The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Quentin West, President of The Cozy Cosmo LLC., Airbnb Millionaire And Life/Business Coach on Building Real Estate Passive Income & Success

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Quentin West, President of The Cozy Cosmo LLC. Airbnb Millionaire And Life/Business Coach on Building Real Estate Passive Income & Success Realquentinwest.com Biography Quentin West is a Short Term Rental Professional, real estate investor, and business coach. He started his career as a college dropout, then worked his way to 6 figures as a real estate agent in his very first year. After seeing this success, he dumped every dollar he had into real estate investing and since this time 3 years ago has built a large portfolio that produces over $100,000 per month in passive income for him and his family. He now works with other people to level up their life, business, and finances to help other people achieve the level of success he has seen in his life.

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chris foss today amazing gentleman on the show he's gonna be talking just about how he has built an extraordinary real estate business and passive income in there. Quinton West is on the show with us today. He's an Airbnb millionaire and life business coach, and he's going to be joining us today to tell you the secrets on how you too can build a successful passive business for you and your business and your family. Quinton is a short-term rental professional, real estate investor, and business coach. He started his career as a college dropout, then worked his way to six figures as a real estate agent in his very first year.

That's pretty hard to do, actually. After seeing this success, he dumped every dollar he had into real estate investing. That sounds like what I did at the casino. No, I'm just kidding. Since his time three years ago, he has built a large portfolio that produces over $100,000 per month, count them up, in passive income for him and his family. He now works with other people to level up their life, business, and finances to help other people achieve the level of success he's seen in his life. So if you don't learn anything today, damn it, check your eardrums.

Welcome to the show, Quentin. How are you? I'm doing great, man. Thanks for having me, and thanks for that intro. Thanks for coming. That's what we do. Sadly, though, my investing and throwing money at stuff going on at the casinos didn't work out so well.

So that's why we have you on the show to see if we can cover that money. That's right. I'm going to get that money back out. Get that money back in. Don't do casinos. Put it in real estate. It's a little bit safer from what I hear. They don't build those palaces in Vegas for nothing.

So give us your dot com, sir, so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, so just find me on realquentinwest.com or the easiest is probably instagram q deals homes there you go and you post a lot of instagram videos over there people love them talking about everything you do so people should check that out so quentin uh give us a give us a hero's journey here what what got you down this road what tell us about some of your life upbringing you know did was uh was uh you know bill gates your or something, or what happened here that you got down this road?

I was going to say Herkshire Berthaway. I was going to say, who's the Herkshire Berthaway guy? There you're back in. There we go. Yeah, man. I'd say my journey started out a lot like anybody's that has achieved much of anything. A little bit rough. Didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

I went to college because that's what mom and dad was pushing me to do, to become an engineer at Virginia Tech. Got great grades in school and, you know, kind of live that high school dream of getting into your dream school and going for engineering and things didn't happen exactly like I planned. About a year in, I got a complaint to the real estate or the school board that I was cheating on a test that I had an email from my professor saying that we could work in groups on, it was a take-home test and everything. So it was kind of just a crazy situation. Uh, I printed out that email, I brought it to the board for hearing. And instead of giving me a zero on the test, like they had given me previously or had proposed, they were now discussing taking me out

of school for an entire semester. So I ended up appealing it and went through a much bigger process than it needed to go through. But eventually they settled back on the zero for the class. And that's when I kind of realized a lot of things in life are rigged. Even though you have solid evidence in your favor, it's not always going to work out in your favor unless you control the majority of the processes. That's when I pretty much decided that I was going to drop out of college eventually, maybe not right then, but sometime in the future. It wasn't but a couple months later and i flunked the test as a calculus test i got 33 on it and that's what i kind of had i was at my breaking point and uh i called my parents and said hey i'm dropping out today i put in my document saying you know i wasn't coming back to school and And that was a huge step in the direction

that would be a long journey for me. I came back home, started working construction for my parents. They've always kind of ran their own companies and done things like that. So I was out there digging holes and still wasn't quite living the dream like I thought it would be. It wasn't much better.

You know, I was running heavy equipment and getting in the way and at some points even getting close to losing my life. I swam a crane into a power line and felt all the electricity going through me. Oh, did you? Holy crap. Crazy experience. going through me and oh did you um holy crap crazy crazy experience if you ever get get the time look up uh crane swinging into a power line um if you don't get it on the power line yeah yeah if you don't get off the power line sometimes the tires will explode and the whole

machine will go up in flames just a crazy thing i didn't even think about it at the time when I was running the equipment. But long story short, I decided I wanted to go into real estate full time. That's where I was hearing all these people making all this money. They were making their own schedules and they were controlling their own life. And I figured the best way to do that was to get my real estate license. So again, I quit something that my parents were dead set on me doing and became the black sheep child again, got my real estate license, quit construction. And, you know, I thought that once I got my license, everything was going to change around for me that, you know, all the struggle I was going through and depression and everything I was going through mentally at the time

and financially was going to change for me. And it didn't happen that way. About two months into having my license and not having that consistent income, I was at the point where I was going to lose my house in foreclosure. And that's where I kind of had to sit back and decide, you know, do I want to quit being an agent and go back and work for my parents again? And swinging cranes into electrical bowls.

Yep, exactly. Did I want to do that again? Or did I want to risk losing the house? And a friend just by chance asked to eat lunch with me. And while we were at lunch, he mentioned he was Airbnb in a house that his parents gave them. And I was like, okay, well that if you could do it, you know,

I'm sure I can do it too. And I had nothing to lose at that point. All the furniture was there. So I listed the property on Airbnb in the very first month. I profited a1,000. I didn't come into it thinking it was going to be a big money-making thing for me. I just wanted to be able to afford my monthly payment and for the house to not go to foreclosure. That's kind of what started it all for me.

There you go. How long ago was that when you made that first money? That was four years ago. Wow. November of 2019. Wow. And you built all of this in just four years. I mean, that's extraordinary. I appreciate that.

It was a lot of hard work and just dumping everything I possibly could into the business. I mean, when I say I dumped everything into it, I literally dumped everything into it. I didn't even have curtains in my own home. The first year of my marriage, uh, I took all of, all of the money and dumped it in the real estate.

There you go. So now you, you, uh, deal in something called, uh, Airbnb arbitrage, or at least you're least that's a part of what you do. Talk to us about that.

I've never heard that term, Airbnb arbitrage. How does that work? Yes, so arbitrage, the word by itself, just means that you're purchasing one commodity and selling it at a higher price. So you're playing the middleman. So you're using the middleman. So you're using it in one way or the other to be able to get more money for it. And the way that we do that is we rent a property with the owner's permission to sublease it.

And then we take that property, furnish it, and then list it for rent on Airbnb. And so by doing that, we're able to charge a premium because we're now offering a higher value product and you're you're kind of like it sounds like you're kind of like the booking excuse me or you're helping people uh maybe book their houses you know if they don't want to mess with the whole Airbnb thing right yeah so we we manage a few people's properties too if they don't

want to uh list on Airbnb their self then we come in, we'll help them design the property and then list it for them, manage it. We have a cleaning company so that we can come in and clean the property ourselves and kind of, again, control the entire process so that we can make sure, you know, there's not another company that's dropping the ball and we're able to really provide a premium service. Wow. Do you want to disclose how many properties you oversee and have on Airbnb? Yes, we've got 38 right now.

Oh, wow. Crazy, man. That is a lot. And then do you specialize in a certain area? Do you recommend that people specialize in an area close to them, or do you need to try and pick hot areas for real estate? Yeah. So if you're nearby an area that would do well, it doesn't necessarily have to be a big city or a super hot spot. My hometown only has 25,000 people and we make money every single month. But when you're first starting out, it is

easier to have properties nearby you, but you can just as easily have a property in another state. A lot of getting over that mental block of having properties away from you is just kind of a beginner thing where you think you need to have the property close by so you can put your hands on it or be nearby in case anything happens. But with our 38 properties, I only work about an hour a week on those properties. Everything else is spent building other businesses and coaching and investing in other assets. And I probably haven't been to a property in over six months. Really? Yeah. I just don't need to go. I have a team built. We have an in-house maintenance crew,

our in-house cleaning crew. So anything that needs to be done, they can put their eyes on it, take pictures, send it to me if it's absolutely necessary. But 99% of the stuff they could fix herself. There you go. And so Let's talk about your coaching program and how you help people. You're a life and business coach. Give us an overview of that and how it works. I'm sorry, say that one more time. You're a life and business coach. Give us an overview of how that works. How do you coach people, etc., etc., what you help them with.

Yeah, so we help people from all walks of life, whether they're just starting out and don't even know what Airbnb is, up to people that have properties already but want to optimize a performance. So recently, we took on somebody. They had four properties, and they'd never gotten any real coaching on how to optimize their units. They were losing three to $5,000 every single month. And within 45 days, we helped them turn those properties around to where they profited $10,000. And a lot of Airbnb is marketing. It's not just as easy as taking pictures and throwing it up on the platform. There's things like user retention and how long people stay on your listing. All of those factors go into how often Airbnb promotes your listing and how well your listing does on the platform. That can make all the difference too and make and make money so when people work with you you help

them teach them the same basic uh fundamental things that you used uh you do some business or some life coaching as well i guess yeah so it all kind of comes into the same same stuff we help people with mindset and things that they're struggling with in the same program because a lot of the reasons why people aren't growing in their business is because there's some kind of mental block, you know, with them personally. It's not always that they don't have the resources or the knowledge or things that they need to grow that business. And that's when I can come in and kind of evaluate where they are mentally and help them get over those mental barriers so that they can either start or grow their business. There you go.

So, you know, I know the real estate market has changed a little bit with higher interest rates that are out there, but it's still a very tight inventory. I mean, there's not a lot of growth that's gone on in housing as part of the problem. How do you see things going out in the future? I think interest rates may have peaked, but is it still a good market to be able to make money on Airbnb and stuff for entry point people? Yeah, so I see there's a lot of oversaturation in big markets, like big major cities, but smaller rural areas like where I'm at and the places that I teach to invest in, there's still plenty of opportunity. There's a lot of markets that I've been analyzing with my

students that have less than 300 units. And the properties that are in the area, they're dominating because there's nobody operating at a really high level. So that's where people like my students can come in and invest and when they're getting help from somebody like me that's been in the business for a couple of years and has seen the ups and downs of the market and knows the back end and how to optimize the unit can really outperform everybody else. And they can take the lion's share of that market.

There you go now uh i see that uh uh let's see the question i had for you um what about people that are out there that want to get started in this business what if they don't have any money to you know down payments or buying stuff or they have bad credit yeah so there's one way to get started well there's a couple ways but one major one to get started without any money at all, and that's co-hosting. So basically you're managing the property for another owner for a fee. So early on, I had maybe 10 or 15 properties and that's about the time where I decided to quit my job as a real estate agent. And I kind of put myself in a tight spot because I had enough money to live off of, but not enough to continue growing. And so I didn't have enough cashflow

to continue growing at the point that I was before I quit. And one thing that I did to kind of get over that hump to where I didn't have the funds to grow or start co-hosting for people. So I found people that either had properties already or that wanted to buy properties. And then I partnered with them as a manager. I took 20% as a management fee, and then I was able to make that extra cashflow so that then I could put that into my business and keep growing. There you go. What about liability-wise? Do you share liability if anything happens? How do you work all that out?

Yeah, so we have an insurance policy for each property that we rent. If we're co-hosting, we have very little liability. In fact, we make them sign a waiver that says anything that happens on the property, we're not liable for. But we do have our own insurance, and Airbnb also has an insurance policy to cover us and the owners of the property, regardless of how that dynamic works. And that way, if somebody gets hurt or there's property damage, then we're covered and we can take care of that. Well, this is pretty extraordinary, man. In four to five years, you've built this up. You have a team that's, that's helping you do it. Um,

and, uh, you're spending one hour a week, uh, you know, dotting the I's and crossing the T's. I mean, that's, that's a great passive income sort of thing going on there, man. That's an awesome achievement. Yeah. Thank you. You know, at this point it's, it is semi-passive. Um, I don't think there's really anything that's truly passive. Um, but you know, it took a long time to get to this point for sure. I mean, up to, up until, you know, a year and a half ago, it was just me. And then I started investing in mentors and people that were doing a lot more than me to teach me the right way to build the business so that I wasn't working 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. every single day, doing all my own maintenance, doing all my own repairs, filing all my own complaints with Airbnb on guests. Those things just steal your time.

You really have to learn how to build the business in the right way so that you can focus on working on your business instead of in your business. That's when you will really learn how to grow. There you go. Now, this is the first time I've really heard about doing stuff like this. Normally, we'll have people on the show. They talk about real estate investing, passive investing for real estate, et cetera, et cetera. How do you feel that this, it seems kind of obvious, but I mean, how do you feel that this is, is what you're doing better than investing in real estate as a, as a, as an investor in real estate properties and then, and then renting them out, you know, for attorney or whatever.

Do you feel like this is better than that? And in what ways? So I think this is building the foundation. I really think this is the best tool that somebody can use that is working a nine to five job right now, doesn't have a ton of cash flow and wants financial freedom. And that's kind of how, where I shifted my investing strategy early on. I always thought I wanted to buy properties. I wanted to use the Burr method and all these strategies that everybody talks about online, but I didn't have the cash flow yet. So I used this strategy to build up my cash flow. So now that we have 38 units, we have enough cash flow where we can buy properties and do it at a high scale.

That way it doesn't take me and do it at a high scale. That way, it doesn't take me 20 years to build a significant portfolio. Now I can do it in relatively easily five years. I can accomplish the same amount of portfolio growth that I could have with 20 years just working my nine to five and buying a property every year or two properties a year. You know, this is what people talk about when they talk about getting wealthy and building wealth is to leverage, leverage other people's stuff, leverage other people's money instead of your own. And by doing that, you can, you can scale much faster, quicker, you know, you don't have to, you know, leveraging someone else's thing. And that's what you're doing with your co-hosting. You're leveraging, you know, somebody else owns a house, they're making the mortgage payment, you're coming in and helping them improve it and stuff and all that good stuff.

Do you ever sell the houses or help flip them or anything like that? Or do you just mostly focus on just getting them filled? Yeah, so I have sold a few. One of the houses I bought, I used a HELOC from the house that I originally lived in to buy a house with seller financing. A lot of the purchases I do now is creative financing, either lease options or I get the seller to hold the note or something along those lines so I don't have to get the bank involved. But I bought a property my first year using those funds. And recently I sold it probably about a month ago because I had accumulated about $100,000 in equity. And just doing the math off of that, that $100,000 as an upfront cash infusion into my business did a lot more than

it would have if I just continue to take that $1,000 a month profit. That way I could scale faster. Because like one thing about real estate is the velocity of money, which is how quickly you bring in money and then reinvest it, is extremely important, early on especially, because the equity isn't really doing anything for you if it's just sitting in a house. Now, this sounds pretty simple. You know, hey, you find a house, Airbnb, co-host it, etc., etc. But I imagine a lot of what you teach and coach clients on

and probably are involved with your team and your program is there's a whole game to running and algorithms and stuff on Airbnb. So you probably really have to go in and master that and understand how that works and how to game it properly, if you will. Yeah, definitely. I mean, getting the property is probably the easiest part. The hard part comes in when it comes to listing it and making sure you're marketing it and pricing the property effectively. Getting the property is definitely the easiest. I mean, I had one conversation with a guy I was at a networking event with a couple of weeks ago. And that was a little less than a month ago. He already has two properties. He had the money to invest and wanted a vehicle like this.

And after one conversation and teach them a little bit about the way we script our outreach to landlords. And he got two properties. And I fully expect him to start reaching out to me over the next couple months because that's when the real problems start happening. When you can make extra money by learning pricing strategy and sending in damage claims to Airbnb and things like that. That's where you can totally change your business and make exponentially more money. You know, I know that that's one issue that you have. In Vegas, they have that issue where they party a little too hard in Vegas when they rent out some of those properties. And then I imagine you have to, I know Vegas has some rules and regulations on Airbnb. I imagine you have to make sure you're in a city and mindful of the regulations

for the local stuff too as well, huh? Oh, yeah, absolutely but the great thing about the damage claims is even if you repair something yourself you can still charge in fair market value for the repair oh wow like early on when when i was fixing everything myself sometimes i would profit up to a thousand dollars on a claim because i went in. And even though it only took me an hour to fix everything, it would have costed me much more if I hired it out to somebody that was a professional. But since I built the skills and had been doing everything myself for so long, I could cash in on those damages. And that's a big part of having a

coach, knowing when and what you can charge. There you go. Well, if you're familiar with this, this is an old 70s reference, but never invite the Eagles, the band, to your Airbnb, especially that one guy, Rocky Mountain, I forget his name.

But the Eagles were not happy to anything that they said in the hotel. So never mind those. And I imagine there's kind of a game to that, trying to make sure you keep the riffraff. You know, people are going to default on payments. People that might want to just, I don't know, throw parties in the house and destroy it. There's probably a whole game to that. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a lot of tricks you can use to keep those people out and early on i almost quit because i had people coming and throwing parties and the police knocking on the door i could see him see him on my ring cameras at 2 a.m knocking on the doors of my units so yeah it's a lot of headache if you don't know what you're doing yeah and again i'm sorry about that night we just uh it got a little out of hand and yeah we had a couple uh yeah it was just sorry man i i i'll keep i'll keep making those payments yeah uh there's one thing i saw that we're on here building an empire with

used furniture is one of the topics you sent me what is what is that about a um taking used furniture and putting them in units like this. When I first started, I didn't have a ton of money to just grow in a property and go down to the local Colfax furniture or rooms to go or wherever you buy furniture. So I had to go to Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and get used stuff to fill these units. And as long as everything looks good, definitely don't use mattresses in your units. There's no telling what kind of bugs or errors in the mattress. But dressers and bed frames that aren't fabric and some couches that they're really nice,

I mean, you can get those for pennies on the dollar and outfit a unit for fairly cheap. frames that aren't fabric and some couches that they're really nice. I mean, you can get those for pennies on the dollar and outfit a unit for fairly cheap. And, you know, I've outfitted three bedroom units for six to $8,000. And then they profit a thousand to 1500 a month. I make my money back in less than six months.

There you go. There you go. Carol calls in the show. She says, great information. Thank you, Quentin and Chris. So thank you, Carol calls in the show. She says, great information. Thank you, Quentin and Chris. So thank you, Carol, for the comment there over on the big LinkedIn. Yeah.

You know, this is really cool. And yeah, you don't want to put, when it comes to rentals and probably short-term rentals, you probably don't want to put new nice furniture in there. Because, you know, they do throw that party that, you know, I threw that one time. Sorry, again. Still recovering financially from that one chris it's a bachelor party man you know there were some booze and some women and uh i don't know but some monkeys i don't know there's some weird stuff that

went on that night and uh yeah whatever i don't know i was doing thinking of an old school induction joke for the movie uh so anyway uh, what have we touched on that you help people with between your coaching, your business, your real estate? What other things have we touched on that we want to share out? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the, I'd say, journey as an entrepreneur or business person is knowing what order to do things in. And I feel like that's something I do very well is, you know, kind of figuring out what the next step is. And early on for me, it was shifting my focus from trying to buy properties with the money I didn't have to creating cash flow where I could buy properties and then looking towards estate planning and building brand if that's something that you want to do and your social media presence. So I think if somebody is kind of at a point where they don't know how to get to the next level or

they don't even know what that level looks like, then that's an opportunity to reach out to somebody like me or somebody in the space so that I can get some help, clarity on what that next step looks like or what steps they need to take to get there. Because a lot of people that I interact with, they might have money. They may not need the money that arbitrage brings and they don't want the headache, but they want to invest in real estate and get that semi-passive income. And that's where, you know, having a network and talking to guys that are in those kinds of rooms can get you to that next level. So if any of your listeners are kind of at that spot, they're more than welcome to reach out to me. There you go. And I imagine you help people with, you know, going from a broke mindset,

you know, where you're paycheck to paycheck to, you know, rolling in the bucks. That can be a bit of a head spinner, especially if you do it in the short term. And so you probably help people get used to, you know, the mindset of dealing with that level, not sabotaging themselves. You know, some people do that when they get successful. They'll sabotage themselves and stuff. Absolutely. We get a lot of people and they won't charge what they're actually worth

because there's a mental barrier there. They work for $25, $35 an hour for so long, and now they're in the entrepreneurial space that they're charging $50 an hour or something for coaching or helping somebody else when like their knowledge and value is a hundred times that and so you know a lot of speaking to people that already in the space like me or you or somebody else coaching is changing your mindset and getting it to the point where you actually realize your value. And that's when I see entrepreneurs, you know, take off financially with their brand, social media, and everything that they're doing.

There you go. Well, Quentin, anything more else you want to touch on before we go out? No. The last thing that I would say is there's a million ways to get into real estate. And a lot of those ways you can get in creatively. With real estate, you either need the money, you need the knowledge, or you need the deals. And the best way that I've seen to make money in this business is to figure out how to find the deals. The money you can get from just about anybody if it's a good enough deal. And the knowledge will come as you continue trying to make deals work. There's been a ton of deals that I've been in where looking at the deal off the cuff, it doesn't make sense in any way. But after you speak to somebody, there is a creative way to make it work. I had a flip that I tried

to purchase. I made a cash offer on it and it just didn't make sense for the owner to sell it to me at any price. He had too much money in the deal already. So what we decided to do was he paid for all of the materials. I used my crew to do the rehab and then we flipped the property and split the money. So he ended up walking away profiting 17 grand. I walked away with 17 grand and my team did all the work. So props to them. But there's so many creative ways that you can make money in real estate. So don't give up on the first off-the-cuff idea that you get to invest. There's a way to make it work. And the best thing is call you for advice first and get coached.

Yeah, that's right. There you go. That's right. Send the deal to me. There you go. That's right. Send the deal to me. There you go. So, Quentin, do you do any deals with any of the people you coach? Maybe they come across something and you decide to work with them? Hey, Quentin, do you do any deals with people that you coach with?

Maybe they come across a good deal and you co-op with them? Yeah, it just depends on the deal. I mean, usually we can make something work. I would say if you find something and you even think it's a good deal, shoot it over to me or I've got a private Facebook group of over 1,200 members. I'm sure

somebody can make it work for you and get some money in your pocket even if it's just a finder's fee. There you go. So you've got a great network, too. Quentin, give me your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. That's realquentinwest, Q-U-E-N-T-I-N-W-E-S-T.com. There you go. Thank you very much, Quentin, for coming on the show and sharing your knowledge with us.

I'm sure we're going to inspire a lot of people. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. There you go. And thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, linkedin.com, Fortress Chris Voss,

those crazy places around the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.