How to identify a high cash-flowing short-term rental

0:00When I first started again I was we were in commercial and then pivoted to residential once we really said this is great but I had a property manager and the property manager frustrated me okay so I but I needed that time to be doing everything I was doing instead of dealing with tenants I was purchasing and rehabbing properties okay so I I only had so much time and I hear all the time oh I can just self-manage I heard it on a podcast people on podcasts here I am one of them right now but I'm always here to tell you the truth and be honest because I'm living it every day I'm not a fake person on a podcast making money off of coaching I don't make a dime off of coaching I make my money in real estate okay that's the truth so that's really going to be your first question but when I was I

0:48Had a property manager I got a little bit frustrated but I only had long-term rentals I was already managing the commercial that was no problem so once I started into shortterm rals already having long-ter rals that were managed I finally said oh I'm pretty comfortable talking with these guests and so at the same time when my son hit I think he was 11 he actually found a baby squirrel and it was injured and it was very small and he's like Mom what do I do well of course I'm not this evil person that I kind of wanted to toss it out the window right and never see it again I was like no I I can't like I'm already have two young kids I had a a full-time job plus I'm doing real estate right I'm tapped out and so of course I'm at the baseball field who wants this baby squirrel well of course at six o'clock on a Friday a couple people said

1:36Oh there's this place or that place that'll take it but it's six o'clock on a Friday and if any of y'all know the South we shut down about three o'clock on Friday no work is g to happen unless you're me after three on a Friday I knew I was hosed until either Saturday morning or Monday I I knew it I was like oh man so of course I did what I taught my children when they were rehabbing my houses if you don't know how to do it get online and fix figed out so we did we got online we figured out how to take care of the baby squirrel some of it was good information and some of it was bad but of course we love this little baby squirrel well we thought it was a boy because we don't we didn't know anything there were things that we thought were things that ended up not being if that makes sense I don't mean to sound like an idiot but we didn't know we were doing I wouldn't NE yeah we thought it was a little boy and my son named the

2:25Squirrel Sid Well turns out it's a girl we figured out later it was a girl so we had this squirrel named Sid and man we just loved her she was awesome and when my son was in school I'm the one caring for the squirrel all day and my son Joshy was fantastic he would get up every four hours at night and feed her like he was very dedicated to this squirrel and we all just fell in love with her well so I'm always carrying Sid with me I'm at real estate closings I'm in houses I'm in Mall you name it I was there and and I just had a giant purse and there was a baby squirrel in it and the people that needed to know knew and the people that didn't didn't so she was great so of course you end up posting on on Facebook and whatever about this so you know it just kind of got to be where everyone kind of knew my son was raising baby squirrels and he was great at it he's a great kid

3:13And so of course squirrels started flying out at ush after Sid came around so as I'm carrying around baby squirrels which I have done for years I still do I I had one last week you know everywhere I would go I would see a squirrel and I'd be like oh there's Sid or Sid's relative you know everything became Sid and so I started saying well Sid was here you know look at that here Sid was here too like squirrels are everywhere so once I really decided that I just enjoyed Property Management I started to really enjoy the guest interactions and I I had a property manager for my short terminals as well so we have two different property managers two different asset classes and I said this is ridiculous I can do this myself and so I had zero and I mean zero intention for managing for anyone else and I do a lot of things to entertain myself and one was

4:02You I started naming llc's because I had been buying real estate well now that we had the squirrels we started naming our llc's after squirrels and when it came time to name my management company I named it Sid was here just for my own entertainment I like the name fast forward today and I'm a fairly good-sized property manager in Savannah managing for others but you know in the short-term Rental World in my opinion Kyle and you can tell me your thoughts maybe I'm crazy I think you do better in this business by standing out and being unique the last thing you want to be is boring and I found very quickly that even though I'm not smart enough to know that that was a great name that people would remember years later and they do I you know it's very memorable and it has a great story and I was always pet friendly with my real estate with my short-term rentals everything I always

4:50try to be very pet friendly because I want to always put that guest or that tenant first and I say I want to have a home that's amazing that they want to come to and that they and they're very comfortable and part of that is bringing your pet and I don't really care if it's your Shetland pony I'll take your llama if you're paying my pet fee and you know it's getting cleaned and put back in order there's no damage I really don't care so I found that tying in Sid you know went beautifully with what I was already doing which was providing great customer service we house squirrels we house humans and everything in between and people really remembered that and it it really came to my advantage you know later on but it really wasn't I wish could say oh I was so calculated and smart I wasn't I just was having a good time and to be honest I wanted to honor my son I have two

5:38sons who are wonderful don't get me wrong but my little one had just put his heart and soul into the squirrel rescue and just did so many things with it and I'm really proud of that every time I use that company name I know that it's a little honor to him and what he has done in life and it's just been really a great way to just celebrate our very unique family that's that's so cool yeah I I think I saw a statistic recently that I think it was like 75% of people who were pulled that that use short-term rentals say that they want to have they do it because they want more of the personalized experience they want to like feel a part of that Community a part like hear the about the host like you know that's they don't want blah they don't want the same of what they've seen every hotel room looks pretty much the

6:26same they want something unique so I think something like that really like you said it leaves its mark and it it that's why people enjoy using short-term rentals and it stands out which you know you definitely don't want to just blend in and be the same in short-term rentals so right that is so cool so on on the short-term rental topic then you have a very diverse portfolio why did you pivot to short-term rentals you know can you share a little bit about like what what your strategy is and why you've you've gone this way instead of you know going with more of the self storage and Commercial properties that's a very good question I'm going to start my answer with talking about the market okay okay and I'm talking any market and I love talking Assets

7:15In liabilities I love it and I will talk about that all day but in any asset class and especially real estate you're going to make your money going in and you've got to buy you've got to see around the corner okay so if you can can get ahead of the curve and get there before everyone else realizes it's coming that's where the money is made right if you'd have bought crypto 10 years ago yeah we wouldn't be having this conversation right you'd be on an island somewhere and and that's a great example but like you understand I started buying real estate in ' 04 05 06 I had a lot of real estate when the market crashed so I'm now in my I don't know what cycle second or third down cycle because things are a little bit down right now especially for short-term rals but I met hard an entrepreneur and what an entrepreneur does is the opportunity

8:04And go after it and I I am that person times 100 so we had commercial we had long-term Ral and as I said previously it's not easy to come up with that 20% down there were no podcasts when I started investing in real estate I didn't even read a book I think I read a book after I had two short two long Terminals and I had a bunch of commercial but that's a different animal once I podcast I said oh gosh this is fantastic I mean I didn't even know to go to YouTube at that point so I had to educate Myself by losing money and you learn real quick when you're losing money I assure you so I needed the I kept running out of cash honestly to come up with that 20% down payment we would work and work and i' I mean I was just doing all kind of side hustel I could but

8:52Long-term rentals it's a very long play to come up with that much cash when you're doing it the way I was which is 20% down Finance the other 80% and so I heard about short-term rals back in 2017 and they were not what they are today I just want to be very clear and I'm not saying I'm a genius but I was smart enough to recognize an opportunity well back to my first deal I'm living in a multif family and the second unit is a poolhouse so I heard about short terminals I'm short on cash and I said huh I have a fully furnished pool housee that I yet let my friends use you know I mean maybe five or 10 times a year but it wasn't really being utilized well we lived in that because we wanted to we wanted our space you know we didn't want people right on top of us so of course I knew my husband

9:40was going to be very opposed but I also knew that he was on the same team as me we were trying to gain real estate so that we could someday retire and so I I had him listen to the podcast that I heard it was y McIntyre back in 2017 and she talked about short marals I said babe she been on the show this she's amazing I'm the biggest fan of Diana she is now a friend I am so honored to say the first time she called me I was like oh my gosh it was like Brad Pit but anyway so I heard about it I said had my husband was I said please just give me a shot at this and he was just like ah people in our pool house you understand this was not done in 2017 right so we changed the front door I put on a keyless entry lock and that was about it because the thing was already furnished and I said I'm not putting a bunch of money I didn't have extra money at the time I was putting everything

10:29I could into buying long-term rals I put my pool house up bam it starts getting booked and I'm like really because we don't live in like the historic district of Savannah we're in the outskirts like it's beautiful don't get me wrong but it's not you know you're not going to walk across the street and and see a historic building you're just not I couldn't believe it and I said we got to do more of this so luckily I already had my home expenses covered so everything that was coming out of my pool housee was just gravy and I say this to everyone there's an asset in your life that you could cash flow off of it could be an extra car you might be able to put your cat on Instagram and make money I mean I don't know but there because of the shared economy there's so much opportunity to make money as a side hustle you just kind of have to figure it out and that's what came to me was that I already had an asset in my possession you

11:17probably do too I turned it into cash flow and boy did I see the money very within a few months I had enough money to buy my second so I took a single family home that second one was one that I already owned and I said well heck with this long-term Ral stuff I'm going to furnish the sucker so then we we rehabed it a little bit nicer than we normally did you know we put in like granite countertops where we normally would have put in laminate you know just stuff like that but I always say one buys two two buys three three by four so I started seeing that come to fruition and I was fairly familiar with the laws in Savannah and because I'm in real estate now and I started seeing all this opportunity in Neighbors kind neighborhoods on the outskirts and I knew it wasn't legal to short-term rent again this is 2017 2018 long before covid long before

12:05Anything and I kept getting people asked to stay in my pool house and my other one for two three four five months and I was like no I really don't want you in my backyard that long no offense but I'm gonna say something offensive I don't want you no I said there's an opportunity so I saw medium-term rentals coming years and years ago which is why I ended up getting to write two of the chapters for the book The 30-day stay I wrote about Savannah and book so I purposely bought home bought homes that could not be short-term rentals and I put them in as medium-term rentals so before Co hit three years before covid hit I had 10 to 15 medium-term rentals in Savannah nobody was doing them at that time and so I was out hustling with business cards going to real estate offices different hospitals I was going to different communities and saying hey I have these houses they're fully furnished all utilities you

12:54know internet blah blah blah no one else had them and so I had a waiting list three pages long for years on my medium ter rentals in fact when the movies found out about me I had movie companies calling and that's when I really started just going crazy with management because I was kind of the go-to chick in Savannah for years with these rentals and so again it was just me having enough of a finger on the market to go wow shortterm rentals okay and then I was like Wow medium term rentals okay and I would pivot and next you know my first medium- term rental I took a house that the owner owner was renting for 650 a month years ago everything in Savannah rented for 650 a month that is the godon truth and I said I think I can get 15,600 for this as a furnish rental and I did and that house now makes over 2,000

13:43A month as a medium-term rental it's still in service I bought it for $51,000 in 2018 and it's now worth over2 200,000 and it has been cash flowing for me since then okay so now medium-term rentals are a fad I've already been in it three years if you can find where the Market's going next and be an early adapter you're going to make really good money we're on the back side of the curve it's a little harder now as many people know but I'm just always saying keep your ear open keep your pulse on the market and see what's coming around the corner and try to get there before the next guy oh