WS418: How to Automate and Thrive In The Short-Term Rental Space with Tim Hubbard

The short-term rental space is growing rapidly with many multifamily syndicators converting their properties into short-term stays. Managing the daily operations of short-term rental can seem daunting for most of us, but today’s guest, Tim Hubbard, has a different perspective. Tim is the founder and CEO of Midtown Stays, a short-term rental accommodation company that has successfully accommodated over 10,000 guests from all over the world.

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He is a coach and teacher at Rest Methods where he teaches the secrets to invest passively in short-term rentals through his quarterly live events, podcast, and website resources. Tim started his career in real estate as an investment broker selling multifamily and commercial properties. Along with a team of five, they’ve cumulatively completed over two-billion dollars in transactions! The key to Tim’s success in running short-term rentals remotely from his home in Colombia all boils down to automation. In this episode, he offers us the roadmap to automation; the tools, and the practical advice for managing daily operations, furnishing, hiring a team, and so much more. If you’re looking for a way to thrive in the short-term rental space remotely and without the fuss, this is the episode for you!

Key Points from This Episode:

  • Why Tim started getting involved in short-term rentals and how they suit his lifestyle.
  • The operational side of short-term rentals and how to outsource guest interaction.
  • The returns on short-term rentals versus the returns on annual lease.
  • Top tips for picking the location and market of your short-term rental properties.
  • Find out how much you should be spending on furnishing your short-term rentals.
  • Tim’s key tactics for finding his properties and why he chooses to go through brokers.
  • Find out how to best prepare for city regulation changes around short-term rental.
  • The digital tools and systems Tim uses to automate and run his business remotely.
  • How to go about building your on-the-ground property management team.
  • Preparing for a market downturn by catering to a wider range of guests.
  • How traveling the world has contributed to Tim’s success in short-term rental.

[bctt tweet=”At its core, short-term rental is basically housekeeping. — Tim Hubbard” username=”whitney_sewell”]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Hubbard on LinkedIn

Midtown Stays

Rest Methods

Home Away

Booking.com

Airbnb

Google Forms

Resilience, Turning Your Setback into a Comeback.

About Tim Hubbard

Tim is originally from Sacramento, CA and started his career in real estate as an investment broker selling multi-family and commercial properties in Northern California. He worked with a small team of five who completed cumulatively over $2 billion in transactions. He has been personally investing in real estate for the last 10 years and has since acquired a multi-million dollar portfolio comprised primarily of small multi-family properties in multiple markets. He has traveled extensively throughout the world in over 70 countries and stayed in hundreds of different short-term rental accommodations. About five years ago he realized the high returns that could be made from converting properties into furnished short-term rentals and renting them by the night. He founded and acts as CEO for Midtown Stays, a short-term rental accommodation company which has successfully accommodated over 10,000 guests with excellent reviews from all over the world. He continues to expand with the help of his teams and manages everything remotely from his home in Medellin, Colombia. He also teaches others to do the same and shows them how they can successfully increase their income 3,4, or even 8x by implementing the right strategies to convert existing long term rentals in to nightly rentals through his live events and podcast. He holds a degree in International business and an MBA from the University California of Davis and is co-founder of the amazon best selling book “Resilience, turning your setback into a comeback”.

Full Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication.

And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:24.1] WS: This is your daily Real Estate Syndication show. I’m your host Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest is Tim Hubbard. Thanks for being on the show Tim.

[0:00:32.0] TH: Yeah, happy to be here, thanks Whitney.

[0:00:33.8] WS: Tim is the founder and CEO of Midtown Stays, a short-term rental accommodation company that has successfully accommodated over 10,000 guests from all over the world. He is a coach and teacher at Rest Methods where he teaches the secrets to invest in passively in short-term rentals through his quarterly live events, podcast, and website resources at www.restmethods.com. He started his career in real estate as an investment broker selling multifamily and commercial properties. Along with a team of five, they completed cumulatively over two-billion dollars in transactions.

Tim, thank you again for your time, I’m looking forward to this conversation because I know the short-term rental piece is like something that’s really growing right now. Even in the larger multifamily, you know, I see more people considering taking a few of those units and converting them, you know, the short-term rentals.

You know, there’s different things that we have to think about when doing that, I know, but I’m looking forward to this conversation and myself even learning what that entails and what we should consider when thinking about doing that but give the listeners a little more about your focus right now and let’s jump in.

[0:01:42.8] TH: Yeah, I started investing traditionally like most people with long-term rentals, yearlong leases and those types of things, I’ve always loved to travel so I’ve stayed in short-term  rentals for a long time, hundreds of them all around the world. At a certain point, I realized there was a lot of money to be made with the short-term rentals and I had some properties I thought would work well for short-term rentals, so I converted some of them over and just haven’t stopped.

Now I specifically look for properties that I think work really well as short-term rentals but then I also work as long-term rentals, the day I buy them as well.

[0:02:20.1] WS: Okay, so you were an investment broker, and did you start doing short-term rentals as you were doing that?

[0:02:24.5] TH: I started with some small multifamily properties even before I became a broker and, you know, fourplexes, duplexes, those types of things. Then while I was working as a broker, you know, I just continued building my portfolio. I’m from northern California and the market had changed, so I started looking at other markets and I went to, you know, a handful of different states and different cities around the US looking for a good market. I was staying in short-term rentals while I was meeting with property managers and different agents and looking at different properties.

I remember looking up the cost of value of one of these short-term rentals I was staying in. I had already started renting some of my own in California at that time and the rate that I was paying out in that other city was almost what I was getting in California, but the property price was like a fraction, you know? 25% of the price of the California property.

Light bulb went off and I just started the – looking for properties to do specifically short-term rentals.

[0:03:25.8] WS: Awesome. Even before the show, we just briefly mentioned like the tools and systems and in that you are in another country right now, I don’t know, you can share where if you want, but you know, you’re in another country and you are managing the short-term  rentals. I’m looking forward to, just so the listener knows, we’re going to talk about the tools and systems that you use because I know even in the syndication business, we can use some of these tools and systems to automate some of this stuff to be able to work more remotely.

Before we get there, tell me more about going into short-term rentals, maybe some things that I need to consider when we’re used to doing say, annual leases at an apartment building, some things I need to consider when I’m thinking, “Well, wait a minute, maybe I can take one or two units and convert them to short-term rentals.”

[0:04:09.5] TH: Yeah, absolutely, there’s a lot more moving pieces, you know? My average stay is a little less than three days versus you know, an average lease a year. You have people coming in and people going out and there’s a lot of operational pieces there. At its core, it’s basically housekeeping.

The whole guest arrival and checkout, those are all communications that are mostly done online now, you know, through messaging and not so much on the phone, actually. You can outsource a lot of the guest interaction when you have self-check-in, you know, a digital lock, someone comes in, they have a code, they stay at your place and then they leave.

A lot of our guests, we never see them, a lot of them don’t even send messages really, aside from the ones that we’ve already sent them so there’s definitely a lot more operational pieces but there are a lot of cool tools to handle all those pieces.

I see Whitney, you know, a lot of people, they get like two or three and they’re like, “This is great, I’m making huge returns,” but a lot of times they’re handling those messages themselves so they feel like it’s going to be really overwhelming, or maybe it is. I see a lot of people get stuck at that point, you know? They have like a couple, two, three, four but they’re doing a lot of these things themselves. So really utilizing some of the tools that are available that helps make sure you can scale easily.

[0:05:31.8] WS: I want to get to those tools. I want to talk about outsourcing the guest communication and I want to get there. But tell me, what about the returns on short-term rentals versus say an annual lease? Because that’s something everybody’s going to be concerned about but even thinking about like the different locations of these short-term rentals. But first, tell me about the returns, you know, the short-term versus annual?

[0:05:52.9] TH: Well, just for example, you know, I started buying properties in the mid-south and let’s say a one bedroom was renting for $550 a month, I might get short-term rents in a property. $2,500 a month. Five times the amount or even more sometimes. Your expenses definitely are not five times more so the returns can be really good if you find a good property and if you set everything up right and keep your occupancy high.

[0:06:22.1] WS: The 2,500, that was for short-term or long-term? I missed that.

[0:06:25.2] TH: That would be short-term, yeah. Some of these apartment and things average monthly rents anywhere from yeah, 550 to 800, 900 bucks and then pretty easily multiply that by three or four or five or have some property even eight times more what the long-term rent was getting. With high occupancies year-round and I’ve been doing it for quite a long time now, so I have some history too, you know?

I could see the trends and things like that so yeah, the returns can be great.

[0:06:56.0] WS: What about the location of these properties and are you picking specific cities based on certain things or is it just the market itself? In general, high population growth, things like that, we would all look at, or are there other things to consider when thinking about where the short-term rental is?

[0:07:12.5] TH: With the short-term rental, I cater to a lot of business travelers because they tend to come back more often, they usually travel by themselves, they’re just easy guest to work with. What I like to have tourism too, really, the bigger the pool of people that would want to stay at your property, the higher the occupancy is going to be.

My company Mid-town Stays, most of all my properties Aare in sort of a midtown area. Between downtown and the suburbs where there’s usually a mix of commercial stores and restaurants and entertainment. But it’s also close to downtown for business and stuff like that and it still offers the guests like a neighborhood type of feel but most of the time, being walking distance to the places.

Those properties tend to cost a little more but in a lot of these markets, you can still find properties. The cash flow the day you buy them, with long-term tenants, they’re in these sorts of areas and then you can convert them over to short-term rentals and they work really well because they have a lot of potential guests that would stay there.

[0:08:14.4] WS: What kind of costs should we look at to, like furnishing the apartment, or the unit?

[0:08:20.1] TH: Yeah, furnishing’s a good question because you can spend a lot of money furnishing a property. You can also spend very little. Since I live in south America and a lot of these properties lately, I’ve been setting up remotely, you know with my team that’s on the ground in the States, I order a lot of my furniture online so it can be delivered right to the property. I do a lot with Ikea. I think they have good products. I think they also have some products that aren’t so good. Just finding furniture’s that’s durable but that looks good and you don’t need to spend $2,000 on the best mattress.

There’s quite a few options you can get now online that show up in a box, $300 for a queen sized mattress. I like to stay in my own properties too. You know, when we first get them started, I know these mattresses is – I’ve owned $5,000 therapeutic mattress, that versus a $300 mattress that you can get online now, it’s incredible. I would say on average, I spend for a one bedroom, and I tend to like the smaller properties too again, because they’re better for businesspeople where our occupancies are higher.

This is ordering online. Maybe $4,000 for a studio and maybe a one-bedroom that’s a little bigger, 4,000 to 6,000, two bedrooms slightly more. Again, it all depends on how much time you have too, because I know friends and students that have the time and the shop on Facebook Marketplace, these things. They can cut that furnishing cost in half or more. That’s kind of ballpark, I’d say.

[0:09:55.7] WS: I would imagine part of your decision making there is that you’re in another country, the fact that these things are going to be delivered right there, that’s a big, I guess, load off that you don’t have to go find out and meet somebody at the gas station or you know, just to swap stuff, you’re not there. That’s a big plus for you, you know, being able to just order it and be delivered right there.

But you know, what about the types of properties? You know, are you buying strictly single family or are they townhomes or are they multi-family, what are you looking for?

[0:10:25.2] TH: Most all of mine are smaller multi-family properties. Fourplexes, six, eight, 12 units. 12 units is the biggest multi-family I have that I operate as a short-term rental and a lot of times, these smaller properties are a little more unique, you know, it’s not like a giant 200-unit apartment building.

Not that that wouldn’t work, but guests like sort of more of the unique feel too. A lot of my properties are older, you know, built in the 1800s even, a lot of early 20th century stuff. A lot of them I’ve renovated, but yeah, I would say that sort of smaller multifamily has worked really well for me. I know that short-term rentals, I mean, they work with lots of different problem types. Single family homes and even you know, yourself and a lot of your listeners have the big apartment buildings that they syndicated can try them out there too, you know?

Maybe just take a couple. Sometimes when you get in these really big cities where there’s tall 20-story apartment buildings or condo associations, a lot of people do short-term rentals in those too and they work out really well. Those also have more regulations sometimes, you know? HOA’s and that type of stuff, you have to look out for that as well.

[0:11:39.5] WS: How do you go about finding your properties? Is it just through brokers or are you doing like yellow letters or something like that? Like a lot of people, what’s your tactic?

[0:11:47.8] TH: Yeah, mine’s been mainly all through brokers. Just got my first place and I’ve worked with that broker several times and then one of the properties that I bought ended up working with a broker that sold that one as well. Just sort of networking but also knowing exactly what I’m looking for helps.

I can tell somebody, “Hey, I’m looking in this zip code, this price range. I either don’t or I do want something with a value ad.” But before that, and still, even actually. I think in some of these markets, you can still find stuff on the MLS, you know? If a fourplex or something that pops up, it’s cash flowing a little bit but then you have the opportunity to turn to short-term rental. I think you can still find some stuff just even on the MLS if you’re quick.

[0:12:33.1] WS: Are you willing to pay more for a property than say, somebody that’s going to plan to use to for long-term rental, you know, because your plan is to use it as short-term?

[0:12:42.8] TH: I would pay more up until the point of the property still makes sense cash flowing with a long-term tenant. I like to have backup plans. A lot of the regulations, they’re still in the grey area, they’re different and every city and municipality. There is literally like, thousands of different rules around short-term rentals. Even down to a specific neighborhood, you know, if it’s historic neighborhood.

That is still a bit of a grey area and I just want to make sure that whatever property I get still going to work well as long-term rentals, if for some reason, I can’t do short-term rentals. I would pay a little bit more. But as long as it still made sense financially.

[0:13:22.3] WS: Okay, I mean, I would imagine too, those regulations or rules could change at some point. You buy it, thinking okay, I’m going to make this much money using it as a short-term  rental and all of a sudden, there’s a regulation change and they say, “Okay, in this part of the community or in the entire community, we’re not allowing any more short-term rentals.” Well now, you’re in trouble, right? Or if you had to use a long-term lease.

[0:13:44.9] TH: You’re in trouble as long as you didn’t buy that property with the only strategy being a short-term rental, you know? Because if you can rent it as a long-term rental, then you’re fine and it’s – actually, it’s probably in an area that’s going to be appreciating a little more, maybe  in the suburbs or something like that because you got into a good area.

You can always go back and rent it as a long-term rental, as long as you bought it right from the beginning. You can also offer like an extended type stay because a lot of times, when a city passes laws or changes regulations around short-term rentals, they define the short-term rental as a 30 night or less, so 31 nights is not short-term rental anymore but there’s a lot of people that are still looking for those types of stay. Traveling nurses, people displaced for insurance reasons, or building a house, or whatever it is.

A lot of times, you can get those guest that are paying nightly rates but for a longer stay and then you can bypass the regulations as well.

[0:14:44.6] WS: You know, before we run out of time, I want us to talk about your tools and systems and even in the multifamily business or, for on e, syndicating deals, you know, we’re always buying, looking at using annual or long-term leases, you know, for the most part. But I know people are considering switching a few units over and so, you know, I’d love to know more about your tools so if we consider switching a few units over like I would love to better understand how to optimize that system.

Because the last thing I want to do is create more work on our team, you know? You’re in another country, you’re managing these short-term rentals all over the country, or different places, and you have to have some good processes and tools or systems in place and I’d love for you to share some of the best techniques so that we can know how to move forward.

[0:15:27.8] TH: Yeah, it’s really an exciting industry because I mean, Airbnb is what sort of driven all the growth with this, short-term rentals have been around forever but a long with all this growth has come all of these tools, you know? All the time, honestly, I can’t even keep up with all of them, there’s just new ones popping up all the time.

I think the core of it is, I mean, something that helps manage your messaging. Having some auto responders and things like that, every guest needs to know where the property is, they need to know how to check in, they need to know important things like how to turn on the heat or the AC. So, what I try to do is essentially just answer all of those questions before a guest asks them. So, it makes it better for the guest and it makes it better for me and so you can do a lot of that with auto responders. I use a property management software specifically for short-term rentals. So, just like you would use something for long-term rentals, it has a lot of tools and integrations specifically for short-term rentals.

You know, to integrate with a pricing tool that automates my pricing automatically, or a tool that syncs my calendars between Airbnb and Home Away and Booking.com and my own website. So, that software is called Guesty.com and they’re out of Israel. They also have a receptionist service. So, they have a team of live people that respond to messages, you know, guest asks them, and they have someone in there 24/7. I have been using them for a long time but there is also a lot of other ones popping up.

You can literally just go on Google and type in “Automate Airbnb’s” or “Receptionist service short-term rental,” and you will find quite a host of tools.

[0:17:19.1] WS: How else have you automated this to the point? I mean even to these furniture’s getting delivered but you are not there to help them get it in or unlock the door, how does that work?

[0:17:28.4] TH: So, the doors, we use all digital locks and you know, we have a dashboard where we can see every lock, we can see how opened it, what the battery level is. We can change the code online. So, having good locks and say with locks, there is dozens of different options now but if you want to scale I think it is good that you start out with something that is scalable and so our locks that is all done remotely. We use a guidebook, a digital guidebook, that goes out automatically as well.

We can send it via text message or email and that answers – especially the guys coming in for tourism. You know, “Hey, what is your favorite restaurant?” or “How do I get around?” So, you can answer a lot of those questions in the guidebook as well, but then aside from all the operations, everything you can do online, you do have to have someone there in person. Someone else has to clean the apartment. So, having a housekeeper is a core piece and then a maintenance person. Or at least a list of contacts that your team or someone has access to, to call.

So, several HK people, several electricians, several test people or whatever it is. So at least just having contacts for your team member but the housekeeping is a big piece and that is something that people ask all the time, “Where do you find them?” I have hired online, my companies hired all of them. I know a lot of people that hire professional housekeeping services.

Every way works they just have different costs. So, the more properties you have, the more of a fulltime job it becomes so you can hire someone fulltime. If you are just starting and you have a couple of units, it might be easier to hire a professional housekeeping service. So, it is quite a range I guess.

[0:19:12.5] WS: Are you building that team say when you are on the ground looking for property?

[0:19:17.3] TH: Kind of both. So that the housekeepers, you know, I always ask for referrals now first off. So, my existing team, if we’re adding more properties, when we need more help, I go to them first but then I am going to be doing some interviews tomorrow online remotely. So, I guess a combination.

[0:19:35.0] WS: Okay, yeah and so then managing them I mean ultimately is it then mostly by guest feedback or how do you know that those people are cleaning the units like they need to?

[0:19:44.9] TH: Yeah, guest feedback makes it really easy. So, when you hire a new housekeeper, it is very simple and if we get negative reviews because of cleaning and that was the unit that you cleaned, we are going to hold you responsible. If that happens too many times, then we are going to have to look for some other help. So that makes it really easy because it takes it off of you. You know it is not you saying, “Hey you didn’t do a good job” or something like that.

It is just, “Hey, you know this guest said there was hair on the sheets” or something, and a lot of times we’ll ask for photos too or the guest will just send them. Like if something did get missed, if there was something on the floor, a lot of times they will send pictures and so you have kind of proof too, but the goal is always five stars, clean 100% it is just super important. That is the core of all of it.

[0:20:36.3] WS: What about and I don’t know if you have done this or not but the conversation with the management company. I haven’t done this, I haven’t talked to our management companies about, “Okay, how would we structure this if we turned let’s say two units into short-term  rentals?” I just wonder do you know what kind of response you would normally get or how you would implement that?

[0:20:55.0] TH: If you are asking your existing management company to –

[0:20:58.3] WS: That’s right. So, let us say we have a 180-unit complex and they are managing the day to day and obviously us overseeing them but then just the conversation of, “Hey, what if we turned a couple of units into short-term rentals?” I know their concern is going to be the quick turnovers and the cleaning and all of that stuff and just debating about, “Okay am I going to build another system over here just to manage those couple of units kind of outside of our property management company? Or because of the increased income, am I going to expect them to adopt these systems and take care of it?

[0:21:31.5] TH: I would say that most of the time you are going to create your own management system because there is a lot of different things going on there and some of the properties that I have got they are managed by long-term professional management companies and I just simply talked to them from the beginning and said, “Hey, this is my plan.” Most premises I got were fully occupied units. So, I have ended leases, moved in short-term rentals and at that point my management took over and they are sort of got into it.

Depending on the size of the management company, I would think if they are managing hundreds or thousands of units they wouldn’t be as flexible to change and adopt some of these practices as maybe as smaller management company operating a couple of hundred or something. But I would say you would most likely to be creating your own system on the side.

[0:22:20.3] WS: Do you own all your units? Or do you ever rent any of the long-term, let’s say you know sign an annual lease and then convert that to a short-term?

[0:22:27.8] TH: Yeah, good question. I own all of my mine just because I am an investor at heart and if you don’t own the property and you are subleasing that then it is kind of like you are just creating a job sort of, you know what I mean? You can make great money, I think it is a great way to get started because all of the operational side is going to be exactly the same but at the end of the day I think owning the properties is going to be a lot better.

It is an investment, but yeah, doing the sublease model or lease arbitrage, a lot of people call you know? So maybe they have signed a lease for a thousand bucks, and they get $3,000 a month rent I mean that’s great and you can do that a lot quicker sometimes.

[0:23:07.3] WS: And how many units did it take before let’s say you started doing this full-time?

[0:23:11.7] TH: That’s the great thing about it. I mean let’s say you have a fourplex that is running for – its gross rent is $4,000 a month but a lot of the short-term rents or $3,000 a month per unit and you are making $12,000 on one fourplex. It doesn’t take a whole lot of units before you can really just do it fulltime. I was doing real estate fulltime with long-term rentals I guess before I started on the short-term one, or sort of transitioned at that point but yeah, it didn’t take a whole lot before. I still do long-term rentals. I am just focused on the short-term ones though.

[0:23:48.2] WS: So, what has been the hardest part of this, the short-term rental process for you?

[0:23:51.8] TH: Getting started in the very beginning I guess and meeting everyone and doing that and I left California, I went to a market where I didn’t know anyone. I brought properties that needed a lot of renovation. I didn’t know any contractors and so building connections I think in the very beginning was probably the most challenging. Then just discovering new tools because I am kind of like techy, I guess. I worked for a software company for quite a while selling management software.

This brought a mode of shops but you know it helped run their whole business and so now I am always exploring new software options and you know I have tried some out that didn’t work well and so trying to make things as easy as possible for my team while making it the most efficient on the back end has been a bit of a challenge. But I found some really good systems now that I think work really well and are very scalable.

[0:24:48.2] WS: So, it is finding the technology and the way to automate this stuff I guess has helped you through the most difficult part of this business, is that right?

[0:24:55.5] TH: Yeah.

[0:24:56.6] WS: So how do you prepare for the potential downturn that everybody is talking about?

[0:25:01.1] TH: Well I think when it comes to short-term rentals, you know, let’s say the downturn happens, middle-class is affected most of the time, especially for vacations. So if you are operating in short-term rental that is only tailored to people for vacations, that is probably going to get hit harder than say somewhere where someone’s travelling for business as well. So, I think by having a bigger audience of guests that could potentially stay at your property, you can protect your downside.

But then at the end of the day too, you know I am not buying – I am buying good properties in A-areas, but they are not class-A properties. So, you know if the economy does take a dive and people are struggling a lot of times, they are going to leave those class-A properties with the really high leases and they are going to go to class-B areas and if all my properties are in class-B areas and they work as long-term rentals, then my rent’s going to potentially go up as a long-term rental.

So, I have those couple of options and then having fixed financing for as long a period as you can so that you know your expenses that aren’t going to change.

[0:26:09.5] WS: Like 30-year, 10-year fix, what do you look for?

[0:26:12.9] TH: I mean I would love to have like 30-year fixed commercial loans but with the smaller properties I am doing it, they just don’t have it available. You know four-units or less, 30- year fix yeah, absolutely. My commercial loans are not fixed for that long, five years, seven years, but just making sure you’ve got enough equity and revenue and everything in there. So, if you have to do finance, you know, when I run the numbers on the property I doubled the interest rates or something to make sure that you can handle that changing.

[0:26:44.5] WS: Yeah, so a few more questions before we ran out of time or quickly but what is the number one way that you have recently improved your business that we could apply to ours?

[0:26:52.4] TH: That is a good question. This is something small I guess but it has been really effective and just using Google Forms, which is free and for those of you who don’t know, it is basically a form that you can create on Google literally in minutes but on the back end you could connect it to an Excel sheet. So, our supply orders for example, you know they used to go to my manager, and she would order them it was like each housekeeper telling her – just created a simple supply order form.

On Google for a few minutes, send a link to the whole team and now if a housekeeper needs more bleach or needs whatever, they can go on there and that goes on the backend into an Excel sheet. It never gets lost. It is already coated with the property. So that is something small, but I think it has been really effective and I am sure we will use that for other things outside of my short-term rental business too.

[0:27:45.5] WS: Yeah, I love that. We have implemented Google Forms recently as well and it’s like wow, and that’s free like you said and it can be shared with any of the direct people that like you said, that are working on that specific property or whatever. So, what is the number one thing that’s contributed to your success?

[0:28:02.3] TH: That is a good question. I would probably – because I have stayed in so many short-term rentals, literally hundreds. I have travelled to 70 counties and hundreds of cities around the world. I have seen how people do this in so many different ways and basically when I created my very first short-term rental, I was creating one for myself essentially because it was a property that I owned in a downtown area and I was thinking I want to furnish it to potentially live there.

And I was just thinking if it didn’t work out, I would live there because I wanted to anyways. So, I designed a rental for myself but using all of the other ones that I had seen and travelled to. I think that really helped me just get started with a rental that worked well for a broad range of people and had a lot of the little things that I’d picked up along the way.

[0:28:54.0] WS: So, tell me, how do you like to give back?

[0:28:55.9] TH: So, I started teaching, recently, how to do this. You know I had some friends along the way pick up short-term rentals and they are doing really well. So, I am super excited about that piece basically just been sharing everything I have learned over the years. Just started my first live event. I am doing the second one in February. I am coming out with a podcast where we are going to have just actionable items people can use in their short-term rental business.

I have an e-book that I wrote on finding the best markets in my opinion and what makes the best properties and duplicate on my website. So, I guess just sharing everything that I have learned. It is a growing industry. I don’t think it is going anywhere and there is a lot of little pieces in there.

[0:29:42.0] WS: How can people get in touch with you Tim to learn more about you?

[0:29:45.1] TH: So, you can go to my website. It is Rest Methods, rest, like real estate short-term methods restmethods.com. They can get their e-book on there. We have a Contact page and then hopefully I’ll be launching my podcast there pretty soon too in a few weeks with some really good tips for people as well.

[0:30:02.7] WS: Awesome, that’s a wrap Tim. Thank you very much.

[0:30:05.1] TH: Thank you Whitney, it’s great to be here.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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