In this episode, we have the special honor of speaking with Travers Xanthos. Travers has a portfolio of 24 properties, 22 of them are rental arbitrage and 2 he owns, all located in Nashville, TN.
Travers had a high paying sales job for 6 years and in 8 months after finding out about Airbnb he already was ready to quit his job with the income he was making from his properties.
In this episode, Travers talks about how he was able to grow his short term rental business in such a fast time period, how he was able to be completely hands-off while living in Bali, the secrets he used to get news reporters to promote your properties, and how to find good deals even during uncertain times.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Travers Xanthos: 00:00:00 So what I’m doing is I’m taking these people that are looking for a 12 month place. They wanted maybe be fully furnished, maybe not. I’m getting them to sign a sublease with me and then I turned around to the apartment complex, sign a lease for that property because they recently went out of business with the other company. So then I put that person there for nine to 12 months and then next year, I take that place back over once things are back to normal. So I’ve been able to actually grow and improve the quality of my properties during the pandemic.
Julian Sage: 00:00:29 This is episode number 60 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.
Julian Sage: 00:00:40 Welcome back to 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 that we all strive for. Five star reviews. So please go on over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy and 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. Hey, what is going on?
Julian Sage: 00:01:10 I am super excited to be back again with you this week. Thank you to everybody that has picked up our new book, Airbnb Secrets revealed. It’s something that we have been giving away for free just because we were planning on printing them out and doing it that way. But because of everything that’s been happening, we’ve decided to make it digital so that one we can update the book but two so that we can just give it to you for free. So if you go to shorttermsage.com/book, you can pick up your free copy of our newest book Airbnb secrets reveal where Jon and I talk about rental arbitrage cohosting, our stories and just all of the exciting potential of short term rental investing. It’s still something that I am super excited and passionate about every day. I’m excited to wake up to be able to engage and create new content for the host nation, but also because of the potential of the short term rental space.
Julian Sage: 00:02:02 There’s so much opportunity out there and I don’t want anybody to feel like because of these difficult times that you really just have to fold your hand. There are so many hosts that are hurting right now and my heart goes out to every single person that hasn’t been able to get the bookings that they were expecting during this time, but right now more than ever, it’s most important to keep positive, keep your head up and remember that this too shall pass. I’m excited to be able to share with y’all some of the stuff that we’re going to be doing in our business because we are also pivoting as well. Don’t worry guys, it’s still all going to be about short term rentals, but we are trying to make some strategic moves to best position ourselves and I hope that everybody else is making those types of moves.
Julian Sage: 00:02:41 Whether that is upgrading your PMs or even just doing a little thing. One of the things that our guests actually said was as long as you wake up every morning and ask yourself, what did I do to move the needle forward? Every single day I look for the needle movers. I try to see what’s the biggest thing that I can be doing right now to be able to get me closer to where my goal is. Sometimes that just means you know, decluttering things or you know, just trying to do a little bit of something. Other days they are big moves and I can feel really good, but whether it’s a small move or a big move, as long as you’re making moves forward, you are going to be okay. Someone that I’m super excited to bring on the show is Travers Xanthos. Travis has a portfolio of 24 properties, 22 of them are rental arbitrage and two which he owns all located in Nashville, Tennessee.
Julian Sage: 00:03:29 Travers had a high paying sales job for six years and then eight months after finding about Airbnb and short term rentals, he was already ready to quit his job from the amount that he was making from his properties. In This episode Travis shares how he was able to grow his short term rental business in such a fast time period. How he was able to be completely hands off while living in Bali and the secrets he used to getting news reporters to actually promote his properties and how to find good deals even during uncertain times. This is a really exciting episode and Travers is really skilled at using media to be able to get his message or to get his properties in front. Actually saw Travers on the most recent CNBC episode where he was actually featured as one of the hosts talking. Some of the tips in this episode are really practical and that you can definitely be using right away.
Julian Sage: 00:04:18 So you want to go ahead and save this episode. Make sure that it is one of your favorites because it is jam packed. Of course, it’d be like my show notes for this episode. You go to shorttermsage.Com/STR60 or if you like my show notes sent directly to your inbox every week, then go to shorttermsage.com/shownotes. With all that being said on this week’s conversation, Hey, welcome back host nation to another episode of short term rental success stories. In this episode we have the special honor of speaking with Travers Xanthos. When I read the name I was like, I was like, is it like Thanos or Zanos? Yeah,
Travers Xanthos: 00:05:01 My name is Travers Demetrius Xanthos. So
Julian Sage: 00:05:07 What’s your nationality?
New Speaker: 00:05:07 It’s Greek.
Julian Sage: 00:05:07 So that’s a traditionally Greek name.
Travers Xanthos: 00:05:13 The two, the Demetrius and Xanthos are. Yes.
Julian Sage: 00:05:17 Awesome. Well now that I just completely butchered your nameif you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself, let the host nation know who you are and what inspired you to get into short term rentals.
Travers Xanthos: 00:05:26 Yeah. So my name is Travis Xanthos. I have about 24 rental arbitrage properties in Nashville. I got started with doing this about three years ago which is kind of trying to find something else to get out of the corporate world. Well, really that wasn’t the reason I got started. I was just trying to make some site and coming. And that’s really what it turned into is my early retirement at 30 years old. So yeah, it’s been an awesome ride so far, but but that’s how I got started.
Julian Sage: 00:05:53 Awesome. Can you give a little bit more so like how did, how did you even know about
Travers Xanthos: 00:05:58 This, you know, the arbitrage model because prior to this you said that you were in a healthcare sales for about six years or so. Yeah, so I was working in healthcare sales. I had, I had a really good sales job. I’m selling to hospitals. Everything was going great. I had a nice commission check and I wanted to try to invest that. I really had no idea of how to invest. I want to get into real estate. I love traveling. I’ve been traveling for a long time and and Airbnb was something that seems really cool, something that was exciting to me. And I had a friend of mine who was doing Airbnb, that’s all that I knew it was that he had an Airbnb business. And I asked him if I could buy him a beer to tell me how to do it cause I wanted to go and just buy another house.
Travers Xanthos: 00:06:40 So I wanted to buy a second house that could bring us an Airbnb. So I went and met him for a beer on music row and an old country bar. And you know, right when I walked in and he was like, Travers, you know, I don’t buy houses anymore. And he explained to me that all he does is goes and pitches to landlords and apartment complex is to rent their apartments to him. And then he turns me into Airbnb, turns them into Airbnbs and rent some, like a regular tenant. He told me about all the, the regulations in Nashville. There’s, you know, if you were to ask someone in Nashville if Airbnb is legal, they would probably say that it’s not, but there’s a lot of loopholes. You just, you have to know how those work. And if you know how those work then there’s a lot of opportunity.
Travers Xanthos: 00:07:20 So anyway, we sat there and I had my little note pad and I was writing stuff down. He was just talking all night, you know, a couple of hours. Explain to me how I needed to talk to the landlord to get them to say yes, how I command is the places. Just basically just an overview of everything. And the next morning I woke up and you know, it was feeling a little rough from the night before and was like, man, that stuff Ricky was talking about sounds really cool but you know, I’m probably not going to do that. And then you know, I’m in sales so I just, I started looking at on Craigslist for apartments and it was like, Oh, this one looks like it would be good. And you know, with a sales background, I started to make a cold call list. So I have my Excel spreadsheet.
Travers Xanthos: 00:08:00 I just started making this list and then I have the list of like 10 or 15 places. And I was like, you know what? Screw it. Like, why don’t we just start calling these places? And I texted Ricky and asked him like, Hey, what are the points I needed to say again? And started making the phone calls and you know, the first day I probably made 20 calls and I got a couple of maybes and those maybes got me really excited and I was, it was all downhill from there. So, so yeah, I picked up my first two properties a couple of weeks later and you know, yeah. So I picked up those first two properties. I kept on growing. I furnished those. It was managing those myself. And I was under contracts with two more. And I went down to Cancun for my, I think it was my 30th birthday.
Travers Xanthos: 00:08:46 And I was with my girlfriend at the time and it was just kind of like sitting there daydreaming and running numbers through my head and realized that I was covering my, my living expenses right then from the two properties that I had. And I was about to get two more. And I was like, Holy crap. Like this is actually real. Like I just started this and I can cover my living expenses. What if I continue to grow this? And you know, when I graduated college and I traveled around the world for two years by myself and experienced a lot of things, and one of the big things that I saw was that, you know, life doesn’t have to be part of the corporate America rat race. But as soon as you get into it, it’s hard to kind of realize that every time I go out of the country, I would kind of fall back into that thought of like, gosh, like this is my two week vacation.
Travers Xanthos: 00:09:31 I’m like stuck the rest of the year. So that was what was going through my head while we were in Cancun for my birthday. I was like, you know what, like Bali is my favorite place in the world. I spent some time there and I turned to my, my girlfriend was like, Hey aye, what are you saying? We quit our jobs and move to Bali. And that’s what we decided we were going to do. So I left him very high paying sales job. We gave it kind of eight months and just continue to grow throughout that time. And by the time that I put in my two weeks notice, I was making as much money with my Airbnb businesses. I was from my corporate sales job and was able to go live in Bali as long as I wanted to and Mmm. Continue growing my business from there. So it’s been pretty sweet.
Julian Sage: 00:10:17 Can you share how, how much were you making and how many properties was that to be able to replace your corporate sales job?
Travers Xanthos: 00:10:25 Well, it was a really high pain sales job. You know, way over six figures. So I think I had like eight or 10 properties at the time. I was probably doing about 150 a hundred, maybe 150 to 200,000 a year once they’re fully running. So I hadn’t made that up to that point. But once they all started going for a full year, that’s what they would have done.
Julian Sage: 00:10:50 So you’re, you were bringing in so around seven to eight, eight properties is what we typically hear on the show is, is kind of like that financially free number or that at least that financial independence. So you were clearing, how about what between one to 2000 per property?
Travers Xanthos: 00:11:06 Yeah, on average I do about 1500 per property. So yeah, it just depends on, you know, first of all, what’s your, your living expenses are. So do you live in a huge house that you have to cover and have a car that you have, you know, have to make payments on and all that, or you know, are you living in Bali? Mmm. And just kind of, yeah, exactly. So that’s, that’s a lot easier to do it with two or three properties and the rest is just saving. So
Julian Sage: 00:11:35 About how long did it take you to get to that point where you, you quit your job?
Travers Xanthos: 00:11:41 Well I gave myself eight months. So I guess it was, you know, about 10 months or so.
Julian Sage: 00:11:46 10 months from the time that you, you first found out about short term rentals and the master lease rental arbitrage model to the time that you quit your, exactly.
Travers Xanthos: 00:11:54 I mean it was, it was two months since I’ve found out about it. No, I decided I was going to leave my job. Wow. Cause that’s, that’s when I was in Mexico and realized that I was covering my living expenses, you know, this is my escape. So.
Julian Sage: 00:12:07 Mm. And so you, you, you, you actually moved to Bali and he lived there for some time or was that just more like a vacation?
Travers Xanthos: 00:12:13 Yeah, no, the plan was go to Bali and live there for a year. We were there for about three months. It was kind of a weird transition. I mean going from the corporate world to Mmm, not having to work anymore. So it was kind of a timeline where I got there. It was great. It was like a vacation for a week. The second week I felt really guilty cause I wasn’t working every day. Mmm. You know, after that I slowly transitioned into enjoying it. About month and a half, then I started get really bored. And then, you know, that’s when I decided like, Hey, I gotta be moving forward with something and I don’t have an online business. The things that I know require me to be at least in a similar time zone. So, you know, it kind of transitioned to just Dean based in the U S and traveling whenever I want to.
Julian Sage: 00:13:03 So how, how did you, you know, that that’s maybe a lot, a big fear for a lot of people is, you know, being able to step away from their business that they’ve built. You know, you don’t, a lot of people, they try to leave their corporate world so that they can have more freedom. But then a lot of people maybe even hosts and I’m getting stuck still hosting. How were you able to step away even from your properties?
Travers Xanthos: 00:13:26 Yeah, I mean, do you just have to structure it in a way to do that? I don’t know if you’ve read four hour workweek by Tim Ferriss, you know, that was kind of a big motivator when I decided I was going to leave my job. You know, I had a, a lot of people like kind of hating on it, not really hating on it, but just like warning me like, is this what you want to do? And so I had a lot of anxiety about it, so I think you got read that book twice and that was kind of like gave me some motivation to continue on with the plan. But yeah, you just have to set it up in a way where, you know, honestly, I’m not needing the business. I pay a property manager to run everything. Mmm. She, she’s amazing. You know, she does everything how I want her to.
Travers Xanthos: 00:14:05 She’s incentivized to do a great job to get good words to use to get high dollar bookings and high occupancy. So it’s just a matter of finding the rights structure for your business so that you can step out of it. And the good thing was me moving to Bali is that you know, I didn’t have a choice like I had to leave and I couldn’t, I couldn’t really help out. So it was kind of like I had to get someone to reply prepared to take, take over the management before I left and when I left, you know, I just need to make sure that there was someone that could figure out on their own.
Julian Sage: 00:14:40 I think Travis, you’re one of the first people maybe on the show that that I can recall that actually once the property manager route to be able to have base, basically manage their business. When did you, when did you realize like, okay, I don’t want to be the one that’s handling all the, you know, the, the nuances of hosting and rather outsource that to a manager.
Travers Xanthos: 00:15:04 Oh, from the very beginning, that was my plan. So at the very beginning it was just my girlfriend at the time and I were managing the properties. I think that’s really important to do so that you understand what goes into it. You understand how to set up the properties, how to set up the, the structure and the processes that you’re going to be using. Once you’ve gotten some experience and know how to manage the property, then you can decide on what you wanna do next. Do you want to hire a virtual assistant? Do you want to hire someone that’s gonna do your onsite help and you can still do the guest communication? Or do you want to hire a full time property manager? I’ve all, you know, obviously evaluated all those different routes. I liked the route that I have, the structure that I have because it’s, I don’t have to worry, you know, I don’t have to deal with anything.
Travers Xanthos: 00:15:49 I trust the person that’s managing my properties very, very much. She’s been with me for three years since she was my first cleaner that I hire. So she knows these places way better than I do to be honest. And Oh, if you look at reviews, I mean having someone local that’s there that knows the area that’s, that knows the properties, like the backs of their hands, it’s going to get you really good reviews. If you have someone, a virtual assistant over in India or in the Philippines you know, they’re gonna be able to handle basic questions. But you know, just like if you were to pick up the phone and call ATMT is, you know, helpline and you’re really frustrated with something and you talk to someone that, that you can’t communicate with it’s not going to rub you the right way. And if you’re leaving a review for someone that’s very a review, that’s very important to them. You know, you want to make sure that they’re getting the service they need. And I feel like a local person is the best, the best routes for that.
Julian Sage: 00:16:47 You know, that, that, that is, that is so cool to see. You know, the, the first person that you hire being your cleaner and then them eventually turn it into your property manager. I was thinking maybe like you hired like another, you know, another host as a manager, but you, you took someone that know, didn’t have any experience in hosting and then train them up so that they’re able to fully operate your business. Now this person, they’re there full time with you. Like you pay them a salary,
Travers Xanthos: 00:17:11 They’re full time. They’re a w two employee. She did have some experience though. She was managing her own Airbnb when I first hired her on as a cleaner. Mmm. But yeah, she, she’s grown with the company and you know, I’m very lucky that I have her. So,
Julian Sage: 00:17:27 And with, with that, when you’re paying someone to manage the properties full time for you to be able to still walk away from your job and have somebody manage your business, how much of a of a cut did having a manager, a full time person take from like your, your, your net profit?
Travers Xanthos: 00:17:44 Well, there’s a lot of different ways to structure the salary or the pay for a property manager. And it’s something that I’ve put a lot of thought and planning and you know, and preparation into you know, you can do a straight up percentage base model. I mean if you were to pay a property management company, it’d probably be 15, 20 to 25, 30%, depending on where you are. You know, or you could pay someone. I mean, you know, I talked to some of the big competitors out there, some of the big corporates, pardon me, multifamily style rental arbitrage, or they call it master lease companies and kind of talks to them about how they paid their employees by interviewing some of their ex employees and found out that they were paid very, very poorly. I mean a property manager managing the entire city whose responsibility is not just handling all the onsite stuff, doing the quality assurance checks but also growing growing the business as well.
Travers Xanthos: 00:18:43 So finding new properties, responsible for furnishing those properties, all that stuff. You know, I think they were getting paid like $30,000 a year plus $500 per property. They’ve found. That’s it. So, you know, the way that I looked at it as if I had someone that I want, you know, I want their goals to align with mine. Right? she pays someone straight percentage based that can be, it can get pretty expensive. I mean, if you have a business like mine that’s doing well over seven figures a year, you know, you don’t want to be paying this person $200,000 a year. So I have a hybrid model, which is a combination of, you know, a low base amount plus quarterly incentive pay, which is a percentage of, of bookings.
Julian Sage: 00:19:29 Okay. And you took that, that kind of concept from interviewing what some of the other managers, how did, how did you even find like all these people I came up with that other companies were paying
Travers Xanthos: 00:19:41 A salary with a finding bonus of $500. So when I just started thinking about doing that, I was like, Oh, well maybe I could get my costs down a lot, but you know, these, she’s not going to want to work very hard. You know, especially if I’m planning on growing. So I mean, so she starts out with 10 managing 10 properties and then I have 20, and she’s still getting paid $30,000. That’s not fair. So,
Julian Sage: 00:20:06 And what, what would you say that your role in the businesses now, once you found that manager and you were able to train them up to be able to handle your portfolio where, where did your position kind of fit in?
Travers Xanthos: 00:20:18 Just kind of, you know, moving forward. So I was finding properties. I mean, it’s really gotten to the point where I find the properties and she, I tell her when we’re moving in and that’s it. I set up the bills that sort of thing. And she’s pretty, pretty good after that. She does everything herself, so it’s, it’s really become passive. Now things have changed recently with the pandemic, but up until that point, my time was spent on, you know, getting creative, thinking about things that I wanted to do and other businesses, how to grow this business, how to, you know, add onto this business. Things like that, which it’s really ideal.
Julian Sage: 00:20:58 Yeah. You put yourself into the position of being the visionary for your company. And I’m looking at, I’m looking at your place as a man. Like these are probably some of those beautiful places that, you know, I’ve seen like an individual host like this, you know, some of these properties they, they look like it would come out of like a Sonder lyric style place. Even like the way that the photos are. Did you, were you studying what they were doing and trying to like copy the same thing or?
Travers Xanthos: 00:21:22 Oh, for sure. I think I told you, and I’m not going to say what company this was, but you know, like I said, I’m a salesperson and I, I’m used to kind of like researching people on LinkedIn, that sort of thing. So basically I was at a point and the road where I didn’t really know what to do, I didn’t know, like I wasn’t a small, you know, I, I wasn’t three or five properties anymore. I was, I was growing. I needed to figure out how to get my process in place. You know, my management process I need to was for housing to pay people. I needed to figure out a better onboarding strategy. I mean, when I first started it was like I was running all over town, no Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, getting a mattress on one side of town, getting the bed frame on the other side of town, then having to go pick up.
Travers Xanthos: 00:22:08 It was just chaotic. I’d start paying rent on the first and the property wouldn’t be ready for guests for like two or three weeks later. And that’s what it’s like working really hard in the meantime. So that was the biggest reason I did this. But what I, what I started doing was reaching out to ex-employees from those big companies that you were just mentioning. I sent out probably 30 LinkedIn messages. And I had a couple people reply. One of them was an ex employee that was a property manager. So that was kind of what I talked about earlier. The other one was a designer who I basically asked if they did freelance work because I loved what they did. When I, when I had coffee with this person, she, she told me there their process for onboarding properties.
Travers Xanthos: 00:22:53 She also told me where they bought their furniture and and that’s really all I needed to know. So basically I would sit there with, you know, a couple of pictures from their properties on the Wayfair and Amazon, find the same furniture, find the same pillows, find everything the same. I would do the same accent walls, throw a wallpaper up. And my process went from taking three weeks to, you know, I moved into a property within 36 hours. I’d be welcoming and guests, which Mmm. You know, just like the increase of money that I was spending on getting brand new furniture, it was almost justified by getting three extra week of weeks of booking. So yeah, it’s just amazing what she’ll learn when you have time and, and and the want
Julian Sage: 00:23:42 That that is, that is very cool. Very cool. That’s very unique. And yeah,
Travers Xanthos: 00:23:46 I love, I love the style and you know, I can probably, I can probably even see maybe through some of the, the properties that you had, like when you really started upping up in your style, let’s look at one to the other. It’s like, wow, that’s something definitely changed. There’s a difference in style. There’s also different, you know, some of the places are older buildings, some of them are new multifamily complexes. So one thing that I wanted to hit on, you said you, you nearly fully automated it. So did you have your property manager going in and like designing the units for you once you already kind of had a layout or an idea? Basically the way that it was going for a while was that I would order all the furniture. I would, I would sit down and use the same process that I learned from this designer, where I would sit there and create a design map like on PowerPoint.
Travers Xanthos: 00:24:40 So I’d be like, okay, here’s the living room. I’ll take a picture from Amazon or wherever I got the couch, put that on there. So then I can coordinate all the colors and how does the color of the accident wall and all that sort of stuff. Then I would go through and order everything at once and have it all shipped to somewhere where I could store it. Mmm. So I would always give myself two weeks before moving date and then I would have everything shipped within those two weeks. And then the day that we move in, you know, I’d have the painters come, we’d follow up right afterward afterwards with some hired hands to help us put furniture together. And yeah. And so that’s kind of what the process is. She’s, she’s taken over. I told you a little bit before we started about how I have four Mmm.
Travers Xanthos: 00:25:27 Storage units full of furniture now, so I don’t really have to worry about that. So now she just knows what we need in the places and she just grabs it from there. And how’s a couple of helpers that help her and I’ll go help her sometimes too. What a good guy. Going back to, one of the things that you mentioned that I thought was really unique was that, you know, you, you’re playing within the rules in Nashville. And even when I look in Nashville, I’m like, you know, there’s a lot of regulations, there’s, you know, it’s very strict. But you said that you were able to find out how to play within those rules. Did you know that going in like what to look for or is it just not blatant to the, to the public? Like what type of properties you should be aiming for?
Travers Xanthos: 00:26:08 Yeah, I mean that’s just something I figured out over time. I know that there, you know, you can go into any city and look up the short term rental regulations and if you read them and you know, go through them with, you know, look at all the detail, you’re going to realize what the loopholes are. Once you figured that out, then you can find properties that match what, what what are allowed. So, you know, when I first started in Nashville, I was getting a lot of nos. You know, a lot, a lot of nos. But now when I call properties, first of all, I know the right types properties to call. I know who to call. I know the biggest thing is the pitch. So now I have a pitch that, you know, I’d say 85% of the phone calls I make now are our yeses.
Julian Sage: 00:26:54 That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And kind of kind of going from, from there you know, you’ve gotten a lot of experience in your name and some of the companies that you, you worked with or that you were, you were talking to there’s a lot of big players in the Nashville space. You know, one that you mentioned was like [inaudible] you said that there was like also stay Alfred Saundra all these really big companies. And you being, you know, an arbitrage or master, you know, arbitrage hosts using the master lease model. How has your business been impacted? I know a lot of people that are probably listening to this are probably like, you know, Oh, arbitrage is dead. It’s not, not gonna work. What are your thoughts, you know, being heavily invested in this space?
Travers Xanthos: 00:27:34 Yeah, I mean, since the very beginning, I’ve always had kind of been hesitant, you know, in my head, I’ve always said this rental arbitrage thing is going to last a couple of years, so I need to figure out something else to do in the meantime. But right now I don’t see any reasons why I would go away. I think that’s right now we’re playing into different zones, short term rental prices and longterm middle prices. I think eventually those are going to come closer and closer together. But you know, who knows how long that’s going to be, especially with what’s going on right now with the pandemic. So multiple ways. Look at this. I mean, rental arbitrage compared to say owning a short term rental property. I’m looking at things like that’s going on right now as a pandemic. I have 24 properties.
Travers Xanthos: 00:28:18 I only own two of them. If I’d own 24 of them, I would be in a lot of trouble right now. But what I’ve been able to do is, you know, I’ve been able to use this time to offload some of my lower performing properties and take on more new properties from, from other competitors that are high performing. If I had, if I owned all these properties, that would be not possible for me to do unless I was able to sell them within a matter of days, which isn’t going to happen. So you know, it’s a lot safer of a bet to do rental arbitrage. You know, landlords and Lisa’s are not as powerful is mortgages and things. So the one downside is you aren’t getting equity, but the upside is that for the same price of getting one one house that you buy, you can probably get about five properties with rental arbitrage.
Travers Xanthos: 00:29:10 And then once you take that over time, five properties, then you get five more. I mean, it’s exponentially so much better as a cashflow business. Mmm. In terms of competitors with Sonder and lyric and stay Alfred and, and all those guys. You know, that’s something that’s worried me. I, I’ve heard through the grapevine, I was always waiting for Sandra to get to Nashville. And that they finally did, I heard that they had two or 3000 properties in the pipeline and Nashville, which, you know, if two or 3001 bedroom apartments coming to Nashville, that’s gonna completely turn, turn this whole Airbnb model on its head. But you know, hopefully some of this shakeup is going to prevent that. But the good thing though is, is a lot of those properties are really high dollar stay. Alfred wasn’t a building called the five Oh five, those right on Broadway and downtown.
Travers Xanthos: 00:30:03 I mean, they’re paying like $3,000, like $2,500 a month for a one bedroom, whereas I’m half a mile away paying a thousand $1,200 for rent a month. So my price point is totally different. My customers, you know, my clients are different because, you know, not everyone can spend $800 on a one bedroom for a weekend night in the spring, you know, so if they’re around the $350 Mark, then come stay one of my places. So there’s that difference. You know, if you look at reviews, and this is one of the reasons I was talking earlier about not going with kind of an outsource call center or you know, virtual assistant as she looked a lot of their reviews, like no one, no one wants to stay with a huge company headquartered in San Francisco when they’re coming to Nashville. They want to stay with someone from Nashville that has local tips for them that knows the neighborhoods, their apartments feel like they’re living as a local and the neighborhoods. So I think that that does help as well. And you can see it in the reviews.
Julian Sage: 00:31:09 Yeah, I’m looking at your reviews and you know, it’s all five stars, a hundred, 150, you know, really, really, really good. And, and like you said, what I really liked, what you said was that you’re differentiating yourself from, from these companies that are maybe overpriced and not personal. You know, you’re, you’re able to offer a competitive price and probably even the deals that you’re picking up, like can have you have you run the numbers on how much maybe they’re bringing in for their properties versus what you’re able to bring in on yours.
Travers Xanthos: 00:31:38 Yeah. So when you’re looking at the numbers you’d want to think that their, their overhead is lower than someone like me. Because they’re doing it at such a large scale. But then also if you look at someone like Saundra, half of their employees are engineers. So that’s gotta be a pretty high cost to keep all those employees, which I know they, they let most of those go. But during normal times, Mmm. I think our margins are probably around the same, which you know, and it, and really it’s about,
Travers Xanthos: 00:32:10 If you look at what’s going on right now with the coven 19 and the whole pandemic thing if I had two properties I would be very comfortable handling this whole ordeal was 24 properties. It’s a little bit harder. I really had to keep myself positive and, and really work hard and create, get creative, creating new a ways to handle things and, and really adapt. But my business is small enough for me to, you know, it’s nimble enough for me to make these changes to, to get through this. You know, if you look at someone with 2000 or 3000 properties across the whole world, it’s a little bit harder for them to do a lot of the same things that I’ve been able to do and other hosts that, you know, our, my size and smaller I’ve been able to do. So all they’re really doing right now is as lowering their prices on Airbnb and on their drug booking platforms, which is going to get you part of the way there, but it’s not going to save your business. We’ll see. But I think a lot of them are going to have a lot of trouble.
Julian Sage: 00:33:11 I’ve heard, I’ve heard from, you know, one or two people now that this, the arbitrage model at scale is, is not really something that’s maybe sustainable. Do you, do you agree with that? Do you think that because of, you know, you being able to find these prop, these properties at a lower price point, you don’t have high overhead that, that the arbitrage master lease is only really good for maybe up to a certain amount.
Travers Xanthos: 00:33:36 So these guys have venture capitalists backing, I mean all that they’re know what they’re supposed to be doing is growing, growing, growing. Whereas my model is different. Like all I want to financial freedom and, you know, semi or passive income. So I’m good with 10 properties. If I want to stay at 10 properties for five years, there’s no boss that’s telling me that we need to, you know, help our investors, which that’s what they have. So my biggest fear through all through this whole business has been that I’ve continued to grow and dump my money back into growing, growing, growing, and something like this happens. And I never ended up making any money and I lose everything. So I’m very lucky to have a mentor named Brian Clayton who last summer you know, he told me, Travis, you need to slow down.
Travers Xanthos: 00:34:25 You need to start getting, building your cash reserves. Which I did. It was a very boring six to eight months because I love growing the business. That’s what I, what I enjoy doing. And I wasn’t able to do that. Mmm. But thankfully I did that and now I have the cash. Know I haven’t had, thankfully hadn’t used any of the cash, but I’m able, you know, if I had 10 more properties right now, it would have been a lot harder, especially if I just paid for them and onboarding them. Where you look at these big, big dog companies who have probably doubled in size last year and planned on tripling in size this year. Mmm. And now they just got a curve ball thrown at them and you know, these companies aren’t made to, these companies are made to grow. They’re made to figure out how to maintain. So I will be very surprised if, you know, I’d say three of the big five, make it through this.
Julian Sage: 00:35:22 Yeah, man, you just dropped so much golden information right there. And I think, you know, like, like, like what you said in your talking about that exponential growth, like this model, it’s so cash heavy, you know, you could, you could, you could easily scale this business if you have the right systems in place and you know, how to be able to, you know, okay, take on more units and that’s what you were doing and you, you were on the exponential growth. But you know, like what your mentor said, you have to be mindful, you know, that, you know, something could happen. So you saving your money, help prepare you for this type of event where companies like that, where we’ve seen them growing and we’re all just kind of like oogling and Googling. Like, man, I want, I want to get to that. Like, I want to have that type of growth.
Julian Sage: 00:36:01 But like you said, they, they got caught with their pants down because they weren’t reserving their cash and maybe there they weren’t as concerned about, you know, the, the, the margins that you are that you’ve been able to look at. So I think that there’s a lot of space for the smaller, you know, arbitrage hosts. And I think, I think you found that kind of that perfect sweet spot. And with that though, a lot of hosts are feeling the burden of you know, lack of bookings. Have you, have you found that, what are the things that you’re doing in your business to be able to generate occupancy? Cause you said that you’re at about an 85% occupancy right now, which is, you know, really, really, really strong.
Travers Xanthos: 00:36:37 Yeah. So I’ll just kind of tell you how this all started for me. You know, I’d say like maybe March 12th I kind of thought this, this whole pandemic was just like most people thought it wasn’t really going to impact us that much. You know, someone asked me, one of my students asked me if I thought it was going to hurt us and all of that. And I regrettably, my answer was that this is international. It won’t affect us domestically. About March 12th I had a conversation with an old coworker of mine and he kind of like warns me about, you know, he brought more to light that I, that I didn’t know before and I started to panic. I was like, Holy crap, this isn’t on the news yet. Everyone’s booking like crazy on Airbnb right now, but if this is real, what this guy is saying, foreign teaming like that, there’s no way that’s going to happen, but it’s just true.
Travers Xanthos: 00:37:29 Like I’m going to be in a lot of trouble. So when my first strategy was, is, you know, right when I thought of that, I kind of freaked out and I decided I was going to lower all of my, all of my rates for the next three months. So through June wait, yeah, I guess through June I lowered all my rates to basically my rock bottom rates cause you know, three months out, four months out, I have them at my highest, highest point. As it gets closer, I lower them. So I basically put them at the same rate that if it was maybe three weeks away. And it was crazy. I mean people were booking like, like nothing was going on. I probably had $80,000 worth of bookings in the next four days. Then on day four which was March 15th I guess I flew down to Costa Rica.
Travers Xanthos: 00:38:15 I was supposed to go down there to go paragliding for a couple of days and I was going down to one of Cyrus for no, just kind of lived there for a month and worked promoter or do whatever. And so, you know, this stuff’s kind of came to a head right when I landed in Costa Rica for my flights. Aye. You know, I was well cause I was like, okay, I’m going to be in good shape because I have all these bookings for the next couple of months. Like no matter what happens, like my cancellation policy, like I’ll be able to cover my rent and my expenses and my payroll. And right when I landed in Costa Rica, I looked at my phone and realized that that was when the Airbnb started giving full refunds to all their guests. My heart dropped.
Travers Xanthos: 00:38:54 And I had sat there for about an hour and was like, I got to go back. Like right now I gotta go back. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I have to do something. And, you know, I ended up staying for the rest of the trip in Costa Rica. But when I got back, I just, I really hit it hard and and just, you know, I came up with a strategy and a plane, a plan, and that plan has changed a lot since then. But luckily I just, you know, and I listened to one of your recent podcasts and I liked how you’re talking. I mean, you know, it was nice how you’re telling the truth and you’re saying that you kind of were down and depressed for a while. And I was the same way. Like I didn’t want to do anything.
Travers Xanthos: 00:39:31 Mmm. And then, you know, my mentor and just myself, I can just kind of, I had a wake myself up and was like, dude, you know, this is your time to step up and prove that you deserve to have as a business. And you know, you’ve worked so hard for it, it’s your chance to try to save it. So so I put together a plan and luckily the plan has worked. I went from 92% occupancy for the month of I think either April or March. Yeah. It must’ve been April. Yeah. So I was around 90, 92% occupancy. That dropped down to about 8% occupancy at one point. But through all the things that I’ve done, I’ve gotten it up to 85%. Mmm.
Julian Sage: 00:40:12 Which I’m proud of. Awesome. Yeah. I want to talk about some of the things that you’re doing, but what one of the really cool things you said you, you made a website called med relief, housing.com, and during this time you got featured in up to like 20 news channels or news articles and you were featured in the the, the the Nashville times. Was it Tassie Thomas
Travers Xanthos: 00:40:36 The the Tennessee in which is like the big news paper, I guess for the state of Tennessee, also on CNBC and a couple of other nationwide programs. But but yeah, so it was on March 23rd, I probably had the idea on 20 seconds. Mmm. Well, March 23rd, I was like, you know, just kind of thinking about what was going to happen and was like, there’s going to be a lot of, of medical people that are coming to Nashville and bigger cities, especially Nashville, Nashville, it’s like a lot of huge, Mmm. You know healthcare companies and hospitals and medical centers and stuff. So I was just kind of thinking that if this stuff gets really bad, there’s me a lot of traveling nurses coming to town. I also asked where it started thinking about doctors and nurses that wanted to isolate themselves from their families to keep them safe and things like that.
Travers Xanthos: 00:41:26 So no one was really doing this yet. So I called one of my friends, John says and was like, you know, running the sides, like this name by her med released housing.com and I was like, med release, is that like a term? Like it sounds good, but is that like an actual term? So I got hurt her, you know, go ahead on the URL and the name of it and just made a website quickly on Squarespace. It’s probably an hour or two and you know, sees a bunch of stock photos my first time creating a website. And once I got that up and running, I kind of framed it as, you know, it’s just kind of discounted, fully furnished, furnished accommodation. Mmm. For medical providers and first responders and you know, that it was over a hundred hosts. Airbnb hosts have come together to do our part in fighting this pandemic.
Travers Xanthos: 00:42:19 The, the healthcare providers are on the front lines. They’re the real heroes of this country. And and we don’t have the same skills that they do, but what we do has, is fully furnished accommodations at lower prices, basically just break even prices just enough to keep the lights on. So that’s kind of what the theme was, was with it. And and yeah, so I reached out to a bunch of reporters and you know, I’ve tried to 15 to 20 news reports throughout Tennessee and the rest of the country, which is pretty cool.
Julian Sage: 00:42:52 And how many bookings did you start getting coming through your site?
Travers Xanthos: 00:42:55 Well, I got an overwhelming amount of hosts reaching out, but I mean I had some nurses reaching out. It really wasn’t as great as as you’d think, but it’s, it’s been kind of cool. I’ve been able to help out some nurses, probably 20 or 30 nurses. And also I, if, if, if I didn’t have a property for, for these people, I was connecting them with other hosts. So I was able to help out some other hosts that were in desperate situations too. So, Mmm. It was kind of cool to be able to give back and do something for everyone as well.
Julian Sage: 00:43:29 So you were the Airbnb frontline before they were even a thing.
Travers Xanthos: 00:43:33 So that was the thing is I made this website, I already had like a couple of interviews set up and and then like my property manager sends me a screenshot of Airbnb’s thing and I was like, Oh my God. Like I can’t believe they are doing the exact same thing as me. But you know, I just decided to phrase it as more of like local Airbnb hosts instead of, you know, just Airbnb as a company. And I think that local news stations are looking for a feel good story right now. And they would rather focus on something local. So
Julian Sage: 00:44:04 That is so cool. Trevor’s that, that, that is, that is really awesome. How did you, because a lot of hosts, and that’s one of the things that we, I’ve been getting a lot more on the show and we have more upcoming interviews is with corporate housing companies and how they’re able to find these types of corporate clients. How did you know who to reach out to or what to say to them to be able to pitch your idea? So like for all the hosts that do maybe want to create something locally, maybe there isn’t nothing local for like for schools or whoever it is oil workers, construction, whatever. How can they reach out and be able to pitch their properties to the right people?
Travers Xanthos: 00:44:41 So before I tell you how to do this, I have some credit. So Brian, my mentor his business partner, gene they have a company called my green pal. If you’re Uber, it’s like Uber for long service. So that’s their little commercial right there because they’re the guys who’ve been helping me with all of this jeans, sole jobs for this company, the startup, that’s a pretty big company now. But his whole job is PR. So if they expand to a new city, all he goes out there and tries to get as many interviews and spread the word as he like as possible so that the word spreads and a lot of people sign up, you know, whether it’s like, well, I’m maintenance people that go on the app or the end users. So I knew that’s what he did. And so I reached out to him and he told me how to do it.
Travers Xanthos: 00:45:26 So basically he gave me a list of like probably a hundred reporters in Nashville and other cities. Basically how you put that list together is you let’s say it’s like Fox seven news or something. Just go on Google search Fox seven news reporters and it’ll take you to their page. You can click on each reporter, they’ll have their name and their email address and their Twitter account or whatever, just, you know, start an Excel spreadsheet with their first name, their email address. And then you can do a mail merge. No, you write one letter, the plugs in their name plugs. And maybe their their station and send that first email and then follow up a couple of days later and then follow up a couple of days later and you know, see how many you get
Julian Sage: 00:46:12 And, and how many, how many did you get from, from your list, how big was your list and how many responses did you get from that, that resulted in these articles?
Travers Xanthos: 00:46:20 Well, the first email that I sent out, and so this is what Brian and Jean were telling me, it was like, Trevor’s isn’t the easiest publicity you’re ever going to get. Like, because it’s relevant. It’s like feel good story. Like I was saying, so I think I sent the first email out to maybe like 60 people and like within five minutes I got three responses, which is crazy. They were like, yeah, that never happens. So. Mmm. Yeah. I’ll definitely be using the same thing in the future for whatever other idea I come up with.
Julian Sage: 00:46:46 Yeah, that, that’s, that’s so brilliant. I love, I love that. And you’re, you’re taking, you’re taking the, that sales knowledge, that skill, and then applying it to the short term rental space with the, with the PR and, and you gotta just the right time. And you know, I don’t know how they would’ve, they probably still would’ve supported you regardless, but like with the Airbnb timing and everything like that.
Travers Xanthos: 00:47:04 Well, yeah, I mean that’s what I was worried about. But then when I, when I changed it, I changed the email to local Airbnb hosts and you know, I think that’s what did it. Awesome. I think if you were to send that out right now, you might not have as much luck, but you might so give it a shot
Julian Sage: 00:47:20 Worth, worth a try. Awesome. That, that is really golden nugget right there. And what, what were some of the other things that you were doing that, that wasn’t the only plan or idea that you had during this time?
Travers Xanthos: 00:47:29 Yeah, I mean, I’ve had the most luck. I mean, I tried to use Zillow. I didn’t really have much luck with that and now they’re charging for it. And I don’t want to pay $240 a week when I’m trying to figure how to pay my rent. Yeah. A lot of stuff. I mean, I’m like, I don’t know. I thought I literally thought I was going to go bankrupt. Like I was like, look, I’m going to lose my business and go bankrupt trying to keep it alive or should I just like lose my business and take my money now? Those are the two options that I thought that I had. Luckily I was able to come up with something in between and utilize these things. I’m going to tell you right now, but also work my landlords Mmm. To get flexible. I’ve subleased a couple of my properties too.
Travers Xanthos: 00:48:12 You know, other people that want to get them to, to rental arbitrage. Yeah. And yeah, just all this stuff coming together. I also got the PPP loan because I have a w two employee, which that’s going to help me keep her getting paid and stuff. But yeah. So the things I’ve had the most luck with were probably the number one thing was probably Facebook marketplace. Yeah. I just put my, you know, grab my photos from Airbnb. I mean I have like 20 something listings on Facebook marketplace. It’s been a full time job. Mmm. And I’m not used to doing this kind of work, so it hasn’t been too much fun, but it’s definitely been worth it. So I’m just creating listings on Facebook marketplace saying that they’re available for once a month or a short term or long term.
Travers Xanthos: 00:48:59 They can be furnished or unfurnished. Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve had good luck with that. I’ve probably has gotten about a, I’d say 15 properties or more on either month to month, week to week or you know, I haven’t been some 12 months leases. No. Just to buy myself some time and no, I won’t be making money from them. Yeah. I have them all for basically breakeven prices. So say my rent the places 1200, I’ll listed on there for 1195 and then, you know, just pay, make them pay like $130 except fee for utilities and internet. So yeah, it’s a grind, but you know, it can, it can really help you. So
Julian Sage: 00:49:41 That’s a, that’s a really unique any tip. I don’t think I’ve heard anybody else share that. So I think a lot of hosts that are listening to this episode definitely, definitely do that. I think I’m going to go into the Facebook marketplace and put my places too. Are there, are there any other things that you were doing to be able to try to keep your business afloat?
Travers Xanthos: 00:49:58 Yeah. Let’s see. So I mean obviously what, what most people are doing, it’s still trying to get Airbnb booking. So what I’m doing is in each building I’m leaving one or two properties open on Airbnb so that I can, so I don’t have to go and cancel on these guests. So all the people that I’ve gotten, months, month tenants. Then basically what I’m doing is if anyone keeps the reservation and the next upcoming months I have a place to put them into. And then with those properties, you know, I’ve done a lot of kind of creative things. You know, one of the big problems is as the existing bookings that you’re pretty sure are going to cancel, but if you cancel them then you don’t get your 12 and a half percent from Airbnb. So one of the things that I did is I have like four or five, one bit basically identical apartments in this one complex.
Travers Xanthos: 00:50:46 I created one brand new listing with kind of the standard photos that are pretty much the same in all of them. I opened up the calendar for three months, well, the flexible cancellation policy and a two week minimum. So now it’s a wide open calendar and I’m getting like three, four weeks bookings for, for this property. And then I just take that clear out the calendar on another one and moves them over to that. And then the calendar is wide open on that, that new listing again. So it’s kind of like you’re able to take the chance with potentially getting these people to come in or at least getting the 12 and a half percent from Airbnb, Mmm. While opening up a wide open calendar for, for you to get some bookings in longterm bookings. And the strategy really only applies if you have multiple units in the same building that are pretty similar.
Travers Xanthos: 00:51:38 I mean, you know, that’s ideal. It depends on what you want to do. If you have like, you know, a couple of the same size places you can do that. I mean we’ve been shifting people around a lot and just haven’t seemed to have a problem with it. Mmm. You know, as long as you phrase it the right way and you’re thankful and communicate and communicate well with them you’ll be good. So that’s one way. So, another thing that we’ve been doing is is making sure, I think every Sunday or so we call all of our current guests cause we have, you know, the whole, just the guests that are staying are different than normal. Right. They’re not bachelorette parties. There are people that are just kind of like stuck in Nashville or they’re nurses or construction workers or whatever, but we call all of them and ask them if they want to extend and like literally like 80% of the time they do.
Travers Xanthos: 00:52:30 Mmm. So that’s really helped us out a lot. Another thing that I could suggest is calling your local trades unions. I have five properties that have construction workers that pay pay me week to week. And that was great. So I mean, construction in Tennessee is still going on. It’s not slowing down. And a lot of times these construction workers have stipends where, you know, they get a hundred dollars a day to spend on accommodation. Mmm. And if they’re able to find something that’s $50 and then they can share it with someone else and we’re going to take that. So reach out to them. I have one guy that I got in originally from Facebook marketplace and I told him that for every apartment he helps me gets get booked, I’ll knock $30 off per week from his, from his rent cost. So he’s got me four other apartments filled these, these sales
Julian Sage: 00:53:26 Techniques, probably something that you’ve like probably would have learned at your previous job and then applying it to the short term rental space. Did you think that you were gonna really gonna make it? Did you, can you honestly say that you thought that you were gonna make it out of this and now to where you are right now?
Travers Xanthos: 00:53:38 I mean, I’m usually a really positive person. I’m big on mindset and all that sort of stuff, but no, I didn’t. I was in Costa Rica with my paragliding buddies and I was like, God is like, the life I’ve been living in is over. Like, I’m going to have to go, you know, close on my business and get a job again and or figure something out because I didn’t think I was gonna make it. I thought that my, like I said before, I thought my choices work so either closed down my business and you know, impact my credit score by getting out of all of these leases and, and keeping the money that I have or taking the money and lasting an extra three months and hoping that it’s good by then. So yeah, I didn’t think I was going to make it, but after a few days, you know, slapping myself and the shape, I realized like, look, you can’t have this attitude.
Travers Xanthos: 00:54:29 And no, it’s all about, I’m trying to get creative and adapt. You know, I, I look at this whole thing as a big, it’s a big shakeup not just in the short term rental industry and just for entrepreneurs and small business owners, you know, all sorts of industries. It’s a shakeup where some people are gonna rise to the top and some people are going to go to the bottom. And it’s really just about having the mindset and wanting to pursue and work hard and try new things. The people that are stuck in the old ways are, are not going to make it through this. So,
Julian Sage: 00:55:00 And do you, do you think that with, with what you’ve set up right now, it’s going to be able to last indefinitely into the future? And do you think that you’ll be maintaining some of the things that you did now, such as basically making like a little corporate housing company but moving into the future with your arbitrage units?
Travers Xanthos: 00:55:16 You know, I don’t know how long it’s going to last. I think a couple more, you know, a couple of years, five, 10 years, who knows. But the thing that I’ve learned now is that, you know, as an entrepreneur we’re able to adapt and change and go with the flow. Like when things change, we change and you know, and it’s still gonna work out. So that’s, that’s one great thing I’ve learned through all this. You know, yeah. I hope like I’m still caught. I’m trying to decide what I want to do, do I want to get, you know, sometimes I’m like, man, it’d be nice if I just had all my places with nine months subleases and I don’t make any money for the next nine months, but when they all move out at springtime and I notice that the Margaret send be back, so at least in my normal and back to money again or do I want to take the chance and you know, keep having to grind and know, respond to all of these fricking Facebook marketplace messages that are driving me crazy. But yeah, so I’m just still taking it day by day really.
Julian Sage: 00:56:13 That was one of the things that you said that was pretty unique. You actually, you’re actually subleasing your units, the people that want to get into the arbitrage space themselves.
Travers Xanthos: 00:56:20 Yeah, I did that once. So
Julian Sage: 00:56:23 It’s just a one time thing. So it’s not, not a lot of properties.
Travers Xanthos: 00:56:26 That was a one time thing. How was that experience? Yeah, fine. I don’t want to talk about that.
Julian Sage: 00:56:34 Alright, well we’ll leave it. But, but, but for the hosts that are listening, you, you don’t recommend that they allow units because that, that was an option. Like even if my partner John, like some of some people were reaching out to him and saying like, Hey, you know, would you, would you allow me to be able to reuse your place? You don’t, you don’t recommend that hosts start doing that?
Travers Xanthos: 00:56:56 No, I think, I think that that’s totally a possibility. I mean, I have one person that’s, that’s gotten mine for four months. You know, he started subleasing, leasing these places before everything kind of hit the fan. So that’s a little bit different. I have another, you know, good friend of mine that’s an entrepreneur as well. That’s trying to make it a little bit of a change in his business model. And you know, he’s wanting to create a software for the industry, but he wants to get more experience on what it’s like to actually manage properties. So we were talking about doing a deal where, Mmm, I would basically sublease four units to him for two years. They would come fully furnished, completely turnkey. All the hard work would be done by me and I would basically just hand over the guy, the playbook and how to do it. Then he could get that experience. She could make some profit next year and the following year and and then two years they would come back to me. So if you have someone you trust, I mean, you just gotta be careful about it. It needs to stay in your, you know, and your name, but you have to trust him and not, it’s not so just, you know, stop paying rent or things like that. So it’s definitely case by case basis,
Julian Sage: 00:58:12 Case by case. And one, one more thing that I wanted to hit on was that you said you were actually picking up some, some apartments or some units from some of these bigger players that were letting them go. Can you, can you kinda explain how that came about? How you even found out about that and your mindset and strategy with, with that play.
Travers Xanthos: 00:58:32 Yeah. So I mean, like I said before, I went from a place where I thought that I was done for and I was gonna have to find another business or a job. Mmm. To been able to really just take advantage of this as an opportunity. So yeah, what I’ve been able to do during this time is I’ve been able to offload my least profitable properties, so my five least profitable properties I’m out of the lease. Both of those worked out very smoothly. All my landlord’s been very great. Honestly. these ones worked out very slowly. One of them, I found it longterm tenant to take my place. The other one, I had three units with this guy and he’s a really nice guy. Yeah, he’s a doctor and his wife was looking for, it’s something to do. And so when I told him that I was thinking about leaving, leaving the, you know, we made a deal where basically no more money was going to exchange hands.
Travers Xanthos: 00:59:27 I haven’t paid March or April rent to him yet. And I, he had my deposit for next month and basically he was going to buy all the furniture off of me. I’m going to give him my, my training and teach him, teach his wife how to manage the properties, so she’s going to start hearing and being them herself and I’ll get them set up with the permits and all that stuff. So I was really a win win and I think, no, it was good for me because I was able to get out of properties and it’s gonna be good for them because you know, their mortgages lower than what I was paying in rent and and you know, they’re going to be making money off of them or more money than they were pretty soon.
Julian Sage: 01:00:04 That’s awesome. So you basically made like a little turnkey property for them. They, they get everything, the training, all that and you get to walk away, Scott Scott for you without, without it impacting you.
Travers Xanthos: 01:00:14 Yeah. I mean, I was so worried about you know, cause I was going to be asking my landlords for some sort of flexibility and when it coming up to April 1st and I sat there and wrote a really well-written, very thought out email you know, all sorts of stuff in there. And I send it out to all my landlords and, and all of them. But one, I think there’s probably 80 emails I send out. Seven of them responded with very understanding emails like, like this is so, cause I basically told them like, Hey, this is the, and this is the real, I started the, here’s the news articles, all this sort of stuff. And some people were like, this is so great. That’s so amazing. You’re able to do this. Some people were like, I completely understand. Like, let’s touch base in a couple of weeks about rent. And like, that’s basically how all of them went. So I was, I was pretty, I went from being really nervous. Like, wow, these people are great. So humanity is still overall.
Julian Sage: 01:01:10 And, and what, what was this about? Picking up, you said about around 20 apartments worth 20 apartments from another company that was going under. What, what was that whole situation about?
Travers Xanthos: 01:01:22 Yeah, so I guess I’ll just tell the story from that. And this goes back to why I love my property manager so much. I had a meeting at a bank. We, we had a couple of projects. We have four properties that we’re moving into in two weeks. So we were looking for furniture. I had a meeting with a lender, some building, some short term rental houses in Nashville, and I told my property manager, Hey, I’m going to be in this meeting from 12 till one, or something like that. And so I was in this meeting when I got out, she called me and while it was this one hour meeting, this is what she did. She found an ad on Craigslist that was selling furniture. She reached out to the person, found out it was one of our competitors that was being bought out slash going out of business. Some of the properties got bought out by a larger company. Then I’ll get back to you later. Mmm. And then the rest of them, they were just closing down shop because they couldn’t transfer the leases over to the bigger companies name. So those, about, what’s the timeframe? When was this? This was like maybe December of last year. Okay.
Julian Sage: 01:02:22 So not, not current. Not current.
Travers Xanthos: 01:02:24 So, so yeah. So she found this person on Facebook marketplace found out that they had 20 properties, that they had to get rid of all the furniture and by midnight that night and she already pre negotiated the deal for me, so, Oh. And she already got two you halls and rounded up about 12 helpers to come help move stuff before midnight. And so she tells me all this stuff and she’s like, I’m just waiting for the go ahead from you. And I was like, hell yeah, let’s do it. So, you know, the rest of the day we started just moving stuff until like two or three in the morning. But yeah, so like I was saying earlier, at this point I was probably spending about $4,500 to furnish and onboard a one bedroom apartment and I bought 20 apartments for the furniture for $10,000.
Julian Sage: 01:03:12 Can you, are you allowed to disclose like where and how that whole situation was like what type of properties were these? Was it just like any rent?
Travers Xanthos: 01:03:19 Yeah, there were, there were a bunch of apartments and a multifamily complexes. So, you know, not only did I take the property, did I take the furniture, you know, everything from the TVs to the sheets and towels to the coded door locks. But yeah, I’ll also made a really hard push to take over the property and unfortunately I didn’t get any of them, but I was pretty close.
Julian Sage: 01:03:40 That is so cool. So now, so you picked up those, those, those 20, so is that something that you’ll be looking forward looking for in the future? Like how do you even find like something that has golden opportunities? Is that,
Travers Xanthos: 01:03:51 Well, I don’t need any, any more furniture for awhile. So I’m not really looking for that. I might even be getting rid of that, but Mmm. Yeah. Cause I have like four storage units full of it. But I do have some other opportunities that I was telling you about before we started. No, it was kind of crazy how I thought I was going to go out of business and then all of a sudden I was able to offload my, my lowest performing properties. I’m going to be able to pick up more properties and complexes that I know are highly profitable. Some of the most profitable properties that I have, I’m probably going to be able to get, you know, four to 10 more units from. Because like I said before, a lot of the big companies are going out of business.
Travers Xanthos: 01:04:33 One of them for sure is going out of business. I’m not going to mention who it is, but Mmm. I have a close relationship with the, the property manager that runs the complex and basically we’re going to set up a deal where I’ve had a lot of success in that same building for breaking evening for 12 months Reynolds or month to month rentals. I already have like a ton of people on Facebook marketplaces on Facebook marketplace that are waiting for me to get back to them, but I don’t have anywhere to put them at this point. So what I’m, what I’m doing is I’m taking these people, they’re looking for a 12 month place. They wanted to maybe be fully furnished, maybe not. Mmm. I’m getting them to sign a sublease with me and then I turn around and see the apartment complex, sign a lease for that property because they recently went out of business with the other company. So then I put that person there for nine to 12 months and the next year I’d take that place back over once things are back to normal. So I’ve been able to actually grow and improve the quality of my properties. During the pandemic.
Julian Sage: 01:05:33 You, you are a wild entrepreneur Travers that is so freaking cool that, that you were able to, and so, so for the hosts that are listening and kind of thinking like, how can you make, you know, how can you turn lemons and turn them into lemonade, you know, look at what everybody else in the space is doing. You know, those people that, or those properties that you thought maybe I couldn’t get into. Because there’s other competitors, you know, there’s like Y hotels Domino’s Sondra’s all these places where they’re in these like awesome, awesome properties. And you might be able to actually have an opportunity where the numbers though, because you said that a lot of these properties that they are in they’re paying over market rent. Was this a property that they just got a really good deal and you were able to just move on that one?
Travers Xanthos: 01:06:18 Yeah. I mean, a lot of the complexes are multi-family places that they’re in. Don’t make them pay extra. So, I mean, a lot of the places in national and other cities, no, it’s an apartment complex that’ll have maybe like eight units with one company, four units with my company and like eight units with another company or something like that. So when it stays like that, Mmm. There’s not really, usually it’s pay regular rent. If it’s one of the Sonder for example, coming into like an apartment complex that’s being built and they want to take over like 50 units, the whole like bottom four floors or something, then they’re going to set up a deal with them. That’s a little bit different. You know, it’ll probably be five. It could be five or 10 years long with some sort of guaranteed payout to the owners of the building. Which is why they’re in a little bit more trouble as well. So but yeah, the, the smaller apartment complex is where they only have a handful of places. This company, these properties that I’m talking about, it was the bigger company that bought out the company that I got all that furniture from.
Julian Sage: 01:07:21 Got it, got it.
Travers Xanthos: 01:07:23 So they’ve only been in there for a few months.
Julian Sage: 01:07:25 And the, this, this corporate housing company more of the traditional corporate housing company, they would you say that they just, they weren’t able to pay for the, for the property and they were just letting them go? Or how do you, how do you even acquire,
Travers Xanthos: 01:07:37 Yeah, corporate housing. I mean, I would call it master lease company. I mean, it’s, you know, one of the big companies that does exactly what we do. Just on a larger scale. Like I was saying before, man, they, they’ve just completely over leveraged. They’ve just grow, grow, grow, and then this happened and they’re, they’re in trouble. So it’s either they cut their losses and just, you know, they’re in so deep that they’re not going to work through it. So they just said, we’re going bankrupt.
Julian Sage: 01:08:06 Awesome. Well, not awesome for them, but that’s a, you know, I think, I think it’s really cool, you know, drivers to get you on here. I think it’s such a unique episode. I highly recommend it. You know, w we didn’t need to get to some of the traditional questions that I ask on the show just because your story has been so interesting. So definitely we gotta get you back on here in, in the future to be able to talk about, you know, some of the ways that you’re, you’re pivoting your business or that you’re growing and I’m sure you know, things are gonna change after this maybe where you end up or what you’re going to be doing. But I think what you’re, what you’re doing right now is, is just so cool. It really inspiring for the host nation community. And so I think, thank you so much for coming on here. What’s, what’s the best way for someone to be able to reach out to you if they have any other questions or they want to be able to find out more about you?
Travers Xanthos: 01:08:51 Yeah, they can go to my Instagram. It’s at Trevor’s Vantis reach out to me there or follow me on there.
Julian Sage: 01:08:58 I’ll make sure to include clue to link cause it might be a little bit difficult for them to be able to spell this out over the podcast. But yeah, I’ll, I’ll include all the, all the links down below. Your, your, your website stay. Como really cool. I love, love the love your, your, your site, your, your properties. And I think it’s really cool what you’re doing. Do you have anything else that you wanted to share? Any, any last words before we start off?
Travers Xanthos: 01:09:20 Yeah, I’d say for the other hosts out there, like just stay positive and you know, you’re going to get through this get creative and adapt and it’s a lot of fun. So, you know, as long as you wake up every morning and say, what can I do to move this forward, you’re going to have some forward progress and and you know, that’s what’s going to get you through this. So stay positive and keep working.
Julian Sage: 01:09:41 Well, I’m glad. Glad we get to see you on the other side. Drivers.
Travers Xanthos: 01:09:43 Okay, well thanks a lot for having me on here.
Julian Sage: 01:09:46 Yeah. And until next time, host nation. 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.
Travers Xanthos’ direct booking website
http://staycomo.com/
Download our FREE check in messages and guides for Airbnb Hosts
https://www.VacationRentalMachine.com
Ready to become a host?
https://ShortTermSage.com/airbnb
[Full Disclaimer: As an affiliate, I receive compensation through various links on this show at no cost to you. Please check out our affiliate disclaimer which goes into more detail.]
1. Life doesn’t have to be part of the corporate rat race. As soon as you get into it, it’s hard to realize that you’re stuck.
2. You need to create the right structure for your business so you can step out of it.
3. Once you’ve gotten some experience and knowledge on how to manage a property, then you can decide on how to delegate your tasks.
4. Having someone that’s local and knows the properties like the back of their hands will help you get good reviews.
5. When you have someone to do the daily tasks for you, your time will be spent on being creative and thinking about things you want to do in your business.
6. Once you figure out the loopholes regulations in your area, you can find properties that are allowed.
7. Rental arbitrage is a lot less risky than owning. Landlords and leases are not as powerful as mortgages and banks.
8. List your properties on the Facebook marketplace to get medium and long term guests.
9. Call and ask your guests if they want to extend their stay.
10. Call your local trade unions and offer your properties to help get bookings.
11. The people that are stuck in the old ways of managing are not going to make it through this.
12. Entrepreneurs are able to adapt, change, and go with the flow.
13. As long as you wake up every morning and ask yourself “what I do to move my business forward?” you’re going to make progress and you’re going to get through this.
