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.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Shiv Gettu (00:00:00):
The way we transitioned into actually raising money was very unique, right? Because typically what people do is they eventually leave their job. They go approach a lot of VC 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 click, 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 growth and who we are as people, approach that person for money.
Julian Sage (00:00:34):
This is episode number 48 of the short term rental success stories podcast. Are you an investor that’s looking to have your home professionally managed, go to cohostit.com 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 in starting and growing the short term rental business. My goal is that you’ll be able to walk away with practical information that’ll help you become a better host and learn how to scale your business like any exceptional hosts. We all strive for five star reviews, so please go on over to iTunes and let us know what you enjoy because it really helps support the show. If you haven’t done so already, go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation to connect with the community.
Julian Sage (00:01:13):
Hey, what is going on? I am super excited to be back again with you this week. I wanted to highlight a special review that came in from JP grey and they said “Five stars, 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, then go to shorttermsage.Com/Strreview 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.
Julian Sage (00:01:56):
A couple of really exciting things. I know you all have been asking for when the BNB empire builders group is going to open up again and it will be opening back up in March. 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 mental space. A lot of it is just on operations and operations are important, but if you are trying to build your BNB empires, we want to be the platform for you guys to be able to grow your businesses. If you’d like more information on the BNB empire builders, if you’d like to fill out an application, then go to shorttermsage.com and on the homepage you can find where we are accepting applications. Another really exciting piece of news is that we are going to be opening up the VRM formula.
Julian Sage (00:02:41):
So if you are interested in starting automating and scaling your own vacation rental machine, Airbnb business, we are going to be opening up the program in March. This is going to be for our early adopters really. So if you are interested in becoming an early adopter for it then you can get in the early bird price, go to shorttermsage.com/earlybird 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 Jon and I have been working on for 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.
Julian Sage (00:03:33):
After talking with over 50 hosts now working with Jon 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 have. 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 going to be including that I don’t want to spoil the surprise but there is just so much.
Julian Sage (00:04:15):
And last note if you are interested in investing with us, cohostit is taking on properties for March. We do have quite a few properties that we are going to 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 cohostit.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 any of the management yourself, then go to cohostit.com. Fill 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 and now we have people like our special guests, Shiv Gettu.
Julian Sage (00:05:04):
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 first unit back in January of 2019. In the span of 14 months, they’ve scaled up to 32 properties, 25 in which are rental arbitrage and seven are cohost units. Now. Shiv is actually a really unique guy. I met him at the bigger pockets conference back in Tennessee this year and he is just a beast. He is like seven foot tall real young guy and he really just looked like a kid that just graduated from college. But man, this guy is rocking and rolling. And when Shiv told me about his story, about how he got into the space and how he was actually venture-backed other people to invest capital into his rental arbitrage business. The first thing that I had in mind was like, you know why?
Julian Sage (00:05:49):
Why would you do that? But the second was like how? How did you do that? 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 has been something 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, so you’ll hear this in this episode. If you’d like more information on this episode or any of the show notes, go to shorttermsage.Com/STR48 or if you’d like my show notes sent directly to your inbox every week, then go to shorttermsage.com/shownotes. With all that being said, on to this week’s conversation. Hey welcome back host nation to another episode of short term rental success stories. In this episode I have the special honors speaking with Shiv Gettu. 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?
Shiv Gettu (00:06:57):
Sure. Julian, thanks for having me. My name is Shiv Gettu. 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 decided 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 the short term rentals and was thinking about doing some buy and hold. But you know, after a few transitions decided that Airbnb was probably the best thing that I wanted to do at this point in time.
Julian Sage (00:08:04):
And just to give a little bit of pre context, you have 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, a 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 transition from you graduating kind of figuring out what you wanted to do to now you have 32 properties a year later and this, this, this big company?
Shiv Gettu (00:08:39):
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 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. In 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 cashflow here when you’re buying. So we thought about buying and doing some buy and hold in, in the Southeast. So we are looking at markets in Atlanta and Nashville.
Shiv Gettu (00:09:23):
And when I was looking at the deals, you know, we were, we found some good properties, they would appreciate a little bit, but they’d cashflow a few hundred dollars. And I was like, okay, how long is this going to take for me to actually, you know, raise money or save up enough money to buy these properties and then have it eventually replaced my, my W2. And it didn’t, it didn’t necessarily seem like the fastest way. So 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 across this article by Paul Morgan is actually a good friend of ours now. He’s a multifamily guy transitioning into storage. So he wrote this article about this guy called Jay Marnie, 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 and he’s working four hours a week earning, you know, seven figures or six figures.
Shiv Gettu (00:10:20):
And we were just like, wow, this, this seems ridiculous. I mean, he doesn’t even own the properties he’s renting and re-read thing. 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 a landlord who owns quite a bit of real estate here. We kind of pitched our idea. And you know, he, he let us trial out our, our rental arbitrage idea on some of his units. So we, we, you know, we signed the lease with him. We each invest in 7,000. So my business partner, Kendrick at the time I was kind of bouncing around the idea of doing this real estate business with him and he was super, he was super down.
Shiv Gettu (00:11:08):
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 eventually agreed and gave 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 VC firms or angel investors and pitch to hundreds of people, you 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, I E going to a bunch of VCs and a bunch of angels and getting a hundred Nos and getting one. Yes. Why don’t we try to choose one relationship, go very deep with that relationship.
Shiv Gettu (00:12:00):
And once we build out a proof of concept, once they see us grow and understand our growth 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 his 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’d made great purchases, but he was kind of more lackadaisical in his management style and wanted you know, it wasn’t running as efficiently as it could be. And we kind of 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 want to learn. Right?
Shiv Gettu (00:12:44):
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 him and spend time and help him out that he ended up just offering Kendrick on 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 business works the more opportunity we get to learn, but also the more opportunity we get to build this deep relationship 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 raised money. Long story short.
Julian Sage (00:13:35):
So you guys are 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 of 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 relationship? Because maybe a lot of people that are listening to the show, they might then maybe they don’t have the money, but they have a partner that does have some money, but you both have the, you guys had a little bit of money to put into these properties. So how, how are you delegating tasks?
Shiv Gettu (00:14:09):
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 you know, systems building. I’m not 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 we’re not missing the ball on 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 kind of how we moved forward. From, from a, from a task split, Kendrick was kind of responsible for furnishing and, and kind of getting it beautified. I was responsible for building our operations and our teams and managing, cleaning and pricing and kind of systematizing the whole business. Well, he focused on business development and sales and building relationships.
Julian Sage (00:15:25):
So you had these couple of properties, 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.
Shiv Gettu (00:15:37):
Yeah. 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 can take it the buildings 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 then 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 like simulate the experience with nothing in there. So I was sleeping in the apartment and then I suddenly noticed that there was some cockroaches and bugs and, and it wasn’t necessarily the best unit, especially since we were considering doing corporate rentals.
Shiv Gettu (00:16:29):
Which, you know, Airbnb and corporate, it’s all review based and hospitality driven. So that wasn’t necessarily the best fit. So unfortunately that unit did work out. But we, we kind of transitioned into finding another building and getting in a unit there and we started the worst time, right? We started in December. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea of the tools that we could use and we were losing money, 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 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 the room, you know, with one bed or two beds. What happens if we’re able to put two beds in a bedroom, right? Well, that increased 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. Granted 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.
Julian Sage (00:17:45):
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 additional capital?
Shiv Gettu (00:17:57):
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 there are two business models. I, 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. Acid 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 whenever you make a on top of that, it’s yours. The other model, which we call asset light is when you take a management fee, kind of co-hosting, 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 had to start raising money.
Shiv Gettu (00:18:44):
But we didn’t necessarily want to sell a piece of our company. So we took debt money, which is 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 had 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 and that kind of got us to 15, 15 units. So we did that for 15 units. So we raised 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.
Julian Sage (00:19:27):
So you scaled up to 15 units. How long did it take to get to 15 units after you started sourcing money?
Shiv Gettu (00:19:35):
Yeah, so we, our first unit was in January in 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 to like five units in may. 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 rent and repeat. And just scaled really fast and that’s when we kind of approached and raise this venture angel money.
Julian Sage (00:20:12):
Where were you getting all of these units from? Was it from the same manager investor or
Shiv Gettu (00:20:17):
No, no, no. Yeah. So we, we, we took a few of, a few more from him, but we didn’t want to 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 had her leads, so we’d, we’d scrape all the Craigslist and the Zillows and the Zumper and all of that get all the, all the places that we’re looking to find renters for their properties in the areas that we desired. And then what we did is we had her do cold calling every day.
Shiv Gettu (00:21:04):
So we created a script. So she would do, you know, anywhere between 40 and 40 and 80 calls a day, right. With and telling, you know, calling them saying, Hey, is this XYZ property available 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’d get some, some some yeses. And then from those yeses, what we did is we tried to establish a deep relationship with them. Oftentimes they were property managers. The huge upside when you are doing Austin heavy is that property managers love you, right? Because you’re basically doing their job and helping them fill their units without really, you know, any work on their part. Right? So we’ve 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 towards, Hey, Kendrick, hey Shiv. Like we have this unit available. We said, okay, yes, yes, yes, yes. And that kind of helped us scale that way.
Julian Sage (00:22:02):
Oh yeah, you, you, you found the golden goose. And that’s, that’s that’s awesome. And I saw you’re, you’re, you’re in quite a few cities are in San Jose, San Bruno dally 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.
Shiv Gettu (00:22:29):
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 of California. We have some in Reno. We’re looking in Nashville right now. The idea was they, they were relatively close. But I think to answer more of your question, the idea is yeah, we want to be kind of location agnostic in the sense that we want to 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 a 35 unit apartment complex that they want to do short term rentals on, I want to be able to leverage that opportunity and set up shop there so I can capitalize on this 35 units. 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 see opportunities and take hold of them when they come.
Julian Sage (00:23:32):
So you get two 15 units and at that point where I imagine that you were pretty profitable, how much were you getting per unit at that point?
Shiv Gettu (00:23:43):
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 longterm lease, that difference is outweighed by the profitability that you can get when you’re Airbnb. So let me explain it through numbers, right? Let’s say I’m renting a one bedroom for $2,500, right? These are by the way, Bay area prices for anyone not in the Bay area. You’re renting a one bedroom for $2,500, right? If you, for longterm, let’s say a one year lease, if you rent a two bedroom, it’ll maybe cost $2,800, $2,900, right? So that three or $400 difference that we would pay in 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 bedroom is still a hotel room, whatever, but the two bedrooms are complete different products. So we started moving into two bedrooms. We were looking at, you know, $1,000, $1,500. Sometimes in our bigger houses we were doubling rents. So we got four thousand five thousand dollars a month. So yeah, it kind of spread, but on average maybe $1,500 per unit.
Julian Sage (00:25:02):
So I mean you, you, you guys were making 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, kinda cruise by. What, what changed because 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 the California area that it’s just like, okay, we’ve got to do the tech startup thing and got to sell the company? Or, but what, what made that switch so that you need to just, you, you could, you could have scaled this you know, using your own capital, but you decided to take a different approach. And I’m curious as to the reasoning behind that.
Shiv Gettu (00:25:45):
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. All 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 28th, December 25th or 28th, 2018. Right. And Kendrick and I sat and 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 is it a nice view and have this like, you know, end of year business meeting and plan for the next year. Right. So we set out in that plan to chalk out what we wanted to do in 2019. Right. some of our goals were to get to 20 units by the end of the year to have discounted cashflow of 300,000 for 2020. And the, these were our goals, right? So when we started getting pretty close 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 initially.
Shiv Gettu (00:26:41):
We thought it was okay, like old, the whole financial freedom thing 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 the salary, it was great. But I think we w we kind of just got there faster than, than we thought. And we didn’t necessarily want to stop there because we were enjoying the process. You know, I, someone told me this analogy a while ago about the road to HANA. There’s a story where his friend this guy’s friend was in and Hannah and you know, he asked a local person how do I get to HANA? 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 Hannah and they’re driving really fast and, and you know, they’re, they’re trying to get there before sunset and they get, they get there and they kind of are just looking around and they’re like, wait, what?
Shiv Gettu (00:27:37):
What’s so different about it? And they go back down and they talk to the, the, the person who told them to get there before sunset. And he said the whole point of going up the road Tonto is not the end destination. It was kind of the road itself right on the journey. So I think for me, and 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 wouldn’t be as exciting. So we thought we’d just raised money and play out this journey and kind of enjoy the experience and see where it goes.
Julian Sage (00:28:09):
Now do you connect with a lot of hosts? Or are you guys, 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, fund 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’re able to, you were received to start funding into properties and how much you, you gave up your company for that.
Shiv Gettu (00:28:39):
Yeah. I wouldn’t be able to receive a share how much we gave up, but we raised about 800,000. But yeah, 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 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 with the investors that we’re working with. They’re very, very weighed 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 lenient in the sense that a lot of the big decisions were still in control of and you know, we have a very good working relationship with our investors. So we have weekly meetings. We make sure that we’re on track. It just adds that layer of accountability, which I
Julian Sage (00:29:41):
Think is, is that it’s beneficial in the long run. So, yeah. And what does, 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 7,000, 800,000, you could, you could do quite a few units. What is it? What does it look like when you have all of that, how you’re going to be operating moving forward.
Shiv Gettu (00:30:07):
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 lease is 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 poor economies of scale, looking at and 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 you can work with the apartment complex, right? Because if you have a 50 unit apartment complex, we tell them that they’re making, you know, X dollars a month on longterm rent.
Shiv Gettu (00:30:51):
We can give you 1.4 X because of the short term rentals, yada 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 and where we’re playing with is how do we hybridize both the multifamily syndication world with short term rentals, right? The way we see it right now, his short term rentals 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 longterm rentals.
Shiv Gettu (00:31:37):
Right? And when you look at valuing commercial properties, the way they’re traditionally valued as, how much income is this asset producing, depending on how much income that asset is producing, that’s what the sales price will be, right? So our idea is if we’ve unlocked a way 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 as it is, convert them. So raise money, do multifamily syndications and convert these instead of being longterm rentals to short term rentals. 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 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.
Julian Sage (00:32:30):
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 mental syndication. Did, did you have a whole lot like I mean 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’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.
Shiv Gettu (00:33:05):
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. I’m nowhere near comparing myself to them. Obviously. What I’m trying to say is that people just learn along the way. You know, they probably 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 podcast, like other people’s podcasts, blogs, websites, just absorbing 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 we’re a lot smarter than me.
Shiv Gettu (00:33:56):
But I think the biggest difference is we were religious and obsessive about taking action, right? Setting goals 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 use the internet to help us, right? There was a lot of resources there. And, and, and I think, like I said, it’s more a part of the journey. So I think the way we’re looking at it is like what, 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 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 to see, see where it goes.
Julian Sage (00:34:44):
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 us indication mindset, 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 estate and, you know, the short term rental world. It’s almost kinda like the wild West. It’s like people are really you know, sling in deals in China, 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 similar to like Saunder lyric style was, was that the approach that you were going with when you initially got that that VC capital that you were going to be going more the, the, I, I guess you could say traditional route with apartment
Julian Sage (00:35:38):
Complexes and furnishing them that way?
Shiv Gettu (00:35:40):
Exactly. Yeah. 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 our growth curve, et cetera. So we pitched all the numbers in the numerics and that’s what we were going to 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 space doing either. Right. They would traditionally maybe do some multi-families indications and maybe make five or 10% of their, their port, their, their units short term or corporate.
Shiv Gettu (00:36:24):
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 rentals, the returns for our investors would far outweigh than traditional multi-families indication. Just because of the economics of short term rentals, right? If we’re, if a traditional short multifamily syndicator is doing longterm rentals and getting X, I mean we will just get 1.3 X or 1.4 X even 1.7 X. And how does that translate to invest a return on their money? So I think, you know, we really see a lot of opportunity in merging these world worlds. You know, we’re always looking for investors and that’s kind of how our, our approach is going to be. Moving forward.
Julian Sage (00:37:08):
You know, I, I kind of see a couple of pivotal moments you know, one of them being when you, when you had those, those, you know that your first couple of 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 want it 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 wants to get other people involved to raise that initial capital. You said you raised the bar around $80,000 from friends and family. What, what does that look like when you are pitching to doing that initial round of funding?
Shiv Gettu (00:37:47):
Yeah, so we did, we did a lot of we did it very bite-sized. 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 personalities is we were very metrics driven, very numbers driven. I think, you know, any investor in reality cares about the return they’re going to get on their investment. Right? And the only way you can 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, this is our projections of how it’s going to look. If you give us this much money, this is how we think we’re going to do in our business and this is why we think we can guarantee you and you know, eight, 10, 12% return on your money.
Shiv Gettu (00:38:33):
Right? I think there’s a bunch of ways to do it right? And 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 to cohost way, right? Because that’s almost like the financially less risky way of building up proof of concept. I think the way it works that we shouldn’t, Silicon Valley is like, it’s very proof of concept driven. Right? If you can build out your proof of concept and 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 liable and then kind of building your systems and tractions and then maybe moving onto master lease. 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 an opportunity you think is stronger, I would leverage that.
Julian Sage (00:39:47):
So you were basically guaranteeing your, your friends and family a the return on their investment at with the 8% or 12% yield on that.
Shiv Gettu (00:39:59):
Right? Exactly. So if they gave us, you know, $10,000, we would promise them a percent return every annually, basically. Yeah.
Julian Sage (00:40:08):
Okay. So this was, this was, this was a longterm play for them. This wasn’t just a quick, they hand you the money and then you give them back a certain percentage more and then that’s, that’s the end of the relationship is more of a percentage stake.
Shiv Gettu (00:40:22):
No, we, we were thinking like, let’s say if they gave us 10,000, we would try to pay it. I think one of the strategies we did, yeah, we would try to pay out the pay, pay it back 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 reinvest it to pay off our investors. I think their hold, they were thinking maybe a year or two years. I mean, we’ve paid off a lot of it. 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’re just starting out and that’s the only way you can start out, I would recommend this.
Julian Sage (00:41:01):
I think it’s super interesting. I talked to a lot of people and they say, Oh, I, you know, I like, I like, you know, because there’s so many different ways that you can play in the 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 co-hosts they were 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 in units that were already operating in. You know, there’s, there’s all these unique twists in this business that are just nobody, nobody had 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 shit because, you know, you went from, you know, a couple of couple of units to now you’re, you’re going the more traditional you know, Silicon Valley, you’re out 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 now you’re doing something completely different almost, you know, moving into a space that is really untouched.
Julian Sage (00:42:01):
For the people that are looking to be able to scale quickly though it, I guess, I guess the question would be, do you, could, could you have scaled the, to where you are now if you didn’t 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 about a year?
Shiv Gettu (00:42:26):
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 going to do, you know, signing master leases, money needs to come from somewhere. So, but I think, I think, you know, co-hosting or property management is easily doable or, you know, I’m where I’m working with a few guys in the Bay area, I know who have grown in the past few months to 10 properties. And they’re, they’re doing all a property management cohost where they’re, they’ve kind of tapped in a, a real estate agent network and yeah, or getting property managers to refer them and kind of 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’s good to be receptive and to be open minded.
Shiv Gettu (00:43:22):
But sometimes what we would do is we’d hear someone who, who was supposedly an expert and then kind of just assumed 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 going to share on this podcast and other podcasts are all good information, but you need to really understand what your situation, right? Like where, where your upsides are, right? We were kind of from this area, we, we had built this network that we could leverage that maybe I wouldn’t have heard this whole strategy of raising money on a podcast because most people are like, you have to go to, you know, a hundred investors, 200 investors and, and talk to them. We decided to spend like a year building this relationship with him, having, you know, Kendrick work with him as a property manager and kind of deepen the relationship and kind of guide them through that and eventually requests to raise money.
Shiv Gettu (00:44:10):
But you know, in your situation may be something different, right? You may have worked in a property management company and you can contact all those property managers and tell them 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 the differentiation between someone who, who is, who is good and someone who’s great, 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?
Julian Sage (00:44:43):
What has been the most challenging part of scaling your short term rental business?
Shiv Gettu (00:44:47):
Yeah, so we’re, we’re at 31 properties right now. We have 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 going to be in, what market that’s going to be. And we’re kind of moving away from California just because, you know, California is not necessarily the most landlord friendly place. You know, that’s a lot of regulations, etc. So we, we do corporate rentals, which is 30 plus days stays in, in places that have regulation, but I think the biggest challenges 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 is sales and business development, you could grow exceptionally fast, but then do you have the operational capacity to handle that growth? So I think understanding that balance and then figuring out what market we’re going to kind of dedicate our, our financial and human resources.
Julian Sage (00:45:55):
When you’re talking about scaling, scaling a team you started off with the one VA who was your sales person, 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 VA’s which is still 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 VA’s on your team and how you’re building that out?
Shiv Gettu (00:46:26):
So we’re very technology driven, but 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 and Kendrick’s in Washington right now. So we’re all virtual. We built this whole thing virtually. I think what we tried 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 apps. So one of the apps we use is called geek bot. That basically allows us to do daily standup calls with our team virtually. So every day, this geek bot 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 value for that day?
Shiv Gettu (00:47:17):
Then what else are they going to 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 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 kind of helps you understand employee engagement. So it’s kind of an anonymous feedback tool, which allows all our team members to give feedback, right? 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 very important and, and making sure they’re working efficiently and, and empowering them.
Shiv Gettu (00:48:03):
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 from 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 and messaging. So let’s put them here or this person is very good with numbers. I’m going to have them own pricing. So kind of being obsessive about understanding strengths and weaknesses and then organizing your team to maximize the value.
Julian Sage (00:48:43):
I think it’s super just the shift. I love talking to the hosts. They 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 partner John who John Bell who, who runs cohost, he has about 35 properties or so. He also is a super lean team. Yeah. I think he has like one assistant and 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 I’m curious, I wanted to know though, what are you doing with your VA’s? Like who are the, what are the roles of the people that you’re adding on and where do you see those rules going?
Shiv Gettu (00:49:24):
Initially we, so we have four right now. We just hired our fourth person recently. Initially what we were doing that was actually affecting our ability to to be, to hold accountability within our team was we were kind of 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 to get done the likelihood of it getting done.
Shiv Gettu (00:50:10):
If I say like, you know, let’s have a calendar, let’s have a meeting next week to talk about it. 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. So making sure all the details are correct. I’m watching, I’m 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.
Shiv Gettu (00:51:02):
Have you heard of entrepreneurial operating system? It’s, it’s by this book, traction by Gino Wickman was super helpful for us to just kind of organize our systems and frameworks. And 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 fairing for that quantitative goal. So it’s very systems driven. So for example, a Kendrick’s goal is, you know, 40 units, new units by the end of Q one, right? So 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, he’ll input how many leads he met and then we’ll discuss saying, okay, well why was it less? Why was it more, what could we do to get better minus like occupancy, random pricing. So our goal was I think 80 or 90% occupancy in Q1. So every week we have a, we have a review saying, okay, we were at this occupancy, why, why were we low or why were we higher, et cetera. And then every team member has their own metric that they own. And then we kind of walk through that every week to help make sure, making sure we’re all on track.
Julian Sage (00:52:24):
So you said, yeah. One person’s more for the listing management. You said one person manages more of the pricing.
Shiv Gettu (00:52:30):
Yeah. So one person’s listing, management pricing and then the other person is, is cleaning clean. I’m kind of owning our cleaning
Julian Sage (00:52:38):
The cleaning and that’s going to 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. Cleaners is, it’s one of the most sticky things in, in this business. It made it sticky because it really, it can get sticky. But it is also very challenging to find reliable cleaners. What, what does the operation look like when you’re scaled out across multiple areas?
Shiv Gettu (00:53:07):
So we our approach there is again, trying to find smaller, smaller companies smaller vendors. We don’t know. So like working with bigger, bigger vendors. Just because we noticed that when we, when we partner with, with the you know, 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 us. We, we have this tool called properly, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, to kind of track current cleaning quality and everything. So we partnered with one vendor. We do calendar sharing we cross reference with properly etc.
Julian Sage (00:54:00):
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 is you and your partners your partner’s role look like at this point?
Shiv Gettu (00:54:16):
So when we first started, we were working a lot, you know, in the business, you guys must have heard that phrase and working in the business person’s working on the business. We’ve, we’ve fortunately moved out of a lot of the guests 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 250 units this year, out of which we want to own a hundred of them. So a hundred out of the 250 is going to be the whole multifamily, the multifamily play. So our role right now is, you know, networking with investors kind of pitching our product strategy. So choosing the markets where we want to, where we want to grow and then, you know, from a high level, I’m still kind of overshadowing pricing just because there’s, your pricing is incorrect. Nothing really matters at the end of the day. You can’t sustain your business. So yeah, it’s more working on the business, that strategy, business development, sales, networking, om, and then price.
Julian Sage (00:55:19):
So with, with four people a year, you’re able to at this point completely basically walk away from knowing the day to day operations and you’re still able to, you know, run a profitable business.
Shiv Gettu (00:55:32):
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 because we’ve created all these, you know, systems and procedures and standard operating procedures that I think the team would have enough oversight to manage. Yeah, I think at this point we’re pretty much, yeah.
Julian Sage (00:55:55):
And what does, what does your build out process when, I mean you’re, you’re planning on scaling really quickly, taking on a lot of units. What is building out look like? Are you going to the units and putting all the furniture together or what is, what does that look like?
Shiv Gettu (00:56:07):
Since we are going to be approaching different cities, the ideas we, we hopefully can work with some furnishing companies to kind of that, that already understand this operation nationwide. But yeah, orchestrating that in the onboarding processes is actually, I just had a call with Kendrick this morning how we’re gonna operationalize and systematize that process, right? Because when you’re going to go to, let’s say Nashville and open up 30 units and then Atlanta opened up 20 units, you know, you’re having 30 units of furniture, right? So how do you kind of systematize that? That’s really what we’re figuring out right now. I think it’s going to be a bunch of like ownership and checklists and if we’re going to do it ourselves, we’re thinking about maybe hiring, like they would just IX 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 want to outsource it to an established company that understands nationwide operations or just hire internally like a logistics coordinator who can fly to these markets and expand.
Julian Sage (00:57:06):
You’ve been keeping everything pretty close to home for you right now. How, how have you been building out, up to the 32 units or has most of this been outsourced?
Shiv Gettu (00:57:17):
Yeah. No, 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 the 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 liked systematized it. We’ve found someone that we’re working with, we’ve been working with for the past year, kind of trained him. So he, he takes ownership. I think the biggest thing is we want to make sure that everyone, w we’re, we’re allowing people to take ownership so we can delegate something and then we can elevate ourselves to the next thing that needs attention. So a business is very centralized around ownership. So the guy we were 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.
Julian Sage (00:58:08):
How do you, how do you, how do you create that relationship with these types of people because you’re in, when you say ownership, you’re not like giving a percentage of, of the company, I imagine. When you say ownership, what do you mean
Shiv Gettu (00:58:19):
Ownership? In terms of responsibility, I think just having encouraging people to kind of, we’re not giving them a percentage of, of of the company, but I think what they’re, they aren’t getting as kind of a, an opportunity to see this company from nothing. I mean it is very exciting. 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 now we have, you know, systems 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 tried to do with the, this office vibe tool and tools is encouraged like transparency. Because sometimes, you know, depending on culture, some people are not necessarily open to like giving feedback and actually sharing how they feel.
Shiv Gettu (00:59:09):
So office five, this app helps us kind of eliminate that, that friction between what people actually feel 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 and the stress levels have gone up. Health, 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 lets people kind of give them ownership and then B feel excited about their job and, and kind of own it. Yeah.
Julian Sage (00:59:44):
I’m sure that we should just keep on talking for quite a few hours. But I, I, I’m, I’m, I wanna follow, follow your progress. I think it’s super interesting. You know, there’s certain people that are doing some really unique stuff and, and you’re one of those people that I think it’s really cool. I think it’s really cool to, to see your progress on, on where you’re taking this cause you are taking a pretty, pretty unique approach. So I do want to 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 want to know more. One last question that I did. I do wanna ask though, is what’s in the space in the, in the VC, a venture back space for the short term rental economy.
Julian Sage (01:00:31):
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, maybe I missed the boat or maybe it’s too late to start, you know, start my own rental arbitrage or co-hosting 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, I guess the overall consensus with, with this with this new market?
Shiv Gettu (01:01:03):
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of excitement. I mean, you can see the, the, the way companies have just been popping up recently, right? Saunders has been there from a while, but there’s, there’s a bunch of companies, you know, one wander, John is a backed by coastal ventures. You know, there are a lot of companies popping up. I think the interesting thing is when you’re going that route and we didn’t necessarily go that route fully. We kind of are in the middle, but w when you’re going that route and, and you see these VC companies very interested in, you know, there’s something up. I think if you just look at it from like the perspective, cause you know, some people when we talked to them about our idea there, they were like, you know, you’re not how are you different from this company that’s doing it?
Shiv Gettu (01:01:46):
That’s that company that’s doing it. Which is, which is a valid point to some degree if you want to be the best in the world at it, right? If you want to be the biggest and the best, then the question of how are you different? It is very relevant. I think taking it smaller to people who want to 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 this many and we don’t know if people are going to want it. Mean the reality is 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 to that. So I think the market is definitely open to having 10, 20, 30 units on, on a small level. And then of course, if you find the right market, I think on a large level as well.
Julian Sage (01:02:43):
Hmm. Wow. You know, there’s, there’s so many, so many good takeaways from the show. I highly encourage anybody that is you know, interested in scaling business. Definitely get a listen to this. And it’s going to be interesting cause I’m sure that your operations and how you’re going to be using your team and the tools is going to completely change in the next six the next six months to a year. So you got to get you back on shift. Thank you so much for, for, for coming on the show. Is there any way that anybody wants 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 anybody does have any questions, what’s, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Shiv Gettu (01:03:18):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, we’re always looking at looking to raise money and kind of get people excited about this opportunity that we have presented. You can reach me at Shiv@experienceastro.com. So that’s, you know, my first name and then experienceastro. I’m sure Julian will provide in the show notes. And then you can also get us on our website at experienceastro.com
Julian Sage (01:03:38):
Experienceastro. Okay. Definitely. I’ll include everything in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And until next time, host nation. Keep on hosting. Hope you hosts benefited 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.
Contact Shiv at
shiv@experienceastro.com
Shiv Gettu’s website
experienceastro.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. The closer you can get to an investor, and understand how their business works, the more opportunity you get to build a deep relationship with them.
2. When you’re managing properties, property managers love you because you’re basically doing their job and helping them fill their units without any work on their part.
3. Have weekly meetings with your investors to make sure you’re on track.
4. It’s a lot easier to scale when you can work with apartment complexes.
5. Short term rentals is the new age way of doing real estate.
6. Be religious and obsessive in taking action.
7. Make sure to set a goal and accomplish it.
8. Keep setting goals, and keep getting after it. Make sure that you’re enjoying the process.
9. Any investor cares about the return they’re going to get in their investment, and the only way you could show them is by proving out numbers.
10. If you can build out your proof of concept and show someone what you’re doing is working, it’s easy to scale that way.
11. The differentiation between someone who is good and someone who is great is the ability to identify an opportunity.
12. Utilize technology to run your business very efficiently.
13. When building a team, understand where people’s strengths are and where to place them, and organize them to maximize value.
14. Use tools such as Properly to track the cleaning quality done by your cleaners.
15. If your pricing isn’t correct, nothing really matters.
16. Allow people to take ownership so you can delegate tasks, then you can elevate yourself to the next things that needs attention.
17. Make sure your team like what they are doing.
18. Letting people know that you want feedback allows them to have ownership and feel excited about their job.
19. If you want to be the biggest and the best, then the question of “How are you different?” is very relevant.
This website is operated and maintained by Short Term Sage LLC. Use of the website is governed by its Terms Of Service and Privacy Policy.
Short Term Sage LLC may link to content or refer to content and/or services created by or provided by third parties that are not affiliated with Short Term Sage LLC. Short Term Sage LLC is not responsible for such content and does not endorse or approve it.
We use cookies to help improve, promote and protect our services. By continuing to use this site, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use.