes to time, right? Like, it's all time management
to get into that, which I think is actually our next point here. And it's like, how much time
can you actually commit to your short-term rental? And I think this is a question that you
really have to decide pretty early on. Because if you're working a really busy job and let's
say that you're like in my past career advertising, it's like very common to work 60, 70, 80-hour
weeks, if you're doing that, you probably don't want to go.
buy a farm on 40 acres that has a couple campsites, right? This is a deal that you and I talked about.
There's a house that had eight different cabins on it. It was pumping out a net of 200, 250K.
You and I had to have the hard conversation of, can we actually give the time to this property,
even though it is a cash cow, can we actually manage eight units at once? And I think we decided,
let's try to find an equally expensive property. Maybe it'll be a little bit less of a return,
but we'll spend less time in the weeds of that.
That's a really good example.
I thought about that earlier when you were talking on the same topic.
If you're only looking at ROI, how much money will it generate?
What's my return going to be?
The decision becomes very easy.
You buy that eight cabin property that's way off in the middle of nowhere and it's
very hard to find vendors.
It's very hard to get boots on the ground.
The cleaners are going to be really difficult.
Getting someone to go out there and look at the septic tanks, all of that stuff.
You don't let me think about it.
You're just like, oh, that's the highest cash on cash return.
All systems go.
let's do it. And then you get married to that property and you're unhappy with your relationship
with real estate because it's not treating you very well. It's demanding. It's nagging constantly.
Fix me, fix me, fix me, fix me. Pay attention to me. I need something. And you're like,
what did I ever do this? I hate it. That's not what you want, right? So we just had the wisdom
to look at that and weigh all the factors and recognize, hey, if we spend less time but get a
smaller return somewhere else, we'll use that time to make much more money than it would
have been spent fixing all the issues that are going to come from that one property.
Yeah, man, I brought you that property and you basically, you shook me and you're like, Rob, your time is worth more, man. And I was like, you're right. We did have a moment, didn't we? Like, I sort of spoke into you. It was like with Goodwill hunting. Remember that? The Matt Damon and Robin Williams, like, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. You're like, I am worth more than that. I really, that was a good talk. Appreciate you sharing that. And then we put it on YouTube and then recited it line for line. We've rehearsed it, man. It was great. Aside from that, I mean, that's kind of on the extreme side of it. But I do want people to like.
really sit down and say, all right, how much time am I willing to put into managing a property?
Because if you say, I don't have any time, it's really going to dictate your strategy because
that means that you then have to go and give it to a property manager.
But if you have, I don't know, five to ten hours a week, then it's very feasible for you
to get in and manage it yourself.
And there was a time that people got used to 2010 through 2016, 17 or so, where you could
just buy a property that was a long-term rental.
And one of the benefits of that was they take less time.
Property manager runs it.
you answer a couple emails, there's not much to do once it's fixed. And so the returns were lower than
than what you could get, but there wasn't much time. And now if you don't have time, it's harder to make
money in real estate right now because many of the asset classes that still work will take more of your time.
Okay. Next one up. How much risk are you comfortable with? Stuff like regulations and HOAs. What do you have to say
about that? You know, this is going to really depend person to person. I typically am a little bit more of a
a risky fella, if you will, but there are things to consider. You know, HOA's for me,
aren't necessarily deal breakers, but they can be. I mean, 90% of the time they're a deal breaker.
If I go on to Redfin or Zillow and I see that, it's got a $15 per month HOA,
that's not really going to scare me quite as much as an HOA that's like $150 or $300 a month,
because I know that probably if it's $15 a month, probably they're maintaining.
They don't have as much control or power over the community if they're only bringing in that.
So that's kind of where I'm like placing my focus. It's like, how active is this HOA? Are there
actual bylaws? For the most part, it does kill a deal for me, but I've made exceptions to this many
times. And then obviously, regulatory risk is something that's like, I think the biggest risk in most
short-term rentals, is the city friendly? Is it receptive to short-term rentals? Does it have outdated
laws? Does it have laws that outlaw short-term rentals that aren't actually being enforced? That's
something that I'll look at too and say, okay, well, they were written in the 90s.
they weren't really thinking of Airbnb.
And so I might still make that decision.
But for the most part, for people starting out, like, I have a very diversified portfolio.
And so that's why when it comes to seasonality or regulation, I don't really have too much risk because I have
such a well-balanced.
I have a little bit of everything.
Whereas if you're first starting out, it's your first deal.
You don't really want to get into anything risky, like an HOA or regulation or seasonality,
because you don't really have a portfolio to back you up whenever stuff starts to dip.
Very good point.
How about the next thing? How fast should someone scale? How does that factor into strategy?
That will mostly depend on how fast they want to quit, which all of us obviously always want to quit
our nine to fives. But I think it's a marathon, not a sprint. It feels like a sprint. For anyone getting
into it, I mean, setting up your first Airbnb, it can be a lot of work, right? You got to go. You got to
get it pre-approved. You got to get an offer in. You got to get it accepted, inspections, furnished,
automations, hire your team. So it's very common for a lot of people to do that. We get that adrenaline
and we're like, yeah, let's do it again and again and again, hurt me.
But, you know, for the most part, I always tell people to like slow down a little bit because
that was me, man.
I was just like a bur phenom for a while there, right?
It just was like every day was cold, just burr constantly.
And then one day I woke up and I was like, I've adopted 55 problem cats from a shelter and
I'm trying to control them all.
I know. I see them in your background there.
But yeah, so like, I think you want to scale up according to how quickly you can save up any kind of reserve.
Very good point.
I tell people six months is a really nice padding that you can have for reserves.
If you can have that, then I think if you can do that and save up your down payment,
it's probably time to move on to the next one.
I have a video on my YouTube where I talk about sort of portfolio risk management that
would be really good to check out here with what I do to scale fast but still be conservative.
Okay, last one would be remodel pros and cons. What do you have for us there?
Well, I pretty much go into any specific Airbnb purchase or short-term rental purchase,
hopefully not having to do too much remodeling. I'm very picky about this. And this, you know,
when I was first starting out, I was all about the value ads. And I was all about like, yeah,
let's fix everything. But now for the most part, unless it's going to add significantly to the value,
like you and I have looked at a couple properties that would be a burster, right? A burr into an
STR. And that to me would make sense if it's going to add significant amount of money to the ADR,
the average daily rate. But for the most part, when I'm looking at a property, there are only a few
things that I'm actually willing to do. And honestly, I probably don't even, I would rather
just move on. But I'm willing to paint the interior of a house and the exterior of a house.
I'm willing to paint, well, no, I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to change the floors in a
house. And I'm willing to possibly paint the cabinets of a kitchen and put like new hard.
hardware. But for the most part, that's it. And then maybe like doorknobs. If I want to change
door knobs, I might do something like that. But that's all I really want to do on a short-term
rental because it's already hard enough getting the short-term rental set up and furnished and
automated and all your teams hired out. But to have to manage a remodel on top of that is not
something that I want to do as much these days. Although I do have a team that does assist me
with that kind of stuff. So if it's something that's like sub five to $10,000 as a remodel,
I'm willing to do it. What's your logic or rationale behind why?
you don't want a big remodel. Just the time needed because I'd rather move on to a turnkey property
that I can get like functioning as quickly as possible. I'll give you an example of how this works out
in real life because this is a good point. I bought a place. I've talked about it earlier in the East Bay,
almost 1.9 million and it's a 5,000 square foot house that's going to basically be broken into
smaller units and rent it out. During the remodel, it's a little over $10,000 a month that I have
to pay to carry that property. The permit process was not started.
when I was told that it was going to be started. So we were three months behind. So take $30,000 plus
whatever, you know, the four to five months of rehab is going to be plus the actual cost of rehab
itself. It will be years before the cash flow ever recovers like many years for that initial
money that I spent up front. Now, if this was a property bought as a short term rental to be a
cash flowing cow, that would be stupid. It's already just doesn't work. I made a mistake. In this case,
I'm looking to refinance it after some of the work is done, and that's how I'll get my cash back out.
But if it's not a burster, like what we talked about, this is why Rob is saying, I don't want to do a
big rehab, because the time it takes to do it as well as the money putting in is going to steal
money from you that you would have been generating when you were renting it out to different people.
So very good point there.
If you're going to add significant, like if you're going to add a tree house or some kind of
feature, like a hot tub or a tree house or a crow's nest around a tree.
Yeah. In my case, I'm converting a garage into.
to like 2,000 extra square feet of living space.
That's going to make the property worth quite a bit more, right?
That would make a big difference on Airbnb.
That's extra rooms.
You can now hold, I don't know, how many people can fit in that?
Like 10 people?
So it'll be a ton.
But what I was more saying is when I go to refinance that that extra 2,000 square feet is
going to up the value of the property, I will get that money back.
Now I don't have to wait however many years it takes to make back the 200,000,
$250,000 I lost.
I'm going to get that back on the refinance.
And now the time can start, sort of like the clock can start from
that point versus if you're not able to do that and you're just making a house look
prettier and it's already at the top of its value, you're starting from way behind if you try
to do a big remodel on a short-term rental. And that's one of the reasons people can sell them
for a premium if they're already ready to go and it still makes sense for the buyer to pay
that much money. All right, I hope you have enjoyed this show so far on how to buy your first
short-term rental property. Now, Rob and I got into so much detail that we actually ran out of time
And rather than trying to make you listen to a two-hour podcast, we are going to air part two
a couple days from now.
Now, what we went into today was some pretty important things that you want to start with
if you're looking at getting your property, the strengths of different markets, how to choose
the location, which is really important.
And then what strategy you're going to tackle going forward.
In the next show, we are going to talk about picking the property type, choosing the timeline
that you want to operate on, both if you're going to be in a partnership or with the property
itself and then a bonus step that we didn't know we were going to give you or you didn't know
we were going to give you, I should say, how to divvy up the work involved in what work to expect.
Now, that's not going to be the end of this series.
We're actually going to have two more episodes at least where we dive even deeper into how to
analyze these properties once you've got an individual property in mind and then how to manage
the operations of a property once you've got it.
So this is going to be pretty close to a short-term rental workshop.
You're getting a lot of information.
It's all free.
So I hope you've liked it.
please let me know in the comments what you think so far and keep an eye out for the next show
to air in a couple days. Rob, anything you want to leave people with before we get out of here.
Man, you know, that was fun. That's like the river flow, I thought. When you give me a mic and
some topics on Airbnb, you know I'm going to talk a lot. So hopefully it wasn't too rambly.
But man, if people want to hear from you, if they want to be enlightened on the social medias
when it comes to anything Airbnb, how can people find you, my friend?
They can find me at David Green 24. I'm actually in the process of hiring
a social media manager because everyone has told me how bad it is. So keep an eye out for that.
It's going to be better pretty soon once we find the person we're going to hire.
I'll take it. I should have just handed you the reins. That's a great point.
But yeah, that's where they can find me. And then keep an eye out because I've got some changes
that are coming. If they want to know what I'm doing, I actually have a text letter that we're
going to be putting out every single week that tells people. So if they go to DGT Live slash text letter,
they can sign up for that. Just like Brandon Turner has one. And you can kind of see what he's up to,
what's going on in his world, they can follow me there.
How about you?
If people want to learn more about this amazing insight you've shared, where can they find out?
There's always the YouTube's.
You know, I just actually released a video called This is exactly how much your short-term
rental is going to make, which will give you a little bit of an insight of what we're
going to be talking about a couple episodes from now where we actually deep dive into
the nuts and bolts of analyzing a short-term rental.
You can always find me on Instagram at Rob Built and TikTok at Rob Bill.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for joining me.
I could not do this without you.
Let me just say I don't think I could have picked a better partner.
I am very happy and proud that you and I are going to be linking at this together
and that we get to share our experience with the masses so that they can learn from it too.
I won't let you down, Cap.
Appreciate that.
This is David Green for Rob won't let me down.
I have a solo.
Signing off.
Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast.
Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.
Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer.
The show is produced by Ian K.
Copywriting is by Calicoke content.
And editing is by Exodus Media.
If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter,
please visit www.
www.
www.com.
The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only.
All host and participant opinions are their own.
Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk.
So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing.
You should only risk capital you can afford to lose.
And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results.
BiggerPockets LLC disclaims,
all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on
information presented in this podcast.
