KGCI: Real Estate on Air - How to Find Short-term Rental Goldmines with Avery Carl

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Welcome to Uncommon Real Estate, where it's all about finding creative solutions for real estate agents and investors. In exclusive mastermind conversations with some of the brightest minds in real estate, you'll learn how to earn an extra six figures a year. Don't follow the herd. Be Uncommon. Here are your hosts, multi-millionaire real estate agent and investor, Chris Craddock and Jeff Saferight. Welcome to another episode of the Uncommon Real Estate podcast. I'm your host, Chris Craddock. and I am super pumped about the topic that we are going to be going over today. We talk about two things, the cash machine and the wealth machine. How do you do the cash machine? Do more deals as a real estate agent.

Make more money. But if you only focus on the cash machine, you are going to be stuck on the hamster wheel of selling properties until you're 90. Nobody's ever been to a real estate agent's retirement party. It does not happen. So then you've got to build the wealth machine. And that is the thing that gets me jazzed up in the morning. morning. Wealth is when your money works harder than you work. Wealth is when you go on vacation,

your income doesn't go on vacation. You go to sleep and your income doesn't go to sleep. You get sick and your income doesn't get sick. That is wealth. And so today I am super pumped and excited to talk with Avery Carl. Avery, tell us a little bit about yourself, about your journey, about what you're doing. Give us some history, quick bio, and then we'll dive in. Yeah, yeah, sure. So my name's Avery Carl. I run the top team in the world at EXP for the last three years running. It's called the short-term shop. I'm a real estate investor with 250-ish doors, maybe 225. I just unloaded a couple hundred doors across the country, all different asset classes. But my favorite asset class and the one that we focus on selling at the short-term shop are short-term rentals or vacation

rentals. So our Airbnb properties, if you will. I got licensed in 2017, but my first real estate investment in 2015, but got licensed to do our own deals and then found that I was doing through investing in short-term rentals and self-managing our short-term rentals, what a lot of our clients wanted to do. So I started focusing on short-term rentals specifically, and the rest is history. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right. So what areas are you looking at what makes you say, okay, this is a short-term rental area that I want to be in?

So in terms of opening up a short-term shop office or just me buying a property? You're buying a property, and then we'll talk about short-term shop in a second, but as I said before, like I get jazzed about investments. So help me think about, help me think about what you're thinking about

when you're looking short-term rentals. Yeah. So I only buy in true vacation market. So mature vacation rental markets where it's been the normal thing for people to go there and rent something other than a hotel for decades. So you probably can think of a dozen places, maybe not a dozen, a handful of places that maybe you went with your parents when you were a kid that you didn't stay in a hotel. So somewhere where you stayed in like a beach house or a condo or a cabin or a lake house, something like that. So I like to focus on those types of markets. So

my properties are all in like the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, great Smoky Mountain National Park. We've got several beach houses and several different beach markets in Florida. So I like to stick to those types of areas that are dependent on tourism, don't have a lot of hotel presence because the whole economy of the local areas depend on the tourists coming and staying in short-term rentals. I like areas that this has been the norm for decades. So like Destin, Florida, where I live, my grandmother has been traveling from Mississippi to rent vacation rentals and Destin since the late 30s. So I like areas that have a lot of history of it because all the anti-short-term rental battles, things like that were fought decades ago. We're very stabilized

in these types of markets. So those are the types of markets that I like to be in. That's great. I'll tell you, we are on a lakehouse. We lived there for the month of July and we Airbnb it when we're not there. And man, there was a massive battle with our HOA that we just barely won. And I was like, this will be terrible. Like, you know, we're making a lot of money on it, but now it's, we break even, but we live there during the best parts of the year. And I was like, man, I do not want that to go away. It's nice to have people paying off your place. So now let's jump into the team. What does your team look like? Tell us a little bit more about that. What gave you the idea to do it like this? And then, yeah, just, let's just dive in. Yeah. We have 45 agents across 20 different markets, all again, the true vacation markets across the country. I was very reluctant to focus on short-term rentals. So when I first got my license, I was coming from the corporate world. I just quit my corporate job. And I was really, we were living in Nashville at the time. And so I really wanted to be a luxury agent in Nashville, which I mean, doesn't everybody

says, oh, I'm going to sell luxury, whatever. It's stupid. So anyway, I was trying, I was getting a lot of organic clients, people coming to buy with me, who were friends of friends who were like, oh, you're making how much on that cabin in the smokies? Help me buy one of those. Teach me how to manage it. And I really was scared of, quote, pigeonholing myself. I didn't want to be the short-term rental girl because the investment properties were cheaper. And I wanted to sell the big expensive luxury properties. And I had to do that by starting at the bottom of selling just any primary homes that I could. I was trying to be that agent for everyone, the jack of all trades. You call me to buy seller invest or buy your next. You can't do all of those things effectively,

not well anyway. So finally, it was the like dead of January. I was maybe not January yet. I remember I was super pregnant and it was very cold. And I was working with a friend of mine's parents who were moving to Tennessee and they ran me all over for two months. Every Saturday and Sunday for two months straight all over Middle Tennessee. I am talking like houses three hours away from each other. And I was just really trying, you know, every, every client that you serve well can send you three or four other people. So I really just would sell anything. I should have just let them go from the get-go. But so I went with the mom three or four weekends and then the dad came later. And he fired me on the first day because I didn't know where to find. I don't

really know what it's called the HUD plate maybe. Effectively, the serial number on a $50,000 mobile home. So he thought I was this big idiot because I couldn't find this serial number. I didn't know where it was. In the meantime, I'd sold $20 million worth of investment properties to investors that were trusting me with these huge investments. And I'm like, I'm not an idiot. Why is this person treating me like an idiot? So on the way home, I stopped and got some KFC, because remember I was super pregnant and driving home two hours from wherever the heck we were like, okay, you know what? The good, easy business, the business that I'm comfortable doing, the place that it is easiest for me to find clients is the short-term rental thing. So why are you running all over hell trying

to sell people these $50,000 mobile homes and getting fired and told that you're an idiot when the thing that you're good at is over here. Just pigeonhole yourself. That's fine. You will make more money by pigeonholing yourself. So that's what I did. That's great. That's great, which is in the niches, right? So tell me this. All right. So you started the team and were you living in the Smokies? Is that where you were at the time? No. So this is an interesting story too. So the Smokies is about three and a half hours from Nashville. And I worked my ass off that first year or two. I would drive twice a week from Nashville to the Smokies. I'd wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning, drive out there, do a batch a bunch of showings together or videos or whatever I needed to do.

And I just operated as if I lived there and just drove. And the agents who lived in the Smokies thought I was crazy. The agents who lived in Nashville thought I was crazy. They were like, why are you doing that? Why don't you just refer it out? And I'm like, because I want to have control of it. Because the people that I'm referring to, they don't own short-term rentals. They're not managing these short-term rentals.

They can't answer my client's questions. So I'm just going to do the work. And so I started, I was commuting from Nashville for the first four years to the Smokies. and then COVID hit, and I moved down to the area of Florida that one of our offices is in called the Emerald Coast, and that's my favorite place in the world. So we just moved down here and I work out of this office. But yeah, it was definitely like a, everybody thought I was crazy for the first few years. And maybe I was.

Yeah, no, no, no, I'll tell you, one of my buddies grew up in a trailer park in the, in the Smokies, and then joined the Air Force and got out, went through college and everything else, got out, and started a satellite company here in the D.C. area. I sold it for a gazilliony dollars and now it's like a gazillion Airbnb is down in the smokies. And so I've been down there so many times. I love it. I've stayed in a bunch of his houses. It is literally just an awesome, awesome area.

So yeah, no, I get it. And it's also super niche. And if you know, you know it, you know it. So I think that's incredible. So what was the start of expanding and scaling and what does that look like as far as, I mean, obviously you guys are doing a lot of business? How many transactions did you do last year as a team? We average about a thousand transactions a year. Okay.

So a thousand transactions in a year. And you said, how many agents? 45. 45 agents. Wow. So that's a super productive team. And what does that look like? What does your team look like?

One, how did you scale it? And then what is the system? Are people doing their own thing under your umbrella? Are you like, you know, Navy SEALs of this is how we operate? and this is our SOP and you follow it? Like, how does your team operate? Yeah, yeah. We started with just the office in the Smokies.

We also did some business in Nashville, but they were, they're super anti-short-term rental in Nashville, so we just scrapped that. But I noticed, so I bought a few cabins in the Smokies over, you know, the course of a couple years. And I said, okay, I really want a beach house. We need to get a beach house next. Let's go buy a beach house in Destin.

And I noticed that I wasn't the only investor who had that thought. a lot of my clients would come to me and say, hey, I really want to buy a beach house. Destin or Panama City seems like a good place. Is there a you that you know there that can help me the way you helped me in the Smokies? And there wasn't. And I said, why don't I just put a me down there? And then that way, they still have access to all of our trainings and tools and things. And they can still feel like I'm helping and consulting them. And then I have control of that agent. So I don't, I do not like doing referrals. I am very like, like you said, the Navy SEAL. of this, like we're doing it this way, and you are coming onto the team because so many people

are like, why don't you just do referrals? It's because you have no control over the quality that your clients are getting. Yeah, we just bring people onto the team. They work for us. They only, they take our leads. We don't sell any primary homes or long-term rentals, anything like that. If they want to help their friend, you know, buy a house, whatever, of course they can. But we only sell short-term rentals and we have a very specific process for doing this. And, we just over time as the short-term rental asset class kind of grew, I do a lot of social listening to where people are interested in buying where people want to buy, what's showing up on lists of best places to invest. And then if it's something I haven't heard of or where

someplace that we're not, I'll go through a vetting process of that market. So I need to see long-term tourism. I don't really like metro markets. There's a few that we've gotten into like Scottsdale or Sarasota that I call them like vacation-ish market. So there's a lot of vacationing happening, but it's still not totally dependent on tourism. I try to stay out in metro markets for the most part, though. I want to see good regulations, short-term rental friendly regulations, and I want to be able to see that enough of the total real estate production in that market is short-term rentals being bought and sold to support an agent their income there. So I would never put an agent like in a teeny tiny town where they're going to do five deals a year. They've got to be

able, it's got to have enough volume to, for an agent to be able to live. Yeah, I know that makes a lot of sense. All right. So you live in Destin now. You had a, you started up in Tennessee. So you have your team in Tennessee. You have your team in Destin. And now you mentioned Scottsdale is another place that you have. So let's say you have some people in Scottsdale. How, what does opening shop look like in Scottsdale for you? Let's say you're starting to send referrals or starting to send deals there or get deals there. what are you doing as far as recruiting agents? What's the conversation with agents? And then what does it look to build out? Yeah. So let me preface this by shamelessly plugging. We are always hiring. So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I work in a market that sounds like it might work for that. Contact me because we are always adding new markets because our clients, they want that diversity of market types and places. And maybe they don't want to have hurricanes. They don't want to have wildfires. So they want to find a market that doesn't have any number of things.

So reach out to me if you feel like you might want to be on the team. But what looks like... Before we get to the question, because obviously somebody may be listening to this that says, yeah, I'm interested. What does the avatar of somebody that you would want to be in business with look like? Because I know there's a lot of teams that are like, you know, can you fog a mirror? Okay, you're in, you know, but it sounds like your team is pretty productive. So what are you, what are you looking for?

So I am looking for a different thing than what, most team leaders are probably looking for. I don't care what your production is. I don't care if you're brand new. I can teach anybody to be an agent. What I'm looking for is an investor mindset. So we have gotten agents licensed before to join the team because they had the right mindset.

What tends to not work as well is maybe somebody who's been like a top producer in their market the past few years selling primary homes. It's really difficult to shift that mindset over to, okay, we're selling feelings and and futures over here. I guess you're selling futures in both. But like in the primary home space of, oh, well, I don't really like the way this feels versus selling investment properties

of really looking at it as an investment. And you know what? It doesn't matter that it doesn't have the biggest yard ever because that's not what makes money in this market. What makes money is you have this extra bedroom. Trying to shift people from that, oh, I sell primary homes to the mindset of being an investor and selling investment properties.

we really, really, we won't not hire you if you don't own investment properties, but if you have them, that really tells me like, okay, this person has the right mindset because they're doing it themselves. Okay, cool. All right. So now back before the rabbit trail, sorry, and that's my fault. Before the rabbit trail, so Scottsdale, how does a new market open up and what does that look like? So I'll, like I said, I'll do some social lists.

see what a lot of our clients where they want to invest. We've got a Facebook group with 70,000 people in there. So I'll just get in there and ask, where do you guys want to buy next? And if something keeps coming up, then I'll start to look into that. And when we hire an agent, you know, we bring them on the team. And it really doesn't require that much because I'm with EXP. So they're already licensed in every single state. I don't have to go ask a broker to find me a broker and find me an office space. Everything's pretty virtual. So that's nice. And we really just do an extensive amount of training for a couple weeks with these agents and teaching them our exact processes, you know, how to handle things, things that we don't do, which is really,

I think, more important than the things that we do because a lot of people, a lot of clients would be like, oh, my agent in Ohio did my final walkthrough for me. Why can't you do it? Let me tell you why, because that's a giant liability. And especially with investment properties, you know, investors are, they will come after you if you miss something. So, you know, just explaining the different liabilities with selling investment properties and processes, SOPs. And really all it takes, I just have to adjust some of my content. So we'll probably do like a my podcast has about a million downloads. We've been around for two and a half years. It's called a short term show. So we'll get that agent on there. We'll talk about the market. We'll get people

excited about it. Start sending leads that way. And that's really, you know, off to the races at that point. Right. Okay. Cool. And how long does it take for you to get somebody up and productive? And are you guys giving them leads or are they get generated their own? Like, how does that all play? So we generate all the leads. We don't even want our agents bothering with trying to generate their own leads because we generate enough to where, no, we need you to take care of what we're sending you. Don't worry about trying to do that. We need you to pay attention to what we're sending you. We'll generate the leads. Depending on the market, it usually only takes about 60 days. I would say at average,

more towards the max of 60 days for them to see their first closing. If you get 10 leads this week, somebody might close in 45 days, somebody might close in 60, but it'll typically, it takes a few weeks of looking for an investor to finally, you know, get under contract and get through the process. Okay. Got it. Got it. And with your marketing, obviously, because you're super niche, it's easier to market for something that is niche. What are you typically doing PC? Are you doing direct me. Like, what are you typically doing for your marketing? We are all organic. So it is all our own Google content marketing, YouTube, and like any of the word, podcasts, I just said. We've got several podcasts. We've got a really big Facebook group. We've got, we're at the point now that we've got

enough followers on social media that we can just kind of leverage that and talking about it multiple times. We don't do any of the traditional real estate avenues. And mainly because they're not built for teams that work in multiple markets. They're built for teams that have multiple agents in one market. And since we're in multiple, a lot of those avenues just really don't work for us the way they would if we were only in one market. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And so most of your leads are they investors that are looking for something? Or are you also going direct to seller and being like looking for specific properties and you're then kind of marrying the two?

So we were extremely buyer-heavy for the first three or four years, but now it's kind of flip-flops because 50% of all investment properties, short-term, long-term, any type are sold within the first year. So now we've got a lot of turnover from people who bought years ago, who are ready to sell 1031 exchange into other things. They've got a lot of equity. They want to transfer. So now we're more seller-heavy. We don't do a ton of direct-to-seller stuff just because if they're not, if they are in the short-term rental space and they're not aware of us already, they're not somebody that's going to respond to well to direct mail. Got it.

Got it. And as you're gross, so obviously your EXP, you know, I'm with EXP as well. And EXP, the way you run your team, like if somebody is listening to this, that's an XP agent and maybe they're bringing in somebody that might be a good fit for what you are doing, do you bring people, I know some people do and some people don't, do you bring people into your team that may be in a different downline? or are you like, no, we try to keep it all systematic together? Leo Pereja shut your ears for this.

I do not give a flying fuck about downlines. I only care about production. And so for a while, EXP was like, oh, you know, we only care about about people who are doing agent attraction. So for me, I don't give a crap about that. I am here to sell houses to investors. So I sometimes we've had a few people. and other people's deadlines on the team.

A lot of times they just come from other places that aren't EXP from the beginning. We get a lot of people from Keller Williams, people at local brokerages that want to just do something different, have a little bit more support and tools and things like that. So to answer your question, a little bit of everything. Well, I'll tell you what. So Leo, Leo is a buddy. And one of the things, you know, I came from KW, and I've got a pretty big team. We do a lot of business.

And I came over and all everybody talked about was RevShare. Now, I didn't see it before and I do see it now and I wish I would have focused a little bit more on it. But I didn't care. My team made really good money, really good money. We were always super profitable. And I wanted to build that. And so like the first like the XPCon, it was all about rev share. I didn't care.

I'm like, what is this? I don't want to bring my team to this. I want to do more business. And after the first event that Leo came to, I remember reaching out and be like, bro, that was that was really good. It was the first like event that I really liked. And he was like, you want to know a secret? And I'm like, yeah, tell me a secret. And I like, tell me secrets.

I'm like, tell me secrets. And he's like, I told everybody that was speaking on the main stage. If you talk about rev share, you'll never speak on my stage again. We talk about production. If you're good at what you do, you're going to attract a lot of people to our company. If you talk about rev share only, you're going to push people away. And I was like, so you're here. Let's do this.

So anyway, that's great to hear. And actually, our group, we have our gain network and EXP agent investors. Global Agent Investor Network. Most of our people are focused on the agent investor network. So a lot of people on this call would probably be a type of person that if you're in one of those localities would be a really good place to be. So even if you're in other lines. So that's awesome. With that said, what should we, I know we're coming up on the top of the hour. What should I be asking you that I haven't asked you so far? I think it's done a really good job. I just think that a lot of real estate agents, like guys, you have

the inside information. Like you are dealing with the best investment, even if you're not selling investment properties out there. Period. End. There is, you have got to find a way to invest in real estate. I could stop. I could never sell a house again. And lifestyle would not change because we have, and now we ground extremely hard the first few years to get to this point. But I think a lot of agents feel like, oh, you know, that's for rich people and I'm just starting out. You can, the best way to start, whether you want to do short-term rentals, whether you want to do anything, is to house hack. Buy a two to four-unit apartment building or a little small quadplex in your market. You can put as little as 5%, maybe even 3%, 5% down, live in one unit, rent out the other three, live in it

for a year, go buy another one. Now you've got seven units that, and, you know, you're living in the eighth. So in two years, you're up to eight units, like, no problem. So it can be very slow. It can seem like, oh, you know, it's going to take me forever to save up a down payment to buy, you know, a vacation rental and destined. Start with what you can do. And that's the house that you live in. So my advice would be just for any agents who are not investing, like it's not as hard to get started as you think. I'll tell you, we have a regular investor seminar. And it's so funny because usually we have two or three clients that come out of this seminar. And almost all the time, every time they reach out to us and say, hey, I want to be an investor.

I want to buy a rental or a flip. And our question is, oh, cool, do you own your property now? And almost always, you know, they say no. You know, we buy somebody that does it. And we're like, okay, first property is your own that you live in. And then you rent it out. So I love that. That's incredible.

So we're here at the top of the hour. how can people, let's say somebody heard and said, man, I vibe with this. This is what I want to do. How can people find you? Or they just want to find out more information. How can they find you? So always our website, the shortterm shop.com, or if you want to hit me up on Instagram, I'm at the short term shop. I do read all those messages. Careers at the shortterm shop.com. If you're interested in maybe joining the team, we're again, always looking to expand and YouTube slash the short term shop. Boom. Awesome. I love it. Cool. Well, until next time, thanks so much for being here. Please leave us an honest review of this podcast. Let us know what we can answer for you if we did not answer questions that

you had. Reach out to Avery, obviously very good at what she does. And if there's anything I can do for you, please send me a message on Instagram or leave something in the notes here. And we will respond in kind. So with that said, Avery, thank you. you so much for sharing your info, wisdom. I hope that people reach out to you because obviously you're really good at what you do and you know your stuff. So keep killing it. Until next time, go live uncommon. See you. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Uncommon Real Estate. Subscribe to the podcast to stay up to date with the latest mastermind conversations from Chris, Jeff, and other uncommon real estate industry leaders. If you love this podcast, please write us a

review. And to fast track your real estate career, go to Chris Craddock.com. I'm