Tom Lewis:                        00:00:00              So we did quite a lot of work on converting those people that stayed into direct bookings next time, you know, leaflets in the rooms, that kind of stuff. Thanks very much for staying with us. I had a great time, by the way, if you ever come back, get in touch directly, you know that kind of stuff. So last year we were able to get 49% of our bookings were direct bookings.

Julian Sage:                       00:00:20              This is episode number 51 of the short term rental success stories podcast. Are you an investor that’s looking to have your home professionally managed? Go to cohostit.com for more information. Welcome back the short term rental success stories. I’m your host Julian Sage. This is a show where I talk to hosts about their journeys and starting and growing the short term rental business. My goal is that you’ll be able to walk away with practical information that’ll help you become a better host and learn how to scale your business like any exceptional hosts. We all strive for five star reviews, so please go on over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy because it really helps support the show if you haven’t done so already. Going over to our Facebook group, the host nation, to connect with the community.

Julian Sage:                       00:01:00              Hey, what is going on Host Nation? I am super excited to be back again with you this week. You know what I love so much about the show is that we can get on some of the most unique stories. Airbnb and short term rentals has changed so many people’s lives and really it’s because of what the power of this business model allows for just regular people like you and I to be able to leverage real estate and be able to make so much from it. One of my favorite new things that I like to tell people is that if you want to retire in a long time, invest in longterm rentals, but if you want to retire in a short amount of time, then invest in short term rentals. And I’m just so excited to be able to teach people the different models and the different ways that you can invest in this business and how to actually do it yourself.

Julian Sage:                       00:01:38              So what Jon and I are going to be doing is we’re going to be hosting a special live training where we’re going to be going live for you guys and talking about the different models and how you can actually scale to a six or seven figure business using only other people’s properties. So Jon and I are going to be hosting this training for our early birds. So if you are on the early bird waitlist you get to join John and I as we are going to be doing a live training and answering your guys’s questions live. And this is going to be an anticipation of our new program, the VRM formula program where we will be teaching you how to start, automate and scale your own rental arbitrage co-hosting business. We have a really cool thing in there where we’re actually going to be giving a certification.

Julian Sage:                       00:02:17              So when you do complete the program, you are going to be a certified co-host so you can manage other people’s properties. It’s a whole lot of really cool stuff and we’re really excited to present this to you guys, but we also do have a training because we do want to teach you how to do this and get you excited. So if you go to shorttermsage.Com/Earlybird, you can find out when the next training is. And actually, today we are going to be doing a live training for you guys. So if you wanted to join us, we’re going to be doing it today, which is March 5th at 6:00 PM ESD. So go ahead and register because it is a limited training. We are not going to be doing this training very long, especially because the early bird program will be closing off and once the program is available to the general public we will be raising the price.

Julian Sage:                       00:02:59              So this only is for our early bird adopters where we will be offering our early bird adopter price. I’m really excited to show you the program. So definitely go to shorttermsage.Com/Earlybird to find out more when the next training is going to be available. And of course today we have the special honor of speaking with Tom Lewis. Tom is a full time professional tennis coach and five years ago he was looking for a way to get extra money for his pension and that’s how we got into short term rentals. Now, Tom manages nine properties, three of which he owns, four are rental arbitrage and then two are co-hosted units. This is a really, really cool episode and Tom shares some really creative ways on how he’s been able to partner with investors to be able to get those into rental arbitrage units.

Julian Sage:                       00:03:40              The things that Tom shares in this episode, I have not heard anybody else talking about the way that he’s able to partner with these investors to be able to get them ready for rental arbitrage and the way that he goes about it is super creative. Tom also talks about how he was able to get 49% of his bookings with direct bookings and how his job as a tennis coach has helped him in building a reliable team of cleaning and maintenance staff. Tom is just a super cool guy. There is so much in this episode. I am excited to be able to share with you. Of course, if you’d like my show notes for this episode then go to shorttermstage.Com/STR51 or if you’d like my show notes sent directly to your inbox every week, then go to shorttermsage.com/shownotes. With all that being said on to this week’s conversation, Hey, welcome back host nation to another episode of short term rental success stories. In this episode I have these special special honor of speaking with Tom Lewis. Tom, would you please introduce yourself to the host nation and let them know who you are and what inspired you to get into short term rentals.

Tom Lewis:                        00:04:32              Okay, so hi everybody. My name’s Tom Lewis. I am a professional tennis coach and was looking for a way to sort of get a better pension sorted out for a, as I get a bit older. So we started buying and renovating properties and then just, you know, kind of fell into this really, we were looking for a way to make a bit more money. I traveled a lot with work and did, stayed in quite a lot of Airbnbs and stuff and thought it was something we’d like to have a go at. So it’s sort of grown from there.

Julian Sage:                       00:05:02              So a, a tennis coach. And just to give a little pre context, you’re in Leicestershire, England. You have three properties that you own, four that you’re doing the, the master lease rental arbitrage model, and then two that you’re doing the cohost management model from tennis coach to now having nine properties scaling up to 13. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty crazy. How, how is Airbnb short term rentals changed your life?

Tom Lewis:                        00:05:28              Made me be a lot more organized filled up my diary. I dunno, it’s brought a lot of new challenges, which I’ve actually really enjoyed it. It’s been a chance to like learn some new stuff and constantly keep sort of delving into how to do better. Some of that is like their service that you provide. And I guess some of that is like the hospitality that you’re able to, how you can make people feel when they stay at your places as well as the day to day problems of, you know, cashflow and dealing with cleaners and maintenance crew and you know, all that kind of stuff. Having to rely on a team is a little bit more tricky I think.

Julian Sage:                       00:06:06              Yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re figuring out all the processes that it takes to be able to run, you know, a successful short term rental business. And one of the things that we were talking about before we were recording was he said you actually went to this thing called the KIgo world conference and you know, if you want to tell a little bit about the story of, of you talking with some of those, those people there.

Tom Lewis:                        00:06:23              Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. They were, they all kind of kept their costs to their chest the first day or so. And you, you know, you’re having a chat with people and there’s one guy in particular that was sat at our table, kept asking me about what I was up to and you know, I said I’ve got six units and we were in a town center and it’s a lot of business travel and stuff. And then what do you do? And you saw it all. I’ve got a, I do like beach villas. So if you wanted to come with your family for your summer vacation, you come and stay with us. And he gave me these little business card and then it was like time for lunch. So he went off to go and have lunch and I kind of fired up a laptop and was like, let’s have a look what he gets up to.

Tom Lewis:                        00:06:59              And this, this Villa was like the photos of it on connect go. This is the sort of dream Instagram perfect model that you look at, you know, snitch 15 on the beach. It’s thousand dollars night. Like beautiful. And then he said it comes back. And so I occasionally sort of slips into conversation and I had a little look at your Villa. Beautiful. How many of these have you got? And he’s like, Oh, we’ve got just under a thousand. What am I, what am I doing? I’ve got six. Yeah, he just, everybody that I met while I was there was like sort of on that scale of, you know, they’ve got 600 properties and 500 ski lodges and stuff all over the world. So it was just interesting to sort of mix with the people know on that scale. They, they brought very different solutions and the way they thought about solving some of the problems was excellent because it wasn’t always just throw loads of money at it and it worked. They figured stuff out really nicely.

Julian Sage:                       00:07:53              Very cool. And I want to talk about it a little bit about your backstory, about how you even got into the short term rental space. So you said you were a tennis coach, you were looking, you know, to, you know, supplement your income, you know, kind of saved towards something to help you with your pension. And then you started getting into traditional real estate investing. What, what made the conversion from you know, doing the traditional, you know, fix and flip style to now doing short term rentals and management.

Tom Lewis:                        00:08:17              Okay. So I guess we, we bought done them up to keep rents them out on longterm rents. And I guess we have one tenant that wasn’t malicious or nasty. They just didn’t look after the place very well. And it was like our baby, we just literally finished it. We thought it was the nicest one we’ve done so far. They left and it left us with quite a few things to fix and stuff. And at the time we were talking a little bit about maybe we have a go at something like this. Some of the more short term stuff, the big benefits being, you know, there’s going to have cleaners in there every week at least to keep an eye on people. You know, having to pay up front, no danger of not being paid. You know, lots of, lots of those little reasons made it seem, and the fact that we both travel a lot.

Tom Lewis:                        00:09:05              My wife works with a company where she has traveled quite a lot. We both stayed in a lot of Airbnb, so we kind of felt we had a good understanding of what made a good one and what made a bad one and, and the things to sort of add in and avoid and stuff. So we said, well, give it, go for six months and see how we get on. We got 3000 pounds worth of bookings in the first weekend that we weren’t alive. So we’re like, yeah, we’ll, we’ll give it a roll and an S just gone from there. Really.

Julian Sage:                       00:09:29              So, you know, that, that, that I love, I love hearing the backstories because you got into it. You, you, you know, you, you bought into what everybody’s saying, you know it’s all about longterm rentals and passive income with the tenants. And then you’ve got your tenants and they didn’t treat the place the same way that your short term rental tenants are. And that that’s the case with a lot of people that I hear is like they get these people in, they don’t, they don’t treat the property the right way and this is something that you put a lot of time and money and energy into and then they just kind of like, you know, you face it and it’s, it almost, it almost hurts. And then when you get those short term rental tenants, they’re in and out, they treat the property lot better and you’re making a whole lot more. But how big of a difference was it from what you were making with longterm rentals versus when you swapped over to start doing short term?

Tom Lewis:                        00:10:11              So I mean in, in terms of long term rental, we were made and you making, you know, a hundred, a hundred pounds a month after all the bills paid and stuff which, which was fine because the pole, you know, our goal was just to keep it and hold. It will be paid off by the time I retire. Then it’s a little, you know, pot of money sitting there for retirement. Now we may like, say anything from 600 on a bad month to probably a thousand, if I have a great month every month. So yeah, it’s a massive different surely or sometimes 10 times more probably. It’s just really helps your cashflow, which has helped just to then keep some momentum going with getting the next one, doing a bit more. So.

Julian Sage:                       00:10:54              So you started off with doing, you know, the longterm rental, you decided, you know the, the benefits of short term renting outweigh, you started short term renting, you’re the ones that you own. And then what happened when you started scaling to the rental arbitrage? The master lease model and co-hosting?

Tom Lewis:                        00:11:10              Okay. So all the ones that we do on the rent Lebow triage sort of model are owed by friends of us. They saw what I’d been doing. So one of them is owned by my business partner. Two of them are owned by my financial advisor. They really like how, you know, we were able to keep property in really good Nick. It meant that they could have a guaranteed investment, you know, they’re not gonna have any problems with me not paying the rent, not looking after the place. You know, I have a guest because with friends as well as I, I didn’t have any track record when they came on board. We’ve been doing it about a year. So you know, perhaps now it’s a little bit easier to attract people in. But back then it just, that they knew me in that work with me, you know, for many years. So that helped, helped a lot. You know, they invested their money, bought the property, did the exactly how we wanted them to know and then just, you know, we signed a three year contract to, to run it going forward. So,

Julian Sage:                       00:12:09              So, so these, these were for you is, it was a lot easier to get into these units just because these were close, close friends. I, when he said that they, they did them up the way that you wanted to or these like investor friends, people that were purchasing properties and then fixing like rent doing the renovations so that you would be able to sublease them or, or what, what was that relationship?

Tom Lewis:                        00:12:32              So I found the tea for them. They bought them, they were pretty run down cause one of the sort of goals you’ve had it all this stuff we’ve bought for ourselves was to add value. So we managed to find stuff that was yeah, a little bit below market value. They could spend a little bit of money bringing it up to spec and then sort of almost remortgage it and get their money back out anyway if they wanted to because they’ve made it worth so much more by putting in a new kitchen, new bathroom, redecorating it all. We just ask them to do that to the level we done off lats out. And so in a couple of the cases we managed the refurb or helped out considerably with it to help them get it done right. Cause we’ve got like a team of friends that are builders and plasters.

Tom Lewis:                        00:13:16              One of the really good things about being a tennis coach and working with so many children is that you also get to find out what all these kids’ parents do. You know, so you get quite a good list of plumbers and you know, if I figure, if they trust me to look after their kids, I can trust them. It’s plastic, the ceiling in my house and not mess it up sort of thing. So, you know, we’ve got quite a good network of people like that, that perhaps these investor friends didn’t have. So we were able to really help them get that stuff then. So yeah, that’s kind of how that, that relationship.

Julian Sage:                       00:13:45              Tom, you’re, you’re, you’re brilliant. I love that. That is so cool. Man, that is awesome. So you had, you, you were basically [inaudible] because you said that they were, these properties are undervalued. So you were out there going and saying like, Hey, you know, I don’t have the money to be able to purchase these properties myself or I don’t want to put up the cash for it. But I do know people that will. So you would actually do all the legwork for them and then even manage the build out for them just so that you could be able to rent it out.

Tom Lewis:                        00:14:14              Is that basically what you were doing? Was that your strategy? Yeah, yeah. That’s what we did with those, those four properties. Yeah.

Julian Sage:                       00:14:19              And where are you like charging, because if they were purchasing these properties kind of under your, under your management, under your supervision are you, was that, was that basically the deal, like you would help do the whole project for them? Did you have to like pay like extra rent or anything like that?

Tom Lewis:                        00:14:37              No I would probably miss the trick by not sort of almost selling them a deal that we’d found. But, you know, we felt that actually what we wanted to do was grow the number of properties we had. So they were helping us out by buying them cause we didn’t have the capital to do about the time. So yeah, we just sort of, I guess we get a pretty good deal on the rent. It’s probably a little tiny bit below the market value for rent. So we guessed flat rate. And especially now looking at what people are paying to try and get into that Drudge market, be able to claim way more than market value these days because people have heard about Airbnb, think you’re gonna make a lot more money. You know. So I think people are getting into it that I speak to. Finding it much harder cause Avens pacing, high rent, that’s a big barrier to entry or a big risk, you know, and go on cashflow. I’m sorry,

Julian Sage:                       00:15:26              When, when did you start, when did you start doing this model with, with your investor investor friends, investor clients? Was this about how, how long after you got into the short term mental space, did you start doing it?

Tom Lewis:                        00:15:41              We, we kind of sounds good, but look, you really, I guess we bought off a property like the best day ever. I mean, I got it so cheap from someone that was desperate, scared of it, did it up. You know, it looked really nice and a couple of my friends, so one of the guys that owns some properties is my business partner on the tennis coaching company. He saw her, it was like, ah, this is a great plan for your pension. If you ever find anything similar, you know, let me know and I’ll buy one. So just by chance one came up for sale not too long after and it was like, well, if you want one, there’s one right there next door to ours, you know? So he bought that and then we wrote to all of the owners in the building where we’d got them.

Tom Lewis:                        00:16:25              There’s like quite a few flats and a couple of people came back and said, yeah, we’d be willing to sell it. We’ve been looking to get rid of them for a while and I ended up buying three more all at the same time from, from one guy. So I got a crazy good deal on him cause buying three at once. And then probably maybe a year after that the other people came on board buying, you know, buying them because they’d seen how well it was working and the fact that they come to look at them when we first did them to sort of just be nosy and see what it looked like. And then they came before they bought to see how they still looked and it was like, wow, look, it still look brand new like a hotel room. So you know you’ve kept it useful and he’s like, well yeah I guess came twice a week. We’re always in here. It’s looked after and I suppose that’s the thing because you make so much money out of it, you can actually really get your properties and really nice Nick, you’re not worrying about paying for maintenance and things cause there’s always enough money to cover all that stuff.

Julian Sage:                       00:17:22              Yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m looking at, I’m looking at your, your direct booking site and your units and wow, they, they are beautiful. I love the style. It’s, and you, you have the same branding throughout all of them, which is really, which is really cool as well. It’s you know, the, the darker colors with the white, the black and the white contrast. It’s got this very you know, this very polished, very clean look. Are these all within like the same building or are these a lot of different units?

Tom Lewis:                        00:17:47              Most of the ones, I’m not saying we’re all in the same building, so we’ve tried to, I mean, I guess the longterm plan for me would be to gradually just buy the whole building. So every time one’s come up South, since we’ve tried to buy it or have bought it, I’m currently negotiating on two more, which would be ones we would own rather than do through management and stuff. So

Julian Sage:                       00:18:07              W w with your, with your the clients that are purchasing these properties and then you’re just doing a longterm lease with them. Did they not see like the profits that you were making and say, Hey, well instead of you just renting it, can you, can you you know, manage it for me, I’ll pay for the furnishing and do that or was that not something that they were interested in?

Tom Lewis:                        00:18:26              It wasn’t something that was probably on my radar at the time. And I think they’re, they, you know, they’re quite happy with the, the way it’s going, you know, so if they price, if they bought more going forwards, they would want that management model. But obviously if they take that on the nail, also take on a fair chunk of risk the way they’re doing it at the moment, there’s not really any financial risks to them. They are getting the market rent for a longterm rent there. So their mortgages paid, they’ve got nothing else to pay out or worry about. So they’ve got a bit of security. And I guess the reason they wanted me to work with them and do that was that they didn’t have time. It wasn’t that they perhaps didn’t have money, they just didn’t have the time to, you know.

Tom Lewis:                        00:19:09              So my business partner is slightly different, but the other two guys that we run stuff for, their brief to us was, look, you know, I don’t want a phone call about the being the boiler not working. You know, just if stuff breaks, just get it fixed and send us the bill. It’s absolutely fine. But we just, we know our day job is so busy, don’t want anything to do with it really. So that was kind of the reason it went that way. So they’re quite happy for me to make a bit more money on the fact that they didn’t already have a do anything. They just get paid every month. And nuts, you know, is, is that,

Julian Sage:                       00:19:43              And you, you brought up that there’s more people coming into the space and looking at the rental arbitrage model and saying, man, that there’s profit there. Have you noticed since you started a larger increase one of the things that you said was that you were able to get a little bit more of a fair market price on, on your units. And some of the other people that are coming into the space, it might be paying a little bit more. Is that what I heard correctly?

Tom Lewis:                        00:20:05              Yeah, I mean, I think some of it’s like an education thing. I mean, people hear Airbnb and st crazy money, so therefore if you tell them, if I go in and say I’m going to run this place as an Airbnb, then they’re very much, you know, Oh, well you’re going to make a lot of money so therefore you pay more than no. So it’s perhaps that education of going, yeah, but your property will be kept, you know, if this contract you signed with me basically says that the condition it’s in when I take it off here is how it will be given back and we’ll be reliable for any repairs, damages or anything like that. We’ll fix it. Or you know, selling on the fact that it’s three years with no voids. I mean, even if you don’t have any damage and you have great tenants, if they leave every year, you’re still going to have at one month where there’s no rent coming in.

Tom Lewis:                        00:20:49              You know, so it covers a lot of those little things. It’s just perhaps educating that and then it’s like, I’m, we’ll look what the worst case scenario is on some of your rentals. You know, someone not paying the rent and it’s taking a year to evict them and you’ve got no money coming in and they’ve trashed your place and you’ve got to fix it up. You know, showing them the other side of the story of going, well, yeah, you know, I’m taking on a lot of the risk here, therefore I should make a bit more reward out of it. But there’s a lot more people doing it now. When we first started our first property, there was five places on Airbnb you could rent. And last day this is now more than 500. So know the competition is a bit fiercer as well. So,

Julian Sage:                       00:21:28              And wow, that that’s a, you started, there was five when you first started and now there’s 500, you said? Yeah. Holy cannoli. That is crazy. And how, how has that, you know, one of, so one of the big fears that people have when they’re getting into the space, one is regulations. And then two is the competition. So, you know, you’re saying you’re going into these properties with these three year long leases. If you wanted to touch on the regulation, is that something that you’re concerned with or is that something that how, how do you handle that, that initial fear?

Tom Lewis:                        00:22:01              So the regulation stuff, I, you know, I kind of figured it’s coming. There’s no way it won’t do. It’s just you don’t know when. So we have it in our contracts with people that, you know, if regulations change and we’re not allowed to do this model that, you know, we can give you a month’s notice and leave. But you know, everybody I’ve worked with, I know reasonably well. So I think they see that as pretty fair that you like, yeah, you know, you can’t help it. If the government come in and say you can only do it for 90 days a year, it’s not really your fault. We’re not, you know, and you can roll with that. So that’s the sort of deal we’ve got on to help with the regulation side of things. I mean, you comply with what you can and you work work ground and the rest is,

Julian Sage:                       00:22:47              And, and if you’re building, if you’re building a business model around this, what are some of the exit strategies that you would have in place if those things do come up?

Tom Lewis:                        00:22:55              So I mean, I guess we’ve been trying to be sensible with the, you know, kind of keeping, keeping some money on one side, making sure you got, you know, you’ve, you’ve paid out all the bills, everything that might, you don’t want to be taking on tons of debt and then find that, you know, business model stops, but you still got 50 grand debt sorts out. So taking care of all that kind of thing. You know, all of the properties we’ve bought, we went with several exit strategies. So exit one, I could buy it, do it up and sell it and make a profit. Exit two, I could buy it, do a rent out longterm and it still makes a profit. And then obviously three best case scenarios, I can do rent on Airbnb and make a much bigger profit. So that’s kind of how we’ve worked. Everything we’ve taken on, which still make a decent profit per month if it was just on a longterm rental, it’s just not quite as fun I guess. Or you not making as much money, but you’re not losing money by doing that.

Julian Sage:                       00:23:52              And then the competition, you know, from five to 500 people, if they heard that, they’d probably think you’re not making any money anymore. You’re, you’re charging $25 a night. What, what has been the case with how you’ve been able to earn from when you first started and to where, you know, the competition has, has increased.

Tom Lewis:                        00:24:10              So I guess, yeah, there’s a lot of competition, which I kind of look out and go, you can be really threatened by that. Or you could go, actually it means there’s a really strong market for people wanting to come here and then have a really good look at the competition and go actually how many competitors have I got? There’s 500 homes I can rent, but I’ve probably got 25 competitors that you go, these guys are offering decent quality. You know, I would stay there and feel like it was a great place to stay. You know, so there’s not that many comparable properties. And then I guess it’s, there’s looking at what level of service you get from the know. I think more and more about that.

Tom Lewis:                        00:24:56              As it gets bigger and more people into it will become more about the hosts and the hospitality they’re able to provide on the service as opposed to just the, Oh, I’ve got the brand new house. You know, that’ll be a part of it. But I think going forward, so having some longevity in the business is helping, you know, having a lot of reviews really helps. Having your own website and branding so people know that you’re not just like one man and his dog renting out his gallery kind of thing I think really helps. Yeah, it’s just like looking at constantly trying to improve, trying to be a little bit better, setting yourself apart from the competition when people stay. We set ourselves the goal last year of, we tracked a little bit of data for the first few years, but not loads, but we worked out that 83% of our bookings came from Airbnb, which is excellent. But also that you were totally dependent on Airbnb. So we, we did quite a lot of work on converting those people that stayed into direct bookings next time, you know, leaflets in the rooms, that kind of stuff. You know. Thanks very much. You stay in with us. I had a great time, by the way, if you ever come back, get in touch directly, you know, that kind of stuff. So last year we were able to get 49% of our bookings were direct bookings. So it was definitely worth the effort in that regard.

Julian Sage:                       00:26:26              Wow. 49% of your bookings were coming through direct bookings. Yeah. Wow. And that was all just from, from just changing from changing things, putting little leaflets in your and your, your units and, and you know, having a website and saying, Hey, come, come stay with us. How, how is, how’d you do that? Is that just because of the type of clientele that are staying there or, or is it like a lot of vacation people that come on back to your units? Like how did you do that?

Tom Lewis:                        00:26:53              No, I think a lot of the people that come stay are people that are working in the town. So you know, by default you kind of think, well, if you’re working here, you’re not working in for two days a year, you probably come in more often than that. So little things we try and put a handwritten notes in for everybody that stays, you know. Dear Chris, thanks for staying with us. Hope you have a great time. You know, if you ever need anything, here’s our number. Give us a call. You know, that kind of stuff. Trying to make sure that you taking care of lots of things that those travelers might want. You know, the price of the place is done so that when they stay with you they’re like, Oh great, I didn’t think about that. It was just done for me. Perfect. 24 hour check-in, remote check-ins where people haven’t got to wait for me to come and let them in and that kind of stuff.

Tom Lewis:                        00:27:40              You know, lots and lots of little things. I think, you know, like the way you word your messages that you send out when, how many you send out, what you send out. They’re all little things, but they add up to, you know, a great experience hopefully. So I’m just finished reading a really good book called setting the table Bower, the difference between service and hospitality. And that’s been excellent. That’s made us change a lot of the stuff that we send out and things because they’re sort of like services what you should expect and hospitalities how that made you feel. And I’m like, if he doesn’t matter how good you service is, it doesn’t make people feel great about being there. So we’ve done lots of little things to try and get that stuff right. And I think that started to really pay off for us.

Julian Sage:                       00:28:24              Tom, Tom, this, this, this is brilliant. I love, I love talking with you because it’s to hear the contrast from when you first started getting into real estate and you were thinking that this was going to be some type of easy passive form of investing and then you’ve got the, the trouble, a headache you know, tenant and then you switched over to your business when you started seeing all the benefits of the short term space. But now it’s, you’re, you’re running like a, a full on like, you know, a corporate housing company. Like you have this apartment complex that you have multiple units out of, you have, you know, 49% direct bookings with repeat clients. And you’re increasing the hospitality of your business. How big, how big of a contrast? Like could you, do you think that, you know, people that are interested in real estate investing that if they are like hearing about all these numbers with Airbnb, everybody wants to get into the Airbnb space, do you think that those same types of people that are just looking at the hard numbers can actually run a successful business in the short term rental space without, you know, reading hospitality books and providing this next level service that like that we’re all trying to do?

Tom Lewis:                        00:29:29              Yes would be the thing, but I would probably say you’d need somebody front of house that’s good, that wants to please your customers. You know, you don’t necessarily have to do that. And if you’ve got the money to keep buying the place and send it up, then you know, crack on and let and get somebody with you that fits that kind of thing. No, I guess I’ve worked in the, as a tennis coach, 25 years. All that’s the service industry, face to face with the customer every day actually equips you with quite a lot of the skills that you need to be the front of house staff in your business. Well I’ve tried to, the people I’ve tried to bring into our business are, you know, like a bookkeeper, someone that manages the cleaning team. You know, I’ve tried to touch you, bring in the business numbers, organization side to the business rather than being that person and bringing in someone to deal with the hospitality side.

Julian Sage:                       00:30:23              And, and when, when did you, because you said, you know, being, you need that person that if, if someone, if there’s a real estate investor who’s looking to get into the space, maybe they don’t, you know, want to be the actual manager. You, you also started taking up some, some cohost property management units yourself. So these are people that are looking at the space saying, there are good returns here, but I don’t want to deal with the management myself. When did you start adding on that service to your, your portfolio?

Tom Lewis:                        00:30:51              That was sort of middle of last year, so quite recently, maybe six, seven months ago. I basically, there’s lack of property network meeting in our town once a month. So I go to occasionally and the host of that asked me if I would, they did like a mastermind round tables, you know, where I know it was one group that was on like, you know, building houses, one group on student houses and things. And they asked me if I would chair the table of service foundation and short [inaudible]. So I met someone through that that was like, I really like what you’re doing. I’ve been sort of sneakily following you on Facebook and looking at what you’ve been up to for a little while. Like, you know, I’ve got a really nice Bhakti that I would like to rent out. Would you be willing to try it under management deal rather than a, well, they would have taken the management or rents or end deal, but the location was a little bit away from where we knew the market. So we agreed to management because we felt it was less risk to us. It was great. They gave us a nice budget to go and furnish the place how we wanted and you know, just let us run with it. Really. So,

Julian Sage:                       00:31:59              Wow. That, that is, that is so cool. And I love what you said there about you, you weren’t comfortable going to that new location yourself if you’re doing the rent to rent as much. Because it just wasn’t a familiar area. But the investor client, your investor client was willing to take on that risk cause they saw the returns and they just let you basically be the quarterback and set the unit up exactly how it is. Cause I’m looking at all your units right now and they all look, you know, the, the branding and the style is all the same which, which is really nice. And this person, they give you two units,

Tom Lewis:                        00:32:32              They can give us one want to start with. So they basically they bought like commercial building. It’s a big cafe deli kind of shop downstairs. And then upstairs is this really beautiful, big three bedroom apartment. And they asked us if we could do something with that. I think they had similar experience. They’d had longterm tenants. They got the keys back gone in and we were a bit disappointed that, you know, it wasn’t as nice as it had been when they’d let it out, you know, 18 months previously. So they had it redecorated, but it didn’t really have any furniture other than just beds in the bedrooms. So they said, you know, here’s a, we agree a budget cause we sort of get them an invent trigger and like this is all the stuff we think you need in place. This is how much we would pay to buy all that stuff when they were like, yeah, fine. You know, and here’s a bit of extra for soft furnishings and pictures and things, you know, go to town. So they just let us get on with us. So we got all that bit done for them and then started from there.

Julian Sage:                       00:33:31              And, and what, what were, what were they able to see from a return from going from the longterm to the short term?

Tom Lewis:                        00:33:38              So I think I think longterm wise, I don’t know for sure cause I, I haven’t asked them, but I think they were maybe getting in 650 pounds a month in rent on the longterm. And I think they pay the bills now, so they pay like the, you know, electricity, TV, license, internet, stuff like that. But I think the worst month we’ve given them, we’ve given them 1200. And it’s been, you know, better than that. I’m on quite a few months. So we’ve sort of talked to them and said, look, we’ve, we’ve sure there will be some months where it doesn’t hit those, but they’ll also be some months where it hits out of the park. So just, you know, keep a little bit of money black on one side. So on the months where it doesn’t cover itself because of the location, you know, it’s in a village outside of the town.

Tom Lewis:                        00:34:27              There’s not too many reasons to go there unless you’ve had family or friends or, but what we have managed to do is get some contractors that we’ve been working with in the town that wanted some way. This place has got great parking, it’s really quiet, you know, not any worries about crime or anything like that. So they can bring their works van and all their kit and stuff while they stay there. It’s all secure. So we’ve managed to get those guys to come. They have Monday to Friday every week and then we just rent out the weekends occasionally to people that are coming to visit friends and family and stuff like that. So.

Julian Sage:                       00:34:59              So you’re taking your corporate clients who are looking for something a little bit outside of the city and placing them in your cohost units?

Tom Lewis:                        00:35:07              Yeah, I mean this one was a little bit by chance. We actually, we were just fully booked when these guys rang up and asked if they could come in, but we were like, ah, actually we’ve got a place that’s, you know, 10 minutes further away. But, so they were like, I think they were a bit desperate for someone to stay cause they were like, yeah, okay, we’ll give it a go. Ask them straight away what the feedback was like. And they looked at it because it’s much bigger apartment than they would’ve gotten town. I mean this place is huge. Very similar price. And they were like actually for where we’re working, it only takes like five minutes longer to get there in the car. Absolutely fall on. So they’ve looked at it, they booked for like 16 weeks and then following on from them we’ve had another group of contractors take it straight away cause I think they heard from the other guys. I think the first group was sort of like the guys building it and then the guys we’ve got now are probably like the electricians that have gone in after them. So I think they’ve recommended it isn’t that it’s kind of gone from this

Julian Sage:                       00:35:58              Tom. That that is so cool. That is so awesome. Yeah, you free for your investor client, the one that, that put up the risk put up the, the front, you know, they’re, they’re making more money now than, than they were with a longterm tenant and you’re, you’re making a good amount of money. How much, how much are you charging? 20% of, of gross or what’s 15. Wow. Very, very, very competitive. And that’s full service.

Tom Lewis:                        00:36:24              Yeah. So we manage the cleaning. No, all the changeovers, all the guests, you know, communication and stuff.

Julian Sage:                       00:36:30              Okay. Wow. That, that, that is so cool. So you’re, you’re, you’re making a good penny off of that and then you’re actually able to take those, those, those corporate clients that you would have, that you would’ve had to turn away cause you were fully booked, but you were able to place them into another unit is with your [inaudible] like what’s your strategy with taking on more cohost management type clients? Is that something that you’re looking to expand on or is it, you know, looking at the rental arbitrage model of the returns? What, what, what’s your, what’s your thought?

Tom Lewis:                        00:37:00              I think going forward will, so that you talked about how we’re going to 13 units, we’re nuts. We’re taking on three more on the management agreement with somebody else. So they should, we’ve got, we’re fully booked at the moment in our apartments, which is awesome. Yeah, absolutely love it. But it’s a problem because you have to turn people away because you can’t, you know, and that kind of plummets you down the rankings on all the sites because you’ve got no availability. So we looked at taking on some more units and I think now for now, I don’t think we would take too many more rental arbitrage ones on, but we would buy more units for ourselves. And we would take more management ones on two reasons really. I guess if everything, if all the regulations change and we had to stop doing it, you’ll stuff we would buy for ourselves.

Tom Lewis:                        00:37:49              We would buy refurb, you know, add value. It would still work as a longterm rental. So it would still fit the pension model. It would just lose a bit of cashflow. And if we’re managing them, there’s very little risk to us financially. It’s certainly we have to stop. You go, okay guys, you know, that’s the way it works. Not much we can do about that. Here’s your keys back. Thank you very much. So it kind of just de-risking things a bit rather than having a giant monthly rent roll that we have to find and then not being able to do it. So

Julian Sage:                       00:38:19              I love it. And one of the, one of the things that we kind of teach is this, like this trifecta, you know, you have your, your buying hold, your rental arbitrage and your cohost, you know, and you’re basically using that to, to feed itself. So now what you’re doing is you’re taking the profits from these arbitrage and cohost units and you’re gonna be using it to basically purchase more properties. So your risk is a little bit more 50, 50. If the regulation changed, you can still throw a longterm tenant in there. You could sell it. You know, with the rental arbitrage, if something happens, you just have to cut your losses.

Tom Lewis:                        00:38:48              Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like you say, it’s all about managing the risks now as we go begging, you know, we, we could have taken on a lot more units, but we’ve tried to grow a bit slower to sort of, I kind of feel like reputation is going to become a big thing for people less than the market. And so, you know, having a load of terrible reviews because you clean this, couldn’t manage the fact that you’ve certainly taken on 20 more places in a month and I didn’t want to know all those kinds of problems. Yeah. But maybe that’s me. They’re sort of perceived problems rather than real problems that might not happen like that. But we took sort of a slow and steady approach.

Julian Sage:                       00:39:24              And with your cleaners, because I mean, as you’re growing you know, you’re keeping up the good reviews. What, what do you, what are you doing with your cleaners as you expand your operations?

Tom Lewis:                        00:39:34              So we can kind of work with, we found a cleaner that, you know, was just a one lady that had a couple of friends work for her. And we’ve just tried really hard to work with them to sort of, they’ve been really great, really willing to sort of learn what we wanted to work with is they do way more than we could ever sort of ask them to do. They’re brilliant like that. They’ve manage, we work with like a laundrette that do all our linens and do all our ironing and stuff. They manage all of that, all of that side of things. So we didn’t have to deal with it really. They get linens delivered straight to them. What we have done is produced like like a little couple of sheets for each apartment going right. You know, this is what the lounge should look like with everything where it is, you know, throws on here, pillows on here, plants there.

Tom Lewis:                        00:40:24              Cause peer stuff gets moved around all the time and here’s a checklist for that room of all the things that should be cleaned and you know, what you need to do. And so they’ve got that for each apartment and then they’ve been able to use that with their staff when they’ve taken new people on to help with the fact that we’re growing to be able to go, right. You know, here’s how it’s done. You’ve had a few goes at it, now you’re on your own in that place and here’s the manual and I’ll come back in and just check that you’ve done it right. Kind of thing. So it’s helped them to grow their business whilst we’ve been growing us. Came wrong. There’s still problems. We still have to go in and check quite routinely. That stuff’s been done the way we want. That’s the problem I’m trying to solve at the moment is, you know, I’d go in and spot check every time we have someone come in. You know, I still find stuff wrong and missing and things occasionally. So it’s, it’s how you deal with that. Cause it, it’s a drain on my time to have to go back to the apartments every day to get that stuff’s been done. Right. So,

Julian Sage:                       00:41:21              Yeah, I think, I think you’re, you’re in that position right now where a lot of hosts face, you know when you, when you have one or two units you can, you can do everything yourself. It doesn’t take that much of a time suck. But when you start scaling up to around five to like, you know, 15 now it’s like the same operations that you had when he first started don’t really fit the same mold. And if you plan on taking that up to another level, it’s like I don’t have the time. I don’t have, I can’t maintain that high level of hospitality service with 30 plus properties. It, it, the, the, the same framework doesn’t, doesn’t fit the mold.

Tom Lewis:                        00:41:53              Yeah. So it’s, it’s sort of what, what we’ve done in the meantime cause we haven’t been able to solve that is we’ve, we’ve tried to solve some of the other things that take lots of times. So rate management, you know, dealing with that. So that doesn’t take so much time. Guest communication, automating some of that stuff so it doesn’t take so much time, which is sort of freed up a bit more time to be at the apartments. Well, going forward, I really do want to solve that problem and it might just be that because we’ve taken on these three units, they’re in a slightly different location. That will add a little more time and it might be that you actually, some of the money that we make from those units will go into employing somebody to do this job. I won’t really be any better off. I’ll just be a bit more, I’ve got more time, but I can perhaps use that time then it’s gone. Find some more units rather than

Julian Sage:                       00:42:42              Tom of you. You are really, and I just got to reemphasize this, Tom, you’re, you’re a full time tennis coach that is running a hospitality, you know, nine units scaling up to 13 on the side that that is, that is pretty wild. Did you, could you ever imagine that you’d be, that you’d be managing five or nine units scaling up to 13 while I was in a full time job?

Tom Lewis:                        00:43:03              No, no, not at all. I mean the one thing I will say is that probably looking after all these units is a lot easier than looking after the 600 kids a week that comes tennis lessons. So, you know, the tennis gives me quite a nice perspective on, you know, yes you have to work hard in the apartment stuff, but it’s not that hard and it’s not stressful most of the time. There’s the odd moment where yeah, all right, things go wrong and you have to drop everything and well, generally speaking it’s pretty nice way to make your living.

Julian Sage:                       00:43:36              W what has been the most challenging part of starting your short term rental business?

Tom Lewis:                        00:43:41              It sounds really lame, but like just getting started, just like some of the things that have stopped me from doing it for a long time and turned out to be so simple to solve. You know, just by even daft things like joining all the Facebook forums for Airbnb hosting, getting involved with other hosts in the area. I set up a WhatsApp group for all the other hosts that have in Lester that I know and we’ve sort of worked together that has been brilliant for, you know, you get double booking and you need to find somewhere else to put it or those kinds of things. We set out primarily for a lot of sharing. So oftentimes I’ll get someone get in touch, go Tom, can I come on day? And I’m like, no, I’m fully booked. But actually I’m gonna put it out to my group of colleagues and see if someone can take it. And the deal is that we always give each other sort of 10% commission or take them out a Curry or something is a thank you. That’s been quite, quite good but also really good for, you know, like, Oh I’m having this problem with this. Has anyone else encountered it? You know, and finding out all those little answers that are little tiny things that kind of stopped you from doing a bit more.

Julian Sage:                       00:44:47              Yeah. Wow. That is so cool. And I love, I love that because a lot of people think, I’ve never heard that before. But that, that is really brilliant. You’ve taken something and where people might be thinking, Oh, I’ve got to just keep everything myself. And you’ve opened it up to where it’s like, Hey, if I don’t have, if I’m fully booked, I’ll, I’ll give it to my network. I’ll give it to my, my, my, the people that are kind of within my community. That, that, that is something else that I’ve never heard before. What about, what about scaling your business? What’s been the most challenging part of scaling this business?

Tom Lewis:                        00:45:17              Perhaps getting comfortable with the risks. Probably the, the thing that’s held me back the most of the kind of not wanting to go out. It’s to a point where I couldn’t get out of it. You know, up to now if things had gone wrong or we’d have to pay out for massive bills or something, you know, we could always do it. Whereas it’s getting to a stage where you go, actually it’s now kind of got to work because it doesn’t, I couldn’t buy my way out of trouble. I would have to make it right. So that element of that attitude towards taking that, those steps, having to rely on other people I’ve found a little bit difficult. You know, like if a boiler breaks and I need someone to come out, I can, you know, you need them to come out now. It’s not like, Oh yeah, you come on Monday, that’s fine.

Tom Lewis:                        00:46:03              It’s no like when can you be here today? So that kind of stuff been challenging to find the right, build the right team around you for that. Yeah. I mean I don’t have like anybody, you have good days and you have bad days and you just have to try and keep going. She’s still a bit more and do a bit more. And I don’t know whose quote it was, but I absolutely loved it. And he just said, you know, the rule is you go as far as you can see and when you get there you’ll always be able to see a bit further. And so it’s been getting this attitude of, you know, when I get stuck with something, it’s like we’ll do as much of it as you can and then see what it still looks like. And you always figure it out. You always just get through enough to do that. And it might be the other people help you or it might be the, you get so far and you go, Oh, that’s how you do it. I’ll just carry on. So, you know,

Julian Sage:                       00:46:52              Is there a, is there anything that you include in your, your rentals that saves you time and money? Like are there any tools that you use that you that you recommend or like any, any particular like a, like a quick drying towel or something? Someone might bring up

Tom Lewis:                        00:47:08              No, nothing really. Nothing, nothing. I don’t think that would be obvious. You know, we’ve got cupboards in each apartment that have like a Cody lock on them so the keenest can leave linens and towels and all the change I’ve stuffed in there. The guests can’t necessarily get up, but having them with coded locks so that, you know, if someone checks in at 11 o’clock at night and they ring me up and they’re like, Oh, you know, there’s, I don’t know, there’s not enough towels left out or there’s a Mark on the bedding. You can always be like, okay, sorry about that. Well there’s brand new stuff in the cupboard. Help yourself. It doesn’t need somebody to go out and have keys and deal with all that kind of stuff. We’ve had coded locks on all of the apartment, so you know, like handyman, the cleaners, anyone in my team can get into all the units without having to come and get keys from the office and things like that.

Tom Lewis:                        00:48:03              That’s been quite useful. Almost everything. Now I’ve got an app for my phone so you can run, you know, with my phone and my laptop, I can run the whole problem from anywhere. I don’t need to be onsite. So that’s been good. But I don’t, I don’t think we’ve got anything specific where you go. Oh that’s been, I think one of the best things we’ve done is we’ve put little extension lead in each bedroom in the bedside table with lack of four plug sockets. If you ever can plug in phone, laptop, you know, all that kind of stuff. We’ve got all the plugs by the in the bedrooms and in the kitchens where you can plug a USB cable straight into the plug socket. Now you don’t need to plug so you don’t lose the plug sockets. Put your phone in, not spot it or rarely is there anything that you do to help your guests leave positive reviews?

Tom Lewis:                        00:48:51              Okay. So yeah, we the day after they check in like 24 hours later or the morning later, we send them a message saying, you know, thanks very much for staying with this game. We hope having a great time. By the way, we expect all of our guests that, you know, have a five star stay with us. If there’s anything that’s not right or not, you know, please let us know straight away so we can fix it. That I think that sets the tone in that you’re expecting a great review because you’re expecting to give them great service. And if they don’t feel they’ve got that, then I don’t want them to sit quietly on that for a week and then leave and be really grumpy and give us a terrible review. I agree. I’d rather they told me straight away because often times you can fix it, you know.

Tom Lewis:                        00:49:32              So we had some guests there with us at Christmas and messaged them. They came quite late at night, so I messaged them in the next morning. They got, they didn’t like the fact they couldn’t open a couple of the windows. He’s got one of our partners got like ginormous windows three meters high onto the main road, but you can’t open them because of that because you know, pretty scary drop down. But because they told us straight away, we can just check them into one of our other apartments. So it was like, guys, look, here’s the code for this apartment. Go and have a look. If you’d like it, you can swap straight away. So they swapped straight away and gave us a great review because we were able to sort of solve that problem. So I think unless you sort of know that stuff in advance and can’t do anything about it and it’s too late once they’ve left, so then, so save that relationship.

Tom Lewis:                        00:50:21              We do that, we send them a guy just before they check out, I’m like, how to check out, you know, hopefully nothing that they wouldn’t think of themselves, but you know, death things like please turn off the lights, turn off the heating, checking the drawers for any belongings that you might left in the bedside table, that kind of stuff. And by the way, again, thank you Stan with this. Please remember to leave us a review, join us on Facebook, Twitter, all that kind of stuff. I’m not, seems to be, seems to be working. So,

Julian Sage:                       00:50:51              And what are you doing with your, your corporate clients, the ones that keep on doing the direct bookings, are you doing anything else to capture those reviews since they are just coming to your website? Do you have like a, like a Google or our Facebook group that you’re trying to have them like or, or leave reviews on there?

Tom Lewis:                        00:51:09              Yeah, so we have a Facebook page or we ask them to join if they want to though obviously they got the option to review on that. It’s not something we’ve pursued lot. We’ve been looking at maybe we like, you know, have a Google business listings or it shows up that way. A bit of it more. But I’m kind of feel like you’ve got to pick your battles and you’d go, no matter how much money I spend on marketing my website, it’s never going to outspend what Airbnb or booking.com are willing to spend. So they use their site to get your new business and then when that new business arrives, convert it into people that want to stay with us and they can use the website almost is like they found it because we showed it to them rather than, because they stumbled onto it on the 12th page and Google. So yeah, we, we sort of gone down that, that approach if, yeah, never going to be Airbnb coming up top listing. So why try, I’ll just work with them.

Julian Sage:                       00:52:03              Love it. Love it. And is there one hash rule that has saved you before?

Tom Lewis:                        00:52:08              Not so much a house rule, but I think just like things like we don’t do same day bookings. So need 24 hours notice we don’t do one stays. Or certainly not very often. It’s more to fill gaps in the calendar in advance. I certainly wouldn’t take like a one night booking on a Friday next week sort of thing. Do a lot. There’s just a lot of red flags. We don’t let anyone stay generally that is from the same town unless their messages are quiet. Compelling is to, you know, if I get a nice message from you saying, hi Tom, I’m having a, an extension built at my house and they’re knocking the back wall down next week and I stayed Friday, Saturday, Sunday. While that work is done, absolutely fine. Totally reasonable. You know, if it’s like a Hey man, your place looks gray, it’s like mm. A little bit more information before. So I think perhaps that side of things gets it rather than stuff in your house rules.

Julian Sage:                       00:53:07              No, I th I think, I think that’s brilliant and I think what you’re doing Tom, every, everything is just so, so, you know, I don’t, I don’t know personally what you have going on behind the scenes, but from what I’m seeing you’re, you’re doing everything the right way. You’re setting this business up and you’re not, you’re not just say you know, coming out there and putting in a bunch of listings online and trying to make a quick buck, you’re, you’re scaling a real business, which, which is really good. And you have all the, all the safety precautions. Like you said, the, the, you know, no, you know, you’re reviewing all the messages you have the, the one, you know, no single night bookings the locals. I think that’s all really great stuff. What would you do differently though if you did have to start from scratch?

Tom Lewis:                        00:53:46              A good question. I think probably the thing I would do differently is almost like have that way of thinking. I think it’s grant called don’t. That’s like, yeah, I know that you’ve seen his books about Tenex stuff. You know, I really liked the idea that if I asked you to double your business, you just work hard. If I asked you to a hundred times better your business, then you have to think very differently about how you would achieve that. I think I would do that. You know, you go, okay, right, I’m starting from scratch, but I’m not going to start with one unit. I’m going to start with six or 10. And so how’s my cleaning team going to deal with some of these issues? How are we going to deal with the volume of work? Because you’ll come to those problems anyway. So you might as well just face them head on right at the start because it’s no different solving that problem in a year’s time.

Tom Lewis:                        00:54:37              It is. Then you still got to solve that problem. So you might as well do it straight away. And actually having multiple units in the same location makes things a lot easier. Now it’s easier to ride the bad times because you never gonna have all your apartments empty. You might have a couple of amenity over Christmas, but most of them are booked out. The clean is like it cause they just go to one location, take all the kit and it’s easy, you know. So probably going forward I’d say, you know, if we stopped everything we do in here and move to a different place, I’d, I’d go for, I’d be looking for developers that were building like a whole block and go, right guys, I can really work with you to make the most out of this development. I’d go after that kind of market rather than just individual.

Tom Lewis:                        00:55:18              But I suppose that depends on your location. You know, obviously if you’re in nice beach in Florida or something then probably very different market that you probably got though. So any city center wise I, I would go for a lot of units all in the same place somewhere where you can really manage the whole of the guest experience. So it doesn’t matter how beautiful my apartments are. If you come into the foyer of the building and there’s graffiti on the walls and post all over the floor and stuff that you can’t really control very easily. Whereas because we own such a big chunk of the blocks, Auckland is take care of a lot of the corridors and a lot of them, all that kind of stuff, you know? And as we buy more of that building and gradually one day own the whole thing, then we’ll be able to really make it actually bang on site.

Julian Sage:                       00:56:02              I love it. I love it. I love it. Tom. I love, I love that mindset shift that you’re, you’re saying, you know instead of just thinking, how do I operate one unit, how do I operate, you know, 10 or a hundred instead of learning how to pick up one unit at a time, how can I pick up, you know, 10 or a hundred units? And with that mindset of, you know, maybe I could even potentially buy out the building, maybe I can, you know, become mayor of a city hall. Whatever your, your grand idea is, it’s, it’s that mindset shift from not just thinking small to thinking big that that is really key. And where, where do you see short term rentals going in the future and specifically let’s say you know, the, your, your particular area in England,

Tom Lewis:                        00:56:41              I still think he’s booming here. I think there’ll be way more growth in the industry. There’s so many more people coming into the market. I think by default that’ll be a good thing. I think that will almost, the competition will sort of strengthen the herd because there are people that are doing it badly. You know, without doing all the right checks, without looking after their guess will gradually just go out into the market because you wouldn’t choose to stay there. You know, cause there’s going to be so much choice. I think the regulation that will come in, we’ll probably, as long as it’s not completely restrictive, you not, I don’t think the 90 day rule is the best regulation. They could have brought in two parts of England, you know, things on safety and you know, all that kind of stuff would have been a far better thing cause it would’ve got rid of a lot of people straight out of the market anyway.

Tom Lewis:                        00:57:32              I kinda think that’s the way it will go. So I think the people that offer the best quality products and then the best service will be the ones that stand the test of time. You know, probably the same as hotels have done historically. You know, the best places to stay are still the best places to stay. You know, I don’t think that was always just because they’re in the best location. It’s just because of the experience that you get when you stay there, makes you go back. So that repeat business will be really important I think for people.

Julian Sage:                       00:58:00              What question would you have for another professional host? Maybe someone that’s at a similar level than you or maybe that next level where you’re trying to go,

Tom Lewis:                        00:58:09              First one will be, how do I get someone that’s a good housekeeper? Once I’ve solved that problem, I feel like I’m doing a bit better. I don’t know really. I think so much of it depends on the individual in terms of what it is you personally want to achieve from it, you know? So I think ours probably started out as any more money and trying to, you know, have a slightly better life. But actually it’s now becoming more about, you know, how can I build a business that I’m proud of that, you know, if any of our friends or family or anyone came to stay would be like, Oh, I had a great time. That’s, you’ve done really great job. How do I provide that on a bigger scale? You know, how do we keep that quality? How do we keep that sort of slightly personal touch on a much bigger scale?

Tom Lewis:                        00:58:57              No. So it’s probably growing your team alongside your units to keep that going and bringing on board people that are like minded people know that. How’s the attitude of wanting to do the best they can do you know, despite the fact that you know, well I don’t know, I lost people around here. Talk about Tina is like slightly in a negative way or it’s just the cleaner and they make or break your business. If they do a job, you’re getting a terrible review, you know? But finding a cleaner that wants to do a great job. I’ve, you know, I’ve got a lot of time for people like that, you know? And so building a team of those kinds of people takes a lot of effort and a lot of getting out there and meeting lots of people and trying stuff. And so it’d be interesting to talk to people and say, how did you solve both problems going forward? Or how did you bring people in that solve both problems for you? You know, cause some of the, like we talked about, some of the guys I met earlier, they’ve got a hundred units and Stephanie and, well, there’s no way you’ve met all of the people in your team over and over again. So how did you put people in place that would hire people that had similar values to what you wanted in your business?

Julian Sage:                       01:00:05              I love it. I love it. Thank you. Thank you so much Tom. And one last thing being in the, the less Lester area if anybody does want to reach out to you, if they have any other questions, maybe they want to join your, your WhatsApp group, if they are in that particular area, what’s the best way that people can reach you?

Tom Lewis:                        01:00:21              Okay, so other than several ways yeah, I’ll send out my Facebook page. If they get in touch with me on that, you know, I’m quite happy for them to have my phone number already, WhatsApp group and all that kind of stuff. So if I just send you the link to that and then, you know, you can distribute it. However,

Julian Sage:                       01:00:38              Definitely, definitely I’ll include, I’ll include the link in the description as well as a, your direct booking site if anybody is planning to go to the Leicester area. Your places are beautiful. I really love it. And you’re doing a bang up job, Tom. Thank you so much. All right, and till next time, everybody keep on hosting. Hope you hosts benefit from the show. If you found value, please go on over to iTunes, leave us a review and let us know what you enjoy about the show. If you’d like to talk to hosts that have been featured in these episodes as well as the community, go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation.