Airbnb Arbitrage: How to Make Money with Vacation Rentals ft. Jerry Conti

(Click The Video Below To Play)

The Jerry Conti Interview

Imagine making $10K per month per property on luxury homes YOU DON’T OWN and having the option to stay in those high-end homes when they’re available… The increasing popularity of home sharing sites like Airbnb, VRBO and Expedia make it possible to make a lot of money on luxury vacation rentals—whether or not you have the capital to buy a million-dollar home yourself!

Jerry Conti is the Cofounder and CEO of LuxHomePro, Arizona’s top short-term rental (STR) marketing and booking specialists. Jerry’s team manages a portfolio of 22 luxury properties in the Scottsdale area worth $23M, capitalizing on the millions of travelers seeking high-end properties through online travel agencies to generate returns of 100% to 500% in monthly revenue. LuxHomePro also boasts an education arm, helping entrepreneurs start their own luxury vacation rental business in markets across the country.

On this episode of Founders Club, Jerry joins Oliver to explain how his vacation rental model works, discussing why he prefers the lease option and the luxury niche. He walks us through the process of finding a property, addressing homeowner objections, financing the deal, and negotiating an option contract. Listen in for Jerry’s insight around what to look for in a STR property (and how to price it accordingly) and learn the skill sets you need to run a successful vacation rental business.

Here is how the interview breaks down:

[1:16] How Jerry’s vacation rental model works

  • Look for luxury property on market 12+ months
  • Approach homeowner with idea to cashflow as STR
  • Bring in investor after year once proven concept
  • Continue to lease from investor as vacation rental

[7:18] Why Jerry prefers the luxury niche

  • Generate $700 to $1500/day on single property
  • Use for own mastermind events

[14:16] How Jerry finds properties 

  • Use Airbnb/VRBO to research areas, occupancy rates
  • Generate list of homes for sale on MLS and visit area
  • Negotiate with homeowner to put together deal

[21:49] Your options for structuring a STR deal

  1. Buy property for vacation rental
  2. Lease method
  3. Partner with homeowner as host
  4. Seller financing
  5. Foreclosure deals

[29:55] Jerry’s advice on getting a lease under contract

  • Negotiate option to purchase (even when overpriced)
  • Disclaimer to exit lease should regulations change

[35:40] Who Jerry’s team negotiates with 

  • Preferably homeowner themselves
  • Give realtor fee to help make deal

[41:00] How Jerry addresses common homeowner objections

  • Security checks, cameras and NoiseAware system
  • Secure damage waiver insurance policy

[46:12] What Jerry looks for in a property

  • Open concept kitchen + right bed configuration
  • Amenities (pool, hot tub and room for gaming)

[52:26] Jerry’s insight around pricing a STR

  • 80% of revenue should come from weekends
  • Weekday rate about 1% of goal for month
  • Consider low and high season + special events

[1:00:10] Jerry’s approach to mitigating neighbor concerns

  • Apologize as necessary, respond to Airbnb asap
  • Systems in place (i.e.: house rules in manual)

[1:06:19] The key to running a successful Airbnb

  • Know your numbers and optimize listing
  • Personal connection earns positive reviews

[1:12:05] How Jerry keeps his STRs immaculate

  • Put energy into training cleaning crew
  • Quarterly inspection of appliances

[1:18:30] Jerry’s tips on the check-in and check-out process

  • Promising early check-in can jeopardize experience
  • Let guest buy day before for half price (if not weekend)

[1:26:40] What surprised Jerry about the STR business

  • Need multiple skill sets to be good operator
  • Must get joy from providing great experience

Listen Here:

Key Takeaway:

Imagine making $10K a month on luxury properties YOU DON’T OWN and having the option to stay in those high-end homes when they’re available! Today, Jerry Conti joins Oliver to walk us through his Airbnb arbitrage system and explain what it takes to run a successful high-end vacation rental business—by leasing other people’s properties.

Links to your favorite other players:

?Listen on Itunes here.

?Listen on Spotify here.

?Listen on Sticher here.

?Listen on Iheart Radio here.

?Watch Full Video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/cY5DzME_3R4

Full Transcript Below:

– Welcome to another episode of Founder’s Club. Today we are out here in Scottsdale, getting ready to sit down with Jerry Conti, the founder of LuxHomePros. And he’s gonna be taking us through his amazing system of how he operates Airbnb vacation rentals, making 10K per month per property, with properties that he does not own.

– What we teach is, like know why you’re not getting bookings if you’re not getting bookings, it may not be the price at all. Look at the exact area that you’re wanting to play in and see where all the vacation rentals are, they’re all right here for a reason.

– He’s also going to be sharing his entire system, start to finish, on how he finds properties, how he finances them, how he uses option contracts, and everything in between. And he’s also going to be talking about everything you that need to know about how to run a successful short-term vacation rental business.

– You’ve gotta look for the hot attraction. Why are people flying there? What is it that they’re there for? Valerie, who’s awesome, just–

– Yes, right.

– She’s managing 50 Airbnb’s, you know? It’s pretty impressive.

– Wow.

– You know? And it’s all in the Anaheim/Disney area. She knows that the traffic is coming there.

– Right.

– How many millions of people come to Disneyland?

– Oh, my God.

– It’s insane, right?

– If you like the show, subscribe. If you have any questions, leave a comment down below. Let’s get started. So I’m sitting here with Jerry Conti, really excited to have him on, mainly because you’re doing some really exciting things

– Yeah. in the Airbnb space.

– Yeah, we sure are.

– And the fact that you can make money on properties that you don’t own.

– Yes.

– In the volume that you’re doing it is quite amazing.

– It’s a cool concept, yeah.

– So, why don’t we start with just like a rundown on how the model works?

– Yeah, the model is you know, typical. We look for properties that are in the luxury level. So typically from 800,000 to about 1.6 million is the sweet spot for us. And we look for homes that are on the market for, say, 12 or 15 months or longer. And we approach homeowners with the idea of taking that property and cash-flowing it through the vacation rental model, using Airbnb, VRBO, and our own platform, to be able to drive traffic to it and make sales.

– Just to kind of frame that out, from 30,000 feet up, you are finding homes in the luxury market, that haven’t sold.

– Right.

– Having a hard time, they’re kind of getting stale on the market.

– Right.

– Maybe they’re overpriced, maybe whatever the reason,

– Yeah.

– And then you’re approaching them with an offer of, hey, it looks like you’re having trouble selling this,

– Sure.

– Why don’t we cash-flow this property instead of selling it. And then they agree to work with you and then you run it and manage it as a short-term vacation rental.

– Correct, yes. But a little bit more.

– Okay.

– Because they really wanna sell it.

– Yeah.

– They can’t. So we’re saying, “Look, we can. “We can bring an investor in to buy it “but you’re gonna get more money for it, “you’re gonna get your price, “if we can show cash flow for 12 months. “So let’s go do that first, as a Step one. “And then at the end of 12 months, “we’ll go ahead, we’ll option the home now, “at the price you’re asking. “And at the end of 12 months, “we’ll bring an investor in. “If we do our job right and we can cash-flow the property, “then we’ll bring you an investor to buy it out.” And then I’ll take, with the investor, and I’ll go lease it back from the investor for five or 10 or 15 years and run it as a short-term rental.

– Wow.

– Yeah. Which is a cool concept because the investor, all they’re looking for is a solid cap rate, with a real estate-backed asset.

– They want mailbox money.

– That’s what they want. And they want it to be secure. Right? They want a secure investment. So we’re finding investors that are happy with a seven, 7.25 cap rate.

– So back to the 30,000-foot view. So, you’re finding properties, that aren’t selling. You’re saying, “Hey, I can help you get this sold.

– Yes.

– “But we need to show 12 months of cash flow.”

– Typically.

– Because, once you show the 12 months of cash flow, then you have investors that will come in and buy it once they see the results.

– That’s correct. And here’s the cool part. Investors will come in if they see enough cash flow. They may even come in earlier than 12 months but typically they want to see the whole cycle of the year.

– They want a performing asset.

– Yeah, they want a performing asset and they want to see the whole year. In the vacation rental business, no matter where you are, there’s going to be an up and a down market, right? So here in Scottsdale, it’s a nine-month market. You’ve got three months that it’s going to be slow season. So they want to see what the slow returns are, you know?

– They want the full-year picture.

– They want the full-year picture. Exactly.

– And then, you’re helping the seller sell their house that they can’t sell, you’re matching up an investor with a cash-flowing asset, then those investors you’ve already worked a deal with to say, “Hey, once you buy it, we’ll continue to manage it?”

– That’s correct. We actually just take it over, we just do a triple net lease.

– Okay.

– So we’ll take the lease in, we pay the taxes, we pay the insurance, we take care of the property period. They have nothing to do with the property at that point. We run the whole thing. And typically, depending on the deal that we look at, we’re either going to sign a five-year contract or possibly a 10-year contract on that.

– So you’re doing longer-term leases

– Yeah.

– Once the investor buys it.

– Correct.

– And then when–

– That’s a typical, that’s a typical purchase deal, in many cases we just find rentals.

– Okay.

– Where we just do it without the purchase of the rent–

– Like a rev-share type thing?

– Yeah, yeah, well, no, not a rev-share. We just lease it.

– Okay.

– We lease it, we give them a little bit more than if you were going to put a single family home, or a single family in the home.

– Fair market home with whatever formula they’re working?

– Yeah, let’s say the fair market is $5000 a month for the property, with a single family coming in to rent it on a year-to-year basis. We come in, maybe offer six, 6200, and make a little bit more money up front every month. They know that we’re using it for the short-term rental. We put it up on Airbnb, VRBO, and our own personal platform, and we go rent the hell out of it, you know? And we bring in 15, 20, 25 a month.

– And you keep the upside?

– Yeah, of course, 100%

– Interesting.

– Yeah.

– So–

– We take all the risk, in that sense,

– Right.

– Either way on the short-term side.

– Right.

– They get their rent. And we pay all the bills.

AirBnB Arbitrage_ How to Make BANK with Short Term Vacation Rentals _ Jerry Conti on Founders Club 9-57 screenshot

– So it’s a win-win because the property owner is getting more than fair-market rent.

– Correct.

– And you’re winning because you get to keep all the upside assuming you can make it perform.

– And not only that, yes, but not only that, we are taking care of the property because, to get the rents that we need, it has to be a five-star showpiece. And so we go in there, we paint, we clean it up, we’re in their cleaning it, or turning the property five or six times a month sometimes, you know, based on the short-term rental.

– Yep.

– People rent it for three days or a week, or whatever. And we’re in there constantly, we’ve got eyeballs on it, I’ve got a caretaker on it, I’ve got a handyman on it. So we’re fixing things all the time. Whereas when you rent long-term, you don’t know what’s going on in your house.

– Right.

– You can’t even get into your house. And we let all of our, either our investors, or our homeowners, come in any time they want as long as it’s available and nobody’s there they can come in and check on the property.

– Inspect it.

– Yeah.

– Stay for a night.

– If they want to stay for a night, they can stay for a night. We put it on what we call a “flex day” so we allow the owners to come in and stay when it’s not rented. But if we get a booking, like a last-minute booking, they’ve gotta leave at ten o’clock in the morning. That’s it. But we get it cleaned and we’re ready to go.

– Yep, yep, love that.

– Yeah.

– So, why why the luxury niche?

– You know, I like luxury because of the price per day proposition, right? So, our properties typically get $700 to $1500 a day.

– Okay.

– That’s real money.

– Yeah.

– Right? I’d rather manage one property and make $60,000 to anywhere to $100,000 or even $150,000 in profit on one property than dealing with six or seven smaller properties. It’s just more work.

– Yeah.

– It’s like, you know, why do more work when you can just do one?

– Right.

– To me it’s just common sense.

– Okay, so your focus is–

– And luxury’s nice, I love luxury, I’ve been, you know, my whole life I’ve been surrounded with beauty, if you’ve ever met my wife you’ll know what I’m talking about. So, I love beauty, I love beautiful things, and I want a place that I can stay when it’s not rented, too. So, you know, or my staff or my team.

– Yeah.

– Or my partners. You know?

– Yeah.

– We use our homes for masterminds, you know, our own personal masterminds. So we love it for that purpose, we save money doing that instead of coming into a hotel.

– Right.

– Yeah.

– With a $25,000 food and beverage minimum or whatever.

– Exactly.

– So now you’re saving a ton of money on that.

– A hundred percent. We bring a private chef in, costs us a couple grand, we feed 25 people, we’re doing one this weekend, you know, at one of our properties.

– Nice. Very cool.

– So it’s really exciting.

– And I love what you said about it’s the same amount of work so you might as well make more money.

– Yeah.

– I mean,

– Yeah, it’s a little bit more risky, you know what I mean? Because you’re not paying $1500 a month in rent and trying to make $2500.

– Right.

– You know what I mean?

– Right.

– I’m taking a risk, you know? Our highest lease payment right now is 10-five.

– Okay.

– A month on one of our properties. We typically do about, last year on that particular property, we did 330,000 in revenue.

– Wow.

– So think about the numbers, right?

– Say you’re paying 10-five a month–

– Ten-five a month.

– You’re making about 30 grand a month.

– Right. So now you take the expenses, right?

– Right.

– So the expenses on that house is roughly about 36 grand a year.

– Okay.

– On top of the 10-five, which is, what, 130, right?

– Yep.

– So now I’m 160, 170 in the deal. And I made 330.

– It’s a double-up.

– It’s a pretty impressive

– Yeah!

– Vacation rental.

– Yeah. For something that you don’t own,

– I wish all of them were like that,

– Which is the key, right?

– Yeah.

– The fact that you don’t own these properties,

– No, I don’t own anything.

– And you’re able to make money,

– Exactly.

– You didn’t have to put

– Yeah.

– Hundreds of thousands of dollars down, you’re basically just

– We structured that lease as a one-year lease with a four-year option. So I can actually make sure that it works in the first year and that we can dial it in from a marketing perspective.

– Got it.

– And then now we’re secure, we can, boom, go another year, go another year, go another year, go another year.

– Love that.

– Yeah, isn’t that cool?

– And then how many of these do you have right now?

– Twenty-two.

– So you have 22 luxury homes

– Twenty-two here in the Scottsdale/Phoenix area, we have 22 properties.

– And they’re all in one market.

– Yeah, all right here. Our students, we teach this in our boot camps

– Okay.

– All over the country. And our students take our wisdom, our knowledge, our education, our teaching, and they go out and do that on their own. And they do anywhere from luxury homes to small homes. We have students now doing apartment buildings, you know?

– Love that.

– We have students that have 12 homes now. You know? And it’s pretty amazing.

– That’s great.

– And so we love inspiring the whole industry and having people do it in different markets. Personally, for me, I live in California. I have an office here. I have a staff here now because of how many properties we have. And we’re helping our students use Scottsdale and Phoenix as like a training center

– Got it.

– In a way. Where, if they want to get into the business, and they want to learn how to do the business, they come out to Scottsdale, we show it to them by putting them into a property. As a trial basis. Like as as apprentice program.

– Love that.

– So this way, they can learn the business, they can follow it a little bit, they can make a few mistakes, you know, during the training process. But then they’re gonna learn it and then they can scale. They can then get another one and another one and another one, you know? And that’s how you build a business that way.

– It is very duplicatable because of the fact that you don’t have to come in with a ton of money.

– Yes, exactly.

– Right?

– Right, yeah. A typical deal in the luxury space is going to cost you some money. You can’t expect–

– Yeah, of course. You’ve gotta do some fix-ups,

– Yeah, yeah.

– New furniture.

– Yeah, we don’t do too many construction things. The most construction we do in any of the properties is taking a formal living room and converting that into a bedroom. Or taking the garage and converting that into a bedroom. That’s typically, just ’cause another bedroom is another 30 or 40 thousand in revenue per year. And of course, if it doesn’t have a hot tub, that’s worth about 30 grand a year, if you have a hot tub or don’t have a hot tub.

– Oh, wow.

– It’s all based on revenue and really understanding how to build out the vacation rental for what people are looking for when they come out and travel.

– When they go on vacations, right?

– Yeah, yeah. We have people come out for, you know, bar mitzvahs, weddings, you know, just regular masterminds like I said, vacations, just typical vacations. They come out for executive retreats, all kinds of reasons now. It’s not just vacationing even though we call it

– Right.

– the vacation industry. It’s more than that. It’s people really coming for special events. And we want to know what that is before they come because what LuxHomePros is about and my holding company is about is all about bringing back the charm in the industry. Because our industry has gotten very bloated very quick with the platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO and Expedia and all these other platforms.

– Yeah.

– It’s exploded and so that intimate relationship with me and you as a traveler, is just broken in so many ways. And we want to restore that. I want to know why you’re coming, so that I can prepare that place for you and for your experience. Because I want you to have the best experience.

– Oh, that’s interesting.

– Yeah.

– So you’re really treating it like a hotel and like–

– You know, it’s not a hotel. We don’t like people that think they’re gonna call room service and we’re gonna be there. You know what I mean?

– Right. We don’t want that.

– Right.

– But at the same time, we want to make sure if they’re coming, if you’ve got four foursome golf groups, right? That’s very popular out here, right? So it’s typical, most of our homes sleep at least 16 because of that. We make sure that we have the right bed configurations to support a group that size because that’s coming out here all the time. That’s one of our, you know, greatest opportunities is to make sure that we can serve those types of groups. And so they come out, we want to make sure that they’re having fun and we want to know what they like and we, you know, we always have a nice little gift for them when they arrive. We stock the refrigerator a little bit. We make sure that

– That’s cool.

– when they walk in it’s that first impression, that wow-factor, you know?

– I love that.

– Yeah, it’s really cool.

– I love what you said, too, about really knowing who’s coming to stay there.

– Yeah.

– Because if you do just a few little things,

– Yeah.

– to impress them up front,

– A hundred percent.

– when they get there, like,

– Oh, works every time.

– Maybe have a couple golf balls.

– That’s what I’m saying.

– Packs of golf balls if you know it’s a golf group.

– All our homes have putting greens because that’s what’s here.

– Nice.

– You have to put that in.

– Smart.

– If it doesn’t have one, you have to put one in. We actually have a house right now that I have to put one in. I’m ready to contract somebody to put the putting green in. ‘Cause that’ll be worth another $20,000 a year in revenue.

– And that just comes back to knowing your customer.

– Yeah, 100%.

– Right, so.

– And really having them come to repeat, you know, so much of our business is repeat business. Somebody has a great experience in your vacation rental, they’re going to come back next year.

– I love that.

– Yeah. And then, so how are you finding these properties?

– Great question. Okay, so, we find them a little, we teach how to find them with our students, which is basically taking them through a process of evaluating the area. Like let’s say for an example, you want to find a property in, say, Lake Tahoe, okay? So, what we teach is go on Airbnb, go on VRBO, and then look at the exact area that you’re wanting to play in. And see where all the vacation rentals are. The next step to the equation is go look at what they’re charging. Go pretend like you’re gonna book it and take some notes. And then once you zone-in on an area, you don’t want your house to be over here where, all the houses are here on the map, you know in Airbnb, you just go right there and it’ll show you all the little icons.

– Right.

– You push on it, it zooms out,

– Yeah.

– You don’t want your house over here. You want to be right in the middle of the conversation.

– That’s a great tip.

– You don’t want to be out here because there’s no traffic out there. And you’ll probably struggle as a vacation rental because you’re out in the boonies. Nobody’s traveling there, they’re all right here for a reason.

– And is there any point of over-saturation? Like is there any number of Airbnb’s where you’re like, “Oh, no, that would be, that’s too many, “I don’t play to in that market?”

– Yeah, of course. I think you have to have some reason. But I think it comes out to the price per day and looking at the calendars and how full they are. You could do that on, you don’t need any fancy

– Right.

– Air DNA software,

– Okay.

– Even though that’s helpful too if you want to dial down a market, you can find it exactly through that software platform of what the rents are and what the possibility for your house could be.

– Okay.

– Right in that area, there’s softwares and companies that provide that data for you to look at. We don’t, it’s never the end-all for us, we always verify with our own systems. And the easiest system is go look and see how many calendars are full in the area.

– Right.

– And what rents are getting and do the math.

– Yeah.

– Make sure the math works, you know, on your property. If you’re leasing something for five grand a month, and you know you could make like 15 a month, then that’s probably a good deal.

– Yeah.

– But if you think you can only make 10, you may be a little in the risk area in the slow season and you may not be able to manage the cash flow for the whole year.

– Makes sense. You’ve gotta look at the high season and the low season.

– So, if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s find a market, as you’re researching that market, one of the key factors is the nightly rate.

– Yeah.

– And to figure out the nightly rate, you’re just looking at, let’s say, 10 homes in that area.

– Yes.

– And you can see what they charge.

– Yeah.

– And if they’re booked or not.

– Exactly.

– So, by doing that simple math, you can get a rough idea of

– What is the the occupancy rate gonna be?

– Yeah, right.

– Because you have to have that book. Our homes are 80%, we want to book them out 80% year in Scottsdale, that’s a goal. It doesn’t always happen.

– Right.

– But you want to try to strive for that.

– Okay.

– You know? And so if you look at it and say, “Okay, at 50% occupancy rate, “this is how much I’m gonna make, “I’m still gonna make some money, “this could be not a bad deal.”

– Got it.

– Right? But you gotta know you’ve gotta book it and you can see what everybody else is doing.

– Got it.

– And one of the opportunities that we have because we’re really good at marketing, you know, that’s why we’re part of War Room and Closing Table, right?

– Yeah.

– We’re here, you know, simply because of learning and sharpening the saw on the little things that make the biggest difference

– Yeah.

– in marketing. A headline. An edited photo. You know, good copy. Bed configuration, price automation. Right, there’s so many things that people don’t realize that could just lift the ad, you know, to the top of the, top of Airbnb under that search, so if you put–

– So is SEO a thing on Airbnb?

– Oh, big time, big time.

– It is?

– Yeah, backlinks, social media marketing, all the ways of really optimizing the listing, just like, no different than Amazon.

– That’s great.

– You know?

– That’s great to know.

– Like when you have a product on Amazon and you want to get it to the top, you know?

– Correct.

– There’s an algorithm behind every one of these platforms. When you understand the algorithm, you can, you can

– Work it in your favor.

– Work it in your favor.

– And so what does that mean? Just include key words,

– Right, key words.

– Like “ski”.

– Yeah.

– “Ski in, ski out.”

– Yeah.

– Or whatever, going back to the Tahoe example.

– Yes, exactly. Especially in relationship to what people are wanting in what market.

– Right. “Near the lodge,” “Near whatever.”

– Right, yeah.

– Yeah.

– Like one of the properties I’m staying at, my property that I’m staying at this week, is right by the Royal Palm Hotel. Which is about three miles from here. And it’s a famous hotel, I mean, they’ve had multiple Presidents that have stayed at this hotel. It was built in the 1920s. The home that we have, the floor comes right from the Royal Palm Hotel.

– Oh, cool.

– Like literally, the homeowners modeled the home after the hotel because it’s so famous.

– Nice.

– Yeah.

– So you would put that in the description?

– Oh, 100%.

– “Near Three Palms Hotel”

– Yes.

– “Whatever, whatever.”

– Exactly.

– Okay. That’s good tips, yeah, yeah.

– Yeah.

– So going back to how you’re finding these deals. So,

– Yeah.

– We’re in Tahoe, we’re looking at the market, what are we doing next?

– Yeah, next step is to, you know, I like to visit the area personally, you know, because I want to feel the area.

– Okay.

– I want to see it. And then of course I’m going to look for opportunities for homes for sale.

– Okay.

– In that area, right? I’m also going to check regulations, I’m going to make sure I know that the area that I’m going in is what I can do.

– Right.

– Some markets limit you to 30-day rentals, you know? You don’t want to be in there. We stay away from gated communities, as an example. We stay away from HOA’s, you know.

– Why is that, just ’cause it’s harder to get in and out?

– No, the regulations around it, yeah, if you’re checking in people, how are you going to get them into the gate?

– Right.

– It just causes confusion. And in many cases, most gated communities are HOA oriented.

– Right.

– And they don’t allow some of the things that we do.

– Got it.

– So we look for areas, there’s just enough areas that allow it.

– Okay.

– And don’t allow it.

– Okay.

– So don’t get all hung up on that.

– Yeah.

– A lot of people get hung up on that, you know? We have a house, actually, right now that’s in an HOA community, they changed the laws after the fact. Right? So we’re in a fight with that, you know? We feel like we have the rights, we bought the, you know, the investor bought the house particularly because it was a vacation rental, we’re running it as a vacation rental. And the community changed the rules after the fact, after it went into title, so, we’re winning that.

– Okay.

– We have rights. We have rights.

– Yeah, yeah.

– Yeah.

– And I want to get back to that because I have a lot of questions about how you’re structuring the agreements and stuff like that.

– Yeah.

– But, okay, so, you’ve checked out the area,

– Yeah.

– You like the market, it’s Airbnb short-term vacation rental-friendly,

– Yes.

– What’s next?

– Negotiations.

– Okay.

– You’ve gotta negotiate with the homeowner and put a deal together.

– And are you just searching the MLS for things that have been sitting for over a year?

– We have bird dogs

– Okay.

– that do that for us

– Okay. on our behalf here in Scottsdale.

– Okay.

– And they work for our company. So, you know, we’re on it. So is our competitors. So we’ve gotta act quickly. You know, so we’re first on-scene, you know? We have to be in that situation. Somebody that’s just looking for a one-off opportunity in Lake Tahoe, I would recommend visiting the area and then seeing what’s for sale and get on there, do some research, pick up the phone, call a short-term rental specialist in that area because there’s typically one there in that area.

– Yep.

– So go ahead and look that person up and see if they can help you or guide you.

– What’s the rules, what are the–

– Yeah, yeah, what are the rules?

– Yeah.

– What are the hot spots? They know everything.

– Yeah.

– They pretty much, pretty knowledgeable so you can get a lot of information. And then try to get the phone of the homeowner, if you could. If you can’t, and you have to go through the realtor, then tell the realtor what your motives are and explain your proposition on how you can help the person turn this into a vacation rental.

– Yeah.

– There’s multiple ways we can do a deal. You know that, right?

– Okay.

– There’s like–

– Let’s talk about those.

– There’s like six different ways, I think, you can do a deal.

– Okay.

– You know, typically if the house is for sale, you can buy the house. Right?

– Yeah.

– That’s a pretty simple one, right?

– Yeah, that’s step one.

– Find a house and then turn it into a short-term rental, right? The other way is the lease method, which I like. And I like that for any business owner because if you’re leasing a property and you have your money on the line, you’re gonna work that thing so damn hard.

– Definitely.

– You know? The other option is you can just host it or partner with them, where they own the house, you do the management. You do the hosting of the property, you take care of the property, you take care of the customer relationship coming off of Airbnb or VRBO or

– Got it, okay.

– Any other platform, right? So they’re not tied up with customer relationships and organizing all that, making sure that the cleaning crew comes in and out at the right time and turns the beds and

– Yeah.

– Cleans the house and all that stuff. A lot of the homeowners just don’t wanna deal with that. They’ll deal with you and you get a rev share.

– Yeah.

– You know? Typically 20%, you know, maybe 30% if you’re a really good negotiator. You know, on doing that.

– And that’s doing straight management for them?

– That’s straight for them. “Straight hosting” we call it.

– Yeah, yeah, okay.

– So that’s like a third way

– Okay.

– Of doing a deal. You know, depending on what they want to to do, you know? If you don’t have the cash to buy the property, but they really wanna sell it and they’re highly motivated in that sense, they may carry the paper.

– Okay.

– Right? Why not?

– Seller financing.

– Yeah, seller finance it, you know? Work out a deal that way, right?

– Okay.

– You know, if the house is in foreclosure, you can go to the local, you can see if there’s any properties in foreclosure that’s in these legal areas. And you can potentially do a foreclosure deal, you know? Or maybe the guy that’s about to go into foreclosure, you can give him some cash,

– Yeah.

– He can quick-deed the house to you and you can do a quick strategy like that.

– I like that.

– They don’t happen frequently but they’re out there.

– So just like real estate investing, it’s only limited by your creativity.

– Yes, exactly.

– Yeah, okay.

– That’s really what it comes down to.

– And then what would you say is your favorite strategy? Like of those six that you just mentioned.

– I like the lease, personally.

– Okay.

– Because it puts fire in my butt, right? To know that I gotta get it done. I’ve done my homework up front, I know it’s a good property, I know I’m going to make a decent amount of money on the deal, I’m going to work my ass off to get that listing up and get that thing cash-flowing even before I take the property over, right? Because you could do that, you could build out the listing once you have a written agreement with the homeowner.

– Okay, okay.

– You have to have a written agreement, a Letter of Intent, this is what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna do it on this day. Now you have the right to go ahead and put that listing up. You’re not going to book it until you actually sign the lease and you’re in the house.

– Yeah.

– But you can start cash-flowing it.

– And then what are the terms of the lease?

– Well, typically it’s, that’s all negotiable. But typically what we’re looking for is at least a year, right? With an option for two more years, right?

– Okay.

– We like the option.

– I like that.

– Fact is, I don’t want to take too long of a risk right out of the gate because I may have been wrong in my calculation, right?

– And if you are, then you can get out after a year.

– Yeah, 100%, right?

– Got it.

– So, the other one is a typical rev share. We call it a hybrid. Which is also a favorite of mine, you know, as far as just partnering with them. Where you work out a deal where you go more like 50/50 on the property, where you take over the management, we put up the money to convert it into a vacation rental.

– Got it.

– ‘Cause the house could be empty. Right, if it has no furniture,

– Right.

– and somebody’s gotta put the money up for the furniture.

– Right.

– So we would do that. But then we would go into a higher percentage on return.

– Okay.

– We go 50/50. Instead of like a 30/70.

– Okay, and then, so generally you’re trying to get at least a one-year lease with an option to extend.

– Yeah, option, yeah.

– If it’s working out well.

– Yeah.

– Okay. And then you also mentioned something about an option contract

– To buy.

– Earlier.

– Yes.

– An option to purchase.

– Exactly.

– So walk me through that scenario.

– Yeah, so, in the beginning, when we were first doing it, it was easy to do it because there wasn’t as much competition in this particular market. And so as the competition started coming in, negotiating those contracts up front became a little bit more time sensitive. So, if a house comes on the market and it’s a decent house, let’s say it’s in Paradise Valley, you know, I can be on it in 24 hours and have a deal and a check in their hand.

– Okay.

– And they’ll sign within 48 hours.

– Okay.

– It can be that quick, right?

– And this is, when you said coming on the market, this is for sale or for rent?

– For rent.

– For lease, got it.

– Or if it’s, you know, a lot of the houses are for lease with, they really want to sell it

– Got it.

– But they put it on lease.

– So it comes up for lease, the first day you guys are on it.

– On it.

– And then what happens?

– So, if we like it, and we do the numbers, I bring my team in, and we evaluate the property in a couple hours, you know, if it’s a decent property and it’s gonna make money, it’s got the right bed configuration, it fits our needs, has all the amenities that we’re looking for. Doesn’t have a pool, it’s, you know, it’s gotta have a pool.

– Yeah.

– That’s what people want here. If it doesn’t have a putting green or a hot tub, we’ll put those in, ’cause that’s not that,

– It’s not too expensive.

– Not that big of a deal, you know what I mean, to put that stuff in. And then we’ll furnish the whole house, we’ll get it turned, and we’ll get all the estimates very quickly, we move very fast, and if we like the numbers in the deal, we’ll do the deal.

– Okay.

– So we’ll see if we can negotiate a deal with the homeowner.

– And then the option to purchase

– Yeah. So, typically,

– comes in.

– If they have are willing to give it to us at their face value of what they’re wanting to sell the house for, we’ll just put it in the lease.

– So even if you feel like it’s overpriced,

– Doesn’t matter.

– You’re not worried about it,

– I’m not worried about it because the market,

– Because as soon as you show the cash flow,

– Yeah.

– Now all of a sudden it’s worth more.

– Exactly, that’s one reason. But the other reason is because the market always dictates market value. So at the time of that opportunity, we can renegotiate the option.

– Right.

– Let’s say you have the option at 950, to buy the house, and a year comes by and the house is worth 900, maybe the market dipped, right? You know, why pay 950 if you can get it for nine?

– Right, yeah.

– You just have to negotiate it. Or I don’t exercise my option.

– Right. But you want the option because–

– I love the option, I love the option.

– In case it does go up,

– Yeah. But if the option is going to get in the way of doing a lease straightaway, and the homeowner’s not willing to negotiate that right away, I don’t want to lose the deal to my competitors.

– So you’ll just move past that?

– I just move past it.

– Yeah.

– That’s what we’re doing in recent times, just because of the market conditions.

– Got it.

– Yeah. But if it is–

– I will always go, but we always try for the option.

– No, that’s great.

– It’s always part of the proposal.

– And so let’s say, I just want to get this conceptually, so let’s say the house is worth, like real-world value, worth a million bucks,

– Yeah.

– And they’re asking 1.2 or whatever so it’s not selling. You’ll say, “Okay, we’ll give you an option at 1.2?”

– Yes.

– And that’s because you know that after you rent it, you can show that extra cash flow.

– Yeah.

– And you can probably sell it to an investor at 1.2.

– Yeah, exactly. Right.

– Okay.

– Now, don’t get me wrong, I love–

– And if you can’t, then you don’t need to exercise the option.

– Exactly.

– And it is what it is, you’ll just walk away.

– We’ll typically negotiate it. I think the homeowner, if they see that we’ve been able to bring an investor to the table, which is our ultimate goal, they’ll probably come down in price to make sure that I make some money in the deal.

– Right.

– You know, typically, we always try to make a hundred, hundred-and-a-half, on the flip because that’s a great business, right?

– Yep.

– If I can beat ’em up and get the house at a million and he’s asking 1.2, we’re in a little bit of a, it’s going to take some time to do that dance.

AirBnB Arbitrage_ How to Make BANK with Short Term Vacation Rentals _ Jerry Conti on Founders Club 40-27 screenshot

– Right.

– Right?

– Right.

– And I don’t want to make them feel bad. And I want the lease, that’s my primary goal,

– Yeah, exactly.

– Is to cashflow the property. Right?

– Totally.

– I don’t want to lose the deal to somebody else. So the issue there is, really, you’ve just gotta kind of read it, and if you feel like the option, that negotiation piece is gonna delay, then it’s not worth it to us.

– Then skip it.

– We really want the opportunity to lease it and make the cashflow.

– Makes sense.

– Yeah.

– Makes sense.

– So that’s kind of our model, you know?

– Yeah.

– I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do for everyone in every situation, because everybody likes to get a great option on a property,

– Of course.

– That’s lower–

– Right, right.

– Than what it’s worth. Right.

– Right, right.

– So we used to do that but we changed it and just said, look, let’s the market dictate, I can’t read what it’s gonna be like in 12 months, you can’t.

– Right.

– Nobody can, nobody has a crystal ball, if we did we’d all be billionaires, you know, in the real estate space.

– Yeah! Yeah.

– So.

– So any other tips for just getting it under contract or,

– Yeah, you know, just some really good, fundamental tips is that because of the industry itself, and the regulations, and the fight that’s going on, there’s fights in every city, major, you know, short-term-rental vacation-type cities,

– Right.

– In America. There’s fights, the homeowners against the short-term rental homeowners, you know? There’s always that battle between,

– Yeah.

– Hey, I don’t want it here, I don’t want it there.

– Big time in San Diego.

– Yeah.

– We’re dealing with a lot of that.

– Yes, exactly.

– Right.

– So we add a little disclaimer to all of our leases that in the event that we can’t rent that out for 24 hours, that we can exit that lease without any, we can just exit the lease and, it’s not a good thing for us.

– Say that again. What was the 24 hour part of it?

– Like if I can’t rent that house out for at least 24 hours, like one day, like if it changes and the regulation says, “No, you have to rent this out on a 30-day basis”

– Ah-hah.

– That kills my short-term rental business.

– Right.

– I can exit that lease with no repercussions.

– Got it.

– Yeah.

– So you put an escape clause,

– An escape clause.

– Into the lease.

– Yeah.

– That says,

– It’s not good, I don’t want to exercise it, I don’t want it to happen.

– That says, but it’s mainly to protect you,

– To protect us, yeah.

– So, if laws change,

– Correct.

– HOA changes,

– Right.

– Whatever changes. And now they say, “Nope, sorry, now it’s a 30-day minimum.”

– Yeah.

– At that point in time you can say, “All right, well, I can get out of this lease because

– Yes

– “I can no longer do 24-hour rentals.”

– Right.

– Okay.

– Short-term rentals, yeah.

– Love that.

– Okay, that’s great advice.

– And we have to do that. And it’s the right thing to do.

– Well, yeah.

– ‘Cause I’m going into the deal based on the fact that I can make two or three X on my money.

– Right.

– Right?

– Right.

– I’m taking the risk, I’m putting up the 7500 a month,

– Yeah.

– The $3000 for bills.

– Yep.

– Right? And I’m trying to get 20 or 30 out of that every month, you know?

– Yeah.

– That’s within the season, you know?

– And how quickly are you able to get these things to cashflow?

– Well, I’ll give you a recent example. You want one?

– Sure.

– So, we picked up a property just about three weeks ago here in Paradise Valley. Beautiful house, $10,000 a month, gorgeous house. Just under 5000 square feet, six-bedroom, gorgeous resort-style pool, it’s got the bar, you know, with the little seats in the pool,

– Nice.

– And just everything that somebody wants to come out here for, you know?

– Yeah.

– It has the flames on the little rock waterfall.

– Nice.

– It’s got the grotto behind it.

– Yeah.

– It’s got the little slide for a kid to come down, right? I mean, this house was just so stellar. And the owner was great, he’s a doctor, a real popular doctor here in Paradise Valley. And I love the house. It was set behind, so you weren’t by any neighbors. So if your guests got a little loud in the–

– It’s private.

– Yeah, it’s private. It’s got the mountain views, it’s really quite amazing property. So we flipped it in 10 days. Literally, we had to furnish the whole thing. We converted the garage. We put some money into the property ’cause it was a higher-end type property. And as soon as we got done in 10 days that went live, the listing went live, and we booked $60,000 over the next two weeks.

– Wow.

– Yeah.

– Wow. So that’s, you cash-flowed it right away, first month.

– Right away, right away.

– Because no matter what you’re on the hook for 10-five.

– Yeah, every month.

– Every month.

– Plus expenses.

– Plus expenses.

– Yeah.

– So your goal is to get it to cash-flow immediately.

– Right away, yeah.

– Okay, I love that.

– So we’re in the high season, and that was obviously a benefit to us.

– Right.

– ‘Cause we’re in the high season right now.

– Yep, yep.

– And you’ve gotta be smart as a business owner in this space. You can’t just burn through your cash, you know what I mean? You can’t just make all this profit during the high season and then go to Vegas.

– Yeah.

– You know? And blow it all.

– Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

– Or buy a car or something.

– Yeah.

– You know what I mean?

– Right.

– Like don’t be stupid.

– Yeah.

– Just make sure you can weather the storm for the year, you know?

– Yeah. You’ll break even or do even better, break even in June, July, and August here, if you’re smart and you know what you’re doing and you have our services. Like we are the bomb.

AirBnB Arbitrage_ How to Make BANK with Short Term Vacation Rentals _ Jerry Conti on Founders Club 44-10 screenshot

– Yeah.

– In a sense, you know? We’re the bomb when it comes to optimization of the listing in the ad, so, you know.

– So seasonality obviously plays a big factor.

– Seasonality plays a role, you know, be smart with your money, you know, in any business, right?

– Yeah. So what I’m hearing you say is save some of the money from the high season,

– Yeah.

– Tuck it away.

– Of course. To cover,

– To get through the,

– To cover the low season.

– Yeah, yeah.

– But in many cases you’ll break even, you’ll do fine. You’re not going to lose money, in our opinion, here.

– Yeah.

– We don’t want to lose money, ever.

– Right.

– You know? And if you have to take it, you know, a couple months may not be as good as you think it is and you need to put a little cash into it, you have to put a little cash into it.

– Yeah.

– Especially when you first get started. You know, for new operators, when they first get started, and they start it off there’s a lot of learning. You know? And you don’t want to make any mistakes, you know?

– Totally.

– Yeah.

– Yeah, I love the fact that you can get into these deals with not a lot of money down.

– Yeah, yeah. It’s typically a 50 to, depending on, a bigger house like that is more like 75 grand, you know, that you have to invest up front.

– Right.

– But you’re gonna make that back.

– And that 50 to 75K, that’s just for cosmetic improvements,

– Furniture.

– Make it look good.

– Furniture is about 35.

– Okay.

– You have your first month, your last month.

– Yep.

– Sometimes a security deposit. So you got 10, 10, 10.

– Got it.

– And then 30 in furniture is 65 and then you gotta put your beds in and your sheets and your pillows and your dishware

– Yep. and your cleaning and you gotta put signs up.

– Yep.

– It’s a little , it’s a little to dial it in.

– But, exactly, but to flip that on its head, to buy that same house,

– Oh, yeah.

– You’d probably have to put like $500,000 down.

– Correct.

– At least.

– Right?

– Yeah. So, on my properties right now, I think my payments are something like around 160. I’m managing $23 million in real estate for about 160,000 a month.

– It’s amazing.

– It’s pretty freakin’ cool

– It’s pretty cool, yeah.

– And I get to use these properties when it’s not rented.

– Right, that’s the other–

– Not that I want to in that sense, right?

– Really cool part, right?

– It’s just beneficial, you know?

– Yeah.

– Have my friends use it, you know?

– Right.

– It’s cool.

– You’re approaching these homeowners, are you generally getting to the owner or are you generally having to go through a realtor?

– Yeah.

– And I guess it’s probably different if it’s leasing or for sale.

– Yeah.

– But, um.

– Yeah depending on the markets, too, it really matters, you know? Of course if it’s, you know, For Sale By Owner,

– Right.

– Then that’s an easy one.

– Yeah.

– Right? But typically they’re, these houses are on the market and it’s the realtor that hasn’t been able to sell them for a period of time.

– Got it.

– We look for the properties we put our search in the MLS, right? Looking for houses that have been on the market for more than 12 months. Right?

– Right.

– So they come up, the list comes up, right? So many times, the realtor, as you know, has a motive.

– Yeah.

– They wanna sell the house.

– Yeah.

– And they wanna make their commission.

– Right.

– And I get that. You know what I mean? Like we respect that. So in many cases, we have to explain to them the entire model so that they can take it to the homeowner. We’re not looking to circumvent anyone.

– Right, of course.

– Right? And we don’t wanna cut anybody out of anything. In the event that that house sells, 12 months, we bring an investor or they bring an investor. Or maybe even the homeowner themselves brings in an investor,

– Right.

– After we write the new story. We’re writing a new story about the property. This property cash flows, it’s a short-term rental.

– Yep.

– It’s in a legal zone. We’re re-writing the story on the history of this property itself.

– Right.

– That’s a big thing.

– That’s a great soundbite, I love that.

– It’s a really big thing. People don’t realize how big that is. And so at the end of that story, when that house sells, that realtor gets their commission. It’s just delayed a little bit.

– Yeah.

– If they help us get in, we have a little spiff that we provide them as well.

– Right.

– So they can earn some money right up front

– Love that.

– If they can help us make the deal happen. We’re not greedy, we want everybody to win. That’s the only way to do business in life, is that everybody wins.

– Definitely. Amen to that.

– Yeah, yeah.

– And then what about conversion rates? Like how many like how many properties that you find that you like that could be a good fit for you are you having to talk to before you get one under contract?

– Yeah, that’s a typical question. So, when people go through our Boot Camps, we take them out to show them how to negotiate with the homeowners and how to work with realtors. Because we actually do a bus tour, you know? So we give them five opportunities to learn it by just doing it with us, like we show ’em. And we also, when we go into the house, we tell ’em why we don’t wanna do the deal. The house configuration isn’t an open concept, the rooms are too small, they can’t fit the double-XL beds to make more sleeping arrangements, right? Our business is heads and beds, right? So–

– Heads and beds, I love that.

– Yeah, so, butts in seats on the seminar side, and heads and beds on the other side. So, that’s my life, you know? And the goal there is to show them what is a good house and what is not a good house. So that they don’t make those mistakes, right? On making sure they can fit enough people in there to get the higher rates that you need. So, typically, you know, our students knock on doors, they talk to realtors. It can be slow for some if they don’t have the experience. For those that have real estate experience, that have been used to talking to homeowners, understand it, maybe they’ve been a flipper, a wholesaler, you know. They’ve been in the business somehow as as realtor themselves, it’s easier for them. The newbie that comes into the business that’s never done a real estate deal, it’s a little tougher. I will tell them, they’re gonna knock on a bunch of doors before they do it.

– Which is natural, they don’t talk the talk, right.

– It could be 10, it could be 15, you know, before they get into that open door and they find it. I would recommend anybody that doesn’t have that experience, that’s learning how to negotiate or find deals, is to go out into those local areas and find the short-term rental specialist to guide you. They’re all there. There’s always one in a market, you know? So you just gotta find that person and see if they can help you get into those doors.

– Okay. And then of the ones that you get in, how many are saying yes? Like how many do you have to talk to before you get a “Yes”?

– Yeah.

– Generally?

– Yeah, I would say on the students side, it’s probably a 10-to-one.

– Okay.

– On our side, it’s usually one-to-one.

– Wow, okay.

– You know, because, because it’s different for us.

– And you’ve got it dialed in.

– We’ve got it dialed in.

– Right.

– We have the credibility. We have a portfolio of properties. Once you have that established credibility, which is everything, we provide that extended credibility–

– Right, sure.

– To our own students. That’s our whole reason for the Boot Camp.

– Yeah.

– Is to give you the brand, give you the credibility. You don’t even need your credit when you’re doing business with us because we have ours.

– Nice.

– It’s a pretty cool deal.

– Yeah, that is very cool.

– Yeah.

– And in all reality, I mean, 10-to-one is still great.

– It’s pretty good.

– That’s still 10% close ratio.

– Yeah, yeah.

– Considering how much money you can make and that you don’t have to put all that much money into the deals, like, that’s

– Exactly. I’m inspired by the new generation of realtors out there. The old realtors are really just very, wanna sell the house, wanna get their commission. But this new generation of realtors that we’re seeing right now are open to new opportunities. They’re open to creative deals. They’re open to understanding that we have a place in the marketplace. And I think that’s a really good thing.

– Totally.

– I have hope and promise you know, for realtors opening their minds.

– I like that.

– Yeah.

– And I do really like a 10% close ratio. That’s not intimidating at all, even for a newbie, right?

– Yeah.

– That’s really good.

– Exactly, right, right.

– I’m curious what’s the biggest objection that you hear? Because I’m sure that like,

– Oh, my God.

– People are like, I don’t want wear and tear,

– Yeah, from who, the homeowner?

– From the homeowner.

– Or from the realtor? Which one?

– Yeah, exactly, exactly.

– From the homeowner, okay. So, we’ll start with the homeowner.

– Okay.

– So, the homeowner, their biggest objection is, obviously, are people gonna trash my house?

– Right.

– I mean, that’s always the one, right?

– Yep.

– And so we have to calm them down a little bit by explaining our process. How we evaluate, take a client off of Airbnb, how we evaluate that client, how we get their driver’s license, how we do a little, you know, basic background check. We match addresses with credit cards. We do all these security checks in the background. We also don’t rent to locals. So if somebody in Arizona, if you’re in Phoenix, wants to rent my house in Phoenix, it’s typical that they wanna keep their house nice and use mine as a party, right?

– Okay.

– So, we kinda read through the lines and we are so good at it ’cause we’ve done it so many times, so many bookings. You know, thousands of bookings, right? So when you do that, you can see patterns of issues, you know? You can never predict it 100%. But we also really reassure the homeowner in the sense that we have cameras on the front of the house. We always have cameras pointing at the garbage cans to make sure that the garbage cans were taken out. It’s one of the biggest complaints with neighbors in our industry is that they didn’t take their fuckin’ garbage out. Sorry, I cursed.

– Yeah, that’s funny because that’s such a random one, right?

– Yeah, it’s such a random one, right?

– Yeah.

– You wouldn’t even think that that was a big objection.

– Right.

– But it’s the garbage that causes a lot of the problems. Of course, noise is always an issue for neighbors. They don’t want large parties out all night. And so typically we put Noise Aware systems in. It’s an industry tool that you could put in areas where you think people are gonna hang out. And it’s an app on your phone and if the decimal volume of that area gets to a certain line it triggers the host

– Really.

– On the phone.

– Wow.

– Letting them know, hey the noise is getting a little loud in that house over there. We pick up the phone and call them straightaway and say, “Lower the volume” before the cops are called by the neighbors, right? So we have those controls. And we always have a handyman and a caretaker close by to the property, within 10 miles. And so they can go over there right away and just calm things down.

– So if a toilet gets clogged or whatever.

– Yeah, anything, yeah, or any maintenance issues. So we reassure them about maintenance, about security, about making sure that their home is well taken care of. We also put an insurance damage waiver insurance policy on every property ourselves.

– Nice, nice.

– We never bother the homeowner with small little fixes like anything under $700 we never go to them

– Okay.

– For those types of things. And then we insure everything else so,

– I like that tip, though, that’s a good tip. They never go to the homeowner for anything less than $700.

– Yeah, yeah, we don’t.

– ‘Cause if it’s like, oh the stupid,

– Are you kidding me?

– Like, they are not trying to deal with that.

– No, they want out of that. You know? They don’t want anything to do with that.

– Right.

– You put a long-term tenant in there, I actually rent my own personal home, on a long-term basis, and I don’t, I never call the owners.

– Right.

– For anything.

– Yeah.

– Unless it’s major.

– Right.

– I had one time I called them where a pipe broke up in a bathroom and it flooded my whole ceiling downstairs. I called them for that.

– Yeah.

– But that’s it.

– Yeah.

– That’s it.

– Yeah, makes sense.

– Yeah, why bother them? Right?

– Yeah. Because I’m imagining the more you’re bothering them, the more they don’t want to deal with you. Or they wanna raise your rent.

– Right, exactly, exactly.

– Yeah.

– Totally makes sense.

– Yeah.

– Okay. And I wanna go back to what you just said about the noise system?

– Yeah, Noise Aware.

– Because that’s brilliant.

– Yeah.

– Because I feel like one of the biggest things that hurt Airbnb short-term rental types is the party factor, right?

– The partying, yeah.

– You piss off the neighbors,

– Yeah.

– Now all of a sudden, everyone’s upset.

– Sure.

– And it sounds like you’ve come up with a cool way to mitigate that.

– Yes. And we have house rules.

– Okay.

– And there’s a no-party policy.

– Okay.

– And if they’re gonna do a party, like a wedding or bar mitzvah or a bachelor party, they need to get a permit, and we need to have somebody on staff, right? Just to make sure things don’t get out of hand.

– Got it. So you do allow it, under certain conditions.

– Yes, under certain conditions, but we show that and we’re transparent to the homeowner to let them know how we’re mitigating these risks.

– Yeah.

– You know? How we’re handling these situations.

– And then so the Noise Aware system, so let’s just say like, the back yard, right?

– Yeah, yeah.

– People are in the back yard.

– Hey, put a little device on the fence, you know? Like around the area where they’re gonna be hanging out. And you set the decimal, and if it jumps–

– And then that way,

– It triggers me.

– If they start getting loud, you get notified on your app,

– Correct.

– And you can be proactive

– Proactive.

– About calling them.

– Right away.

– And what are you saying, like how?

– Chill!

– Okay.

– I know you guys are getting to loud over there. The neighbors are going to have a problem, you know?

– Are you telling them how you know that?

– Yeah. 100%.

– So you say,

– Yeah.

– “Hey, we have a noise awareness system,

– Yeah. We know it’s you.

– “I’m getting alerts.”

– “We’re getting alerts, man. “You guys are just too loud. “Lower the volume. “Kill the radio, you know? “Do what you gotta do.”

– Yeah.

– Yeah, yeah.

– And that’s great because now you’re

– The security deposit’s in–

– Combatting against one of the biggest problems and complaints.

– 100%

– Which is parties and noise.

– Parties and noise.

– Yeah, yeah.

– Yeah.

– And garbage.

– And garbage, yeah. Trash cans. Trash can cameras.

– You wouldn’t think that, right?

– No, no, never, never.

– But that’s a big deal.

– That’s great, love that.

– Yeah.

– Those are some great tips. So let’s talk about what makes a property the right property.

– Yeah, yeah, cool. So, again I think any property is the right property that makes money.

– Okay, I like that.

– You know? Personally, I have–

– Pretty straightforward.

– I had to, when I first got into the business, I was, my partner who was doing this prior to me doing it, I realized that I was emotional when I went into a property. Oh, I love this place, this is me.

– Right.

– This is my wife. Oh my God, we’re going to have so much fun here.

– Yeah.

– You’re done.

– Okay.

– You’re gonna lose money every time.

– Okay.

– You can’t have that attitude. It’s hard, I promise you, for those who are listening to this or watching this, it’s hard. It’s hard to go into a property and not happen to be your favorite property but look at it from an economics standpoint, can it make money?

– So, no emotions.

– No emotion.

– It’s all about the numbers.

– No emotion. Make sure its got the right bed configuration. Make sure its got the open-concept kitchen which people want. Make sure its got enough spots for gaming and various things.

– Hanging out.

– Yeah, we convert the garages into game rooms and stuff.

– Oh, nice.

– Yeah, you wanna make sure it’s really dialed in, its got a nice pool, a nice sitting area. You’re looking for those things, right? You’re looking for how many beds you can get in that house.

– So back to beds for a second.

– Yeah.

– ‘Cause one thing I’ve heard you say a couple times now is the right bed configuration.

– Yeah, bed configuration’s critical.

– So what do you consider to be the right bed configuration?

– Yeah, great question. So let’s say it’s a six-bedroom.

– Okay.

– Okay? So if I go ahead and put six kings in that room, right? I can only sleep 12 people. Right?

– Right.

– Six couples.

– Yeah, couples, too, exactly.

– Six couples, right?

– Right, yeah.

– Men don’t sleep together, typically.

– Right.

– Especially golfers, right? So, you know,

– Totally.

– So what we do is we wanna make sure that we could configure that in a way where it’s not six kings, it’s 12 singles that match up to a king. So we can configure it by putting the beds together or separating it. Now I can have 12 people in it and I can optimize revenues by having larger groups.

– Got it. So you’re asking them before they get there to figure out whether you need to push the beds together?

– It’s all done through our proprietary software.

– Right.

– It’s all done through our rental manager software.

– Got it.

– Which is really great. Where they request it through the online booking side of the equation.

– Okay.

– And our cleaning crew configures the beds.

– Got it.

– Right? While they’re cleaning the sheets and turning the thing.

– It’s a great tip, wow.

– Yeah.

– That’s great.

– Very important, too.

– Yeah, no, that’s huge.

– Most people don’t do it, most people won’t get rid of their king or their queen, and split it and buy two beds and take that one out and sell it and so forth. Most people just won’t do it ’cause it’s just too much work for them. But they’re losing so much money.

– Makes sense.

– Losing so much money.

– Great tip, man.

– Yeah.

– That’s really good.

– Yeah.

– And then in terms of like the amount of work that you’re doing up front, so you kind of mentioned the putting green and the hot tub,

– Yeah.

– How much work are you typically anticipating and what is the threshold to where you’re like, “Nah, it’s not worth it”?

– Yeah, yeah, it’ a good question, you know. Typically you can get a putting green for around five grand.

– Okay.

– You know?

– You’re gonna get a jacuzzi or a hot tub–

– Probably about the same.

– If you get it new. Right?

– Okay.

– We like to buy used on those types.

– Nice.

– As long as it’s in good shape. We know how to check them out.

– We call those “previously enjoyed.”

– I like that, actually, that’s really good.

– Yeah.

– Yeah, and that’s typically around two grand.

– Okay, okay, great.

– You know? So it’s not that expensive, right? We’re definitely going to have a pool table. We’re definitely going to have, uh,

– Ping pong

– Ping pong table. Sometimes hockey, sometimes golf stuff, depending on what you’re doing. So, depending on the house is really kinda how you figure what you want to spend on it based on the rents you’re trying to get, right? But we never try to overstock the home on things that don’t make us money.

– Right.

– We want to configure the house that drives revenues.

– Okay.

– Hot tubs and putting greens drive revenues.

– And I love what you said about turning the garage into a game room.

– Yeah.

– That’s very cool.

– Which is really cool. And we can do that for very inexpensively.

– Right.

– You can buy everything on Craig’s List.

– Right.

– You can buy everything used. You don’t need to have new stuff.

– Throw down some carpet.

– Yeah.

– Good to go.

– Throw down some carpet. You put some garage signs.

– Yeah.

– Man cave

– Yeah, yeah.

– Stuff up. You know, it’s fun.

– That’s very fun.

– Put a refrigerator in there.

– Maybe a TV or something.

– Yeah, a TV, always a TV in there.

– That’s great. That’s really good.

– You keep ’em smoking in there and doing their thing there.

– And what about on, as far as the work goes, in terms of like, are you doing construction?

– No.

– Or you’re like, if there’s construction involved,

– Yeah.

– That’s too much.

– No, no, the only construction, like I said before, is we’ll convert a formal dining room

– Okay.

– Into a bedroom.

– Got it.

– Because you don’t need that

– Got it. in a vacation rental space.

– Got it.

– You know? Typically, a formal dining room will only hold six to seven people anyway. And our groups are 16 to 20, right?

– Right.

– So, you know, we set up tables outside, we set up tables in larger areas so that it can accommodate that. So we don’t necessarily need that. So we’ll just frame that up and make it a bedroom.

– So you’re really just

– Yeah.

– designing them to be best for big groups.

– Yeah, yeah, exactly.

– And then what about like, are you doing paint, carpet, any of that?

– If it needs it, obviously it has to be done.

– Right.

– Right? We try to negotiate.

– But that’s not something you’re scared of?

– No, not at all, and we try to negotiate that in the lease up front with the owner.

– Or maybe 50/50 or something?

– Yeah, yeah.

– Yeah.

– 100%. Like if the rugs are completely wear out, we try to get them to pay for that.

– Right.

– Or to do any major repairs that it may have in the moment.

– Right.

– The house has to check out to make sure everything’s working,

– Okay.

– when we take it over. So if the refrigerator’s broken, the homeowner–

– And you’re doing what, like, a home inspection?

– Yeah, yeah.

– Okay.

– We do our own internal. I was actually thinking about bringing a third-party company in but we’re pretty good at it, our handymans and stuff.

– Sure.

– You know, can pretty much figure out if–

– Get a good handle on it, yeah.

– Yeah.

– Okay.

– And you’re gonna have to expect to replace those things, you know? You’re bringing in groups after groups after groups. So, typically the appliances are gonna take a little bit more hit than a single-family resident, right?

– Right.

– So, you have to just kinda budget for that. That you’re gonna upgrade everything over time.

– Right.

– Yeah.

– And, I mean, in all reality, if you’re making 10 G’s a month,

– Yeah.

– you can buy a refrigerator

– Yeah.

– Every year and not

– Yeah, as long as you’re not going to Vegas

– Not really effect,

– and buying sports cars.

– Not really effect your bottom line all that much.

– Right.

– Totally.

– Exactly.

– Okay, so I want to shift gears now to pricing the property and, because I feel like that’s kind of a science.

– Yeah, that’s a big science. And we created our own proprietary algorithm around that.

– Okay.

– Called Pricing Autopilot.

– Okay.

– Which is really cool and it’s market-centric.

– Okay.

– So it’s built in, the software is designed, to literally build in the market. So in this particular market, it’s flawless. Because it takes in all the events that are coming into town, takes all of your weekends, it configures all your amenities and how many beds you have, how many people it sleeps, who’s the operator. We’re literally grading the operator. If you have an experienced, you know, host, that has done, you know, managed home after home after home after home, that rating is actually a factor in how well that house is gonna perform. And that actually goes into the Pricing Autopilot.

– Very interesting.

– And so all that data is compiled into Pricing Autopilot by what the house actually is and what is has and what it doesn’t have. So if it has a hot tub, you check that off, right? So it has to have all this in. At the end of it, it spits out a goal for the year, broken up into months. And so each month, we have a goal that we need to achieve. And then we mathematically have to go back and figure out how to break that goal up. So let me give you an example, Oliver, all right?

– All right.

– Let’s say our goal is $25,000 for the month.

– Okay.

– Of January. Okay? So if that’s our goal, we have eight weekend days, Friday and Saturday.

– Okay.

– Okay? 80% of the revenue has to come from those eight days.

– Okay.

– For the entire month.

– So that’s the bread and butter, is the weekends.

– That’s your bread and butter, right there, okay? The rest of the time is what the daily rate will be. Which is typically calculated at 1% of the overall goal.

– Okay.

– So, those days, maybe only 250 a day.

– Okay.

– In that scenario. That we’re talking about.

– That’s a good number. Yeah.

– Yeah. So, typically, if somebody wants to come and they want to stay over the period of two weekends and you have to price that to make sure that you can get 50% of your goal within those two weekends. So if somebody comes in on a Friday and they leave on the following Monday, they’re crossing over two Fridays and two Saturdays.

– Right.

– Which is 50% of your revenue.

– Yeah.

– 80%, 40% of your revenue.

– Right.

– 80% of the revenue is coming from the weekends.

– Okay.

– So you’ve gotta make sure you understand how to price it accordingly. Pricing Autopilot does that automatically for you and it puts it into your calendar exactly the way it’s posted. And take into account very special events that come into the marketplace.

– ‘Cause that’s when you’re getting more–

– Oh my God, big money.

– When the Waste Management Open comes into town.

– $2500 a night, you know?

– Nice, okay.

– We had Waste Management over just this last, uh,

– Yeah. I went, by the way, it was awesome.

– Yeah, it’s fantastic.

– That 16th hole where everyone goes crazy,

– Oh, it’s incredible.

– Is amazing.

– I know, I know.

– Put that on your list if you haven’t gone yet. So, I like what you said there, 80% of the revenue’s gonna come on the weekend days. And then you said 1% of goal is what you can expect for a weeknight.

– Yeah, in that scenario.

– So that’s a pretty big difference between a Monday through Thursday,

– Crazy difference.

– Than a Friday/Saturday night.

– Yes.

– Okay. And then what about how big of a swing are you seeing between high season and low season?

– Oh, it’s night and day.

– Okay.

– It’s night and day. I mean, you have to understand your market.

– Okay.

– You know, here, in June, it’s hot. It’s 116 degrees.

– Right.

– You know?

– Yeah.

– July is brutal.

– And so how much do those numbers go down, then, at that point?

– Substantially. More than 50%. Your rain rate–

– So in this same example, January you’re getting 25K,

– Yeah.

– That’s the goal.

– You get 12.

– You’re getting 12, so it’s about half.

– Yeah, at least, yeah.

– Okay.

– Yeah.

– Okay.

– And you have to be smart, you know, you need to book your calendar in advance.

– No, that’s good. I’m just trying to think of like,

– Yeah.

– How to calculate,

– Yeah.

– How to prepare, if you know the numbers,

– You need to prepare, yeah.

– Are about 50%,

– About 50%.

– Of what they are on the hot season

– Correct.

– versus the slow season. That’s

– That’s it.

– That’s pretty good

– Yeah.

– To at least be able to ball-park it.

– People love coming out, like I love doing events, like our Boot Camps out here in the summer.

– Yeah.

– We can get room rates for $99 at four-star or five-start hotels here in June.

– ‘Cause no one wants to come out here.

– Well, it’s hot, you know? But if you’re in the hotel, it’s really cool, you know?

– Right, right.

– I learned that from Jack Canfield, you know?

– Yeah.

– Jack does a lot of events, he’s a real popular speaker.

– Yep.

– And he comes out, I think it’s every August, he comes out here. And he saves a lot of money by doing that.

– I’m sure.

– You just bring big groups of people and you can know you can, say, for the student, is coming, they get a room rate in a nice hotel for a hundred bucks a night. And by the way, even when it’s really hot like that, some people like that, by the way.

– Right.

– And not everybody does.

– Yeah.

– But when it’s really, really hot, man, a pool, there’s nothing better than a pool.

– Oh.

– During that time.

– For sure.

– You just wanna be in the water, you know?

– Right.

– So that’s what people do.

– I wanna be in the AC or in the water.

– Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

– Totally. Okay, and then what kind of tips would you have around pricing when you’re analyzing, if you’re trying to get into a deal?

– So, because of our unique software,

– Yeah.

– I don’t have to overthink it.

– So is this something that you sell?

– We mainly use it for ourselves

– Right.

– But we’re actually ready to roll it out to everybody.

– Okay, cool. So, we’ll keep you guys posted on that.

– Yeah.

– What about for the people that don’t have that software? How would they approach it?

– Yeah, they have to break out their goal. They still have to come up with a goal.

– Okay.

– You know, in their market. Look, if you’re gonna start a business, right? I don’t care what businesses. Coaching business.

– Right.

– Training business, mastermind business, you know? I don’t care what it is. It really doesn’t matter, a franchise. You really go into the business knowing what you wanna make.

– Right?

– Okay.

– If I’m looking at a luxury house, and I say, okay, I’m going to work this thing for a year, I want to make 60 to 70 grand out of this thing and if I can’t make that I’m not gonna do the deal. So now I’ve got my goal.

– Okay.

– Okay? So I add that number of what I wanna make to the rent that I gotta pay and to the expenses that the house is gonna come up with. I’ve got pool heat, I’ve got cable television, I’ve got electric, I’ve got water, I’ve got gas.

– Yeah, maintenance.

– Maintenance.

– Right.

– All that stuff, right? I’m gonna add it all up. And I’m gonna look at that number and I’m gonna say, okay, here’s the number, I’ve gotta do 200 grand in revenue on this property. I’ve gotta do 200 grand of revenue. I’ve got 12 months to break that out in. I’m going to break that out in 12 months. I know these three months are slower. They’re going to be at 50%. That leaves me with this across the board. And if you’re in an area that you’re unaware of, get aware of the area. Don’t, you know what I mean? Like you’re not gonna put, you know, a Baskin-Robbins in, you know, a very, very, very cold–

– Right, in Alaska. Yeah, Alaskan area. You know what I mean? Like you’re gonna look and say, “Hey, where am I gonna put this ice cream shop”? That most customers are gonna come in off the beach or something and be really, you know, hungry for ice cream.

– Right, yeah, no, makes sense.

– So you’ve gotta be a little smart and proactive in business. And you’ve gotta kinda know a little bit about what you’re doing in the area. You’ve gotta look for the hot attractions. Why are people flying there? What is it that they’re there for? I met somebody here at the closing table, Valerie, who’s awesome, just a great gal.

AirBnB Arbitrage_ How to Make BANK with Short Term Vacation Rentals _ Jerry Conti on Founders Club 1-9-49 screenshot

– Yes, she’s great.

– She’s managing 50 Airbnb’s, you know? It’s pretty impressive.

– Wow.

– You know? And it’s all in the Anaheim/Disney area.

– Oh, nice.

– I’m thinking that is amazing.

– That’s great.

– That’s brilliant. Right?

– Totally.

– Now, she’s not doing luxury, she’s doing smaller single-family homes. But it’s still great because she knows that the traffic is coming there.

– Right.

– How many millions of people come to Disneyland?

– Oh, my God.

– It’s insane, right?

– And the cool thing about being near like a Disneyland is that it’s year-round.

– It’s year-round. Totally, especially there.

– Right.

– In California or Florida.

– Right, exactly.

– Right?

– Yeah.

– You know, both those areas are really all-year-round areas.

– Yep.

– That’s why they put those parks there in the first place. They knew that the weather was pretty decent.

– Right.

– Yeah.

– Okay, okay. I like that. How concerned are you with the anti- Airbnb short-term rental groups and initiatives?

– Yeah, that’s a good question, you know. Obviously we’re an advocate for what we do.

– Yeah.

– And I am ready to write that check any time I can fight that, you know? Either it be supporting a group that’s in our favor.

– Right.

– Or going down to City Hall and, you know, being–

– Participating, right.

– Participating in the courthouse. So, I am a big advocate of that. On the other side of it, I understand. Like, I’m a conscious guy and I know that there’s issues.

– Yep.

– And I can see both sides of the coin.

– Totally.

– Some people in our country can’t do that.

– Yeah, no, I get it.

– You’ve gotta be able to see both sides.

– For sure.

– Okay? In any relationship. Even a husband and wife relationship, if you’re not seeing both sides, you’re in trouble, you know? Your marriage is in trouble. So, we have to go into it with an open heart, open mind, and, you know, fight our battles and explain our side. Take our stance on what we believe is true, right, and within reason. At the other side of the coin, I go over and above to make sure I mitigate any concerns of any neighbor. If there’s an issue, I am the first one to knock on the door to let the neighbor know, hey, I’m sorry. I had that situation

– Wow.

– That came up yesterday.

– It’s good accountability.

– You know, with the garbage.

– Okay. So we had, you know, TPC was here in town, and the house that I’m actually staying at, one of our properties, we had a big group in there. Last week. They seemed like a really decent group. But they left over 10 bags of garbage on the curb. And they were up late at night. And we just got a complaint from a neighbor, you know, through Airbnb, about that situation. We respond immediately to Airbnb and let them know that here’s what we’ve done to mitigate that. We apologize for it. And we are gonna go ahead and knock on the door at the neighbor’s and let them know that we were unaware of all that and here’s what we’re gonna do in the future to prevent it. So, we’ve gotta take proactive, we’re in this business, we wanna protect our business, right? You wanna protect your business.

– Of course.

– Yeah. So you do what you’ve gotta do. You humble yourself in that sense. You just don’t ignore the issues.

– Yeah.

– Ignoring the issues is not the cool thing. So, you know, of course, the other side of it is that when there’s a lot of regulation and things move in and they change, you’ve gotta navigate. Just like anything. If a Costco opens up next to your little supply store, you’ve gotta be courteous to them, right?

– Right.

– You’re gonna have to navigate

– Yeah.

– That situation a little bit. But in our sense, we want to be proactive but we want to stand for our rights. And then at the same time, just continue to work on the systems and the processes to make it better

– Yeah.

– For the surrounding neighbors.

– Yeah.

– You know?

– No, that’s really great advice. I like a couple things that you said there. I really like the fact that you see both sides, right?

– Yeah.

– Because, like, I’ve lived next to an Airbnb before.

– Yeah.

– And it was super annoying.

– Yeah.

– Like they’re up til three in the morning.

– I know.

– They’re partying every night.

– It’s tough.

– And it gets old.

– Yeah.

– So, I see the, you know,

– The neighbor.

– The neighbor thing, and that’s really real. But I also like the fact that you’re really conscious of that

– Yes.

– And you’re doing everything you can to almost be on the neighbor’s side. Like,

– Yes.

– Hey, I see you, I hear you.

– 100%

– I’m going to put the Noise Alert things in the back yard.

– Yes.

– I’m going to put cameras up

– Yes.

– To make sure the trash goes out.

– Yes.

– I’m gonna be on top of it with you personally.

– Correct.

– Belly to belly if there’s any issues.

– Correct. Here’s my phone number.

– Right.

– If you ever have a problem, call me directly.

– Right, yes, yes.

– This is what you do with your neighbors.

– Yeah, that’s great.

– But at the same time, you’re always going to have maybe a potential, you know, just really radical neighbor.

– Yeah.

– That just doesn’t want to see your side of it at all.

– Yeah, totally.

– And it’s tough. And sometimes you have to deal with it where you have one of those. Out of all the properties, we have one neighbor that’s really crazy. You know, it’s hard, you know, we had to serve ’em,

– So define,

– We had to serve them with legal papers.

– Define really crazy, like he’s just,

– Crazy is,

– complains about everything.

– Yeah.

– Blowing up your phone?

– Yeah, and then hanging signs on, you know, facing the guest with profanity. Literally just put a sign right up on the,

– Like what, what did it say?

– I don’t want to repeat it because it’s not probably appropriate right now. But just bad stuff.

– Really?

– Really bad stuff like, do you know that the people in the house were doing this or doing that or left this or left that? Horrible situation.

– Wow.

– Horrible situation. But we served that person. We have one of the best STR lawyers here in town. And we’ve been able to write out a letter right away and say you’ve gotta stop this, this is affecting our business.

– Wow.

– And we’ll sue you. You know?

– That’s crazy.

– So, you have that once in a blue moon.

– Yeah.

– And the same thing with the party thing. Even though it sounds like, you know, you tell me that, and it sounds like everybody’s experiencing that, it’s not typical.

– Totally.

– Not, especially in the luxury side. I’m not saying on the smaller homes. The smaller homes, you know, that market’s a little bit more consolidated. The houses are a little closer together. Where our houses have an acre, two acres, of land, so we’re a little, kinda separated a little bit. That gives us an advantage.

– That’s another good point.

– It’s a good advantage for the luxury market.

– Right.

– When you’re on top of each other, it’s a little challenging. So, and you have to have rules. We have house rules, we post them around the house. I mean, “you’ve gotta leave the back yard by 10 o’clock,” you know, in some houses. “This area’s closed.” You know?

– Yeah. You’ve gotta treat it like a business, it is a business.

– And where are all those rules listed? In the book, or?

– Yeah, we have a manual, when people come in, it has all the rules. But they’ve also signed off on those rules.

– Got it.

– Through the software process as they come in and we have them fill out a renter data form where we get their driver’s license and you know?

– Okay.

– And all their information.

– Cool.

– And we verify that information. They also are electronically signing agreements that they’re not gonna do this, and not do that. And if there is a problem,

– Got it.

– with the house that we’re gonna mediate that ourselves before we blast anybody on social media.

– Yeah.

– Or do anything stupid like that. So we have all that protocol in place. We have a complete system. We’re a really professional organization in the sense of making sure that we, you know, cross our t’s and dot our i’s.

– Yeah.

– With everything.

– I like that.

– Everything’s processes. You know?

– That’s great.

– And systems. And if you can stay to that, and stay true to those, you’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be great, you’re gonna have a great business, a great life, and it’s a vacation lifestyle, you know? It’s cool.

– I like that.

– I always wanted a vacation lifestyle, you know?

– No, that’s very cool. I’m really impressed by what you’ve been able to do with all that, man.

– Thanks, thanks.

– So what would you say is, like, the key to running a successful Airbnb?

– Yeah.

– From your perspective?

– Yeah, I think knowing your numbers is really key. Like just understanding your numbers, understanding the math. Make sure you don’t take a cheap deal or discount your property too much just because you think you’re not getting bookings. Like know why you’re not getting bookings if you’re not getting bookings. It may not be the price at all. It may the pictures. It may be the headline. It may be the body of copy. Maybe the bed configuration.

– Yeah.

– First thing somebody goes–

– I, go ahead.

– And does is they look at the pictures.

– Yeah. I literally, you took the words right out of my mouth. I imagine it’s a lot like listings, where some agents will just go up and just throw the shittiest photos up.

– Yeah.

– And it’s just like, how do you expect this house to sell?

– I know, not with the competition that’s out there.

– Where the other people

– Yeah.

– That are top producers are generally, they have professional photography, they’re enhanced with lighting and After Effects.

– Exactly.

– And they just look gorgeous and those are,

– Here’s the thing, I mean,

– Yeah.

– Pictures, you can’t spend enough money on pictures. A lot of people wanna go cheap with pictures. I find that so wrong.

– Yeah.

– You know?

– And it’s cheap.

– Yeah.

– And it’s up front. It’s a one-time expense.

– It’s a one-time, I mean, you know, $1700, $2500, for really good photos on your property, your luxury property, is not abnormal. A lot of people try to save money and do it for 250 or 500 bucks, it’s not the right model. You know, you can, with that cost, you can get an aerial, you can get some footage as well.

– Yeah, yeah.

– And you can create your own platform. We teach that, you know, how to create your own listing engine. You know? So that you don’t have to always be dependent on just Airbnb and VRBO and the big boys.

– Totally.

– You can do your own marketing.

– Totally.

– Yeah, straightaway.

– I love that.

– Save a lot of fees.

– I love that ’cause I do agree, I think the pictures are hugely important. Another thing I think is hugely important is testimonials. Right?

– Yeah. No, reviews are everything.

– Reviews, reviews, yeah.

– Reviews, so, yeah.

– What do you have as far as tips for getting more reviews, getting better reviews?

– Yeah, I mean, you have to be of service. You know, it goes back to bringing back the charm. Right? This industry was a cottage industry back in the ’50s.

– Yeah.

– And, you know, people have been–

– The bed-and-breakfast time.

– Yeah, they’ve been.

– Right.

– Yeah, they’ve been room-sharing for hundreds of years, I think, you know, room sharing’s been, you know, come in my cave you know?

– Right.

– Share my cave.

– I’ve got a bed for you.

– Yeah, exactly.

– So I think home sharing and what we do has been around for a long time but it’s become a professional industry, really in the ’50s it started to organize. In 1985, the Association, the Vacation Rental Association was born.

– Okay.

– So it’s not a very old industry. But we’re moving more toward regulation and protocol. So we make sure that all our students go through a hospitality training. It’s a two-day, full-on training to understand hospitality. Like if you were to go work in a hotel, they put you through so much training, right?

– Right, right.

– If you were to work for McDonald’s or buy a McDonald’s, they’ll teach you, you’ll go to Burger U. You know? And learn how to flip burgers, you know?

– Totally.

– So we want the highest-trained operators, right? That’s why we have an educational company bolted on to our holdings company, in a sense, right? Because we want our students to be the best, right? And it’s that personal communication. And here’s the tip. Here’s the million-dollar tip, okay?

– All right.

– Million-dollar tip is that people that like you won’t say something bad about you, no matter how bad their experience was. So let’s say you come into my house, and you like me because we’ve had a great conversation about booking my house. You wanna do your next mastermind in my house. And I say, hey, here’s how it is, this is for you, here’s the price, you know, we make a deal. And I treat you well, and you treat me well. And all of a sudden, you have a question and I’m answering it, I’m on it, and you’re not waiting 24 hours or 48 hours for me to get back to you.

– Yep.

– And you like me. Okay, you’re in the house, the refrigerator goes. Right? This stuff happens all the time.

– ‘Course.

– The refrigerator blows out, right? A bee hive, you know? Bees decide to settle that week that you’re there with your mastermind and everybody gets stung by a bee, right? You’re pissed.

– Yeah.

– Your vacation is now being tainted by unknown issues that are just coming up, dishwasher breaks, whatever the situation is. And if we have this bond, you’re not gonna write something bad about me. Now I may have to give you something to make you feel better

– Right.

– At the end of it.

– Yeah.

– You may say, “Look, you know, this broke, that broke.”

– Give me credit or whatever.

– These were things that you should’ve fixed a long time ago. Yeah, I’m gonna look at doing something special for you. Either, what I like to do is, you know, unrestricted travel credits so that when you come back, you get a discount when you come back, so I can get some repeat business.

– Yep.

– But in any case, I’ve gotta give you a gift card for $100 or take you out to dinner. “Hey, guys, go out to dinner on me,” you know, come back in, you know? That’s okay.

– That’s great.

– You can do those things, you know? These are the kind of things that you can make right and still get your five-star review. Because the refrigerator’s not your fault.

– Right.

– You know what I mean? The dishwasher, the beehive

– Bees!

– Are not your fault, you know? But if there’s maintenance issues that were just not taken care of, because you’ve been a lousy operator, then your business will go down, it will not flourish.

– That’s a great tip.

– It just won’t. You know, your stars will be three stars, four stars.

– So really just staying ahead of it, staying on top of it.

– You have to, you have to, it’s a business.

– And really have communication with the guests.

– We do that with our coaching clients. We have to do that with our mastermind clients, right? We have to nurture everybody, make sure everybody’s feeling heard and getting what they paid for, and so forth and so on. It’s no different, right?

– That’s great. It’s the same thing in any business.

– What about around the cleaning process and making sure

– Yeah.

– You’re turning over stuff fast and efficiently.

– Yeah, yeah, so your business is made up of vendors. Right? We have cleaning crews, we have handymen, we have caretakers, we have landscapers, we have tree service, we have plumbers, you know, these are–

– Pool guy.

– Pool guy, electrician, right? So your business is made up of a lot of different people. My number-one rule is to take care of your people. Take care of your people so they take care of you. You’ve got to personally train them. You do, you know, from an operator’s standpoint, I know what I want. When I come into a luxury home or if I rent a nice place, I personally want that to be immaculate. I want that to have the wow factor, right? So I am a little anal in that sense but I take my cleaning crew and show them what I want. Because if you just leave it up to them, they may not know what you want and they think it’s clean. And what clean is for you may not be clean for me.

– Right.

– And you want this house to represent every aspect of you.

– Yeah. And you want the highest standards.

– A hundred percent, right?

– Right.

– That’s what these particular clients are looking for.

– Okay.

– That come into town. Now, don’t get me wrong, some of the golfers that come into town don’t really give a shit about that house.

– Right.

– They just wanna play golf, they wanna drink beer, they wanna smoke cigars.

– Sit in the hot tub.

– Yeah, sit in the hot tub.

– And crash.

– Yeah, exactly, that’s what they wanna do, you know? But some of our more sophisticated, wealthier, higher-end clients that are coming over from Europe, or around the country or whatever, they’re gonna expect an experience.

– They want the Ritz-Carlton experience.

– Yeah, look,

– Yeah.

– If you’re spending $1000 or $1500 a night, you would want it, too, right?

– Definitely.

– So, we’ve gotta look at the little things. We’ve gotta train our people, you know? Everybody has to be on the same page. So you have to put some energy into it, so that’s like rule number one. Put energy into training your people. And then don’t just undercut them with price. A lot of times, people are trying to keep margins down so their profits are higher, right?

– Yeah.

– You don’t want to skimp on certain things. And I just always feel like the cleaning crew is your eyes and ears of that place, right?

– Totally.

– They know everything that’s going on, you know? They’re the ones that’re gonna report what’s wrong with the house. You need to know what’s wrong with the house to fix the things that’re wrong.

– Yep.

– So I got into, one of our most elegant properties is only three miles from here, the one that I was just telling you about, next to the Royal Palm, it’s a beautiful home. $3.6 million house across the street, a $3 million house over there, and ours is a $1.7 million house, right?

– Good company.

– Yeah, good company. And around a really elegant community. So I go in and I’m staying there, and our mastermind’s coming up this weekend. And I’m preparing it. And I go in there and there’s no place to put my luggage. Like I go into one of the bedrooms, I have a bunch of people gonna stay at the house. So I took a small bedroom off to the side for myself. You know, it’s got a bathroom and I’m just really happy about it. And I’m looking in here and I’m like, there’s no place to put my luggage rack, there’s no luggage rack and there’s no dresser. There’s a little dresser, but there’s no big dresser to put my clothes in, I’m gonna be here for a whole week.

– Yeah.

– I’m like, I don’t wanna work off the floor.

– Right.

– You know? So, immediately, of course, I get on the phone and I explain this to my team. Like, we’ve gotta have luggage racks in here, right? Then when people come in in large groups of people, they scuff the walls a lot with their luggage. They’re pulling their luggage in and out, sometimes when a big group comes in, it fills up the whole garage floor with luggage. ‘Cause they’ve got their golf bag, they’ve got their suitcase, they’ve got their handbag. And all of a sudden, picture that.

– Yeah.

– Sixteen of them.

– A big pile of luggage.

– That’s a pile, it’s like coming to an airport, you know? And you see all the baggage on the luggage thing, it’s the same thing. So walls get nicked, doors get nicked. You’ve gotta go in there and make sure that your cleaning crew knows how to touch that up. How to make that look good for the next person coming in. These are some critical little things,

– Yeah, totally.

– That make the biggest difference.

– Totally.

– And then of course things will always fail over time. I woke up in the middle of the night and I was like, “What’s that noise?” Like, “What’s that noise?” And sure enough, the toilet was just running, and the float came up, and then it would drip down. And it was like, and I was like, “What the hell?” So I take a picture, I send it to the caretaker, or the handyman, and let’s get this thing taken care of. Like you don’t know what’s wrong with the house until you stay in the house.

– Yeah.

– But it’s important that you stay in your house. Like any time you get a vacation rental, figure living there for an entire week so you understand that house better than–

– That’s good advice.

– You have to do that.

– Yeah.

– And you have to know where all your emergency switches are. Where the breaker box is, where the water valve is, where you can access the garage door, the remote controls to the TV’s, right? You’ve gotta have everything dialed in and understand that property because when that customer calls you and they ask you a question, you wanna have the answer. It’s pretty important.

– And what about making sure that they’re at that high-level standard that you were talking about?

– Yeah.

– Is there a process for?

– Yeah, we have checklists, that we have that the cleaning crews go through. We do a quarterly inspection on all the appliances and everything every quarter. It’s a routine maintenance system that we have.

– Okay.

– It’s all driven by our software, our proprietary rental manager software. Which is really awesome because we built the software based on the ability to manage these properties. Like literally, because we knew we needed it. You know, ’cause in any business, if you don’t have a good software to manage your business, you’re really up shits creek. If you’re scaling it.

– Yes.

– You don’t necessarily need all those things.

– But one or two.

– Yeah, yeah. But if you start getting into multiple properties and you wanna scale your business, you’ve gotta have something that’s gonna communicate

– Right.

– to the staff.

– Right.

– Right? And make sure that people are coming on routine maintenance. And you have someone checking the checker, you know?

– And another great tip I heard from another guy that I know that operates a few Airbnb’s is he has a book for the guests, and he has a book for the cleaners.

– Yeah.

– And in the book for the cleaners, he basically got every room exactly the way he wanted it to look,

– Yeah.

– Took a picture of every room.

– That’s awesome.

– And now he says, “I want every room “to look like this when you leave,” you know?

– That’s fantastic.

– So now it’s super consistent.

– I think I’m going to pimp that idea.

– Right?

– That’s a fantastic idea.

– It’s a great idea. So if someone moves a chair over or whatever, it’s like no, no, no, put the chair back over here.

– Yes.

– Put the flower vase back on the table, or wherever it was.

– I really like that a lot.

– And that way, it’s consistent.

– Yeah, exactly.

– And every time they can, uh,

– And it’s consistent to the pictures.

– Right, you know?

– That you’re presenting the house on AirBnb and VRBO.

– Yeah.

– Yeah. So, anyway, that’s another good one.

– This is cool.

– What about tips for check-in, check-out, and making that smooth and a good process and a good experience for people?

– Yeah, so, everybody wants an early check-in. You have to be firm. You know?

– Okay.

– You can’t do it.

– What about, could you–

– Let me elaborate on that.

– I’ll let you elaborate, I just wanna ask one quick question. Would you do it if they paid more? Would you offer that as an upsell?

– Yeah, so there’s a couple options.

– Go ahead, go ahead.

– The typical thing, somebody wants to check in, their flight’s getting in early. Remember, check-out’s 10, check-in’s four. We have a very short window to make that a really great experience from the last group.

– Right.

– Depending how crazy the last group was.

– Right.

– Right?

– Totally.

– Depends on how long it’s gonna me to clean it. And I’ve got a bunch of ’em. So I’ve got cleaning schedules, you know, that are going on, right? We have to turn and wash, in many cases, 16 to 20 beds. Right? Think about the time it takes, we wash all the sheets on-site.

– Yeah.

– Now, we also have additional extra sets of sheets. So we pull the old ones off, put the new ones on. And we’re washing them while we’re cleaning the property. So we need that time. So the way that you communicate such things is, you just don’t tell your customers “No.” Customers don’t like to hear “No.”

– Yeah.

– They want to have a better reason for “No.” So what we like to tell the customers is, look, we can’t promise you anything, that this house is gonna be ready when you wanna check in. But we’ll let you know. We’ll keep your number. We wrote the notes in the software. So we’ll notify you if we can give you the codes earlier to get into the house earlier.

– Okay.

– But we don’t want to tell you that we can do that, we don’t want to promise you that we can do that until we’re absolutely sure we can.

– Yeah.

– And, at the same time, we wanna make sure that you’re having the greatest, that that house is prepared for your experience. There’s nothing more important to us that you experience for the week, or for the 10 days you’re there or the three days that you’re there, that you’re gonna have the most awesome experience. And nothing will jeopardize that. We don’t want to check you in early and things aren’t right and not working and sheets aren’t clean and then things aren’t done because we had to rush that process. So when we explain it that way, they understand it. And we’re going to make every effort to make them a check-in if we can.

– Right.

– Okay. Now, if they’re coming in real early in the morning and they’re flying internationally, they have to buy the day before. It’s that simple. If it’s a decent booking, and it’s a 10, 12, $15,000 booking, I’ll give them maybe half-price for the day before.

– Okay.

– Just so that they know that the house will be ready and ready to go when they walk in at seven in the morning or six in the morning.

– No, that’s a great tip.

– They’re an international flight.

– I think that’s fair.

– Yeah, it’s very fair. If it’s available.

– Right.

– But I’m not gonna give them a Friday, the day before. If they’re coming in on a Sunday, I can’t give them the Saturday.

– Yeah.

– I can’t.

– Yeah.

– Because why? I told you that before.

– Because that’s where you make your money.

– That’ where I make my money, right? So, even if it’s not booked, I can’t sell it to them because, if I sell ’em the Saturday, then I lose potentially the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday for somebody coming in on a long weekend.

– Yeah.

– They won’t look at my property.

– Makes sense.

– If that day is taken, and that day is extremely valuable. So for them to buy the Saturday, they really have to buy the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

– Right. It makes a lot of sense because it sounds like there’ a couple of factors, right?

– Yeah.

– If they wanna come in early and it’s a Monday, and you didn’t have it booked anyways, like,

– Right.

– You really probably don’t care.

– No, you’re right, exactly. So, but if it’s a Monday,

– Right.

– that’s different.

– Right.

– But what did I tell you before on the weekends?

– Exactly.

– That’s 80% of my revenue.

– Exactly.

– Right?

– But if it’s a Saturday, then all of a sudden that’s a totally different story.

– Exactly.

– Makes sense. Makes total sense.

– Totally.

– And then do you have any sort of minimums? Or is it, like three-night minimums?

– Yeah, we typically like to do four-night minimums.

– Okay.

– Sometimes three-night minimums.

– Okay.

– If you’re getting through your calendar, right? Let’s say I’ve got bookings that are kinda filled up for February and right toward the end of February, they’re not sold. And I get too close to that, right? If I’m seven days out before a booking, I’ve gotta reduce my fees by 50%.

– Okay.

– Because that’s pretty much our rule of thumb is 50% reduction within seven days.

– And that’ll get ’em booked up.

– Yeah, will get them booked really fast. You just have to understand that advanced bookings is your lifeblood in this business. You have to learn how to get advanced bookings. That’s your bread and butter. You’re getting full-price for advance bookings. People are blocking your calendar months in advance. We have bookings a year in advance.

– Right, so that’s great.

– We have bookings for TPC next year.

– Wow, already?

– Yeah, because people come back and they want

– Totally. They want the same house.

– They love it.

– Yeah.

– It’s a family thing. When we used to travel when we were younger, I don’t know how old you are.

– I’m 39.

– You’re 39?

– Yeah.

– That’s awesome. I’m 53 so I’m a little older than you, so maybe a lot older. But when we were young, we used to go to like Nantucket, Cape Cod, my family loved it out there. And I was really young, you know? We went to the same place every year, it seemed like. You know what I mean? It was just like this family tradition. I don’t know if those traditions are still around, but some people still wanna come back.

– Yeah, sure.

– They have a great experience at the house,

– They have memories there.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Cool.

– That’s how it works.

– Love it. Trying to think here. So I know you have your own proprietary software.

– Yeah.

– But outside of that, what would you say are your favorite tools, softwares,

– Yeah.

– And apps for running an Airbnb business?

– Sure, sure. So we do use our own so I’m not gonna really endorse others any more, because there’s no real reason to do it.

– Okay.

– You know, the tips like the Noise Aware system is really cool.

– What’s that called?

– Noise Aware.

– Noise Aware, okay.

– Yeah, that’s actually the brand name, yeah.

– Okay.

– So that’s a really cool device, you know?

– Love that.

– We also use Airdna to do some research.

– Okay.

– We don’t rely on it exclusively.

– And Airdna, that’s like a–

– It’s a data.

– Pricing comparison,

– Yeah, pricing management.

– Comps, stuff like that.

– Yeah, data, locations, what kind of traffic’s in the area, you know?

– What percentages.

– Yeah, they’re scraping all the data from Airbnb and all the processes there. Now they’ve also included VRBO.

– Okay.

– Now you’re getting a better picture with their platform. So that’s a helpful tool.

– Cool.

– There’s a great platform called Vrolio out there, which is a really cool platform.

– Vrolio?

– Vrolio.

– Okay.

– Yeah. And Vrolio is a platform where they have short-term rental buyers and people who want to sell their homes. So it’s kind of like a match maker, where they’re matching investors with–

– So that’s perfect for people like you.

– Perfect, yeah. Exactly. So we have a very unique deal with them. We formed a joint-venture partnership where we can get an early look at some of the properties before the rest of the community gets a look, right? We’ve got a special arrangement with the CEO and she’s terrific and she’s a wealth of knowledge in the space.

– Cool.

– So, great company, great motives and intentions to help bring investors together with short-term rental operators who want to do a deal.

– Awesome.

– You know?

– Yeah.

– People who want to sell their home and people who want to run a vacation rental business. You know, it’s like perfect.

– Match ’em up. Matchmaking.

– I like that platform a lot.

– Yeah, for sure. So Noise Aware, that’s the app and system that protects

– Yeah.

– You and the neighbors from your guests getting too loud.

– Sure.

– If they get too loud, it alerts you and you can proactively tell them to turn it down a little bit.

– Yes.

– And then there’s Airdna?

– Airdna for research.

– Which is for research and data and all that.

– Pricing and so forth, yep.

– And then Vrolio for finding properties

– Finding properties.

– That people wanna sell.

– Yeah.

– That might fit this box.

– And they have a lot of bells and whistles on that platform to look at regulations in areas. They color-coded it across the country.

– That’s smart.

– So if you’re looking for a specific area and you wanna know what the regulations look like, they’re color-coded. You can dial in. Sometimes you have to verify that information as well because it’s feeded in, right, and things change.

– Yeah.

– Right? So, but it’s awesome, it’s a great tool to use. And of course Rental Manager is our proprietary software, we’re ready to roll that out to the general population soon.

– So we’ll have to check that out once it comes out.

– Yes. That’s gonna be cool, people are gonna love it.

– Very cool.

– Yeah.

– No, that’s great, I love those tips. And then this is one that I kinda always like end with. And that’s what’s one thing that you wish you would’ve known when you started that you know now that would’ve made everything a lot easier?

– Yeah, yeah, that’s great. I didn’t know the complexity of this business. Like the one thing that I didn’t know is how many skillsets you need to have to be an effective operator.

– Okay.

– At first, I thought anybody can do this business. And then I realized if you didn’t have the personality to deal with challenging people at times, like you have to be able to keep your cool. You know, when a customer is yelling at you and screaming at you, you gotta be able to keep your cool, right? That’s a skillset.

– That’s definitely a skillset.

– Some people fly off the handle, you know. That doesn’t make a good operator. The other thing that I didn’t realize is that you need to know a little bit about software. And you do need to know how to run some of these platforms and communicate via both email and communications is really an important part to this business.

– And quick, I’m guessing, as well.

– Yeah, your response time in this business is everything. In fact, Airbnb and VRBO is grading you on your response time.

– Oh, really?

– So, if you don’t respond quickly, your rating as an operator goes down, you know? And that’s not good. That effects your bottom-line business. In addition to that, you have to have a little common sense around a property. Like you have to understand and know what a pool heater is. You gotta know what a thermostat is. You gotta know what a water heater is. A fuse box. You gotta understand that, how to communicate to vendors, like plumbers and electricians and stuff like that. So you need a little bit about that, I didn’t really know you needed so much of that. Until I kinda dove in and got into it, I’m like, wow, you have to have a lot of skillsets. I’m fortunate that I have all of what it takes to do this. You know? And I’m not even really hosting. I have a team that does it.

– Right.

– But, you know, you need certain skillsets to do this business. It’s not for everyone. I will be honest with you, just like running a Massage Envy may not be for everyone.

– Yeah.

– Or running a Baskin-Robbins.

– Totally. So what makes it right for someone?

– What makes it right is if you like people.

– Okay.

– And you like to provide great experiences for people. Right, if you have a lot of joy because someone else is joyful. Like if you have that in you, like typical coaches. Coaches love people. You ever have a life coach, business coach?

– Business coach, yeah.

– Yeah, a business coach and sometimes life coaches or spiritual coaches, right?

– Right.

– There’s every coach under the sun these days, right? But coaches are heart-centered people that care about the experiences in life of another person. And I think that’s the core skillset you need in this business. You’ve gotta like people and really want them to have a good time. That’s what this business is about. It’s a vacation rental business. You want ’em to have a good time.

– I love that.

– So that’s really important, you know? If you don’t have that, I don’t know if it’s right for you. Okay?

– So that’s the one.

– Yeah. The other one is just being, knowing that running a business is gonna take time, there’s a learning curve. And just really understanding you have to have multiple skills and if you don’t have these skills, you’ve gotta find ’em. So I’m a big advocate of learning something.

– Yep.

– It may take you a little longer. I hate to give up on people too soon. But there’s times where I feel like, this isn’t ever gonna work with this operator. They just don’t have all the pieces and they’re not there yet with all these attributes that you need

– Yeah.

– To run a successful vacation rental business. And so,

– At the end of the day, you’re in the hospitality business.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Yeah.

– That’s why we’d send ’em to a two-day hospitality thing.

– Right, yeah, yeah.

– So they know how to greet, meet and greet people.

– So if you’re a person who doesn’t like people, and doesn’t like customer service,

– Not your business.

– Not gonna be a good fit.

– You’ll get in it because you see the vision to make some really good money in a very short period of time, like some of our operators can make a quick 10 grand in the first couple months. I mean, that’s a pretty cool business, right?

– Yeah.

– Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. So you may see that up front but then not realize how much work there is on the back of it, and you may be surprised to realize that hey, this may not be right for you. I was actually thinking of developing a quiz. That pre-profiles them,

– Right, is this right for you?

– Yeah, is this right for you because you can know that you have the right personality for this type of business.

AirBnB Arbitrage_ How to Make BANK with Short Term Vacation Rentals _ Jerry Conti on Founders Club 1-30-21 screenshot

– Right.

– Yeah.

– Love it.

– Yeah, it’s cool.

– Let us know if you come up with that, we’ll post the link to it.

– There you go, perfect.

– But man, great conversation.

– Awesome. Oliver, thank you so much, man.

– Really appreciate all the insight, man.

– Really appreciate being here.

– It’s been really insightful.

– Thank you.

– A lot of great tips on running an Airbnb. If you guys have any other questions, leave a comment down below, subscribe to the show. We also have a free Facebook group, it’s called Real Closers. If you wanna get on there, we do a lot of these interviews, we make ’em very interactive. And we hope to see you on the next one.

– Awesome, cheers, man.

– Thanks again, Jerry. Really appreciate it, man.

– You bet. Thank you.

Pullout Quotes

“Another bedroom is another $30K or $40K in revenue per year.”

“Lux Home Pro … is all about bringing back the charm in the industry.”

“If you’re leasing a property, and you have your money on the line, you’re going to work that thing so damn hard.”

“You’ve got to be smart as a business owner in this space. You can’t just burn through your cash. You know what I mean? You can’t just make all this profit during the high season and then go to Vegas and blow it all.”

“I’m managing $23M of real estate for about $160K a month.”

“We’re writing a new story about the property.”

“We want everybody to win. That’s the only way to do business.”

“Our business is heads in beds.”

“Any property is the right property that makes money.”

“You can’t spend enough money on pictures.”

“You have to be of service. It goes back to bringing back the charm.”

“People that like you won’t say something bad about you, no matter how bad their experience was.”

“My #1 rule is to take care of your people.”

“Advanced bookings [are] your life blood in this business.”

“The one thing that I didn’t know is how many skill sets you need to have to be an effective operator.”

Connect with Jerry

Connect with Oliver

Resources

Other episodes of Founders Club you might like:

Story Selling the Secret Behind $400,000,000 in Sales ft. Perry Belcher

How to Crash Proof Your Real Estate Business ft. Mike Ferry

Thank you for watching this Jerry Conti interview!

If you’d like to see all the episodes go to: www.OliverGraf.tv/FoundersClub

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas contact me here.