WS1121: Increasing Rental Income with Nico Ortega

Short-term rentals can be a good additional source of income for multifamily operators. This business model is promising especially that people are starting to travel again. In this episode, Nico Ortega of Nouvo shares how you can incorporate subscription-based living into your multifamily properties.

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Nico talks about the current trends in travel and nomad living. He says people are now looking for larger spaces than the regular hotel room. He adds because of the global health crisis, people want more space. He also gives tips on how you can turn some units of your multifamily property into short-term rentals with a subscription-based living business model. Listen now and learn more about this possible additional source of revenue!

Key Points From This Episode:   

  • Nico shares his current business model and his company Nouvo.
  • How the revenue management system helped Nico’s company amid the pandemic.
  • Nico talks about the experience of running a hospitality business during the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • The current trends in travel and nomad living and how they can affect the multifamily sector.
  • People are looking for more space and travelers are opting for longer stays.
  • How do travel restrictions affect short-term rental space?
  • Nico shares how they do revenue management.
  • How can multifamily operators use Nico’s business model of subscription-based living to increase their revenue?
  • Nico’s suggestion on how to choose which multifamily units can be turned into a subscription-based living: have a community approach to it.
  • How can operators of subscription-based living prepare for a downturn?
  • The daily habits that helped Nico achieve success.
  • How does Nico like to give back?

Tweet This!

“So, in the traditional travel area, we see huge trends in people just looking for larger spaces than your regular hotel room. People want space. They want to feel a little bit more, freer or that they can have more with their price points.” [0:11:16]

“The digital nomads, I think that’s a reality that we cannot shy away from. With work from home becoming more of a work from anywhere type of situation.” [0:12:20]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Nico Ortega on LinkedIn

[email protected]

Nouvo website

About Nico Ortega

We have all heard of many different subscription-based services including entertainment, software, classes, food, beauty, personal products, medical services, etc. These services offer value, convenience, and personalization, making them quite popular with a wide range of consumers and specific niche markets. One thing most people have never heard of is subscription-based living, a new, unique concept brought to you by Nicolas Ortega, CEO, and co-founder of NUOVO, a Miami-based tech-enabled short-term rental management company. NUOVO partners clients with short-term rentals and manages properties for owners. Ortega and his team are launching a new, innovative, and truly unique subscription-based rental housing network that will revolutionize how people live, work, and travel.

The subscription-based travel and living concept is designed to serve those individuals who spend a lot of time on the road and need a reliable place to call home as they move from city to city. COVID-19 took a majority of traditional offices online, and after over a year of remote work, many professionals have found they do not want to go back. Digital nomads, influencers, creators, and more and more people have found ways to work in the digital space, giving them the flexibility to travel and work from anywhere in the country. This has increased the need and demand for short-term rentals, and NUOVO has created a subscription-based model that will benefit those who need to live and work regularly in different cities around the United States.

Currently, many people are embracing the semi-nomadic lifestyle, however, the cost of sustaining a home, or regular place to crash in multiple places can get pricey very quickly. The subscription-based living model will cater to those who need to live and work in different places, offering financial security and flexibility at the same time. Subscribers will have the ability to pay a monthly fee and guarantee themselves a reliable place to stay in multiple cities. NUOVO provides a living solution that not only serves digital nomads and those who work remotely but is also a perfect fit for those in the creator economy as it provides flexibility to experience new locations and cultures, inspiring them to create organic and engaging new content.

NUOVO plans to launch this new service within the next 18 months and is working through the different phases of research and development now. NUOVO has launched a crowdfunding campaign on the startup investment platform Republic, offering investors an option to grow with this opportunity, they have raised $2.5 million and now aim to raise another $1.07 million to apply towards business development and growth, product development, team building, and marketing of this new, subscription-based short term rental platform. Check out Nico’s feature in Tech Time last month or their Republic Crowdfunding Campaign to see more.

Full Transcript

EPISODE 1121

[INTRODUCTION]

0:00:00.0 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.

00:00:24.000

Whitney Sewell: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today our guest is Nico Ortega.

Nico is the CEO and co-founder of NUOVO, a Miami-based tech-enabled short-term rental management company. They partner with clients with short-term rentals and manage properties with owners. Nico and his team are launching a new, truly unique subscription-based rental housing network that will revolutionize how people live, work, and travel. 

So, Nico, today goes through how their business model really changed through COVID, running hospitality business during the pandemic, I think all those in that asset class their model has probably changed significantly, but they have learned a lot. But he talked about as focused to it from least arbitrage to really revenue management, and the transient travel and nomad living, how’s that going to affect us as multifamily owners. But then, they partner with lots of large multifamily operations and they can help focus on the increase, the rental revenue, right. I mean, significantly increase which he had talked about, and how they have done that in multifamily. 

So it’s just an interesting dynamic. I’m seeing more and more people think about bringing a few units of their apartment complex just over the short-term rentals. Oh, and sometimes they could double their income, if not more than double the income of a few units of the entire complex. So I know you’re going to learn a lot today and enjoy the show.

[INTERVIEW]

Nico, welcome to the show. I know you have some experience in some skills that’s going to help us, possibly significantly increase our rental revenue in multifamily and in any kind of residential property that we have, some things that we need to consider so, looking forward to the conversation. Give us a little bit about your current business model and kind of how you got there.

00:02:11.000

Nico Ortega: Hi, Whitney. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. Yeah, so let me tell you a little bit about NUOVO, which is my company: started NUOVO around six years ago. It’s kind of like an accident in a sense, me and my brother who’s my co-founder we come from a real estate background. We were both working together in real estate development back home in Ecuador where we’re from, mostly in commercial real estate and mixed-use development. We built a shopping mall, and we had a project that we flipped while it was still in plans which was a mixed-use project – departments will tell the whole shebang. So when we came to the U.S., when we came to Miami in 2015, we obviously do…we wanted to do something related to real estate. My brother had around 10 years of experience working in real estate, before I had about two and a half, three years, I went into real estate and started working with him right after I graduated college. 

So, naturally, for us, we decided “Okay, let’s try and find something we can do together in this world which we know we work well together and we understand each other perfectly.” So, we started looking at options and, we try to go towards traditional real estate, but we started seeing how technology was re-imagining everything: the sharing economy was coming up, Airbnb was starting to become this huge thing – remember this back in 2015 – and we decided “Okay, until we figure out what we want to do exactly…” And, we were looking at house flipping or buying land to build some townhouses or something like that, right, a development type of mentality, but he said “While we figure that out, while we find the right opportunity, let’s rent an apartment from a friend who has a multifamily property in the Brickell area. Let’s furnish it, let’s equip them, and then let’s rent it out on Airbnb.” So, once we got there he was like “Nah, minimum you have to like five units because we have other companies here and we can’t just rent one apartment for you,” right. 

So, we went in with five and, out of nowhere we quickly started seeing this great product-market fit, and we started seeing that the units were profitable, we started seeing that they could give us money, and within a couple of months we had – we started this on late August 2015 – by the end of the year we had, I think 12 or 13 units under management, and then it just started growing, growing, growing, growing. When we realized that we had a company that had around 30 to 50 apartments in the Miami area, in several areas of the city that was developing, well okay, so this is not just a meanwhile type of project, right. This is something that works, this is something that our customers want, and this is something that can be built on skill. 

So, we decided “Okay, let’s do this, and let’s build a plan around it, and let’s start moving forward a little bit more serious,” and that’s how we started and we started growing. Pre-pandemic we had around 250 units on their management in six U.S. cities, we build our revenue management system which is it’s built with the sort of underlying objective of being able to sell the right room at the right price to the right person and at the right time. Right. We always use this analogy to describe our business even though it seems very archaic of an analogy, but in reality, it’s what it comes down to pre-COVID – we were in the lease arbitrage business so we bought a pizza pie, an entire pizza pie, we will put some pepperoni, some cheese on top of it, slice it up and then sell it for a profit, right, sell it by the slice – that’s what we would do. 

As we started growing into other markets we quickly realized, Miami, we knew the city, we lived here, we bred the city, we had that feeling in a sense of the city, but as we grow into other markets, know Orlando, we grew into Atlanta, we grew into Philadelphia. These were markets that were completely different in seasonality, in demographic of our clients, in channel distributions, and where we get our clients from, so that’s when we started building that technology for revenue management. We decided to build it, we’re not guys with any tech experience, we’re not coders, we’re not hackers, we’re not anything like that. So we always built this company with the fundamentals that we were operating in the technology industry, like in the real estate technology industry but, we didn’t have sort of the technological background pushing us, so if there was something that needed that we needed, a piece of technology that we needed to bring into our company in order to make it better, we wouldn’t build it but we would just look for what’s out there. 

The problem was that when we started seeing all of these things that were out there, every revenue management software that was out there, every consultant, those others, we were continuously outperforming them with our methods, and our methods were still not enough, because we understood these properties, and we very thoroughly because that was what our background is. We weren’t making those numbers, and the revenue management that we were getting, we’re making it either so, that’s when we decided…we hired our professor from our machine learning and data analytics course in our MBA, which we both did and we build this platform, and that’s how normal it started growing and this revenue management system actually played a huge part in being able to help us withstand the effects of COVID in our industry.

00:07:31.000

WS: Let’s talk about that a little bit, let’s talk about running a hospitality business through the pandemic, right, and COVID. Speak to that a little bit directly, some things that happened, things change, things you learned, a little more detail into that.

00:07:44.000

NO: Yeah, that was, I’d say one of the most challenging experiences of my life. First of all, you had a lot of pressure from a lot of people around us saying, “What are you doing? This business is destroyed, people won’t travel anymore,” you had experts saying that you know when things were going to be resolved in two weeks after everybody went home and then you had extra saying that this was going to last for four years. 

So long story short, we’re two years in and we still have COVID around us and it still plays an important part in our lives. Right. So, ultimately what we decided to do was, we weren’t one of these companies that were heavily funded by venture capital or stuff like that, we didn’t have millions of dollars in the bank, we had good sales and that’s what helped us carry our company and grow but nothing that could help us sort of withstanding, so we were faced with a decision either. When the lockdowns came, with the Trump announcement, traveled by the gam it was either continue the way we were, we were at risk at all but we weren’t going to last more than two and a half or three months, with just complete shutdown, or scale down, negotiate with our property owners and try to come to an agreement, downscale and then build back up again. And that’s what we did, we went with the latter. 

I think that was one of the best decisions we ever made. It was horrible but because of the hard work that we’ve been putting into our growth was crumbling down in a sense because we were losing these units, but I think it was the responsible thing to do. We managed to sort of pass the most horrible months, in which we saw not only zero sales, but we also saw a bunch of refund requests, a bunch of chargebacks in OTAs or online travel agencies which are mainly a provider of clients just signed with the clients is that have mediating or looking for a good option with us. 

I just basically getting left to the side in a sense by everybody. Until the PPPs came and that obviously helped a lot, the second round helped even further because they were a little bit more generous with our industry. But they were very, very tough months. And that we’re all pressure from everybody – from loved ones, friends, everybody thing. Why are you still fighting for something like this? And it really is because I believe that, first of all, the business that we built was solid enough to withstand it. Second of all, that the product that we have at the company and the team are in a perfect position to be able to capitalize on this. And third, because once COVID passes or once things start to normalize after COVID, we believe that all of these trends that are coming up, so says digital nomads and people wanting more space, and a longer travel and so forth, we are in a unique position to be able to capitalize on this. 

And I mean, what better thing to have on your resume as a hospitality company to call yourself a COVID survivor? Other companies that had similar business models such as ours, and were had millions of dollars in the bank, and they were larger companies or bigger companies are no more recognized companies, they didn’t make it after two months. So it really speaks a lot about the fundamentals of how we carry our business and the long-term vision of what we want to build.

00:10:58.000

WS: We’re going to get to how this could affect multifamily owners and operators in a moment, but speak to any more around just the current trends that you see on travel nomad living, those would be our tenants, right, and these types of units. So speak to that a little more, anything else just in our current market. 

00:11:15.000

NO: So, in the traditional tribal area, we see huge trends in people just looking for larger spaces than your regular hotel room, right. People want space, they want to feel a little bit freer or that they can have more with their price points, right. So we focused on our part, where we have three times the square footage as a regular hotel room, you also have a washer and dryer, you have a living room, you have a full kitchen so that you could make your breakfast there, right so that’s one thing. 

The other thing is that we are seeing the longer lengths of stays, not just in the Miami market but in general. Pre-COVID, we had a robbery was between three and five days, now it’s between seven and nine, and the…I don’t want to say in the pandemic because we’re still in the pandemic, but in 2020 we were seeing the length of stay while there were still a lot of travel restrictions within Latin American countries. We have like two stays have between 10 to 14 days, so it’s been changing a lot the length of stay but we see a tendency for it to continue to increase, that’s one thing. And then the digital nomads, I think that’s a reality that we cannot shy away from. With work from home becoming more of a work from anywhere type of situation, right, home is where I am, it’s not necessarily Unit 505 on 123 Main Street, correct? And that’s the market that we want to push, we see this trend is especially increasing within millennials and Gen Zs, the younger generations. We see that, first of all, they’re taking a lot longer to purchase a house and they continue to rent, and now they want more and more flexibility. 

So, they make up our own 50% of the U.S. workforce, if not more, I’m not entirely sure right now about the actual percentage, but it’s like 50 million renters that are excited or have the potential to work from anywhere that they want, and they want to live the world, they want to see the world, and you don’t want to live out of an Airbnb for the rest of your life. Why is that? Because let’s say you have a great experience here in Miami with, with Nico as a host but, you go to Phoenix and John is your host, and what happened to Don, didn’t take care of the Airbnb that week and it was dirty, pictures are not the way they show. We’ve all heard of the teddy bears with the cameras in the rooms, right? And so, there’s really a lot of security concerns, any consistencies with the regular, traditional host. There are amazing experiences that you can have as well, but no, there’s still a lot of informality in a sense, and that’s what we’re trying to bring. We’re trying to bring formality into this business, being able to trust where you’re staying and being able to have a consistent experience with the bread, wherever it is that you’re traveling.

00:13:56.000

WS: What about travel restrictions and, anything around some of those things that are happening right now and how you see that affecting this business model?

00:14:03.000

NO: I think that travel restrictions right now they’re sort of a lack of drawing, right. We really don’t know what’s going to happen, we really don’t know when another wave is coming, one another variant will be showing up and where it’s going to be coming from, so the way we’ve decided to mitigate those risks is basically we do not do lease arbitrage anymore, we do revenue management. What does that mean? The owner provides us with the property, we furnished them and we equipped them, and we’d current capital expense but we don’t pay them a fixed rental fee, but rather we do a management agreement, which we take a commission. 

We make a little bit less money, but we also give them the possibility of participating in the upside of the short-term rental business versus just getting their regular rent, but having that security. So it’s kind of a trade-off, we take away the liability on our end, we don’t incur the liability of having to pay the rent, the fixed rent, and we make a little bit less money. And then on the other side, they don’t have that security of the actual rent, but they can participate in the upside when the units are performing well. And in reality, the past three or four months have been some of the greatest months at least in the Florida market some of the greatest months we’ve seen for the summer.

00:15:19.000

WS: Okay. Well speak to that multifamily operator including myself who’s listening right now, how they can use this model to increase their revenue, right? I love that you said you’re not focused on least arbitrage now, you’re focused on revenue management. I feel like most of us should be or that be a big part of our focus, you know, the revenue management, right, income and expenses. But speak to multifamily operators, how they can use this model to increase that revenue across, maybe units that they can’t feel right now.

00:15:50.000

NO: Yeah, so multifamily has been sort of our playing field for the past four years. Previous to that we had a big focus on condos, but we stayed away from that just because it was too difficult to deal with the actual landlord and then with the management company of the condo which they change every six months or so. 

So with multifamily, we found that we could align our interests in the best way. First of all, we only dealt…let’s say we have 20 units at one property, we’ve dealt with one owner, right, but interests were aligned all the time, so that’s why the revenue share a project is as interesting as it can be. On a one and we have a lot of multifamily operators that have troubled filling their units, right, getting them all filled, especially in downtown areas, so what we do with them is, let’s say you have a 100 unit apartment building, okay and, you have around 20% empty or 15% then we can say okay, let’s get those units, let’s furnish them, let’s equipment them and let’s onboard those units into the mobile program. 

By doing that, we take care of everything first of all, so that’s the most important thing, we take care of getting the customer, of managing the customer because it’s an entirely different customer on the long term rental, right, so this is a person that expects hotel-like service in a sense, even though they…it’s a limited hotel-like service, they expect that type of service so they want to call at two in the morning for a reservation that’s in the next 60 days, asking if they’re going to have tablets. 

So that’s the type of service that we provide, so it’s calls, emails, texts, we take care of all of that pre-stay, during their stay, and post-stay. We take care of all of that cleaning, the upkeep of the furniture, the turnover, and all of that fun stuff, so that’s one thing. So, when we put these properties into our system, we start promoting them and the advantage of us we partner with around 150 different distribution channels, so once you put a property in our system, we distribute them everywhere. So, we’ve had customers I think from like 65 different countries. 

We’ve had everything from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, everywhere you can think of. So we start marketing these units and we get occupancy right off the bat like once we push a property life, the first month we start, we start making money so that’s amazing. For us, we’ve always pushed to get these units, failed unoccupied as fast as possible. We have average occupancy rates of around 85%, obviously depending on the month and we are not in a low season but that’s where the revenue management comes in. We always try to maintain the units as occupied as possible and play around with the rates. 

This is something that we do with the owners where we set up minimums, we set a maximum, usually, there are no maximum but we set a minimum so in order to maintain a good quality of the property, but the revenue management that’s our expertise, that’s what we do, and we are able to sell these units and get the most efficient return out of these units. On average, we see that a unit in short-term rentals generates around two to 2.5 times your regular market rent, and the net income at the end of those units will generate around 15 to 20% more after all, direct and indirect.

00:19:01.000

WS: Speak to the operator and, maybe property management, things like that, is extra workload or different workload or things like that, that maybe some of those concerns that the operators have “No wait a minute, we don’t have anybody that can take those calls at midnight about towels” or those things you were mentioning, what should they expect when thinking about maybe taking one or two units offline and trying this model?

00:19:24.000

NO: Saying it’s absolutely no work, no extra work is obviously too absolute right? You might have some people that instead of calling us will go down to either a front desk or to a leasing office and ask something. And what we try to do there is, have good communication and clear responsibilities in which when that happens, the leasing agent or the front desk agent or whoever receives that person can direct that person through the proper channels and to us. So we manage all of that, we manage the calls, we manage the emails, we manage the text, we have the onsite operators as well and they’re moving around the units, we have housekeeping that takes care of everything, and we have housekeeping supervisors as well that take care everything. 

So, it’s really not at any additional work, but there might be some circumstances in which the leasing agent is involved accidentally, and we have proper communication with them in which we train them and we get them to send them our way. But yeah, all in all, I personally believe it’s an amazing solution for multifamily. It allows you to sort of get a small percentage because it doesn’t have to be like 50% of the property, right? As a matter of fact, we never recommend doing 50% of the property for short-term rentals, because there starts to be a clash between the two clients, right, the long term rental starts feeling that they live in a hotel.

00:20:44.000

WS: That’s a good point.

00:20:45.000

NO: Yeah, so it’s like for us, it’s either cap it at 15, 20%, which is usually the rotation that a normal long term renter sees of people in their property, or do the entire property but never exceed that 20% threshold because that’s when it really starts affecting the property and the experience of the long term rentals, which you don’t want that to happen.

00:21:06.000

WS: No, that’s a great point thinking about other tenants, right. Most of your tenant base sees these new people are there all the time, you know, and I can see that making some families a little more insecure or things like that ’cause you never know who’s gonna…they don’t know anyway, but I could see just as there’s that much more turnover if it’s too much of the population it could build some uncertainty, right? 

But, I think it may be certain properties may even be better for this than others, depending on the layout of the building. We have a few properties like fourplex-style apartment communities, right, and we may be able to select well this building or these two buildings or it’s this part of the property, it’s not just random, maybe…I don’t know, I was just thinking through that and how that would work the best. But any suggestions around that before we move on to a few final questions?

00:21:48.000

NO: Yeah, it really depends on the actual property. Just to tell you the truth, we try to cap it at 15, 20% just because of in our experience it’s what we’ve seen. We’ve done 50% of the property, we’ve done 100% of the property, we’ve done five units in a 250 unit property, we’ve done full floors. And really, the most impactful thing is having a community approach to it. So educating our guests, educating the long term renters as well, and to the long term rentals, giving them something in return, explaining and educating them. 

As a landlord, what are the benefits that they’re going to have, so usually we build in a sort of resident programs for them to bring, let’s say families visiting you get 15% off. And these types of situations if the unit is uninhabitable because for some reason they need to fix something in the ACs or the bathrooms are the plumbing or whatever, we can provide them with a unit during their stay and they’ll be literally right there. 

So all in all, I think it’s all about having a community approach. Educating everybody from the guests that are saying that they’re coming into a residential property that their neighbors might be little kids and that they can be throwing parties a toy in the morning. And on the resident side, to be to let them know because the problems start coming up when the landlord feels like they’re doing something wrong when really they’re not and they try to hide it from them. And that’s where most of the disgruntled with the residents comes about. 

But it’s really that and we try to make the guest experience as seamless as possible, so we have a noise monitoring systems that notifies them when they’re exceeding noise, we have electronic check-ins, we have 24/7 call numbers so that they don’t start making a mess whenever something is wrong because, you know, accidents happen, but they have always somebody they can contact. And apart from that, there are things you can do, right so you can book them all on one floor, that’s what we do, usually in high rises, let’s say the entire fifth and sixth floor, it’s for normal, right so you don’t have like door-to-door neighbors with long term residents, or a long term resident isn’t stuck in a 10 unit floor with nine short terms, right?

00:23:53.000

WS: Yeah, that’s some great points to think about. And I just think this could be a good option depending on the property type, and style, and layout, all those things, some great points at your line and I just want to think through a few final questions. With this business model and apartment communities that you’re already working with, you know, just thinking through how we prepare for a downturn, right? How does this affect that business model? You know, people are gonna say “Well these are short term, if we did 10 units that are short term leases, you know, they could move out very quickly and all of a sudden we have this vacancy during a downturn,” is that a question that a lot of people have? How do you think about that?

00:24:31.000

NO: So downturns can happen, especially now, right? We rely a lot on tourism, but with the revenue share agreement, in a sense, yes, we are taking away that security that the long-term lease provides, but at the same time we’re allowing you to participate in the upside of our business. 

So if you can capitalize on that, that sort of mitigates the risk of a potential downturn, and you’re not going to have those units empty during that time. With a revenue share agreement, as we don’t have the obligation to pay like a fixed lease, we will remain there and we will shift our strategy to focus more on longer-term or midterm renters, sort of three to six months, which is, well, we did during the initial lockdown months, which in most of South Florida with most of our units we could only rent our first responder for less than 30 days and after that everybody was 30 or 45 days more and, that’s new water we needed to navigate in, and we focused on that, just getting traveling nurses, getting people that were traveling for work that had to travel because, obviously, not a lot of people were traveling for work, but sort of shift our focus into this other demographic that provides a more consistent rental approach but is a thinner margin, in a sense. So, it’s all about shifting our strategies and focusing on different kinds of demographics.

00:25:46.000

WS: No, that’s great information, and then just thinking through, you have already been through a pandemic once now and so it’s great to…that learning experience to move forward with as well. In operators, now we could use this model to potentially double the income on some of these units, right? And then during a storm, potential pandemic storm, right something like that, you can still weather that with other methods so it’s nice to know that there are people can’t just move out and it’s just going to be vacant, right? And that’s the way it is.

00:26:12.000

NO: Yeah, it’s all about finding the opportunity.

00:26:14.000

WS: Yeah.

00:26:15.000

NO: Here in South Florida we deal a lot with hurricanes, so you might feel, you know, hurricanes, no business for like a week. Actually, we make good business out of hurricanes. It’s a lot of work, but all of our reservations get canceled, literally wiped out our screen is zero because people can come in and it gets filled right away with people that are, you know, have houses or live in flood areas or have houses right by the water, and they seek shelter in our units because usually, they’re in high rises where they have generators and this and that right so it’s actually a good business.

00:26:50.000

WS: Nico, what are a few daily habits that you are disciplined about that have helped you achieve success?

00:26:55.000

NO: I played a lot of sports regularly for the past six years, but since the pandemic started, in order to remain sane with the business being literally changing by the second – I have two small kids at home – so, I decided to go like deep into working out. So I work out every single morning, routinely. If I don’t do that for whatever reason, it just screws up my entire day. I cannot do that and it just keeps me energized all day. So workout is one thing, 100%. I try to fix my schedule the previous night, so before going to bed or before doing my nightly routine, you shouldn’t watch a movie with my wife or stuff like that. I try to organize what my next day is going to look like, my schedule my to-do, my meetings my him, and I try to block a few hours of sort of deep-diving work: Hold on, do not disturb, just focus on the computer, or anything like that. And then just trying to realize, when I get home and try to disconnect, obviously our industry is a 24/7 industry, and when most of the problems come about, is in the weekends and holidays, which is a problem, thankfully I have a team that allows me to relax on the weekends. I had at the very beginning of the company, I had times where I was the godfather of my nephew’s baptism, and I literally had to run out from the church because somebody was locked out of their unit a minute to go and help them out. So, if you’re trying to disconnect on the weekends, spend time with a family and not bring sort of all of my work-related issues or troubles or these home, try to segregate everything.

00:28:30.000

WS: Constant battle for every entrepreneur, no doubt about it, including myself working on that every day, it seems, to try to split that up, right, and sure I’m having that quality family time more and more, just so important. How do you like to give back?

00:28:45.000

NO: I really haven’t seemed like a big initiative that has caught my eye that I could participate actively in. Since I got, like very, very involved in the whole fitness thing, I’ve tried to help people that are close to me that I know are struggling with being a little bit overweight. I’ve decided that sort of tried to help with the practices that have helped me, I’m just not like I’m shredded or anything, but it has allowed me to carry on a healthier lifestyle, make me feel a lot more energized and healthy, and I think I look better and I think I feel better in general. Right?

So try to get that to a lot of people around me. And coincidentally, one of the things that I’ve done is I recently started working on a program with a friend, it’s a way to get back to entrepreneurs. So we’re meeting with a bunch of different entrepreneurs within our network, interviewing them, getting a feel for what their experience has been like, what they’ve learned, what recommendations they had for new entrepreneurs and then, we’re going to launch that within the first couple of months of next year, because he’s the type of entrepreneur that right after the school decided to build his own business, that’s very successful and never went to college. I’m the type of entrepreneur that went to college, wasn’t very successful in college, and didn’t feel like it was very fruitful for me, in a sense. 

That’s why I decided to do an MBA, and I didn’t have a good experience with my MBA either. Right, so well I love my college, don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot, but I don’t think it prepared us for entrepreneurship – being an entrepreneur. I think it prepared you to work in a corporation, to work in corporate America and this and that, and the education system is not built for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is all about getting your hands dirty, living your experience, learning from others’ mistakes and getting to know people, talking to other people, so forth. So I think that’s my way of giving back right now, and it’s been super rewarding because out of all of these interviews, I’ve never approached these conversations with this network of people in such an educational way, which I’m learning a bunch as well, right, so it’s super interesting.

00:30:48.000

WS: Yeah. No, that’s awesome. College does not prepare most any way to be entrepreneurs. But Nico, a pleasure to meet you, have you on the show, appreciate you going through just the hospitality business, through COVID, some different things that happened, things you’ve learned, the trends, you know, the traveling nomad living, just things we need to be thinking about right now, especially for having short-term rentals, but also just how we could use this model with large multifamily, and to significantly increase the revenue. I think it’s a model that we should all keep in mind, and there are probably many listeners who have not considered it before or thought about it with their multifamily properties and it could be a great way to increase the revenue, an adult different dynamic depending on the property type. But tell the listeners how they can get in touch with you and learn more about you.

00:31:30.000

NO: Yeah, of course. So, nerd to get in touch me, very easy, send me an email at [email protected] – that’s ‘stay’ s-t-a-y and ‘Nuovo n-u-o-v-o dot com – [email protected], that’s the best way to reach me. And you can reach out to me if you want to learn more about what we offer if you have some properties that would you like to onboard. 

And really we partner with multifamily properties that are as little as four to five units and can go all the way up to 400. Obviously, we won’t be able to take on the full 400 right now, but we try to focus on getting a good percentage of that in order to get things going. We’re also doing an equity crowdfunding campaign through a Republic, which is an equity crowdfunding platform. The link is www.republic.co/Nuovo, and there you can find more details about the company, the problem that we’re trying to solve, there’s a small video there, what we’re raising and so forth. You can invest as little as $100 if you’d like to be a part of our company as well. But yeah, so as far as multifamily owners we can partner with you. If you want, we provide really good service, reach out to me and we can make something happen. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well with my full name Nicolas Ortega, and yeah, happy to help.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[OUTRO]

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[END]

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