In this mini‑episode of The Real Estate Investor Show, co‑hosts Liz and Andresa Guidelli walk women investors through a five‑step framework for shifting into a new real‑estate niche—such as high‑end vacation or short‑term rentals—while leveraging the expertise they already possess. They begin by emphasizing that listeners are not “rookies” because their existing real‑estate knowledge, skills, and personality are transferable. The first step is targeted due‑diligence: gathering basic market data and property criteria for larger, million‑dollar vacation rentals. The second step is mapping a clear vision and deal criteria that align with the desired guest experience (e.g., retreat‑style, running routes). The third step involves building a leadership team with defined roles (Liz as front‑person, Matt handling finance, Andresa managing short‑term‑rental operations) and setting a concrete goal (e.g., having a property under contract by year‑end). The fourth step is to bring in external experts—agents, market specialists, mentors—to fill knowledge gaps rather than trying to master everything alone. The final step is taking consistent, weekly action, tracking progress, and iterating. Throughout, they stress the importance of setting aside ego, leveraging existing strengths, and focusing on one actionable step after each episode. The episode also includes sponsor messages for Rent to Retirement and Steadily, and a call‑to‑action for listeners to join their community and share one action they will take.
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Welcome ladies to The Real Estate Investor Show, providing inspiration, strategies, and insight to empower women investors to live balanced and financially free lives. Now here are your co-hosts, Liz and Andresa Guidelli. Welcome back ladies.
This is Liz and this is Andresa.
Welcome back to The Real Estate Investor Show. Where our mission and passion and what fuels me and Andresa is to empower women to live a financially free and balanced life. And you were back with a mini-sode, and I'm excited about talking about today how to move powerfully and to a new niche. When you're in one niche in real estate investing and you've had success there, how to move powerfully to a new one that might be a little more uncertain and a little, you know, you're not clear on what to do. So how do you do that in a powerful way?
I like that a lot. I don't think 10 minutes is going to be enough, but we'll give it a shot. People, stick with us.
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So I actually have kind of 5 steps. I know I pack a lot in 10 minutes. So let's get going here. Here's what's coming up for me and why I thought this would be a really helpful conversation. So many times in real estate we are in a niche and it's working. Hopefully we're in a niche and it's working and we're creating work. I should, I should preface that. And, and you're having success with it, right? You've built something. So, you know, for me and my husband, we've had the most experience in our tenure, if you will, in multifamily, in buy and hold investments. Andresa has a lot more experience in short-term rentals, Airbnb, and, and other focuses. But I've personally never bought a vacation rental or a short-term rental in our portfolio. And so, you know, what's interesting and what's exciting sometimes is to look at what's happening in the market, what's happening in your business, and then to shift to something that will work in the market as well as work for your business. And so we, we're talking a lot about how powerful it'd be. I'm share a little bit about our vision, and because we are active investors just along with you, How powerful would it be to have a, a beautiful property, a property that women and men wanna come to for different reasons for both of our businesses, InvestHer, DeRosa, and all the different businesses we have going on where people can come together and they can really not just come together, but have breakthroughs, have breakdowns, and, and, and you're around like-minded people in a retreat-like atmosphere. And that was something that really energized me and Andresa, me and Matt. And as we talked, we're like, okay, we can find a property that is kind of a luxurious destination that people wanna be there. So we can hold some of these, you know, really intimate masterminds with women and, and also for other areas of our business. And then we can, people, other companies can use this too that wanna just like white glove it and figure, you know, not have any of the figuring out to do. Right.
Andresa Guidelli, I discovered that that's my love language. Like there's 5 love languages, right? The 6th love language is concierge.
Concierge.
I like concierge. That's right. I like it doing it for me. Do it for me. Yes. Do it. Think ahead for me. I like that a lot.
Yeah. And you don't have to deal with all of it yourself. So that idea, that vision excited us. And then we had a call with a couple key people and that's part of my process I'm gonna walk you through. And then I'm gonna go through what we did to kind of navigate a new niche. Again, not new to Andresa necessarily, but this concept's probably new for all of us that the idea that we have and to have a solid vacation rental that we can expand. As another business opportunity and a win-win. So let me walk you through the process. And so often I think women have confidence in one area and then when they're transitioning to a new niche, they're like, oh my gosh. Like they're just, they can get a little rookie again. Yeah, you're a rookie again. And so the, the prerequisite before I get into my 5 steps is that you're actually not a rookie, right? So me not ever personally buying a vacation rental is not like I'm starting 17 years ago buying that first duplex. I'm not the same Liz, not my skills, not my experience, not my knowledge. I know a lot about real estate and even just talking to some agents this week about vacation rentals, questions I was asking a rookie would not have asked. I don't know vacation rentals. I can't whip up like, you know, like a little analysis within seconds, but I know questions to ask. I know what property's gonna be desirable cuz that's the experience I have. So my point being is that don't dismiss the experience you already have if you have to write it down, if you have to get clear. And again, I always like to come from skills, experience, and personality. Like you are already bringing knowledge and an expertise, maybe not in that niche, but in real estate investing that is highly, highly valuable. Don't dismiss that. So I just wanna mention that before I jump into my 5. So the first thing or steps is to gain some basic information, do some due diligence depending on where you are in the research mode. I know we've been taking a lot of assessments on Jess and I, and although I'm not like someone who is like, I need to spend hours on research, I actually need some, some of it. I really do. And I get it differently, but I I do need some of it. I don't just wing it. I'm not a complete wing-it person, but I don't need as much as maybe others. So for me, you know, and for us, we're going to start to do some due diligence in larger vacation rentals, right? We're not just doing an Airbnb that's a 2-bedroom. We're looking for, like, you know, 7 to 11-bedroom properties. Yeah, these are million-dollar-plus properties. So again, new niche, new market. So let's do some due diligence. And so that's what we started to do. So then when you start to do your own due diligence, and I'm not saying, say spend 6 months doing this, I mean spend some time so you know what you're looking for and you kind of have some basic knowledge is helpful because if you don't have that and you get someone on the phone, which is my third one, they're not gonna know how to help you. So you have to bring something to the table. Doesn't have to be a tremendous amount based off who you are, but it has to be something, some basic information. So that's number 1. Number 2 is always mapping out where you wanna go. Andresa, myself, and Matt spend a lot of time mapping out what our deal criteria is, what our vision is, what feelings do people wanna walk into, right? With this property. If this is, if this is a retreat center, that's a very important question. Do they wanna feel relaxed? What do they wanna look at? What do they wanna experience? Like, that's critical. We have to look at the properties next, but that, if you don't know that, then any property will do. So we really mapped out our deal criteria. We all spent time putting a Google Doc together. Simple stuff. It wasn't like this huge thing, but it was, you know, simple enough that we got our vision out there, our deal criteria. And those sorts of things.
I just want to pick up on that. As you create your criteria, I want you to think about, and I don't know if you're going to talk about this right after, hopefully not, but who you're building that for. What is the habit of that person that is going to be going there? So for example, many of the people that we mastermind around run in the morning, right? So when I, we're visiting those places, what I'm going to be looking for is like, okay, if people want to run in the morning, where would they go? It can't be a busy street or that they're going to be like the midst of cars or things like that. So think about the behavior of the people that are going to be using what you're looking to offer.
That's a great point. I don't have that in my 5, so I love that. Oh, there you go. So second one was mapping out where you wanna go. The third one is then developing a team, and that goes along with role clarity and then goals. So the team is, you have the leaders of the team and then you have like, kind of like your go-to people that are gonna support you along the journey, right? So for us, it was me, Andresa, and Matt for this particular project. Good example. So once we kind of got our, like, thoughts out, our deal criteria, our vision, then the next thing we did was we had a, a meeting to talk about our roles in this project, right? So we're not all gonna be on the same calls. We're not gonna be all obviously doing the same things. So we said, okay, base is core genius, base is time, base is everything. What does that look like? And we assessed that, you know, it'd be good for Liz to be the front person talking to agents, getting some clarity on our areas, you know, starting to put those pieces together. You know, Matt's gonna step in. But kind of secondarily, but part of that too, to assess the finances or pie, you know, depending on the project size, definitely gonna be enrolling, you know, doing probably some sort of private money opportunity and syndication. And then thirdly, Andresa's skillset and strength on more of like, okay, let's put this thing into place. She has experience doing that already in terms of the management of the short-term rental, right? So we kind of got very clear on that. Now we're not, the three of us aren't gonna do everything, but in terms of like leadership and where we are gonna sit, that makes sense. So that's role clarity. The third thing is our goals. We said by the end of the year, we would love to have something. Our goal is to have something under contract. That's, that's our goal. And we're moving towards that. So having that vision and then having the role clarity is critical. The fourth thing to share with you is then to start to get experts to support what your role is. So for example, for me to now study what markets in the United States have that— I'm not gonna go do that by myself. I'm gonna look at who do I know that knows the markets in the various areas. So we spoke spoke to our friend, right, Avery Crawl, who's, you know, pod mentor and a strategic partner of ours. And we talked to her about areas. And again, I am not gonna do all the research. That's way too much time and energy. You wanna talk to people who've been there, done that, who can offer ideas and thoughts. And then we start to drill down, oh, basis of that, what are our areas? So we kinda drill it down within two areas. But you have to develop the team and gather the expertise once the leadership team has gained clarity, roles, and goals. So that's the key piece there. And then you start taking action. So I'm in action, right? I had one call with a realtor this week. I have another one later in the week just to start developing our next steps with those areas. What do the numbers mean, right? And what's the opportunity here in terms of revenue, all those sort of things, and how do we analyze and crunch those numbers? And then it's all about maintenance, right? Weekly, moving the needle every week towards that. It's an exciting project for us. We have a lot of stuff happening, but for me not to do anything in that role, I'm not— we're not gonna achieve our goal, right? For something. So wherever you see that new niche that you wanna apply, maybe it's a short-term rental, maybe it's something, you know, maybe it's glamping, maybe it's, you know, really you see in your neighborhood an opportunity to do new construction cuz you know, all the other properties are, and you see land and you're like, this is an opportunity. Start doing those 5 pieces of the puzzle. Get some information, map out where you wanna go. You don't need to know how you're gonna get there or all the tools you're going to use. I still— there's still gaps there in my head too because I don't have that experience yet. But I certainly know where we want to go. And I know the roles. And then I know the— we're going to start developing the whos. Just— and then the key is developing the team, which is the whos, role clarity, talk to experts, and get into action. And then keep shifting and keep learning and keep asking. That's my recommendation on the 5 steps.
You know, Liz, I think that one of the biggest mistakes investors make when they are going to explore or pivot to, into a new niche is to try to figure out everything by themselves. To me, that is, you're shooting yourself in the foot. If you're trying to figure out everything by yourself because you don't want to trust other people or because you just don't understand and you want to earn the right. To do it, you are basically delaying your progress. I cannot emphasize how much I wish I have learned that at the beginning of my career, not at the end, but like in the middle of it, right? But I cannot emphasize how much I wish I knew this early on. If I had done that, I would have gained more traction into achieving my goals. In a more peaceful and on my own terms. So I encourage you to put the ego aside and really seek support. I'm not asking you to just don't do your homework and understand how things work. I want you to really get comfortable with it. I don't want you to be a master of it. Liz does not need to be a master of short-term rentals in order for her to move the needle forward. And I think that we are expecting to, oh, I didn't read enough. I didn't, I have to prove myself in order for me to have a conversation, ask for help. I don't care. I want to leverage the resources of other experts in those areas. And then their resources, their experience, now mine. That's the shortcut, people. Please do it. Don't do it by yourself.
Come on.
That's what we got for today.
That's what we got for today. And anything we share in minisodes or interviews, That's why we built a community. That's why we just don't do podcasting. So we'd love to hear from you. Tag us in the Facebook group.
What did you learn?
What did you get from this? What one action are you gonna take to move the needle forward on your journey? Because that's what Andresa and I stand for. That's why we do this literally. So we'd love to hear from you and we appreciate you being on today. Ciao.
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