Julian Sage:                         00:00                     In this video, we’re talking about is it a good time to get into short term renting? So stay tuned.

Julian Sage:                         00:06                     Vacation rental machine helps hosts just like you learn how to start, grow and scale your short term rental business. The show’s all about creating systems that help you automate your business, giving you more time and money freedom. If you’re ready to start living the vacation rental life, then subscribed to this podcast today, come and join us on our Facebook group, the host nation, or we’ll be talking about starting automating and scaling a short term rental business. Now onto the show.

Julian Sage:                         00:33                     Hey, welcome back host nation to another episode of vacation rental machine. I’m Julian Sage with Jon Bell and we are talking about is it a good time during this pandemic to get into short term renting? So we all know that right now there’s a lot of fear and like our good friend, Mr. Warren buffet says, is that you get greedy when others are fearful. So is this a good time for us to start getting into short term renting when everybody else is fearful they’re dropping units, they’re saying rental arbitrage is dead co-hosting, you can’t make any money. Is now the perfect time to start a short term rental business? What are your thoughts, Jon?

Jon Bell:                               01:09                     Absolutely! I mean this is so exciting. This whole thing has reiterated a new end point for everybody to jump in. Literally, if you didn’t see the signs before, they are playing in front of you right now.

Jon Bell:                               01:30                     When people are fearful, they are going to scurry and run away from anything that they wanted to do. Why? Because everybody has heard “I can do Airbnb and make a lot of money,” and that’s why they want it to jump. Yeah. Now they say there’s no money there, so they don’t even want to jump in. That is already 80% of your competition. 80% of your competition just said, “I don’t even want to compete.” So now it’s really the 20% that is really still considering jumping in. This is still right, right. We all know there’s a curve that anything goes through, and maybe you don’t want to start at the bottom, but you want to kind of catch it before it reaches its top. Just like any stock, right? What’s going on with the stock market right now? Everything has gone down, right? So everything’s gone down, but what is it going to do eventually, it’s going to start taking back up, and if you don’t know how to make those plays, when to make money going down, okay, well everybody knows how to make money going up. It’s just you gotta get the right implant. Don’t buy Amazon when it’s above $1,200 you want to buy it when it’s $800 and then it’s going to go right back up to $1,200 that’s the type of opportunity that we’re talking about right now within short term rentals and listing things on Airbnb, booking.com VRBO, all of that stuff.

Jon Bell:                               02:56                     Right now is the time to really jump in.

Julian Sage:                         02:59                     I think Brian Chesky brought up a really good point when he did his last webinar saying that Airbnb came out during 2008, during the recession because people were trying to save money. People at that point, they weren’t thinking, how can I make a bunch of money, listing to my place and putting it on Airbnb, people were just thinking, how can I use this tool to be able to make more money?

Julian Sage:                         03:20                     And right now like, you know, for myself, you know, I listed the basement unit and that was able to cover my mortgage. Right now, during this time it’s not really covering that much. If I do get someone in there for a longterm, it’s able to bring in some really good money. I think being conservative, being smart about how you’re moving forward, how we’re picking up units is really gonna be key and where those specific locations are . Like you said, Jon, so many people are really fearful right now. They’re saying there’s no money there. There’s nothing there. I mean, people are still traveling though. People are still gonna need places to go in the mind of a civilian or in the mind of a regular traveler. They don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes.

Julian Sage:                         04:02                     They don’t know that all these hosts are probably super angry and are saying “I quit. This isn’t worth it. Rental arbitrage is dead. Airbnb is dead. I’m not listing anymore. I’m going to go get my regular W2 job or whatever it is.t They don’t see that and we don’t see what’s on the, on the Traveler’s side because we’re so focused on what’s behind the scenes. But for them, they’re still gonna need places to stay. They’re still gonna want to go to all these locations and that just makes our job a little bit easier.

Jon Bell:                               04:29                     Yeah. I mean, let’s think about what happens once this whole thing blows over. If you already had your units ready to go and you already started having maybe five reviews on your listing, you have instant credibility for when people want to start to travel again.

Jon Bell:                               04:49                     If you don’t have anything after this whole thing, then you really have to get it. You have to go out and get it. You gotta set it up, you got to get it listed, you got to get some people in to give you some clout and once you do all that, then you’re ready. But everybody else has really capitalized on a bunch of different things. Let’s talk about financing. Right now, it’s really low, right? I mean interest rates are really low. Right now, landlord might be going to be in a pickle so they might even give you a great deal to jump in so you have the best of both worlds, money and you have like specials that might mean two months free, three months free, just as the car dealers are doing right now. We’ve all seen the commercials, Hey no payments for 90 days.

Jon Bell:                               05:38                     That might extend to 120 days. That stuff can get mimicked in our industry just because they want people to come in that can come and pay. And you’re talking about multiple places. Even places that might have denied you entry before, might say, now you know what, if you can come in and take a couple, I’d gladly give them to you. So yes, this is a very good time to take advantage of everyone’s fears, fears of the people wanting to get into Airbnb and short term rentals and fears of the landlords that people are just not going to be renting right now. So you can capitalize on all of it.

Julian Sage:                         06:19                     Now, one of the big things is that, you know, it takes a lot of effort to get the ball rolling; to get your listing, to find the landlord, to get it furnished, to get the lease signed, to get all of your back-end systems in place, to get those, those initial reviews, there’s a good amount of work. This isn’t a do nothing, make money business. We’ve been covering this stuff for over a year now, just talking about all the different things that you can do within this business on the podcast. But it’s getting that ball rolling and once the ball starts rolling, Jon can attest to it, you know, our businesses can attest to it that when things start moving, they start moving really quick because it just works that people need places to stay and if you know how to provide really well serviced accommodations, then people are going to want to stay with you and they’re going to pay out of their pocket for that. That’s where really the do nothing, make money comes in is that once you have it going, it really just starts feeding itself.

Jon Bell:                               07:20                     Exactly. Let’s play this scenario. Maybe I go out and I get my first property and it looks like I survived all the way through the pandemic. Right? You’ll have people that have already had units looking for somebody experienced to come out and support them or list their property or manage it for them. So now, you have another avenue that you can speak to. “Hey, I went through this, I made this happen, I did these things to make sure that I could stay afloat. And now that it’s all over, I still have those practices in my pocket. So if it ever happens again, I know how to get it filled.” We all can take advantage of this time and we should. I know I will.

Julian Sage:                         08:06                     Yeah, it’s just kind of one of those war stories that you get to put in your back pocket.

Julian Sage:                         08:11                     Now everybody that’s been through the 2008 or 2001they always talk about back back in my day, back in 2008 when I was there during the last recession. And people look at that as a credibility. If you were able to withstand that, if you were able to even just scraped by and not go under and you didn’t, you didn’t fold your card, fold your hand. People look at that as like okay you toughed it out. I think anybody that’s in the space right now that is going to be able to just kind of tough it out, we’re not saying to put your family at risk. We’re not saying to over leverage yourself. There are options out there where you can take a large line of credit, pick up a bunch of units and overextend yourself but we’re not saying that. We think that you should do everything within your comfort, but if you are trying to do this for the long and you are trying to make this a business as we are on the showI think that this is really just kind of a blessing in the end.

Jon Bell:                               09:12                     Yeah. I think you said it right. I mean, we gotta be conservative during this time. Even lions sneak up on their prey to get really close, but before they explode and start to jump after them. So we just need to poise, get ourselves in the right position so once this is over, maybe we are ready to instantly pick up multiple units and then we’re still ahead of our competition because we started with this one, now we got the funding where we’re ready to do more and we can keep it going that way.

Julian Sage:                         09:41                     You know? And I think during times like this, some of the most creative ways of really true entrepreneurship really starts to shine during this time. Even you and I, Jon, we’re coming up and thinking of different ways that we can pivot the business moving forward.

Julian Sage:                         09:57                     Something that has longevity, something that will stand the test of time. And I think a lot of people are also changing their mindset, changing their thinking. You know, we’ve seen a lot of people, a lot of hosts and you know, I’ve gotten some messages about it talking about, “Hey Julian, you know, you look like you’re taking a beating. It looks like you’re taking maybe a negative approach cause there really is two fields to this. You can either look at everything in a very positive light and be optimistic and say, there’s a lot of potential and I think that we can really, you know, turn these lemons into lemonade or what seems like the larger majority of hosts, they definitely have a louder voice during this.

Julian Sage:                         10:39                     And those are the people that are very negative, pessimistic and really not hopeful for during that whole time that we were very profitable, very good. Right now it seems like everybody has almost like cynical view on short term renting as a whole almost.

Jon Bell:                               10:57                     Yeah, you mentioned something, just a comment ago, right? So remember when the housing market crashed and then it came back and now it’s way higher now, and everybody said, well, if I were to know, I would have jumped in then that way I could have capitalize on now. Well, again, I’m telling you that this is one of those opportunities right now that you need to jump in so you can capitalize on the later, later. But we all thought about all of these things in hindsight. Oh, my mentor has that. He bought a house for $10,000. It was one of the worst properties that he ever purchased, never even visited him himself.

Jon Bell:                               11:40                     Now the property’s worth 1.4 million is the only house that’s left after they revitalize the entire area. So that’s a great investment, right? He got in, he is seeing something that nobody else sees. I’m telling you guys, I see it. You gotta see it. If you don’t jump in, you can catch us a little bit later. But it’s very, very, very important. You acknowledge the signs that Hey, fear makes money. Anytime investors or people start talking about, Hey, there’s fear in the market, trust me, they’re not pulling their money out. They’re putting more money in. Right now I’m dumping money into the stock market just because, Hey, it’s all down. I’m dumping it in places where I would probably never really want to put it, but because I know it’s going to go right back up. You want to capitalize on that too and this is the right time.

Julian Sage:                         12:36                     Right, and we’re not saying that out of this, it’s going to be pedal to the metal and bookings are just going to start flowing in, you know, everything’s going to be really good. Jon’s putting money into the stock market. It might dip down even further. It might drop even more. That’s a very real thing. But as we’ve seen history show, stock market’s always going up. As we’ve seen history show, travel is going up, millennials are more inclined to want to book Airbnb. You know, everybody’s saying they’re doing these publicity stunts. Well, they are really good at publicity. They’re good at marketing and they’re good at getting in front of people and really converting people into, Airbnbers, Airbnb stays.

Julian Sage:                         13:23                     We’re all going up, just depends on which point in this trend are you going to be entering.

Jon Bell:                               13:30                     I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but this is definitely something you should acknowledge. You shouldn’t jump in and try to get 20 units to start out with. We’re not saying that, but you should at least put the gas in the car, open the door, turn the ignition on, and at least start down the road. So as you start down the road, you are in front of everybody else who’s staying at home. That’s what we’re saying. So don’t go crazy, but be ready. Set yourself up for success. And that’s what this is about.

Julian Sage:                         14:04                     And during this time, we do have a program that is available, the VRM program that you can put that gas in the car and get yourself primed and ready for when this really kicks off.

Julian Sage:                         14:16                     We plan on growing and scaling our business. You know, even right now during this time and having that training or you can go back and listen to the nearly one year of podcast episodes that Jon and I have been putting together on the VRM podcast. So if you do want to shortcut your way get everything, all the contracts and tools that we do have, you can definitely use the VRM formula program or use the VRM podcast. But we are excited. We are hopeful. This is an exciting time in an exciting space that we think is just going to keep on going up. So with that being said, question of the day, where do you see short term renting? Are you in? Are you out? Do you think that it is the end of short term renting? Is right now the best time? Leave your comments or thoughts in the comment section down below

Julian Sage:                         15:08                     And until next time, host nation. Keep on hosting. If you’d like Jon and I to answer your guys’ questions and be sure to go to the host nation Facebook group and use #askvrm. Hope you hosts found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review as that would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon, the community, and I then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation

Julian Sage:                         15:31                     Talk to you host in the next episode. Keep on hosting.