In this episode, I have the special honor of speaking with Shiv Gettu. Shiv recently graduated from the University of California and fell into real estate and short term rentals by chance. He and his business partner, Kendrick, had their first unit in January 2019, and in the span of 14 months, they’ve scaled up to 32 properties in which 25 are rental arbitrage and 7 are co-host units.
Shiv shares with us how they started their short term rental management company, what they did to raise money to scale their business and the opportunity that they found with multifamily and short term rentals syndication. He also shares the importance of setting up systems and utilizing technology to run your business efficiently.
Video Transcript
00:00:00
The way we transitioned into actually raising money was very unique, right? Because typically what people do is they, you know, eventually leave their job. They go approach a lot of BC firms or angel investors and pitch to hundreds of people. The strategy we had was why don’t we first instead of creating a hundred shallow relationships and hoping one of those quite why don’t we try to choose one relationship, go very deep with that relationship. And once we build out a proof of concept, once they see us grow and understand our, our growth and, and who we are as people approach that person for money,
00:00:34
This is Epson 40, a short term rental success stories, podcast, a investor that’s looking to have your home professionally managed, cohost it.com for more information, 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 their 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 host. We all strive for five star reviews. So please going over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy has really helped 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? Host nation? I am super excited to be back again with you this week wanted to highlight a special review that came in from JP gray and they said five stars.
00:01:22
Fantastic, very helpful info. I love hearing all the different ways people are becoming successful through short-term rentals. Thank you so much, JP for the review. I really appreciate when you guys leave reviews for us, if you’d like to leave a review for the podcast and go to shorttermsage.com slash T R review, and you can leave us something which we will feature on the next episode, one of the goals for this year is to become the number one rated podcast. So we are now the number one and two podcasts on iTunes for Airbnb, but it’d be really nice to be the most highly reviewed. So if we can make that happen, host family, that would be awesome. A couple of really exciting things. I know you all have been asking for when the Airbnb empire builders group is gonna open again, and it will be opening back up in March.
00:02:07
We’ve got a lot of applications from so many of you, and I’m really excited to really focus on scaling. Scaling is something that is not talked about a lot in the short term rental space. A lot of it is just on operations and operations are important, but if you are trying to build your BME empires, we wanna be the platform. Are you guys to be able to grow your businesses? If you’d like more information on the BMB empire builders, if you’d like to fill out an application, then go to Short Term Sage dot com and on the homepage, you can find where we are accepting applications. Another really exciting piece of news is that we are gonna be opening up the VRM Formula. So if you are interested in starting automating and scaling your own Vacation Rental machine, Airbnb business, we are gonna be opening up the program in March.
00:02:51
This is gonna be for our early adopters, really. So if you are interested in becoming an early adopter for it, then you can get in for the early Birtch price, go to Short Term Sage dot com slash early Birtch. And you can join the wait list for when that does go live. When we do release that it will be for initially the people that are interested in getting early access to that. When we do decide to open it up to the public, though, we will be increasing the price. It’s something that John and I have been working on for we’re a long, long time now, and I’m really excited that everything’s kind of coming together. We have a lot of lofty goals, but becoming just a really, really just the foundation for your business, to be able to give you all the tools that you need to be able to succeed in this business.
00:03:33
After talking with over 50 hosts. Now working with John one on one for all these months, starting our own management company and just really diving in and figuring out how can we take this business, break it down into its simplest forms, and then be able to repackage it in a way so that other people can just take it and then start and grow and scale. That’s something that I’ve been really passionate about. And I love just being able to take all this information and find the best way for you creating all these really cool tools that we, of things like our Rental arbitrage and cohosting calculator updating all of our forms and check-in processes and ways that you can scale a cohosting and Rental arbitrage business. There’s just so much that we are gonna be including that. I don’t wanna spoil the surprise, but there is just so much.
00:04:15
And last note, if you are interested in investing with us, co-host that is taking on from March, we do have quite a few properties that we are gonna be picking up. So if you’d like to join and you are interested in investing in our turnkey Rental arbitrage program, then go to cohost it.com. The returns that we’re able to bring in for our investors is just wild. So if you are interested in investing into something passively and getting into the Rental arbitrage space, without having to do of the management yourself, then go to co-hosted dot com, fill out out an application. And we would love to be able to speak with you more about that. So lots of exciting stuff happening in the space. And one of the things that is really exciting is all of the new people that are coming in and coming up with these really creative ideas of taking something that, you know, the traditional real estate model, which was very slow, hasn’t changed for very many years.
00:05:02
And now we have people like our special guest Shiv get to Shiv recently graduated from the university of California and fell into real estate in short rentals, by chance he and his business partner, Kendrick had their first unit back in January of 2019. And the span of 14 months, they’ve scaled up to 32 properties, 25 in which are Rental arbitrage, and seven are co-hosted units. Now ship is actually a really unique guy. I met him at the bigger pockets conference back in Tennessee this year. And he is just a BC is like seven foot tall, really young guy. And he really just looked like a kid that just graduated from college. But man, this guy is rocking a roll. And, and when ship told me about his story about how he got into the space and how he was actually venture back to other people to invest capital into his Rental arbitrage business.
00:05:48
The first thing that I had in mind was like, you know, why, why would you do that? But the second was like, how, how, how did you do that? And I really couldn’t understand why he decided to go venture backed route until I spoke with him on this show. In this episode, Shiv shares how they got started in their short term rental business, what they did to be able to raise capital, to be able to start this business and the opportunity that they found in the multifamily and short term rental syndication space. This is an episode I have just been waiting for because syndication’s been thing that I’ve always thought about, but to see somebody actually going after it is just so cool. Shiv also shares the importance of setting up systems and utilizing technology to run your business. Effectively. Shiv is a very Silicon valley startup type of guy.
00:06:29
So you’ll hear this in this episode, if you like more information on this episode or any of the show notes, go Short Term, Sage dot com slash STR 48. Or if you, you like my show notes sent directly to your inbox every week, then go to Short Term Sage dot com slash show notes with all that being said onto this week’s conversation. Hey, welcome Matt host nation to another episode of short-term Rental success stories. In this episode, I have this special honor speaking with Shiv getto Shiv. Would you please introduce yourself to the host nation and let them know who you are and what inspired you to get into short-term rentals?
00:06:57
Sure, Julian, thank for me. My name is she get to, I am a 24 year old, recent graduate from the university of Southern California. I studied engineering and I kind of fell into real estate and Airbnb by chance. I was I’m from the bay area. So I lived in, in my, when I moved back, I to live in my parents house to save money on rent. They actually aren’t located here. They moved to India and they built kind of this granny unit that they used to come back and forth. So I was kind of acting as the property manager. I kind of fell into real estate, you know, helping them manage their unit, started exploring different alternatives for tenants found this company that does this, you know, where they rent out, rent out properties from you. And then they kind of room for rent each, each unit. And I kind of just got exposed to being creative in real estate and started brainstorming. And yeah, it came across short term rental and was thinking about doing some buying hold. But, you know, after a few transitions decided that Airbnb Airbnb was probably the, the best thing that I wanted to do at this PO point in time.
00:08:04
And just to give a little bit of pre context, you’re you’re you have a, you have a, a management company that does primarily Rental arbitrage. You’re at 32 properties right now. You have a co-founder and what’s also pretty interesting is that your VC venture capital backed. So you had some investors that, that helped you to get started, I guess. Do you mind kind of explaining how that kind of transitioned from you graduating kind of figuring what you wanted to do to now you have 32 properties a year later and this, this, this big company.
00:08:38
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, it’s a long story, but I think the way it starts is I, I always was kind of unsettled with the idea of having one source of income. I, I mean, I’m sure most of your guests talk about this, but it didn’t really seem like the most smart thing to do when people talk about job security and relying on one source of income, I wanted kind of that flexibility to transition to something else if I wanted to. And the best way to do that in my mind at that point in time was real estate, right? So I was looking at, you know, I’m from the bay area. I live in the bay area. Obviously things are very difficult to cash flow here when you’re buying. So we thought about buying and doing some buy and hold in in the Southeast. So we were looking at markets in Atlanta, in Nashville.
00:09:23
And when I was looking at the deals, you know, we, we found some good properties. They would appreciate a little bit, but they’d cash flow a few hundred dollars. And I was like, okay, how long is this gonna take for me to actually, you know, raise money or, or save up enough money to buy these properties and then have it eventually replace my, my W2. And it didn’t, it didn’t necessarily seem like the fastest way. So I, I basically spent the first three or four months as like an incubator, just learning, reading, podcasting, everything I could get my hands on. And I came this article by Paul Moore. He’s actually a good friend of ours. Now he’s a multi-family guy transitioning into storage. So he wrote this article about this guy called Jay Martin. Who’s also a friend of ours who basically travels the world and has 20 properties on Airbnb, which his team is managing and it’s all passive.
01:10:15
And he is working four hours a week and earning, you know, seven figures or six figures. And we were just like, wow, this, this seems ridiculous. I mean, he doesn’t even own the properties he’s renting and re renting, right? So we kind of got creative. You know, I reached out to everyone I knew, started networking with my parents are from here. So started asking them if they knew about anyone from who did real estate and eventually got connected with the landlord who owns quite a bit of real estate here, we kinda pitched our idea. And, you know, he, he let us trial out our, our Rental arbitrage idea on some of his, so we, you know, we signed a lease with him. We each, so my business partner Kendrick at the time, I was kind of bouncing around the idea of doing this, this real estate business with him.
01:11:06
And he was super, he was super down, he was in Boston at the time and we approached this landlord, pitched this idea and he was, he was kind of hesitant at first, but he, he eventually agreed and gave of us a few units. But yeah, I mean, that’s kind of how we got started. And the way we transitioned into actually raising money was very unique, right? Because typically what people do is they, they, you know, eventually leave their job. They go approach a lot of DC firms or angel investors and pitch to hundreds of people, you know, know, get hundreds of nos. The strategy we had was why don’t we first instead of creating a hundred shallow relationships and hoping one of those click, you know, IE going to a bunch of VCs and a bunch of angels and getting a hundred nos and getting one, yes.
01:11:54
Why don’t we try to choose one relationship, go very deep with that relationship. And once we build out a proof of concept, once they see us grow and understand our, our growth and, and who we are as people approach that person for money, right? So the strategy was with this investor, we knew that there was kind of a gap in this business, right? He was very, he, he was, he was very on top of it. I mean, in the sense that he, he had, he made great purchases, but he was kind more LA in his management style and wanted, you know, there, there, it wasn’t running as efficiently as it could be. And we kind had ideas. So we approached him, we told him our ideas and he said, yeah, sure, this sounds interesting, but how are we gonna make this work financially? And, you know, we at the time were like, we just wanna learn, right?
01:12:44
I mean, we, we had met this guy. He had done so well in real estate. He was a very inspiring guy. And he was kind of taken aback by the fact that we were willing to like work for free for, and spend time and help him out. That he ended up just offering Kendrick my business partner, the opportunity to just work with him directly. So Kendrick in a few days wrapped up his whole life in Boston, moved from Boston to, to California to work with this investor. And the idea with us was the closer he can get to this investor and, and really understand how his, his business works, the more opportunity we get to learn. But also the more opportunity we get to build this deep relationship with the, with, with the real estate investor. And eventually when the time comes, you know, see if we can further the relationship financially. So that’s kind of how we raise money. Long story short,
01:13:36
You, you, you guys recent graduates, you had a little bit of money in your pocket that you were looking to invest in some real estate, but you saw the market saw that you’re maybe gonna make a couple hundred dollars a month based off of market conditions. So you said, Hey, well, let’s get into the Rental arbitrage space with you and your partner. How did you handle that partner relat ship? Because maybe a lot of people that are listening to the show, they might maybe they don’t have the money, but they have a partner that does have some money, but both of you guys have a little bit of money to put into these properties. So how, how are you delegating tasks?
01:14:09
Yeah. So I think the idea was we, so we first put in $7,000 each, right? The way we delegated, it was kind of on skillset. I’m traditionally a lot more logical. I’m very systems driven processes driven. You know, we’re both engineers, he did mechanical engineering, but I think I tend to lean towards more structure and, and goal oriented and, and, and, and know systems building I’m necessarily as creative. So Kendrick is more kind of creative and willing to take risks. And I think the dynamic we had was he would kind of push us to do things and I would kind of make sure that we’re doing it correctly or making sure that we’re not missing the ball in anything. So the dynamic we had was he would kind of move us forward and I would make sure we’re moving forward correctly. So from a, from a tactical and strategy standpoint, that’s kinda how we moved forward from, from a, from a task split, Kendrick was kind of responsible for furnishing and, and kind of getting it beautiful. I was responsible for building our operations and our teams and managing, cleaning, and pricing, and kind of systematizing the whole business while he focused on business development and sales and building relationships with the et cetera.
01:15:24
So you had these couple of properties. How, how, how were they performing and how long was it before that you said, okay, you get to the next, you get to the next point, which was meeting your, your, your investor partner.
01:15:37
Yeah. So that, that’s also a good story. So when we decided to take the first year from the investor, he has a big building in, in Redwood city. And we, you know, I was super excited that he said we could take it the building’s a little bit older. So when we decided to go to the, to the building, I was like, okay, I’m ready to sign the lease. I was super excited. And, and the property manager gave me the paperwork and I signed the lease and I was already there. And it was in the evening. I was like, why don’t I just spend the night in this apartment? And I didn’t have any furniture, didn’t have a pillow, but I was like, let me why like simulate the experience with nothing in there. So I was sleeping in the apartment and then I suddenly noticed that there’s some cockroaches and bugs and, and it wasn’t necessarily the best unit, especially since we were considering doing corporate rentals, which, you know, Airbnb and corporate it’s all review based in hospital.
01:16:34
So that wasn’t necessarily the best fit. So unfortunately that unit didn’t work out, but we, we kind of transitioned into finding another building and getting a unit there. And, and we started the worst time, right. We started in December. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea the tools that we could use. And we were losing, we were losing money. And we were like, why, why did this seem so easy when it’s not? And we’re losing a couple hundred dollars a month, right? And, and this is when we kind of got creative, we started brainstorming and thinking about like the different products, like what does a hotel offer? They offer just a room, you know, with one bed or two beds. What happens if we’re able to put two beds in a room, right. Will that increase the occupancy and therefore make it more affordable for people to stay? So we did a little bit of tweaks. We did AB testing and understood that, you know, if we make these small tweaks, our margin just increased. So we went from, you know, losing a couple hundred dollars a month in January, December, January to starting to make a lot more money grand that’s partly due to seasonality, but also partly due to the fact that we added a bed and kind of made it more, made it more affordable for more people.
01:17:44
So at this point, you’re, you’re probably January, February right now you’re losing money, but you made some tweaks. And then at which point did you say, I need to find some, some additional capital.
01:17:56
Yeah. So, you know, we, we put in $7,000, which was good enough for, for us to get started, but we were still trying to, you know, we do. So they’re two business models. I’m not sure if your listeners know, but the two business models we work with, we call them asset heavy and asset light. They’re different names. Asset heavy is known as like master lease, right? Where you sign a lease with an owner, you guarantee them rent, you buy the furniture, you pay them rent. And whatever you make on top of that is yours. The other model which we call asset light is when you take a management fee, kind of cohosting et cetera, we were doing asset heavy. So we were signing these leases, which meant that we needed to buy furniture. Once we got a few, few units going, we, we had to start raising money, but we didn’t necessarily wanna sell a piece of our company.
01:18:46
So we took debt money, which is BA we basically, we took out a loan from friends and family. So we raised some money from friends and family and told them that we’d pay them a fixed percentage interest rate. And this is our idea. This is what we’re doing. This is how the returns have been so far. This is what we’re projecting, et cetera. You know, a lot of them were earning three, 4% in a bank. We offered them, you know, eight to 12%, which was a huge dump. So people were interested in that, kind of got us to 15, 15 units. So we did that for 15 units. So we raised, I think maybe 80, 80 grand, 90 grand through this technique. And that’s when we decided like, okay, well maybe it’s better to just get equity money and sell a piece of our company in.
01:19:27
So you, you scaled up to 15 units. How, how, how long did it take to get to 15 units after you started sourcing money?
01:19:35
Yeah, so we, our first unit was in January, 2019 by March, 2019, we had one unit still, or two units. It was like, kind of that, you know, when you look at hockey stick growth, it was like that flat, horizontal. And then in April, we just suddenly went from like, I think one unit, like five units in Meg. We were at like 10 units. And then like by August, we were at like July or August, we were at 15 units. So in these three or four months, we just kind of like built this whole system and process and then just did RINs and repeat and just scaled really fast. And that’s when we kinda approached and raised this angel,
02:20:11
Where were you getting all of these is from, was it from the same manager investor or
02:20:17
No, no, no. Yeah. So we, we, we took a few of a few more from him, but we didn’t wanna necessarily put all our eggs in one basket. We also wanted to build out proof of concept that we can do this in any situation. So what we did is we kind of built a very strong sales cycle. So by this time we hired our first virtual assistant in February of 2019. And we kind of noticed that she was, she was very good on the phone. So the sales cycle we set up was we had, we, we had her generate leads. So we’d, we’d scrape all the, the Craigslist and the Zillows and the Zumper and all that get all the, all the places that were looking to find renters for their properties and the areas that we desired. And then what we did is we had her do cold calling every day.
02:21:04
So we created a script. So she would do, you know, anywhere 40 and 40 and 80 calls a day, right. With, and, and telling, you know, calling them saying, Hey, is this XYZ property available in, in the city? You know, this is what we do, yada, yada, yada. And then we’d get, you know, it’s a typical funnel, we’d get rejections, but we get some, some, some yeses. And then from those yeses, what we did is we tried to a deep relationship with them. Oftentimes they were property managers, the huge upside when you’re doing asset heavy, is that property managers love you. Right? Because you’re basically doing their job and, and helping them fill their units without really, you know, any work on their part. Right. So we built these kind of deeper relationships with these property managers. And eventually what happened is they kind of became a, they became feeders. So they just, when they had units that were available, they just dropped it to us. Hey, Kendrick, like we had this unit available. We said, okay. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And that kinda helped us scale that way.
02:22:02
Yeah. You, you found the golden goose and that’s, that’s, that’s awesome. And I saw you you’re, you’re in quite a few cities. You’re in San Jose, San Bruno, D city, San Francisco, Palo Alto, all these different cities. Why, why did you expand operations to so many? And, and when did that happen? Did you keep everything close by initially or after you had the VA funnel, you just were reaching out to anywhere that basically said that they’re offering their property to you guys.
02:22:28
Yeah. So the bay area is a little bit unique in the sense that there’s a lot of cities compiled in one, you know, one hour of, of driving depending on traffic, 50 or 60 miles. So a lot of those cities are in that, in that region, but we do have some cities that are out out of California. We have some in Reno, we’re looking in Nashville right now. The idea was they, they, they were relatively close. But I think to answer more of your question, the, the idea is, yeah, we wanna be kind of location agnostic in the sense that we wanna be able to build a system so that we can be opportunistic. Right. If I go to a conference and meet someone in Philadelphia, and they tell me that they have have a 35 unit apartment complex, that they wanna do short term rental on, I wanna be able to leverage that opportunity and set up shop theres. So I can capitalize on those 35 units. So the idea is, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re kind of trying to be location agnostic. We’re trying to build our systems so that we can tackle markets and, and see opportunities and take hold of them when they come.
02:23:31
So you, you get to 15 units. And at that point where you, you, you were, I imagine that you were pretty profitable. Were you getting, how much were you getting per unit at that point?
02:23:42
So what we found our niche to be is, is kind of bigger units. We noticed that the way it works in, in, in pricing, at least in our experience was when you look at a one bedroom versus a two bedroom, right? The difference between a one bedroom renting a one bedroom for a long lease, that difference is outweighed by the profitability, get when you’re Airbnb being in. So let explain food numbers, right? Let’s say I’m renting a one bedroom for 25, right? These are by the way, bay area prices for anyone not in the bay area, you’re renting a one bedroom for, right. If for long term, let’s say a one year lease. If you rent a two bedroom, it’ll maybe cost 2,820, right? So that three or $400 difference that we would pay and rent would be completely outweighed by the Airbnb or short term rental profitability, right? A two bedroom is way more profitable. You can also think about it as there’s no hotel product that necessarily can compare to that. Right. One is still a hotel room, whatever, but a twos, we started moving into two bedrooms. We were looking at, you know, a thousand dollars, $1,500. Sometimes in our bigger houses, we were doubling rents. So we got 4,000, $5,000 a month. So yeah, it, it, it kind of spread, but on average, maybe 1500 per unit.
02:25:02
So, I mean, you, you, you guys were making some, some pretty decent money, you know, 15 units. I mean, that’s definitely enough for two, two guys that just graduated college to, you know, kind of cruise by what, what changed because you’re, you guys are actually the first on our show and the, one of the first people that I’ve heard of that we’re talking to that decided to go in investor route and actually sell a portion of your company to acquire some more capital. Is it just because you guys are from California area that it’s just like, okay, we gotta do the tech startup thing, gotta sell a company, or, but what, what made that switch so that you need a, yeah,
02:25:35
No, it’s a great
02:25:36
Cause you, you could have, you could have scaled this, you know, using your own capital, but you decided to take a different approach. And I’m, I’m curious as to the reasoning behind that.
02:25:44
Yeah. I mean, it’s a great question. Right? So the logic was when we, when we set, set out to do this whole thing, right. We, we met at a country club. I think it was like December 20, December 25th, or 28th, 2018. Right. And Kendrick and I sat, we we’d go to these country clubs and we’re not members of them. We just kind of walk in and just like, figure out, sit, sit in a nice view and have this like, you know, end of year business meeting and, and plan for the next year. Right. So we set out in that plan to, to chalk out what we wanna do in right. Some of our goals were to get to 20 units by the end of the year to have, you know, discounted of 3000 for 2020. And these were our goals. Right. So when we started getting to that relatively quickly, I think we kind of realized that at the end of the day, like we’re pretty ambitious people and it wasn’t necessarily about the money.
02:26:40
I initially we thought it was okay. Like the whole financial freedom thing is, is great. Right? We were, we were doing this whole thing by the way, while we had a job. So when we had the option to leave our jobs and kind of take a salary, it was great. But I think we, we kind of just got there faster than, than we thought. And, and we didn’t necessarily wanna stop there because we were enjoying the process. You know, I, I, someone told me this analogy a while ago about the road to ha there’s a story where his friend, this guy’s friend was in, in HANA. And, you know, he asked a local person, how do I get to? And the person told him, and the person said, make sure you get there before sunset. Right? So he, he and his family, they’re driving up the road to HANA and they’re driving really fast.
02:27:28
And, and, you know, they’re, they’re trying to get there before sunset and, and they get, they get there and they kind of are just looking around and they’re like, wait, what? What’s so different about it. And they go back down and they talk to the, the person who told them to get there before sunset. And he said the whole point of, of going up the road to was not the end, end destination. It was kind the road itself right. On the journey. So I think for me in, for Kendrick, it’s, it’s really about the journey for us. So we just wanted to continue the journey. I think if we just didn’t raise money, we didn’t, we kind of grew slowly. It would, it wouldn’t be as exciting. So we thought we just raise money and play this journey and enjoy the experience and, and see where it goes.
02:28:08
Now, do you connect with a lot of hosts or are you, are you guys kind of in, cause I imagine that it’s gotta be pretty different with when you are having an investor client, you know, funds, you, are there different, different types of relationships or different types of ways that you have to operate having an investor partner when you, when you do sell and, and just to give a little bit of pre context, are you allowed to share how much you able, you received to start funding into properties and how much you, you gave up of your company for that?
02:28:39
Yeah. I wouldn’t be able to receive, share how much we gave up, but we, we raised about 800,000, but yeah, I, I, in, in the sense it’s different because you’re more accountable for sure. Right. You have, you have, you now have investors that you, you have to, you have to make sure you’re, you’re returning, but I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. I think we got lucky again within the, that we’re working with. They’re very, very laid back and they kind of understand that we’re closest to the business and we could make the decisions that we, we need in terms of how you operate. I think it really depends on the situation with the investor. Right? You have your term sheet and you define what the terms are for us. It was, it was, it was very, we in the sense, said a lot of the big decisions we’re still in control of. And, you know, we have a very good working relationship with our investors. So we have weekly meetings. We, we make sure that we’re on track. It just adds that layer of accountability, which I think is, is that is beneficial in the long run. So, yeah.
02:29:45
And, and what is, what does business look like when you just kind of have all this money? That’s kind of given to you to be able to expand as much as really you want, I mean, 800,000 in this business, if you were setting up a unit for 7,800,000, you could, you could do quite a few units. What, what it, what does it look like when you have all of that, how you’re gonna be operating, moving forward.
03:30:06
Yeah. So that’s kind of, that’s kind of where we’re transitioning our new. Maybe it’s a good time to talk about what we’re trying to do now. You know, we, we were doing a lot of asset heavy, which, which is signing master leases, paying for the furniture. I think where we’re transitioning to right now is, you know, we obviously have this chunk of change that we need to figure out how to deploy most intelligently. Right? So the idea now is we’re thinking about for economies of scale, looking at going and approaching apartment complexes, then also doing asset light, basically management fees, right? The idea being one it’s, it’s a lot easier to scale when even work with department complexes, right? Because we have a, you know, 50 year apartment complex, we tell them that they’re making, you know, X dollars a month on long term rent.
03:30:51
We can give you 1.4 X because of the short term rental, yada, we’ll manage it for you, et cetera. It’ll help us scale a lot more fast. But the, the twist that we’re trying to do right now, we’re we’re playing with is how do we hybridize both the multifamily syndication world with short term rental, right? The way we see it right now is short term rental is kind of, you know, the new age way of doing real estate, correct. When you can, when you can make money on real estate without owning real estate 30, 40 years ago, that was never the case. Multifamily syndication. A lot of the players there are, are more traditional in their thoughts. So they’re doing, you know, traditional they’re buying buildings. They’re, they’re, you know, renovating, increasing the rents, but also still doing long term rentals. Right? And when you look at valuing commercial properties, the way they’re traditionally valued is how much income is this asset, depending on how much income that asset producing asset is producing.
03:31:47
That’s what the sales price will be. Right? So our idea is if we’ve unlocked a way to, to take, you know, rents in the bay area where, you know, there’s some of the highest in the world and make money off that what happens when we go and find these apartment complex, convert them. So raise money to multifamily, syndications, and convert these instead of being long term rentals to short term rental, how does that play out for the return on investment for the investors? So that’s kind of the idea. And I think it’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of an untapped opportunity that, that a lot of people haven’t figured out yet because there’s not yet a player that can do both.
03:32:29
You, you left college, you’re, you’re trying to get into real estate. And then a year later you have over 32 properties and now you’re you’re have investors. And you’re about to start doing multifamily short term rental syndication. Did, did you have a whole lot of like, I mean, that, that that’s, that’s quite the growth curve. Do you, are you just kind of learning as you go? Or did you have like someone that was helping you all along the way? Cause I mean, you’re, I mean that that’s quite, it’s quite impressive and it’s also a lot of responsibility, you know, to, to be working with with, with this much.
03:33:05
It’s a good, it’s a good question. I think the answer is that you can ask, you know, Elon Musk, you can ask all those guys, nowhere near comparing myself to them. Obviously what I’m trying to say is that people just learn along the way. You know, they, they probably don’t don’t have it completely figured out. I think for us, we, we, we didn’t have anyone besides the internet to help us. And I think this is a very important point that people do need to understand that there’s so much information out there, you know, Julian, your podcasts, like other people’s podcasts, blogs, websites, just all that information. And I think the biggest difference for us is we were religious about taking action, right? There’s so many smart, creative people, people that I worked with in my previous company, people that I went to school with that were a lot smarter than me, but I think the biggest difference is we were religious and obsessive about taking action, right.
03:34:00
Setting go for the year and, and being, being obsessive about getting after it and making sure that we, we, we set this goal and we accomplished it. Right. So I think to answer your question, we, we used the internet to help us, right. There was a lot of resources there. And, and, and I think, like I said, it’s more part of the, so I think what, the way we’re looking at it is like, let’s just keep setting goals and keep getting after it and making sure that we’re enjoying the process. But yeah, it is a lot of responsibility. And I think, you know, I’m happy that we’re younger and we, we don’t have family. We don’t have, you know, kids to kind of risk. So that’s why we’re trying to be aggressive right now. See where it goes.
03:34:43
You know, I’m, I’m definitely curious in the, in the multifamily syndication with the short term rental spin to it, you know, a lot of people in that, in that syndication mindset, it, it it’s almost like real estate, but at the same time, it’s also not, they’re very business oriented, very suit and tie. It seems like they’re very numbers driven with a lot of the real and, you know, the short term rental world, it’s, it’s almost kinda like the wild west where it’s like, people are really, you know, slinging deals and trying to, you know, make a couple hundred bucks here and there. So to see where you guys go with the, with this pivot or with this move would be interesting. But I also want to hit on something that you talked about before, which sounded more SIM to like Soder lyric style. Was, was that the approach that you were going with when you initially got that, that VC capital, that you were gonna be going more the, the, I, I guess you could say traditional route with apartment complexes and, and furnishing them that way.
03:35:39
Exactly. Yeah. That, that was our original pitch. We were like, okay, well obviously the unit economics of what we’re doing is very strong, right. We had a track record of 15 units and, and our growth curve, et cetera. So if we pitched all the numbers and the numerics and that’s what we were gonna do, right. Is, you know, traditionally go and, and, you know, work with owners of apartments and master lease and, and absorb and, and build the brand that way. But I think what we realized is that there was so much upside to be capitalized when you actually own real estate that we weren’t capitalizing on. And we didn’t see a lot of people in the multifamily face doing either, right. They would traditionally maybe do some multifamily syndications and maybe make five or 10% of their, their port, their, their units short term or corporate.
03:36:24
But, you know, since we’re becoming masters at this, why not take this idea because the reality is if we’re, we’re doing multifamily syndication and we’re doing short term rental, the returns for our investors would far outweigh then multifamily syndication, just because of the, the economics of short term rental, right? If we’re, if a, a traditional short multifamily, syndicator is doing long term rentals and getting X by, I mean, we will just get 1.3 X or 1.4 X, even 1.7 X. And how does that translate to investor return on their money? So I think, you know, we really see a lot of opportunity emerging these world worlds. You know, we’re always looking for investors and that’s kinda how our, our approach is gonna be moving forward.
03:37:07
You know, I, I kinda see a couple pivotal moments. You know, one of them being when, when you had those, those, you know, your first couple units, you’re starting to make money, but then after that, you realize you need a little bit of capital a little bit quicker. If you wanted to be able to scale, you know, the way that you did. So you, you started raising money from, from friends and family. How, how do you present something like that? Maybe there’s a lot of listeners on the show that would like to be able to scale a little bit quicker, but they want to get other people involved, raise that initial capital. You said you raised them around 80 thought thousand from friends and family. What, what does that look like when you are pitching to doing that initial round of, of funding?
03:37:47
Yeah, so we did, we did a lot of, we did it very bite size. We didn’t take, we didn’t ask for 80,000 all at once. We kind of did it in bite sizes. Right? I think the approach we took just because of our personnel is we’re very metrics driven, very numbers driven. I think, you know, any investor in the reality cares about the return they’re gonna get on their investment, right? And the only way you could show them is by proving out numbers, right? So we really went over, okay, this is how we’re doing so far with the, with the money we put in, this is where it’s kind of translating to, is our projections of how it’s gonna look. If you give us this much money, this is how we think we’re gonna do in our business. And this is why we think we can guarantee you an, you know, eight, 10, 12% return on your money.
03:38:33
Right. I think there’s a bunch of ways to do it, right? You can, you don’t necessarily have to do it where you’re taking this money and guaranteeing someone eight, 10, 12%. You can also take the money and kind of do equity splits on, on a small scale, right? You can take a deal and say, I’ll do all the work. Maybe I’ll get 10% of the profit. You just put in the money, something like that. Right. I don’t necessarily advise someone who’s not completely confident or sure of what they’re doing. I would, I would honestly advise trying the cohost way, right? Because that’s almost like a financially less risky way of building out proof of concept. I think the way it works, at least in Silicon valley is like, it’s very proof of concept driven, right? If you can build out your proof of concept, show someone what you’re doing is working. Then it’s kind of easy to scale that way. So maybe your strategy would be, you know, build out a proof of concept doing cohost, not having to put up all the money or being financially and then kind of building your systems and tractions, and then maybe moving on master, you know, there’s pros and cons to both. I don’t necessarily recommend one or the other. I think it’s very situational. So whatever situation you’re in and, and opportunity you think is stronger, I would leverage that.
03:39:46
So you, you were basically guaranteeing your, your friends and family, a, the return on their investment at, with a 8% or 12% yield on that as well.
03:39:58
Right? Exactly. So if they gave us, you know, $10,000, we would promise them 8% return every annually, basically. Yeah.
04:40:07
Okay. So this, this was, this was a, a, a long term, long term play for them. This wasn’t just a quick, they, they hand you the money and then you give them back a certain percentage more. And that’s, that’s the end of the relationship is more of a percentage stake.
04:40:21
No, we, we were thinking like, let’s say if they gave us 10,000, we, we would try to pay, I think one of the strategies we did. Yeah. We, we would try to pay out the pay, pay it back as, as fast as possible. Right. So throughout this whole process, I haven’t, nor Kendrick has taken any money out for us. Right. Everything that we were getting was reinvested into the business or reinvested to pay off our investors. I think their hold, they were thinking maybe a year, two years. I mean, we paid off a lot of it right now, but yeah, it wasn’t, it wasn’t necessarily like a royalty model or, or anything like that, where they would continue to get dividends. Although, you know, if you, if you’re just starting out and that’s the only way you can start out, I would recommend it.
04:41:01
I think it’s super interesting. And I talk to a lot of people and they say, oh, I, you know, I like, I like, you know, because there there’s so many different ways that you can play in this space. Like one of the ways that you were, you were saying that almost sounded very similar to what we’re doing is, you know, with this, you know, through cohost that we’re offering this turnkey Rental arbitrage is what we call it, our turnkey arbitrage program, where investors can fund us and we’ll go and basically fill occupancy and units that we’re already operating in. You know, there’s, there’s all these unique twists in this business that are just nobody, nobody have thought of. And you can, you can be creative. You know, this is the wild west right now for, you know, these entrepreneurs. And it’s super exciting talking to you sh because, you know, you went from, you know, couple, couple units to now, you’re, you’re going the more traditional, you know, Silicon valley route, raising your initial around a, you know, you’re around a funding from your friends and family, and then you get the VC back and, and now you’re doing something completely different, almost, you know, moving into a space that is really untouched for the people that are looking to be able to scale quickly, though.
04:42:04
It, I guess, I guess the question would be, do you, could, could you have scaled to where you are now, if you didn’t rule raise that initial capital or you didn’t get that second round of funding, or, or is it just maybe not possible to be able to scale to, let’s say 32 properties in, in about a year?
04:42:26
No, I think it is possible. I think, you know, in our situation, this was kind of the best move to make, given our circumstance, our opportunities. But I think, you know, obviously if you’re gonna do, you know, signing master leases, money needs to come from somewhere. So, but I think, I think, you know, cohosting, or property management is easily doable. You know, I I’m, I’m working with a few guys and, and in the bay area, I know who who’ve grown in the past few 10 properties. And they’re, they’re doing all property management, cohost where they’re, they’ve kind tapped in a, a real estate agent network and are getting property managers to refer them and kind building it that way. I think it’s definitely doable. I mean, the one advice I would, I would give everyone is when we, when we started out, one of the problems was we kind of would, it it’s good to be receptive and to be openminded.
04:43:21
But sometimes what we would do is we’d hear someone who, who was supposedly an expert and then kind of just assume that they knew everything or their way was the best. And I think the message I’m trying to communicate is what you guys are gonna hear on this podcast. And other podcasts are all good information, but you need to really understand what your situation is, right? Like where, where your upsides are. Right. We were kind of from this area, we, we had built this network. We could leverage that. Maybe I wouldn’t have heard this whole strategy of raising money on a podcast. Cause most people are like, you have to go to, you know, a hundred investors, investors and, and talk to them. We decided to spend like year building this relationship with him, having, you know, Kendrick work with him as a property manager and, and kinda deepen the relationship and kinda guide him through that and, and, and eventually request to raise money.
04:44:10
But, you know, in your situation it may something different, right? You may have worked in a property management company and you could contact all those property managers and about your business, right? So you really have to understand where your upsides are and where your opportunities are. It’s sometimes hard to see, but I think that the differentiation between someone who, who is who’s good and someone who’s great is really the ability to identify opportunity. It’s not that you, that one person has more opportunity than the other. It’s how, how, how able are you to see the opportunity?
04:44:42
What has been the most challenging part of scaling your short Rental business?
04:44:47
Yeah, so we’re, we’re at 31 properties right now. We have a, a pretty aggressive goal. We’re looking to get to about 250 properties by the end of the year, right? So we have, you know, basically a 10 X plan right now, our, our biggest, our biggest hurdle is kind of figuring out what market that’s gonna be in, what, what market that’s gonna be in. We’re kind of moving away from California, just because, you know, California is not necessarily the most landlord friendly place. You know, there’s a lot of regulations, et cetera. So we, we do corporate rentals, which is 30 plus days stays in, in places that have regulation. But I think the biggest challenge is, is finding the market and then kind of understanding, I think there’s a trade off between growing too fast and dropping operations and prioritizing operations and not growing too fast. What I mean by that is if you dedicate all your efforts to sales and business development, you could grow exceptionally fast, but then do you have the operational capacity to handle that? So I think understanding that balance and then figuring out what market we’re gonna kind of dedicate our, our financial and human resources.
04:45:54
When you’re talking about scaling, scaling a team, you started off with the one VA who was your salesperson, which seemed like it did a really good job because then it opened the doors to a lot more of those golden gooses. But now you have four VAs, which is still a, a pretty lean lean team. And you guys have basically the opportunity to grow this exponentially more. What, what’s your, what’s your strategy with your VAs and your team and how you’re building that out.
04:46:26
So we’re very technology driven. We use a lot of technology. We try to, we try to make our company, you know, our company’s all virtual, right? So we have people in the Philippines. We have some people in India, I’m in California, Kendricks in Washington right now. So we’re all virtual. We built this whole thing virtually. I think what we try to do is make sure that we’re using technology to run very efficiently, right? So we use slack. I mean, I’m sure you guys know slack. We also have a lot of slack at apps. So one of the apps we use is called Geekbot that basically allows us to do daily standup calls with our team virtually. So every day, this Geekbot app requests from, from all our, from all our team members, what their agenda is for that day, what’s the one thing they can do that can yield the most for that day.
04:47:16
Then what else are they gonna do? Did they, did they complete their one thing that they said they would do yesterday? And then are there any blockers? Right. So we can kind of go in now, if I go to slack, I can see everyone’s, you know, report and it kind of helps them plan their day too. So we leverage tools like that. We have another tool called office five, which I recommend when you’re growing a team, it kinda helps you understand employee engagement. So it’s kind of an anonymous feedback tool, which allows all our team members to give feedback right on, honestly, right. So I can actually get the help. I can get a clear understanding of the health of our company. So I think using tools like this, understanding the wellbeing of your employees is, is very important and, and making sure they’re working efficiently and, and empowering them.
04:48:03
I think the other big thing is when you’re building a team, you really have to be obsessive about understanding where people’s strengths are and where to place them. Right? You may hire someone for one thing, but you may notice that this person is way better a communicator than they are, you know, a guest messenger, they’re better on the phone. Okay. So maybe we’ll take this person and put them in a sales position, or this person is really Hospitable and very good at writing messaging. So let’s put them here or this person is very good with numbers. I’m gonna have them own pricing. So kinda being obsessive about understanding strengths and weaknesses, and then organizing your team to maximize the value.
04:48:42
I think it’s super, just, I love talking to the hosts that come onto the show, because what I’ve noticed though, is that the, a lot of the engineers, the people that are tech savvy, they, they are very lean and mean my, my partner, Jon, who, Jon Bell, who, who runs cohost, he has about 35 properties or so he, he also is a super lean team. Yeah. I think he has like one assistant at everything else is like automated. Like it’s just like crazy because a lot of this stuff can be, you know, scale fully automated. How, how I’m, I’m curious. I wanted to know though, what are you doing with your VAs? Like who are the, what are the rules of the people that you’re adding on and where do you see those rules going?
04:49:24
Initially, we, so we have four right now. We just hired our, our fourth person recently, initially what we were doing that was actually affect ability to, to be, to hold accountability within our team was we were kind grouping them all as a team and, you know, reaching out to them when we had something that we needed to be done. But the problem with this was we were treating them as kind of one group. So when we, when we wanted something, when we wanted to work on something, there wouldn’t be clear accountability and ownership. Right. And I think this is also a very important thing to note for people is when you’re building a team, accountability and ownership is super important, right? When I, you know, when we work on something and we request something, get done the likelihood of it getting done. If I say like, you know, let’s have a calendar, let’s have a meeting next week to talk about it.
05:50:14
And I put it on the calendar. Now everyone’s accountable. It’s it’s way. It’s way more likely. So yeah, it just, you know, we have one person who’s focusing on kind of our listing management. So making sure all the details are correct watching, watching the pricing. So making prices, making sure pricing is correct now that we’re kind of approaching it with different buildings and units. We have people owning, owning certain areas, certain buildings. So we have a new building in Reno that we’re actually picking up. And we have one of, one of our team members kind of owning that building. And then we have someone owning sales. So another, another thing that we’ve recently done is leveraged the, this, this EOS, have you heard of entrepreneurial operating system? It’s it’s by this book, traction by Geno, Wickman was super helpful for us to just kind of organize our systems and frameworks.
05:51:12
So now what we’re doing in our company is we’re being even more metrics driven, where we’re giving everyone a role in their company and then helping them choose their, their quarterly goals. And then having a metrics Monday meeting every Monday to see how we’re faring for that quantitative goal. So it’s very systems driven. So for example, Kendrick’s goal is, you know, 40 units, new units by the end of Q1, right? So if his units are, if his goal is 40 new units, maybe he needs to network with five strong potential leads that have an 80, 90% likelihood. Right? So his goal is five, five every week, right? So every Monday we have this meeting and he he’ll input how many leads he met and then we’ll, we’ll discuss saying, okay, well, why was it less, why was it more, what could we do to get better minus like occupancy, right? And pricing. So our goal was I think, 80 or 90% occupancy and Q1. So every week we have, we have a review saying, okay, we were at this occupancy. Why, why were we lower? Why would we hire et cetera? And then every team member has their own metric that they own. And then we kinda walk through that every week to help make making sure we’re all on track.
05:52:23
So you said, yeah, one person’s more for the listing management. You said one person manages more of the pricing.
05:52:30
Yeah. So one person’s listing management pricing, and then the other person is, is cleaning cleanings kinda owning our, cleaning,
05:52:38
The cleaning. And, and that’s gotta be a lot of cleaning. You have a bunch of different cities, ha they are, they basically running the whole cleaning operation. You have like a cleaning funnel. It’s one of the most sticky things in, in this business. It’s sticky because it really, it can get sticky, but it, it is also very challenging to find reliable cleaners. What, what does that operation look like when you’re scaled out across multiple areas?
05:53:06
So we, our approach, there is, again, trying to find smaller, smaller companies, smaller vendors. We don’t necessarily like working with bigger, bigger vendors, just because we notice that when we, when we partner with, with a, a, you know, a small business cleaning team and we kind of present them with the opportunity of our growth plan and, and what we’re looking to do, they get more excited about the opportunity and they take more ownership. So we’ve been very fortunate enough to find, have found a very good small business cleaning team that has kind of targeted our whole, you know, bay area region. So they’ve been very helpful with that. We, we have this tool called properly. I’m sure you’ve heard of it to kinda track cleaning quality and, and everything. So we partnered with one vendor, we do calendar sharing, we cross reference with properly, et cetera.
05:53:59
What does your role look like when you first started to where you are now, now that you have these dedicated people that are able to work on, on some of the other aspects of the business? What, what is you and your partners, your partners role look like at this point?
05:54:15
So when we first started, we were working a lot, you know, in the business of working in the Birtch business versus working on the business. We we’ve fortunately moved out of a lot of the guest operation issues. So, you know, now I don’t really know what’s going on too much on a day to day. What we’re really doing right now is focusing on our, on our goal right. Of two 50 units this year out, which we wanna own a hundred of them. So out the two 50 is gonna be the whole multifamily multifamily. So our role right now is you knowing with I strategy. So choosing the, where we, where we, and then, you know, from a I’m overshadowing, if your pricing isn’t correct, nothing really matters at the end of the day, you can’t sustain your business. So yeah, it, it’s more working on the business, the strategy, business development, sales, networking, and then pricing.
05:55:18
So with, with four people, you’re, you’re able to, at this point completely basically walk away from knowing the day to day operat. And you’re still able to, you know, run a profitable business.
05:55:32
Yeah. Right now it’s kind of, it’s kind of like that. Yeah. So, I mean, technically at this point, if we, if we wanted to, I think we could just step out and, and not work on the business and kind of let it run cuz we’ve created all these, you know, systems and procedures and standard operating procedures that I think that team would have enough oversight to manage. Yeah. I think at this point we’re pretty much.
05:55:54
Yeah. And, and what is, what is your buildout process when, I mean, you’re, you’re planning on scaling really quickly taking on a lot of units. What does building out look like? Are you going to the units and putting all the furniture together? Or what is, what does that look like
05:56:06
Since we’re gonna be approaching different city? The ideas we, we hopefully can work with some furnishing companies to kinda that, that already understand this operation nationwide, but yeah. Orchestrating that the onboarding process is, is actually, I just had a call with Kendrick about how we’re gonna operationalize and systematize that process. Right. Because when you’re gonna go to, let’s say Nashville and open up 30 units and then Atlanta open up 20 units, you know, you’re having 30 units of furniture. Right. So how do you kinda systematize that? That’s really what we’re figuring out right now. I think it’s gonna be a bunch of like ownership and checklists. And if we’re gonna do it ourselves, we’re thinking about maybe hiring like a logistics coordinator that kind of gets deployed to these markets to set up shop there. But you know, as of now, we’re, we’re still kind of figuring out whether we wanna outsource it to an established company that understands nationwide operations or just hire internally like a logistics coordinator who can fly to these one and expand an open up shop.
05:57:06
You you’ve been keeping everything pretty close to home for you right now. How, how is, have you been building out up to the 32 units or has that most of this been outsourced?
05:57:16
Yeah, no, no. That’s all been outsourced. I haven’t seen a lot of the units actually. Cause I do, I do operation. I do more of this systems. Kendrick was doing business development, sales. I think he’s only seen maybe 60 or 70%. I haven’t seen a lot of them. So we’ve, we’ve really like systematized it. We found someone that we’re working with we’ve been working with for the past year kind trained him. So he, he takes ownership. I think the biggest thing is we wanna make sure that everyone we’re, we’re allowing he able to take ownership so we can delegate something. Then we can elevate ourselves to the next thing that needs attention. So a business is very centralized around ownership. So the guy we’re working with, he’s kind of owning this whole process and understands it. So he knows what to do when we get a unit, our cleaning team knows what to do. Everyone just kind of owns their piece and it just like flows like that. So yeah, I haven’t seen a lot of them.
05:58:07
How do, how do you, how do you create that relationship with these types of people? Because you’re, when you say ownership, you’re not like giving a percentage of, of the company. I, I imagine no. When you say ownership, what do you mean
05:58:18
Ownership in terms of responsibility? I think just having encouraging people to kind of, we’re giving them a percentage of, of, of the company, but I think what they’re, they are getting is kind of an opportunity to see this company from nothing. I mean, it is very exciting. Like our first employee Karen joined, well, it’s been almost a year since she’s joined and she saw us when it was me and Kendrick, like going and staying up all night, furnishing apartments to, we have, you know, systems for, and, and people to support us. I think it’s making sure that people actually like what they’re doing and they’re happy. So I think what we, we try to do with the, this office vibe tool and, and tools is encourage like transparency because sometimes, you know, depending on culture, some people are not necessarily open to like giving feedback and, and actually sharing how they feel.
05:59:08
So office five, this app helps us kind of eliminate that, that friction between what people actually feel and, and create that transparency. So I get a lot of feedback there. So I get feedback, you know, saying like this week’s been really hard. The stress levels have gone up, helped, you know, I don’t, I feel like, you know, there’s too much going on and we’re not able to handle it. So I’ll make sure that I address that or, you know, other concerns. So I think really being there for people, letting them know that you’re, you’re actually listening and you want feedback. I think let’s people kind of give them ownership and, and be, feel excited about their job and, and kind of own it. Yeah.
05:59:43
Sh I’m sure that we should just keep on talking for, for quite a few hours, but I, I I’m, I’m, I, I wanna follow, follow your progress. I think it’s super interesting, you know, the there’s certain people that are doing some really unique stuff and, and you’re one of those people that I think it’s, it’s really cool. I think it’s really cool to, to see your progress on, on where you’re taking this, cuz you are taking a pretty, pretty unique approach. So I do wanna get you back on the show, you know, maybe, maybe a few months down the line, we’ll see, we’ll see where you’re at and your, your processes, but super, super interesting. Definitely wanna know more, one last question that I did, I do wanna ask though, is what’s in the space in the, in the VC venture back space for the short Rental economy.
06:00:31
Is there, is there a lot of noise or interest from people that are looking to invest into this or is it still pretty new for the people maybe that are feeling like I, maybe I missed boat or maybe it’s too late to start, you know, start my own Rental arbitrage or cohosting business, you know, coming from your, your, your background and from, you know, just where you are in the Silicon valley, a lot of money, a lot of people there. What, what is the, the, I guess the overall consensus with, with this, with this new market?
06:01:03
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of excitement. I mean, you can see that the, the way companies have just been popping up recently, right? Saunder’s been there for a while, but there’s, there’s a bunch of companies, you know, wa wander, Jon is a backed by coastal ventures. You know, there are a lot of companies popping up. I think the interesting thing is when, when you’re going that route and we didn’t necessarily go that route fully, we kind of are in the middle, but when you’re going that route and, and you see these VC companies very interested, you know, there there’s something up. I think if you just look at it from like the perspective, cause you know, some people, when we, we talked to them about our idea, they, they, they were like, you know, you’re not, how are you different from this company? That’s doing it.
06:01:45
That’s that company that’s doing it, which is, which is a valid point to some degree, if you wanna be the best in the world at it, right. If you wanna be the biggest and the best, then the question of how are you different is very relevant. I think taking it smaller to people who wanna start their own Rental arbitrage business and have, you know, 10 units, 20 units, 30 units, I think there’s way there’s more than enough space, right? If you think about it, how many rooms does Marriott alone have hotel rooms, right? Did they say, oh, we shouldn’t build any more hotels because we already have, you know, this many and we don’t know if people are gonna want it. I mean, the reality, it’s a function of supply and demand. You can see growth in demand for, for Airbnb and short term rental type products. And you know, all, all you need to understand is if there’s a growth of demand, there needs to be a growth in supply to fulfill that demand. So I think the market is definitely open to having 10, 20, 30 units on, on, on a small level. And then of course, if you find the right market, I think on a large level as well.
06:02:43
Wow. You know, I there’s, there’s so many, so many good takeaways from the show. I, I highly encourage anybody that is, you know, interested in scaling business. Definitely gonna listen to this and it, it’s gonna be interesting cuz I’m sure that your operations and how you’re gonna be using your team and the tools is gonna completely change in the X six next six months to a year. So gotta get you back on Shiv. Thank you so much for, for, for coming on the show. Is there any way that anybody wanted to reach you if they had any other questions? I know that you have some stuff going on as well with your, your syndication deals. If the, if anybody does have any questions, what’s, what’s the best way to get in contact.
06:03:17
Yeah, totally. Yeah. We’re always looking at looking to raise money and, and kind of get people excited about this opportunity that we have presented. You can reach me@shivatexperienceastro.com. So that’s, you know, my first name and then experience Astro. I’m sure Julian will provide in the show notes. And then you could also get us on our website@experienceastro.com
06:03:38
Experience Astro. Okay. Definitely include everything in the show notes. Thank you so much chip for coming on the show. And until next time host nation, keep on hosting. Hope you host benefit from the show. If you found value, please going 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, going over to our Facebook group, the host nation.
