To celebrate our 200th episode we’re recapping all the best moments from our very first live event: TFV Live! Experience at the Sahara Las Vegas.

Real Estate

Kenny Bedwell from STR Insights – STR real estate deals are both emotional and logical. Don’t just chase the right returns; make sure you’re investing in towns and communities that you have a connection with and are passionate about.

Creative Funding Panel – There are a myriad of ways to make a real estate deal happen. Don’t stop if you get turned down by one or two banks; keep asking, and keep pitching. (Or, be like Mike Hicks, and focus on private lenders over banks!)

Operations

Sean Kemper from Kemper Industries – Make sure you have the proper array of cleaning supplies for your STR (and your home). Not every solution works with every type of mess; whether it’s mold, pet messes, or salt & snow from winter, you need the right product for each scenario.

Justin Ford from Breezeway – Safety is the MOST important thing in any STR. Treat your property the same way that hotels are required to do by law, including smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, and structural safety. Don’t assume that insurance has you covered! (And be sure to get your free safety certification from Breezeway).

Kyle Stanley from Fearless Kyle – Don’t overthink hiring; leverage your network, take action, and hire before you’re ready. Try posting something like this on your social media of choice: “I’m looking for someone in [Your Area] who would like to make $400-500 per month, part-time, to help with some real estate tasks. So easy, anyone can do it. Please message me or tag someone you know who may be interested.”

Marketing

Emily Miethner from GetawayUpstate – Leverage social media to differentiate your listings and drive interest from guests. And don’t underestimate the power of influencer marketing: you can partner with local influencers and media outlets in your area to offer giveaways or promotions and drive new bookings.

Arthur Colker from StayFi – It’s never too early to start gathering your guest’s information to build an email list. StayFi offers an integration for your property’s WiFi to automatically collect guest emails and begin cataloging them into your email marketing tool of choice.

Direct Booking Panel – Don’t leave your success in the hands of Airbnb! You could go from 0–30% direct bookings (or more) just by taking quick action on simple items like creating your direct booking website, or starting a blog based on your property’s city or state.

Thank you so much to all of our guests, speakers, and sponsors who made TFV Live possible!

Resources:

• Vacation Rental Manager's Association
• Thanks to Breezeway for letting us record at their booth
• #STRShareSunday: @ThanksForVisiting_

Mentioned in this episode:

Hosting Business Mastery Method | Join us for our live, free, host masterclass and learn how to OWN your digital real estate!

HBMM | Sign up today at hostmasterclass.com.

Breezeway | Go to breezeway.io/tfv to claim your free implementation when you start a Breezeway account.

Minoan | Minoan helps short-term rentals and boutique hotels enhance their appeal with their customizable, curated retail platform.

Minoan | Visit MinoanExperience.com and tell them TFV sent you!

[00:00:05] You are listening to the Thanks for Visiting Podcast. We believe hosting with heart is at the core of every short-term rental. With Annette's background in business operation--

[00:00:14] And Sarah's extensive hospitality management and interior design experience, we have welcomed thousands of guests from over 30 countries, earning us over $1,000,000 and garnering us thousands of five-star reviews.

[00:00:27] We love sharing creative ways for your listing to stand out, serve your guests and be profitable. Each episode, we will have knowledgeable guests who bring value to the short-term rental industry.

[00:00:39] Or we will share our stories of our own experiences so you can implement actual improvements to your rentals. Whether you're experienced, new or nervous to start your own short-term rental, we promise you'll feel right at home. Before we dive into the content, let's hear a word from our sponsor.

[00:01:01] Hello listeners, welcome back for another great week. I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:01:05] I am Annette Grant, and together we are--

[00:01:07] Thanks for Visiting.

[00:01:08] If it sounds noisy, if it sounds a little like--

[00:01:12] There's commotion.

[00:01:13] A commotion, it's on purpose.

[00:01:15] Right.

[00:01:16] We are recording from VRMA from the Breezeway booth. We were so excited. We asked Breezeway. We're like, it'd be really fun to just set up shop, recap our event this weekend. And Annette, what else are we doing?

[00:01:29] We are celebrating drum roll. I wish I had it. Our 200th episode. I can't even believe I'm saying that. Our 200th episode. But Sarah, let's kick the show off like we do every time.

[00:01:40] All right. So we're going to kick off the show like we do each and every week. That's sharing one of you our amazing listeners and viewers, but instead of sharing one of your properties this time, we want to ask for your help and we would like for you to STRShare us, Thanks for Visiting.

[00:01:56] So we are our own, STRShareSunday is @thanksfor visiting_. And if you are one of our listeners that we absolutely adore and love, what we ask this week is that you share us with either one of your hosting friends, someone that wants to host, or even someone that just uses vacation rental, short-term rentals. That would mean the world to us. So we're going to give ourselves a little love this week. But because we love you so much, we want you to continue to hopefully spread our message. You can make some more hosting buddies and yeah, just give us some likes, give us some love and share on the podcast with the world.

[00:02:32] All right. So if you guys know or don't know, Annette and I had a live event this past weekend, the weekend prior to VRMA. If you don't know VRMA it's totally fine. It is the Vacation Rental Managers Association. It's an international event. So if you want to belong to a professional organization like VRMA, it's a really great educational place for you to be around other like-minded collaborators.

[00:03:01] This is their international event, but they have regional events across the country all throughout the year. Some of them, I believe you do need to be a member, and then other ones you do not need to be a member. You can get a ticket still. But Sarah and I, cannot support education and finding your people. And this is exactly the place that you could do that. So we want to give VRMA some love. Check them out vrma.org.

[00:03:27] Yes, and of course thank you to Breezeway not only for sponsoring our podcast, but thanks to Ben at Breezeway for allowing us to crash their booth here at VRMA. We think it's a really good opportunity to just recap our first live event this weekend. We would like to give you our top takeaways from our speakers who so generously shared their time with us.

[00:03:51] And their knowledge. And if you don't know what we're talking about, we had our first live event, TFV live in Las Vegas at the Sahara on October 23rd. We had around 175 amazing host speakers, sponsors, and it was a blast. It's still a blast. People are still here hanging out. And we're going to go over that. What was one of your biggest takeaways from our morning sessions about--

[00:04:14] Real estate.

[00:04:15] And like analyzing deals, the properties? What was something that just really you were taking notes on, Sarah?

[00:04:21] So first of all, we asked our members, our HBMM members, if we do a live event, what do we want to cover in the live event? And so we structured the education around what they requested and they wanted real estate, operations, and marketing. So in the real estate portion, we had Kenny Bedwell from STR Insights, we had Tony Robinson from the Real Estate Robinson's. He's also the host of the BiggerPockets Rookie Podcast Panel--

[00:04:48] In the morning--

[00:04:48] Creative funding panel.

[00:04:50] We had Joe Vieri talking about taxes and cost segregation.

[00:04:54] Yes, so my biggest takeaway was I think I'm going to go with cost segregation and depreciating our assets and being able to pull out money that I-- the short-term really benefit from all the tax but benefits and shelters that are short-term rentals are properties bring us and there are people like Joe that can help us--

[00:05:17] You need to make sure-- and the key there is don't just stop at the first person that is a CPA or a bookkeeper. You want to keep searching, searching, searching. And we can tell you, Sarah and I, on our business journey, I think we're on our second bookkeeper, our second CPA. We're always making sure that we're keeping up to date. And it's nothing about the bookkeeper CPA. It's we want people that are in their zone of genius ad we're in that same zone of genius. So please make sure that's on the top of the list because we're getting towards the end of the year. Don't delay. Work on that today.

[00:05:53] What is your biggest takeaway from the real estate portion?

[00:05:55] The biggest takeaway, again, it just keeps coming back to me over and over again. And it was Kenny Bedwell and it was that when you're analyzing deals, it's still logical and emotional. And you can have a spreadsheet all day long and run the numbers, run the numbers. But if that property's in a town that you don't have any sort of an emotional draw to, it doesn't matter what the numbers are. And we don't want short-term rental homes just chasing the cash on cash return or chasing where they think they're going to have the biggest tax deduction. So I love that he continues to bring that up. And it actually, to be honest, it just makes me feel good about how I feel about investing and that-- Sarah and I are backyard investors in Columbus, Ohio. And we're not in the Smoky Mountains. We're not in Joshua Tree. We're where we know the property. And not to say we won't go to those places, but he just reassures us-- because I also don't like the emotion and logic is like, how many doors do you have? And it's quality over quantity.

[00:06:55] Yeah. If I'm going to sneak one more takeaway there, we had a creative funding panel. And number one, I love that of the four seats, three of them were sat in by women because--

[00:07:06] Tanya Rooney, Ashley Gallagher--

[00:07:09] Annette Grant, and then, of course, Mike who is probably the king of creative funding. But the message from the entire creative funding panel, which I know all your listeners and viewers are going to really appreciate, is like Annette said at the beginning of this whole recap of the real estate portion is don't settle on the first bank you call, the second bank you call. I'm actually in a situation right now where I had the first bank let me down. The second bank was also not helpful. And all of my friends at this event reminded me, call bank three, four, five, and six. Get it done. You have to be tenacious.

[00:07:41] And by the way, again, Sarah and I are also going to start working with two new banks and we're going to introduce you to them hopefully soon because we need to diversify that also. Another thing from the creative funding panel, a takeaway from that is you always need to be planning your next deal before it's anywhere in your world. You need to be making those connections, asking people, do you know anyone who-- do you know anyone who would want to invest? Do you know anybody who has money to invest? And that's a nice, soft way to ask that person directly, but indirectly, and ask them if they want to invest. And so that's just the way-- because there were people asking questions during the panel and they were trying to get the funding together while the deal was on the MLS and it passed them by and I was like, you need to prepare for that before you're ready. Speaking of the MLS, it was time and time again at our event. We asked our panelists, our speakers, our attendees, when they were talking about a specific property where they found it, MLS came up over and over and over again. So I don't want you to think-- a lot of people think that things have to be like this magic off-market deal that they found to make the numbers work. And that was something that was really reassuring for me that, okay, things can be found on the MLS, they can be found on Redfin, they can be found by driving through your neighborhood and seeing "Not for sale" sign in the yard.

[00:09:12] Yeah. All right. Let's move on to the next pillar of our aggressive, all-day learning intensive event was operations.

[00:09:21] Oh, Sarah just lit up.

[00:09:22] I did. I did light up. So we have the real estate in the morning. We got it. We secured the property.

[00:09:27] We had an amazing lunch. Thank you, Sahara. Our lunch was amazing.

[00:09:31] It was good. It was very good food. But that's the thing that we feel sometimes is missing when people talk about short-term rentals and acquisition is what to do with it afterward. I know all of you know that it is a far more difficult than just hiring a great professional cleaner and then going to the beach and sipping on your cocktails. So my biggest takeaway is I was very excited. I found I got introduced to Sean Kemper of ETI Solutions.

[00:09:55] And we are going to do more work with him in the future, so whole time.

[00:09:57] We are. So he manufactures cleaning products down in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and his products are safe and they are effective and they are inexpensive because of the way he is created the packaging system for them.

[00:10:14] Yes. And we were sitting there, I was like taking notes on mold and I didn't understand what bleach did to mold. Here's the thing, listeners. If you have a cleaning team, you still need to educate yourself, know the products that they're using in your home, supply them the products. If you're going to have an opinion about what's being used in your home, on your marble countertops, on your hardwood floors, don't just let-- you need to have a partnership with them on that. And if you're asking for certain things, you need to support them with the right tools and right products.

[00:10:49] And protect your materials. A lot of you are doing amazing builds, unique situations, unique materials inside your property so that you stand out. You don't want those to get ruined by having the wrong chemicals.

[00:10:59] It's an investment. So Sean Kemper was awesome. Like I said, we are going to bring him back to talk about his amazing products and just give us some of the chemistry. We learned a lot of chemistry, and that was important to the cleaning.

[00:11:12] And I will tell you, if you want to get a hold of Sean, he will actually get on the phone with you like a Zoom call and build out a cleaning program for you with his chemicals. So you can describe what you need and he'll tell you of his products what will work best. So I love supporting Sean. He's a good guy. He supports our industry.

[00:11:28] He's doing the most important work.

[00:11:30] Of course, we had Justin Ford there.

[00:11:32] Yep. Another shout-out for Breezeway. He is Breezeway's safety-- just he's all their safety.

[00:11:38] Yeah. International safety expert Justin Ford and he, of course, if you are new to our podcast, thanks for being here. Justin's been on our podcast more than any other guest because safety on our spaces is the most important thing. Of course, to protect our assets that again, we've invested so much money in, but also to protect our guests and us from liability. And no one wants to get sued.

[00:11:59] So awesome. And my biggest takeaway from Justin this time, which every single time I learn something is just how insurance companies are not looking at accidents anymore. These are incidents. You can't just say, oh, sorry, there was an accident in my house. There needs to be preventative things going on. You are a commercial business and people are paying to stay there. So your safety standards need to be up to speed. If you have not checked out Breezeway safety certification, please, please do that.

[00:12:32] It's free. It's free for you to do. And if you work with Proper Insurance, who also here at the event, you will get a 5% discount off of your insurance. So that's pretty cool. So then we moved into marketing because you know that Annette and I champion direct bookings and building a business.

[00:12:48] And then we did Kyle Stanley.

[00:12:50] Oh, that's right, we had Kyle, thank you. And actually that was--

[00:12:52] She should because she took so many notes.

[00:12:54] That was next level.

[00:12:56] Yeah, so Kyle @FearlessKyle talked about team building. And that was really important because there was a lot of people there that were maybe new. They were just getting started, but other people that were veterans and he did a great exercise of just reaching out on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram saying, hey, I am hiring somebody at 2 to $500 a month to help me with some real estate endeavors. And people were taking action on that and that was one of those things hire before you're ready. Start to plan your team. You should always be hiring.

[00:13:29] And you can put their resume, quote-unquote "on file" and discuss what they want out of real estate or at what they want out of short-term rentals. And even if you don't use them right then and there, you can reach out to them in the future and know you want to deal with them.

[00:13:40] Yeah, for sure.

[00:13:40] Kyle's presentation was next level and everyone was taking action. People are coming up to us, even still here at VRMA and being like, oh my God, I got comments. I have a coffee date this Friday, so thank you. Thank you, Kyle.

[00:13:53] Maybe we'll try to put his little call to action in our show notes so people know what to put on their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

[00:14:00] Okay. But then we went to marketing because again, we champion direct booking. We do not want to leave our businesses in the hands of Airbnb. They are great lead generator. We appreciate them.

[00:14:11] Or Booking.com.

[00:14:12] Or VRBO, yeah. So we started with social media. We talked about-- Emily Mentzer who was on the show before, we talked about making sure your bio is really dialed in. She talked about collaborating with local media outlets and how she paid to collaborate with local media outlet. But her ROI on that investment was like--

[00:14:36] Yeah, the stats are insane. The email list grew. The giveaway actually brought her in revenue because they ended up staying longer than just the two nights stay that they were awarded so she ended up making revenue from this giveaway.

[00:14:54] She did twice with the same media outlet in her area. So that was great. And then we had Arthur from StayFi.

[00:15:01] If you don't know what StayFi is, please check them out. Go to our website. You want to know what StayFi is.

[00:15:06] Yeah, we'll put the link in our bio. It is where you can collect email addresses from your guests, just like when you go to a hotel or a café and they ask you for your name and email.

[00:15:14] A splash page pops up and you can get that. And the key to this-- Sarah, what's the key? It's not just the guest that booked.

[00:15:21] It's all of the guests that booked because to get online, they also have to give us their name and email and, of course, accept the terms and conditions and if--

[00:15:30] No spam.

[00:15:31] Yeah, no spam allowed here. But with StayFi, it also has an email marketing software or email marketing abilities within its platform, so you can send it. They already have templates, so all you need to do is create a message, select automation flows and it'll go right out to your guest once a month even. Just invite them back, have a little code. But anyway, that was wonderful. He actually sat at the AV booth and was doing email--

[00:15:58] He was doing live-action emailing.

[00:15:59] He was showing them how to create a template because I feel like we make it more difficult than it needs to be.

[00:16:03] Yes, for sure. And then we had an amazing panel that I got to host, and it had four amazing humans on them, one of them being Sarah, my lovely co-host, and John Hayes, Megan Morgan, and JL Napolski. And this panel was all about direct booking. Oh my gosh. So it went all the way from Sarah has a property that is 100% direct booking. John I think he said--

[00:16:33] John and Megan had 30%.

[00:16:34] They were at 30% and they just started their direct booking. Megan literally, I love this story. Maybe we can have her on. She listened to one of our podcasts about direct booking. She did not even have a website. She stayed up all night just building a simple Wix website and she is now at 30% booking. Can I tell you my takeaway from her?

[00:16:53] What's up?

[00:16:54] We asked her one of her keys to success. She's in Texas, where high school football is huge. She says for a couple of hundred bucks, she advertised in her local football program and the local football like on the field. And she is getting so many bookings from--

[00:17:14] She's like at like $100 so throw her logo in there, her business email, and phone number. And it's as simple as that. It was simple as that.

[00:17:20] Yes. And then I'm trying to think of some other huge takeaways there. Oh, the one John was talking about is reusing content. So he writes blogs. He does a lot of like listicles. So a listicle is something like 10 best coffee shops in my town, 10 best hiking paths, five best places for brunch. And what he'll do is he'll make that a blog on his website for search engine optimization. Then he will send that out to his email list and then he will make those TikTok Instagram and Facebook posts. So he can just create that one idea. And it's probably a question. He said his blogs and his content, he's answering questions that his guests are asking. And they're helping him with that.

[00:18:05] And then we closed off the event with a really great happy hour. We had a Stefan repeat. It was a lot of fun.

[00:18:09] It was a blast. We may or may not be already--

[00:18:13] Planning next year?

[00:18:14] Yeah, okay. Sarah, I'm going to on the fly. What was your takeaway from just having a live event and having all the hosts and the listeners in one room? We haven't had a chance to talk about this, right?

[00:18:25] Well, and I don't-- listeners who have been listening for a while now maybe you know like Annette and I are very much yin and yang and I am a perfectionist. I get very nervous that if I do something and it's not perfect, that I'll be judged, I'll be whatever. Who knows? I don't know. It goes in this crazy brain of mine, but we did it. And could it have like, can we make tweaks, make it better next year? Always. I think you can always be better, but just never be afraid to get started.

[00:18:50] Yes. And that's for anything. That's my biggest takeaway from this week is like, holy smokes, I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's going to your first event and putting yourself out there. We're doing our 200th episode here, which is crazy. So start the podcast. But there were people there that were veterans ready to learn. There are people that are just getting started, ready to learn, and that I just feel when you start to take action on whatever that is, even us planning the event, things start to go in your favor. And have there been some hiccups?

[00:19:22] Yes, there were hiccups.

[00:19:23] But that's part of it. That's part of it. And you got to get going. And guess what, though? It got Sarah and I so super fired up to support you even more. We have so many things like ideas for 2023. One of them may be taking our podcast on the road, so be on the lookout for that. But it just got us really fired up to see everyone that was there, meet them in person, hear their story, get our picture taken with them, do some social with them.

[00:19:50] Thanks for Visiting is bigger than Annette and myself. We want to serve all of you so that our whole ecosystem of short-term rental hosts, owners, operators, we can all thrive up level.

[00:20:00] The whole industry. The whole industry.

[00:20:02] Yeah. So we have to get going because lunch is about to hit. The Breezeway booth is about to get slammed with people interested in their products. We want to make sure that we can let them do that. But we really appreciate you celebrating the 200th episode with us. Please, again, leave a review.

[00:20:15] If you want to help us celebrate, leave us a review on Apple, on Spotify, follow us on YouTube. And last but not least, if everything that you just heard got you fired up, we are going to have the recordings for sale from our live event. We videoed it. We got the audio. We are preparing that now so we can hopefully release that to you if you're interested in it. We are hoping to release that soon once we get home and get back to work. But we want to make sure that you can participate in the event also.

[00:20:46] So with that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:20:48] I am Annette Grant, and together we are--

[00:20:50] Thanks for Visiting.