VRM 153 – Our Airbnb Powerplay Strategy for 2022

Video Transcript

00:00:00

In this video, we’re going to be talking about our 2022 Airbnb short-term rental power play strategy. So stay tuned.

0:00:17

Hey, welcome back. Host nation tone. Another certification, the machine I’m Julian Sage with my partner in crime, John Bell. I’m very sorry for the delay in the videos we took about a month of hiatus to be able to really figure out what our goals are in 2022, moving forward, as well as some of the exciting new things to the content and the strategy that we will be moving forward. One part of that is you can go to our brand new facelifted website at Short Term, Sage dot com, where we did a complete overhaul of our branding and our messaging and what we’re trying to share, the community that we’re trying to build and the message that we’re trying to share with other people. We are 100% in the short term mental space and this channel, isn’t going to be changing away from that as far as our strategy, but we, we do have some things that we will be focusing a little bit more heavily in the short-term rental space, which you definitely wants to stick around for because after taking this month and working on where we see the short-term rental industry and what we want to do as a business, as a brand and where we see ourselves long-term in the future is also going to dictate how we are going to be producing content and sharing with you guys.

00:01:26

So maybe just the recap 20, 21, and what were some of the lessons that you learned this past year? Jon,

00:01:33

You know, one of the biggest lessons that I think we experienced as a company is that, Hey, although our methods are definitely still applyable till today, right? I mean, and forward doing that with the scale that we needed, wood was difficult to say the least, it became almost impossible to pick up 20 apartments in the same building. It became almost impossible to still get 10 units inside of a same building. I feel like that once 2020 head and the eviction moratorium kind of hit landlords, weren’t kicking out people. And the idea of bringing in a company which business travel and a general just took like a big dive. So there were less business travelers. I feel like some of the landlords were thinking, well, if the businesses aren’t traveling, then this person is at risk. I’d rather go get me a regular long-term tenant. And I think that kind of played out still to this day, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to still build a portfolio of, you know, a few units here at this building few units there.

00:02:44

And this building is just for us one, we’re trying to sustain employees and things. It’s very hard to go out and just get a few units and then hire people. And then you have to go get a few more and that might be too spread out to really make an efficient team. And for us, we want to make things a little smarter, a little more efficient. So we wanted to manage that risk. And I think our new plan going into this year is definitely our way forward, which solves our issues. Again, this is more of a scaling issue. This doesn’t affect anything that we talked about prior. It’s just scaling, right? I mean, if you know, you’re growing when you face new challenges and you have to figure out ways to kind of overcome them, and that’s all we’re talking about here. So our focus for 2022 is definitely to increase the CNDB quadrants of our RCB cycle, which again is a rent or a rental arbitrage, C as in co-hosting and B as in buying or purchasing properties. So we’ll be focusing on co-hosting and purchasing properties to help sustain our own growth.

00:03:58

Right? So what John was talking about with the RCB model, it’s something that we’ve always preached on the channel and kind of what I think makes our, our content and our strategy. So unique is that, you know, John really started when, when we first met, he grew to 24 properties in 18 months through rental arbitrage. And that was a very unique strategy to me and the way that John was able to scale that way, I haven’t seen anybody else do before. So that was really the pinnacle prime time. I feel where, you know, scaling was, was a bit easier, a little bit more predictable. And as that shifted, it started to shift more towards cohosting properties. And the focus was more on managing other people’s properties and working with other investors and partners and, and helping them to scale their portfolios. Because like we always say, you know, rental arbitrage is going to be that high cash flow, you know, very, very high cash flow, but you still do have to put in, you know, there is a certain level of risk with that because you’re paying for leases, you’re paying for furniture, all of these things.

0:05:04

So once you get to a certain point of scale with rental arbitrage, it makes sense to start co-hosting other people’s properties and growing through that model, but then cohosting properties, you know, we found out who do we want to serve and how do we, you know, what types of clients and what type of investors do we want to work with? Do we want to manage regular vacation properties? Do we want to manage apartments? Do we want to manage for individual investors? We want to manage for a group of investors. And then how do we want to scale? And scaling is, is really the, the thing that we came across when we finally came and figured out who, who we serve and how we want to grow and where we see the future of short-term rentals. Then we started finding some more of the challenges with scaling with our specific approach, which was still, you know, rental arbitrage or leasing properties.

0:05:55

So for us to be able to scale a little bit more predictably, our thought process is to purchase property and reach out to a wider audience of investors that are more traditional, more buy and hold focus that maybe don’t see the returns that the short-term rentals typically make, which, you know, we can see returns from purchasing properties in the twenties to thirties. Percent’s pretty, pretty common where in leasing property, you can see 50, a hundred percent, 120, 150. Those numbers aren’t uncommon either. So being able to take our knowledge and our expertise in the operations, and then be able to apply it in the, you know, traditional slower long-term rental space is a little bit more of our strategy. So blending the two, because I feel that for a long time, there was, there was a separation between the long-term rental and the short term rental.

00:06:49

And then now we’re starting to see a lot more crossover where a lot of multi-family investors are actually trying to lease out their own properties, or they’re trying to partner with other people. But again, that comes down to a scaling thing. How do you want to grow your business? You want to be working with someone that maybe doesn’t want to spend a lot of money into the property, or maybe they are, you know, they’re more flippant. Maybe they want you to lease up their property and then they want to sell the property, or maybe they want you to work with them and manage it, but only on a part-time basis. And maybe they want to try some different things. So it really is figuring out who you want to serve. And that’s really what we spent 2021 figuring out, or maybe everybody was figuring, you know, their own identity in their own personal lives.

00:07:36

We were figuring that out as well, but in our short-term rental business. So now moving into 2022, we’re really excited because we feel a lot more confident in as far as who we are and who we want to serve and the strategy at which we’re going to grow. And we’ve built up these years of track record of being able to operate short-term rentals, build up the systems and be able to teach what we have then on this, on this channel for here for over two years now, through all the interviews and all the content, the strategies, the operations, the, the know-how, the systems, the tools for being able to scale the market research, being able to analyze these, these rental arbitrage or co-hosting properties and build that business model. So moving forward into 2022, you know, our, our thought process and our strategy is, is a little bit more predictable, a little bit more sustainable for growth and reaching out to a wider audience of people that are more from the commercial, commercial space, more traditional long-term investors, and bringing that into the world of systems and automations in hospitality.

00:08:45

So our content, you know, for John and I is, you know, part of our, part of it is also John and I sanity to be able to bring some fresh content into the space, keep us excited is, is going to be more focused on the future and more market specific numbers, a lot more analytical. We’re going to try to bring you into the growth that, that we see, which is more of the buy and hold co-hosting space while still leveraging, you know, rental arbitrage. And we’re still going to be teaching all of the same strategies that we did before. Just, you know, we we’ve come to this point where we’re ready to grow and to take it to the next level. And we hope that you also can grow with us. And maybe you’re not at that point yet. Maybe you’re not aware you can go out and purchase a single family or multifamily or work with investors.

00:09:38

Maybe you don’t feel that you’re ready. Maybe you feel like you just want to get your first co-host property or your first rental arbitrage master lease property. That’s totally okay. And we’re going to be able to help you and support you along that journey. You can go back and listen to the hundreds of episodes that we have across our, our channel here. But at a certain point, we do want you to be able to scale and grow and create more of that buying hold wealth, be able to hold that, that money that you’ve made and be able to roll it into larger properties, have a little bit more predictability. And again, it might not be the fastest way of growth, but we know that it is going to be a lot more predictable and a lot more easy to scale because we’re going to have complete control over, over that asset and over what the numbers can be and how we choose to either keep the property dispose of the property. A bunch of different ways that we can grow. Go about that. So question the day, what is your strategy for 2022? We’d love to be able to know in the comment section down below, and until next time, host nation, keep on hosting.