WS1180: Running Successful Vacation Rentals with Christina VanDergrift

EPISODE 1180

[INTRODUCTION]

0:00:01.5 

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.

0:00:23

Whitney Sewell (WS): This is your daily Real Estate Syndication Show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. 

Today our guest is Christina VanDergrift. Christina has become a short-term rental expert. She didn’t start that way though. She started at 20 years old, was in single-family rentals. I think many of us have these mental roadblocks like she had and that we can relate to and learn from. She felt that they were more safe. But now she owns two brokerages. She has grown her real estate portfolio and her real estate businesses very quickly to a large scale. In the show, we focus today on short-term rentals that are performing very well. I just think even as a multi-family operator, it’s just something I like to have in my back pocket as I’m looking at new markets or even looking at different properties to purchase. Maybe this is a good part of the plan to have or a potential thing to have in my back pocket.

0:01:21.4 

WS: But there are some things you need to know about. She goes into numerous things that, if I’m going to buy, let’s say, a duplex or even a larger multifamily property somewhere, maybe it’s an option for me to have a few units as short-term rentals. It’s a way to boost your NOI in a big way depending on where it’s located in the local attractions and things like that. This could, significantly, raise the value of your property as well. I know you’re going to enjoy the show, but I want you to be equipped with other avenues like this to help increase the value of your commercial property. 

Christina, welcome to the show. I’m honored to have you on and you have such a vast array of experience in real estate – owning two brokerages right now. There are different things I know we’re going to discuss during the show today that are going to help many of our listeners who are on a business or entrepreneurship journey. There’re so many roadblocks that happen, that you have to navigate as an entrepreneur. You have done just that on numerous occasions. So, give the listeners a little more about your background in real estate, and let’s jump into where you’re at now as well.

0:02:34.1 

Christina VanDergrift (CV): Sure. And thank you so much for having me. So, I have been selling real estate since literally my 20th birthday, which unfortunately is almost 17 years ago. And it was so neat because it exposed me to all different lifestyles and just people and backgrounds that I had never been exposed to prior to that., I realized early on that I wanted to start investing in real estate as early as I could, just because you see people who either didn’t invest or the ones who regretted not doing it when they had the opportunity. Bought my first house when I was 22. Then I was so hungry and probably a little cocky and a novice, but I wanted to be the number one realtor in our area. Then fate would have it that my mom decided to sell a brokerage, and I decided to buy it from her, and it’s just been a whole roller coaster ride of events. But now, like I said earlier, we have two real estate brokerages, one is just commercial residential land sales, and then the other one is vacation rental property management also.

0:03:33.8 

WS: Nice. Okay, you started at 20 years old selling project properties. Tell us, what were a couple of the roadblocks as far as growing your real estate company and how you scale. How you move to the next level of that.

0:03:46.4 

CV: Sure. So, it’s a 20-year-old female in a very male-dominated industry in our area, it was a little intimidating. A lot of people would look at me and think – oh, she’s just some punk kid. So, I felt that I had to put 150% into it to prove myself that I knew what I was doing, that they should take chances on me and work with me. The same has happened with buying properties. I’m kind of old school when it comes to being a millennial. I’m a handshake, look-in-the-eye kind of person. There have been different opportunities over the years that I look at the person in the face, ask them if they want to sell, and then made the deal face-to-face. So, it’s just not being cocky, but not being afraid to ask sometimes also and putting in the work to figure it out. 

0:04:31.9 

WS: I think it’s a common issue for anyone getting started especially young in any business. But you mentioned you had to prove to people they should take a chance on you, any examples around that? That would help a listener struggling right now with that.

0:04:44.2 

CV: One of my favorite things that we’ve done over the years, especially early on in investing, was we didn’t have 20% down for every single property that we bought. You never know if the owner is willing to hold part of it or all of it. The worst they can say is no. So, there was a time when I went to a gentleman’s house, just face-to-face and I will give you what you want as far as asking price, but I need you to help me out also, and would you be willing to hold the 20% down? And he could have yelled at me. He could have said, get out the door. But he actually said, sure. I explained the terms and everything, and it was cool because I bought that property with no money down. Then, years later reinvested that equity into a property four times as much money. That made a lot more money also. It would not have happened if I didn’t take that chance to just ask.

0:05:31.3 

WS: No doubt about it. You have to be willing to ask. Like you said, all I could do is just say no. And oftentimes you have to be willing to ask many, many times. So, what were other, maybe a couple of transitions to where you’re at today? Getting started so young, how do you think big? How did you start to scale? How did you start to do bigger things? Really believed that you could? Or how did you grow your team? Anything around that.

0:05:52.2 

CV: I’m a big self-education kind of person. I think that is so important. If you don’t have that mentor, find people, whether it’s authors or speakers or coaches or something like that, to help. No one in my family had invested in any real estate or anything in my entire life. I knew I wanted to think way bigger than anything I had been exposed to even in that regard. So, definitely tried to learn and listen to as many podcasts and different things as I could. As I got more sales under my belt and was exposed to different clients who had investments, I tried to learn from those around me also. And started buying single-family homes for rentals. We did that a lot. We had 15 at one point and then decided we need to make more money. We’re building all this equity and have all these write-offs, but it wasn’t fun. I was ready for something else, which transitioned us into figuring out, maybe we should have a vacation rental. We ended up buying our first property down in Florida to make it a vacation rental because it was a Sunday, maybe it’s our winter home situation, it’ll pay for itself and get the tax write-offs, and then appreciate.

0:07:00 

CV: But then we have a free vacation home and it gets to be fun also. Then we started buying properties locally or upsizing our rentals into them. And they were just so much more lucrative and we can use them if we want to, keep a better eye on them also.

0:07:13.3 

WS: Yeah, interesting to hear different people talk about that. Go into a little more detail there about why short-term rentals now? Why that’s more lucrative? And why you’ve focused so much more energy on that asset class?

0:07:25.7 

CV: Our first one that I managed myself was called the Sky High Chalet. It was a property near our home. It had 10 acres and it was like a chalet-style house with beautiful views. We wanted it because it was close to our home. I want to get as many properties around us as we can. I didn’t think it would be as big as it would be if we were to buy it and rent it out as a traditional family rental. It would have been $1400 a month for our gross rent plus taxes, mortgage insurance, and all of that stuff. We launched as a vacation rental, and it grosses $80-90 grand a year. In the summertime, we literally gross $8,000 a month. Had the same upkeep and wear and tear and everything else. It was such an eye-opener that I’m like, I need to do this for other people also. I also help educate people on how they can do it also because, you know, I was the 20 year-old girl who didn’t have any exposure and experience but figured it out sometimes the hard way. I wanted to help streamline it for other people so that they could have that abundance also.

0:08:28.1 

WS: Wow, that’s incredible. Just thinking through that, you said $1400 a month versus what?

0:08:32

CV:  8 grand!

0:08:33

WS: $8,000 a month. Yeah, it’s incredible. Even in multifamily properties too, I know that more people are considering turning a few units into short-term rentals because of what you just said. Maybe they have a few vacancies anyway, so it’s like, why not try? So, when you’re thinking about whether it’s a couple of units in a multifamily property or whether we find a single-family home in the city that we want to visit sometimes, what are some things we should be thinking about as far as having a successful short-term rental?

0:09:03.5 

CV: So first off, I highly suggest this, and I talk about it in my book and my course, make sure the zoning allows it. You don’t want to go down that path of investing money and time and effort into it to find out you’re not allowed to. So, that would be my biggest thing. Make sure you’re legally allowed to do it.

0:09:22.2 

WS: But how would we know that?

0:09:23.5 

CV: You want to check with the local municipality. So, whether it’s the town or city or township, depending on where you live, definitely go to the authorities to look up the zoning regulations. It’s interesting because since Covid, the vacation rental industry has just exploded and it’s only going to continue to (do so). And there’s a lot of areas across the entire country that don’t have zoning on it because it’s so new to them still, so you definitely want to make sure. Even locally, we have some towns that allow them and others that don’t. Don’t ever assume because you know what that does.

0:09:58.5 

WS: Even if other people have short-term rentals there, you still need to check, right?

0:10:03.8 

CV: Exactly. Things change all the time. 

0:10:05.8 

WS: Okay. So, be sure zoning allows for it. What else?

0:10:08.2 

CV: I would definitely always want to make sure the space is clean, great quality. I know it’s intimidating thinking about having to furnish your space. It doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to spend $50,000 to furnish your space. But it has to be nice and quality materials because it’s going to get a lot of wear and tear. 

The other thing is, I feel like your audience probably knows a lot of these things just from the real estate market, but you want to have it staged in professional pictures. There’s so much technology out there to help you market it, but I think it’s those small things that really make the biggest difference.

0:10:40.8 

WS: Staged pictures you mentioned are just professionally done right inside. Like personally, I wouldn’t have a clue. And the things that I would probably go find to stage, probably would not be very cosmetically appealing to most if I was doing that myself. How would we find somebody to help us do that to ensure that that is done well?

0:11:02.1 

CV: Actually, on my website, I have Vacation Academy Course. I actually have a free download with my furnishing list. And there’s a free training video that breaks it down, how I do it from top to bottom, how I furnish it, the list of all the things. So, I would definitely suggest people check out christina-vandergrift dot com. They can find that on there. And then my book also breaks it down and explains, and you can purchase that through my website also.

0:11:28.6 

WS: Give us a couple of details, a couple of tips here on how to do it though.

0:11:32.9 

CV: Sure. The biggest thing is you are showing people a good time. It’s all about the experience from the time they walk in. They want to feel like they’re at home. They don’t want it to be cold, and especially not dirty. They want to feel comfortable. You have a lot of solo travelers, families, you want to make sure that you can accommodate as many people as you sleep a night for chairs and table setting and just everything. And I think there’s a lot of little things that people might not think of like that if you say you can sleep eight people, you better have enough towels and plates for eight people or more.

0:12:10.0 

WS: And they’re gonna be calling you, right? They’re gonna be calling you. Tell me a little bit about underwriting for a short-term rental versus buying a single-family home for monthly rental. I would hope that we could still buy and work it as a monthly rental if we had to, but is that something you consider? Or is it like, if we can make eight grand a month versus 1400, now we can pay a lot more. I would hate to think about it like that, but is that the case?

0:12:37.4 

CV: As far as the underwriting goes, you want to make sure, and I teach you this on my course also, when you are approaching the bank about it, that you are very conservative with your numbers. And like you said, worst-case scenario, you can just rent it out as a traditional rental. There are different banks, depending on the area it is, that are very familiar with financing short-term rentals while there’re others that aren’t. You just want to make sure that you are very conservative from start to finish. You don’t want to assume anything. But yeah, it’s been very interesting because again, it’s so new. So, there are a lot of banks that are like, “Well, that sounds risky, we won’t finance it.” So, you want to make sure you do your research, find the right lender, and be upfront with them. Don’t try and say, “Oh, I’m buying it for a second home and then decide after the fact to do that because I’m (unintelligible) also.”

0:13:25.5 

WS: What would happen there in that instance? Do you know? Obviously, you want to be very upfront, like you said, it’s good advice. It’s your lender.  Let’s say it wasn’t going to be a second home and then you convert it into a short-term rental, do you see a problem there with your lender possibly?

0:13:38.3 

CV: So with my real estate broker hat on, it just doesn’t sit well in my gut.

0:13:42.8 

WS: Yeah, I agree.

0:13:43.5 

CV: They have a reason to re-inspect it or go back through your paperwork or if you default on your mortgage, then they can change your terms. I’m sure that it happens all the time. Or there’re people that buy it as a second home and then eventually convert it. They don’t normally come back and check those things as long as you’re in good standing, but it’s just the moral side of it.

0:14:03.6 

WS: I want to be completely upfront with them, no doubt about it. No doubt. I’ve heard of the same things happening. What about location? How do we find the right location and find some competitive property?

0:14:14.2 

CV: So, you want to make sure that you – location is everything – you want to be easily close to all the attractions. You want to have easy access for people to get in and out of. And that all determine how much you can charge ultimately also. You want to definitely think, if it’s in an area where you’re not familiar with, you want to find out, what do people like to do? What did they like to have? When we bought ours in Florida, my realtor said it’s okay to have a pool but you really want to be on a canal also. And me from Pennsylvania, I wouldn’t have known that. So, just doing that due diligence to ask questions and find out what you don’t know already is huge. The locals may know of things that people want to see and do. So, you want to make sure that you have all those things also if you can. And if not, you want to make sure it’s staged nice and marketed properly, but it affects your price also.

0:15:08.9 

WS: Yeah, so the local things you would know. Like you said, talk to the realtor, talk to other locals that are going to tell you what they want. It’s so important. What about managing from a distance? You mentioned that you’re in Pennsylvania. Some of these properties are in Florida, how do you do that? It seems like it would even be more of a headache because you’re so far away. Even more turnover, may be a daily turnover or a weekend, every weekend or every few days, or something different. Talk through managing that process.

0:15:36.3 

CV: Yeah. So, ours in Florida and Tennessee both have property managers that are a whole different company than what I own. From the get-go, I knew I was going to have somebody manage it. You definitely want to do your homework. They all charge different percentages, and you just want to make sure their reviews and everything. In Florida, we had a bad go of it with our first one, hardly any bookings, not promoted very well. So, you want to make sure you do your research with that. But for me, even the ones I have now locally, I have them go through my management company. Because I’m only one person, I have multiple jobs and hats, I’m a mom, I’m a wife. I’m all these things so my time is limited and my time is valuable also. So, I highly suggest if you don’t have the time to dedicate to it, to get a property manager. You’re looking at somewhere between 10 to 40% off the top if you have one. But, you just get to get your check every month and you’re pretty hands off. They do everything. You just have to make sure utilities are on and if there are issues, that you’re paid to prepare the problems too.

0:16:36.6 

WS: I appreciate you even giving us a percentage there to expect. Are those property managers for short-term rental going to be different than say, larger commercial properties, or multi-family or single-family?

0:16:46.7 

CV: Yes, definitely. Short-term rental property managers are completely different, a whole different kind of worms. And I know this because I do both. I do property management but then short-term property management also. Just the whole mindset is completely different from that side of it, because it’s a long-term relationship. It’s not a short thing for the owner side of it, but they handle all the problem costs. They handle all of the accounting and remitting taxes for you. They do a lot of different things that a traditional property manager would not do.

0:17:18.4 

WS: That’s great to know. How do we know this is somebody that’s going to be good at managing our short-term rental?

0:17:22.7 

CV: There’re a lot of bigger companies out there, but I think thanks to good old Google, you can always look at their ratings and reviews and other websites also. I talk about it in my book, in my course. But if you have a specific area in mind, just Google it. Look up different property managers and interview them and question them and ask more than one. Don’t just go with the first one, unless it’s the only one in the area, because they might offer different things that the next one doesn’t. For example, the first company we used in Florida. They said, Oh yeah, we’re on Airbnb and Vrbo, when in reality, they were on those platforms but in Europe and not in America. And there were a lot of folks from overseas that would stay at our place but locals didn’t even know about it and had no way to access it because it was a whole different website.

0:18:13.2 

WS: Knowing what you know now, the different avenues or asset classes you’ve been in in real estate, what would you have done differently? Say, 17 years ago, or maybe even 10 years ago.

0:18:24.3 

CV: Definitely, this may sound silly, but I would have done pretty much everything the same but I would have educated more people earlier if that makes sense. I think that there are so many people that think, well, my family didn’t do that, there’s no way I can do that. I think people assume if you have properties and everything else that it’s unattainable for them. That’s not the case. You just have to be willing to learn and put in the work and learn from others. So, that would be the thing I would do differently, I would try and educate people sooner, and I’m trying to do that now. I’m playing catch up to have as big an impact as I can with it. I love to do it with kids. I’ve been able to speak to kids in high school and try and say, you can make as much money or do as much as you want, you just have to want to learn from others. You don’t have to just stay with the surroundings that you have. That would be it.

0:19:17.0 

WS: What’s the biggest risk on short-term rentals? What should we be considering as the risky side of that type of asset class?

0:19:24.5 

CV: You definitely want to know seasonally, the market. When is the busy season and how steady it will be? Florida, we did not know that, it was our first one. We learned so much from that. That market is busy in the wintertime. So, in the wintertime, we can charge over $300 a night. Summertime, $100 a night. Where we’re at in Pennsylvania or even in Tennessee, it’s pretty steady year-round. So, you want to know the market conditions and if it does have an on and off-season. That has a huge impact on how much money your monthly cost and upkeep and all of that also.

0:19:58.3 

WS: That’s great advice. A better understanding of the local market, no doubt. Do you have any predictions for the real estate market over the next six to twelve months?

0:20:06.8 

CV: I think that it’s still crazy busy. There’s been word all the time, and even going into winter in Northern Pennsylvania, everything that gets listed is getting jumped on right away. I think it’s going to stay like this for a while, honestly. And I think that by the time the interest rates start going up, there will be some market condition that helps it stay steady that way. I don’t think it’s going to slow down any time soon, and we’re going to ride it out as long as we can. And as far as short-term rentals go, I really think that, like I said earlier, it’s only the beginning of this. People are changing the way they travel. The demographics of people that travel are changing. I think that after Covid, the era of social distancing is kind of a norm now. So, the days of people staying in hotels with people and elevators, I think there’s always going to be that client, but I think that there’s a lot of people that want a place where their family can go, they can have good internet, work from there, and vacation.

0:21:02.2 

WS: How do we prepare for a downturn though? if we’re buying short-term rentals, if it does happen and there’s something massive, how do we prepare when we’re thinking about buying one?

0:21:14.4 

CV: That’s where I go back to being conservative with your business plan. Don’t just say whatever number just to get the loan. You want to be conservative so that if you have a couple of off-months that you can get through it. We were very fortunate during Covid and the shutdown that we could still rent to our guests for the most part. There was a small gap of time, but the crazy thing is after the world back up, it was busier than it was before. Airbnb and different platforms also offered money to people who had cancellations or had loss of business because of that. 

So, you want to make sure, if God forbid that happens, you’re conservative. You’re saving money for those downtimes. And one of the other things I really always suggest to my clients, the people that I coach with vacation rentals, is to have a little unexpected fund. We’ve had the craziest things happen. We’ve had buried a hot tub cover. We have had lizards get in the swimming pool in Florida. You just never know. So, you don’t want to just keep blowing your income even though you’re making more money. You have to be prepared because it’s still going to have wear and tear, and you’re still going to be dealing with people and they’re unpredictable sometimes. So, you want to have that unexpected fund for those cases.

0:22:30.1 

WS: Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you about as well is the fees, cleaning fees and different things that happen when you rent a short-term rental. Oftentimes, just from personal experience, we’ll be looking and we see one out – that one’s $175, $200 a night. But then obviously with the fees, it may be $300 a night or more. What’s realistic there? How should we think about that? Or is it just standard across the board? Or is it per operator? How’s that done?

0:23:01.0 

CV: So I think everybody does them differently. How I do mine personally, and the ones that we manage for other people is when you advertise your property, that guest should be paying your cleaning fee and any other additional fees on top of it. At the end of the day, in my mind, the owner should only be having to pay for maintenance or that commission that the property manager takes off and there are other little fees that might go into it. But the majority of those, taxes and other additional fees on top like cleaning or pet deposits or things like that, the guest pays; which is great because you know you have your itemized things on your statement fewer deductions, and you can have a more realistic idea of what you can expect.

0:23:43.6 

WS: Now, that’s great. I appreciate that. And what’s a way you’ve recently improved your business that we could apply to ours as well?

0:23:50.0 

CV: Social media. I mean, that’s what you do, but that is huge across whether it’s my real estate company, my short-term rentals, or any of it. People want to learn and they want to see and they want to experience. So, the more you can share with that, the better. The more you can put your authentic personality into it, the better. Whether it’s Vacation Rental Academy, my real estate company, people are curious. The internet and social media are how most people spend their days, so why not entertain them, share your story with them and maybe it’ll empower them and inspire them to take action in their lives too.

0:24:26.1 

WS: Awesome. That’s great. Tell us a few daily habits that you have, that you are disciplined about, that’s helped you achieve success.

0:24:33.0 

CV: I have to get my sleep. So, I get seven hours of sleep every single night. I’m an early riser, 5:00, 5:30 every morning. I try to work out every morning before my boys get up. I always try to have a list so I know exactly what I have to do that day, and it helps me be efficient. Mostly sleeping. And I’m very big about what I eat, I don’t like to eat junk food or sweets. So, I think it’s so important that those core little things can make or break your day from the time you wake up, honestly.

0:25:03.7 

WS: Yeah, we would have a lot in common around that what you just said, for sure. Christina, how do you like to give back?

0:25:09.0 

CV: And I think I touched on it earlier, but I love motivating other people to step out of their comfort zone. Try and get them to get more out of life. Inspire them to not settle whether it’s real estate or just coaching them. I think that there’s just a lot of people that don’t realize that they don’t have to settle. They just have to try and it’s not easy. So, that’s what I do, whether it’s my kids or other people’s kids, or my employees and agents, I make them set goals and I really try and coach them. Try to make them set goals so that they can accomplish them.

0:25:43.8 

WS: That’s awesome. I appreciate you, Christina, being on the show and giving back in that way. I also enjoyed that as well. I feel like I can relate so much to your getting started, and your goals, your thoughts that you’re not near big enough, you limit yourself, you just feel like it’s just not for you or you can’t do it. But hey, we’ve all had to step out. We’ve all had to be uncomfortable to make things happen. From 20 years old to getting started in real estate, down to owning brokerages, now just a successful short-term rental business. 

I appreciate you elaborating on many details about short-term rentals that I just think even as a multifamily operator, it’s just something I like to keep in my toolbelt. Maybe here’s a couple of units that we should try in this location, or maybe this one over here. I’d like to learn more about it, so we always have that available potentially, right? Depending on zoning, depending on other things, at least as some things that we could consider. But grateful. Just going through some of the risks and the fees and things we should think about.

Christina, how can people learn more about you and get in touch with you?

0:26:47.3 

CV: Sure. So, my website is probably the best way to reach me. It’s christina-vandergrift.com You can connect with me. I do one-on-one consulting and coaching on there. I have my book on there and my course. Also on Instagram, it’s Christina VanDergrift. I’m on LinkedIn, the same name, and also on Facebook. So, definitely any of the social platforms, but definitely on my website also. I have my blog in there where I try and educate and help people with vacation rentals also and have little tidbits of free resources too.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[OUTRO]

0:27:22.8

ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Real Estate Syndication Show, brought to you by Life Bridge Capital. Life Bridge Capital works with investors nationwide to invest in real estate while also donating 50% of its profits to assist parents who are committing to adoption. Life Bridge Capital, making a difference one investor and one child at a time. Connect online at www.LifeBridgeCapital.com for free material and videos to further your success.

[END]