Boostly Book Club Live - With Avery Carl

Host of the Short Term show podcast and I'm an investor with 250 doors, no partners, and I was able to get from 0 to 250 over the course of about five and a half years because five of my first six investments were short term rentals. So because they cash flow so much heavier than traditional long terms, I was able to scale much more quickly than if I'd started with traditional long term rentals. I'm also the CEO and founder of the Short Term Shop, which is the US's only short term rental specific real estate brokerage. We are brokered by exp. I have to say that or else I get in trouble. And we have offices in 15 of the top short term rental markets in the US. And if you guys buy a house with us, or anyone buys a house with us, any client in any of our markets, then we've got a whole training program that we put them through for free while they're still under contract. So that by the time closing rolls around, you already know what you're doing, ready to manage your property and take off.

That's amazing. I didn't realize that last part. That's such a great asset to buy a property and get that training while you're kind of waiting around to figure out what you're gonna do. Sometimes people don't use that time the way they could. So that's awesome. Thank you. And that's amazing to hear that. So many doors. So that's really inspiring. Thank you. The first question is something I always love to ask people. What is something that you wish you had known sooner when joining the STR world?

Well, I started investing in 2015, so there were a lot of things that nobody knew yet about short term rental investing. There weren't really any training programs. There weren't all of these automation tools. I guess I just wish I would have known that I could have. I mean, everything kind of got me to where I am, so there's not really anything that I wish I would have done differently other than maybe start earlier for sure.

I love that. Yeah. With real estate you always feel a little late. Oh yeah. So this one's great. It's specific to your business that you've grown. How did you start and grow the top STR focused real estate agency and build an awesome community around it?

Well, it was a little bit by accident and it kind of happened organically. So I had just quit my corporate job, replaced that income with short term rental income. It only took two because I was not making very much Money at all. And I was making 37,000 US which is like not enough to live on. Luckily, I was married, so I didn't have to live on that by myself. So those two, those first two got me out of my corporate job. And then we started having friends. I got my license because my husband is a terrible client and he was embarrassing me a lot. And I was having to apologize to agents, like, I'm sorry, he's just a New Yorker. He's not really mean. Um, so I got my license so that I would not have to make other people deal with him. And we started just having friends who were like, hey, how much are you making on that cabin? What are you doing? Can you be my agent? Can you get me one and then teach me how to do it? And it kind of grew organically from there. First it was friends, then it was friends of friends. And it was truly, you know, random people that I had no connection to at all that that came to us to do that. And then I just started noticing other markets that made a lot of sense. So I grew up in Mississippi, which those of you from other countries probably not super familiar with the geography of the US But Mississippi borders Tennessee. And then it's also only about a six hour drive from where I'm from in Mississippi to the Florida Panhandle. So I'd been to the Smokies in Tennessee growing up. Every time I went there, we stayed in a cabin, not a hotel. And that's just what people do when they go to the Smokies. Same thing. Every time we came to the Florida Panhandle to Destin or 30A to go to the beach, we always rented a beach house. So I kind of just thought, well, this market is the same as that market is the same as, you know, I just started identifying a lot of markets that were really similar and started hiring agents in those markets and opening offices in those markets and just kind of grew from there. But it actually being a short term rental specific brokerage, I really did not want to be that. I was. When we were living in Nashville, when I first started the short term shop and we had, we had a Nashville office too. But I was really worried about pigeonholing myself into one asset class. I was like, man, I can't just only sell short term rentals. Like, what kind of living is that? I need to be able to sell the million $2 million primary homes. I need to help all these people in Nashville find primary homes. And so I was really trying to just be everything to everyone. Which, as you know, doesn't. And after a friend of mine's parents ran me all over Tennessee four weekends in a row, 10 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday with no lunch breaks, they fired me. They were looking for a primary home, fired me because I didn't know where to find the serial number on a $50,000 mobile home. And I was like, well, you know what, I don't do mobile homes. Like, I just sold four or five cabins in the Smokies that were easy. Like, it was easy for me because I know about cabins and the Smokies. I owned five of them. I was managing five of them. So all those sales came really, really easy because I was an expert in that, whereas I was not an expert in $50,000 mobile homes. So after that, I drove home the three hours that it took me to get home because again, they had run me all over Tennessee. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not helping anybody, anybody buy primary homes anymore. It's ridiculous. People will not, not buy anything because they don't like paint colors. And I'm like, you can just paint it. But they don't have that investor mindset of, oh, if I don't like this one small thing, it's not that expensive to fix. They'll just, you know, throw, throw the whole like, want to tear the whole house down because there's some really minor like thousand dollar fix that they don't like. So finally it was at that point that I was like, okay, I'm going to focus on investments. That's what I'm good at. That's where my mindset is, where my mindset matches my clients mindset. So. And the rest just kind of like happened organically. I hate, hated posting on social media. I don't like, I mean, it sounds kind of funny because I have a book and a podcast and all that stuff. I don't like being in front of people. I would be a recluse in my house and never talk to anyone if I could. But that is not where, where my life has led me. So I had to get over that. And the, the community has just kind of also come naturally because we would have a lot of clients that would say things like, oh, I really like this neighborhood, but I don't know how it does. And we would say, oh, we have three or four clients that have bought over here and they, let's connect you guys so that you can see. And so we were like, why don't we just do a big Facebook group and Then it just kind of, kind of happened. So it was all organic.

I love that. Thank you for going into such detail too. And I think it's important for us to all hear like things can happen organically and to listen to what is going on in your world, what you like and what you don't like. Like if you really don't, like, you don't have to do that. You can pivot or focus on something else. So it's really refreshing hearing you say, like, I didn't like to do primary home, so why did I keep trying to do it? So it's awesome to hear. Just listen and do what you like to do. And thank you for taking the time to speak to us. Even though you might not love being in front of people. We really appreciate it.

I'm much more comfortable with it now than I used to be.

Yeah, this is a good group too. So the next question is. So basically it feels like every year there's kind of like a new trend or a pivot in what HOST should be focused on for 2023. What do you think HOST should be focused on?

I think quality properties over quantity is very important. I think a lot of people get caught up. Like they'll hear me say I have 250 doors and they're like, oh, I gotta have 250 doors. Well, only eight of those are short term rentals. And because that's all I need, I don't need 250 short term rentals to get where I want to be cash flow wise. I only need, I really only needed five, but I've bought three over the course of the last two or three years. But those core five were really what paid for all of my other rentals. So I would say quality over quantity. And by quality I don't mean like having the, the biggest, nicest, fanciest house in the entire market. I mean buying in the right market where the regulations are favorable, buying a property that is something that the tourists in that area have come to expect, what they want to rent. So what I mean by that is especially like last year when everybody was buying short term rentals, we saw a lot of people and these are the kind of people who are, who are getting in trouble now that would, they were so desperate to get something that they would buy something like kind of weird. That's probably not going to work for the market. Like, you know, in a mountain market, guests want to stay in cabins. They want that mountain experience. So. But people would buy like a brick ranch house that could Be anywhere in the world like Kansas City. And I call them Aunt Susie houses. Feels like you're sitting in your Aunt Susie's house and you know that kind of stuff. Yes, they were able to get it at a time when it was really difficult to get properties. But now that the market's kind of changing and going back to normal, the whole the having bought the kind of weird thing, it doesn't really work. So I mean, buying in the right market, buying the right type of property, but. And then of course, the obvious thing, making sure that the numbers work have I see. I really, really hate that phrase running around everywhere called marry the house, date the rate. I think that's really irresponsible advice because. Yes. Will interest rates go down again at some point? Probably. But I feel like everyone's saying that encourages people to just buy houses that don't work and bank on being able to refinance it later at a lower interest rate when you should be able to buy a house that works now. And if the interest rate you can get it lower later, that's great, that should be extra. But anyway, all that to say quality over quantity.

I love that. I think that's so important. I think we're kind of all feeling that in the market. So I think that's a great thing to focus on. The next question is, as a real estate agent, what types of changes are you seeing in the STR market? Are more people looking to enter? Are people turning their existing homes into str? So maybe not buying an STR specific property, but working with what they already have. Are people continuing to look to expand their business or kind of what trends you're seeing?

So I'm seeing, in spite of a lot of the news and uncertainty in the market, now really is the best time to buy in probably the past three or four years just in terms of being able to have a choice in the property that you're getting. Like last year you didn't get a choice. You just had to like fire off 100 offers. And it had to be thousands and thousands of dollars over asking to even be considered. And you just kind of had to take whatever you could get if hope one seller would accept your offer. Now there's a lot less competition in the market. You have the ability to like calm down and analyze and make sure things work and offer under asking and ask for closing costs and all those things. So that presents a really great opportunity because sellers don't know what's going to happen either. So a lot of times because things are uncertain, you can get them to come down to a price that they ordinarily wouldn't have and get yourself a much better deal than we've seen in the past few years. Again, you got to make sure that interest rate works. But I mean, and not being so scared of interest rates because at the end of the day, they're just an expense, just like anything else. So if you just look at it as this is what that expense is, and don't look at it as this big thing that's like hiding under your bed that's going to come out and eat you, you know what it is going in. So, you know, just run your spreadsheet like you always would and just make sure the numbers work. So I'm seeing, at least in my business, so we don't work in metro markets. We only work in regional drivable vacation destinations. And what we're seeing is we have two types of markets. We call them our blue chip markets and then our emerging markets, which I need to come up with another word besides emerging, because the. Our emerging markets are still very mature vacation rental markets. But what I mean by emerging is becoming more popular to invest in because there's opportunity there. And I'll get to that in a minute. So our blue chip markets would be like the Smokies, the Emerald coast, the places that there's always going to be a ton of tourism. There's been millions and millions of people coming there for decades and decades and decades. Like my grandmother's been renting vacation rentals here in Destin since 1937. So Destin's not going anywhere. So I call those our blue chip markets because. Because they're such great places to own. You're going to pay for that, right? They're expensive. Our emerging markets are a lot of times just as mature in terms of how long people have been coming to vacation there, but they're significantly cheaper in a lot of cases. So we're seeing a lot of people maybe switch over from focusing on the Tennessee side of the Smokies to moving over to one of our agents in the western North Carolina market because it's the same mountains, a lot of the same attractions, but it's cheaper. In Florida, we're seeing a lot of people shift to like the Forgotten coast because there's a lot of opportunity there. Because I would say like 98% of the vacation rentals there are on 2 or 3 really like old dinosaur vacation rental management companies that are not optimizing pricing or anything like that. That's Actually, where I bought my most recent one. Ever seen people switch? We've got. Myrtle beach would be another one of our emerging markets. So really just seeing people pivot from those blue chip, super expensive markets that everybody could afford with the interest rates the way they were last year, to a little bit lower price markets where they can still grow their portfolio, but it's not as big of a financial undertaking as some of the more blue chip markets.

I'm gonna.

I love that. Oh, yeah, please do.

Sorry, Miranda, I gotta jump in for. For one thing, this is really good and I hope you're all enjoying it. Please, please say thank you. And just anything that you've got to share, do it in the Zoom chat. But before we go any further, I do have a question. But before that, I wanted to send Avery a little gift just to say thank you for doing this. I believe it has arrived. The box is there. So, Avery, if you could be so kind just to. Just to open it up and I will explain the story around this. If it works.

I feel like it's going to be like a dead body part or something, the way you've been messaging me. Ask me if I've got it yet.

I can confirm it's not one of them. But just as you're opening this and getting close to this, I want to say thank you very much for doing this. Thank you very much for all of the support. A lot going on behind the scenes, and I just want to say thank you very much for everything this year.

Says do not cut.

So, and as Avery is doing this, if you've got any questions, please can you do me a massive favor? Pop it in the chat. We do have a couple that are coming in and we do want more. We're gonna have maybe about three or four more questions after this one, and then we're going to. We're gonna let Avery get back to the day, but hopefully you are enjoying this. And if you are not part of the Bruce Lee Book Club Facebook group, because I know that I'm doing this live on YouTube as well, please head over to the Boostly Book Club on Facebook and you can join it. We've got nearly 800 members. Every month we do a different book. I really hope this has worked, because if not.

Hey.

Oh. All right, Avery, I've got to tell you, I gotta come clean. That was meant to be a box, right? So this is a box. It's meant to be a box, but this is a box you've got to put together, right?

Yeah.

Ah. All right. You're gonna have to keep and hold. This isn't. This is not work. So this is meant to be a box. It's going to be a box that when you are.

You sent me a bag of confetti.

Yeah, confetti was going to explode because I was recently on a. On an. On a podcast with Avery where she called me the confetti of the short term rental industry, which I thought was very funny. And I thought, right, brilliant. I'm gonna get a box, get it sent. I didn't realize it was going to be a builder friggin box, but there we go. Thank you. Anyway, thank you for doing this. All right, so the question is. So this is the question, coming back to the book. So been doing this for many years now. What part of the journey did the book come into the equation? What was the sort of the driving force of the thinking behind I want to put this book together?

So.

It was really more of a. There were a lot of things that I had not streamlined in my business on the front end in terms of clients coming through the door. And everybody has the exact same first, like, 10, 15, 20 questions. So everybody. I mean, even me, when I go to buy something new, it's the exact same few questions. So I'm like, okay, I'm having, you know, 10 calls a day with people and saying the exact same thing over and over and over every single day, 10 times every day. And I'd spoken at the BiggerPockets conference a few times, and they had started publishing more books. And I just. I didn't even have it written yet. And I just wrote Mindy, and I was like, hey, do you need a short term rental book? Because short term rentals are kind of like a thing now. Whereas, you know, 10 years ago, people were like short term rentals, or even five years ago, they were like, that's like kid stuff for people renting their couches to each other. Like, that's weird. But now it's an established asset class and a lot of people are doing it, so maybe you guys want a book about it? And they were like, yes, write it.

And I was like, okay, cool, I'll write it.

And I just kind of went through all of the FAQs that I would get 10 times a day, every single day, and made it a book.

There you go. It's as easy as that. And Jody's nodding because in the room is nodding away. Brilliant. Thank you, Miranda. Passing the floor is back to you. So we're set with a few more questions.

Awesome. I love that. It's great too that you saw a need and asked if you could fill it. That's really good lesson for us all to know because I think sometimes we see things and think someone should do that and don't do it. So I love that. So this question I love. With so many doors, what has been your best method for balancing work and home life?

That's a really good question. So with only eight of them being short terms, all the rest of them are on property management companies. So yes, you do have to manage your systems. Like, even if you have long term rentals that are on a property management company, it's still not what I would call truly passive. Like you still have to deal with the managers. Like, for example, we were on our way home from somewhere, I think we're on our way home from Mississippi actually last week and my husband Luke is like, we have seven empty units in Birmingham. What is that about? Nobody. The manager didn't tell us about this. Like, I need to go bust some heads. So he just called him, was like, hey, this is unacceptable. You know, there's just things like that, or like, hey, we need eight new decks on this one apartment building. And so there's still some management stuff involved. But as far as like day to day with long terms, you're, you're not really dealing with them that much. Where short terms, you know, people are messaging.

So.

So we have several VAs between all of our businesses. We have one VA who is actually, he's technically Luke, my husband's VA. But part of his job, not even his whole job, is to answer our short term rental inquiries during the day. And then we have business hours set on all of our Airbnb and VRBO listings. And we say, hey, these are the hours. We're going to answer the phone. If you have a problem outside these hours, that's like an emergency, you know, call the proper authorities. And that's worked really well for us. So we do have quite a bit of delegation. Although there's still, you know, being, being an investor is still a lot of just being an entrepreneur, like running any business, you do have to kind of have your hands and everything. But we have a lot of systems in place. My husband Luke is really good at systematizing it. As a matter of fact, he over, he tries to systematize me sometimes. Um, and so he's, he's done a really good job of making everything a system and getting upstream of, you know, the things that you run into over and over again.

Love that that's really helpful. The next question is more Airbnb focus. So as we go into some people's slow seasons and with all the changes and updates, do you have any advice on how to get slow season bookings and then how to just show up in the algorithms?

So for me, I own five properties in a market that's pretty much year round with the exception of January and February and the Smokies. Then I own three on the Emerald or, sorry, two on the Emerald coast of Florida and one on the forgotten coast of Florida, which is very seasonal. And for me, I don't really worry about the off season so much. I, a lot of investors are really scared of seasonal markets and I don't have, when I do presentations on this, I'll have my screen. But so an example that I like to give people when they have this concern is that I own a four bedroom cabin in the Smoky Mountains and a four bedroom beach house in Destin, Florida. I bought those in the same year, roughly the same purchase price. And this cabin in the Smokies has like an 80% occupancy rate and the Destin beach house has probably a 67% occupancy rate. So, you know, very clear defined off season. So a lot of people will say, oh that cabins way better. I'm going to buy the cabin instead of that beach house all day because of that occupancy rate. But then I tell them, well, my beach house makes about $60,000 a year more than my cabin even though it's only between March and the end of October. So, so I don't really care that it's empty in November and December and January because it made it did what it needed to do just in a shorter period of time. So I have that off season to, you know, do any repairs, do any updates, make any replacements. But you also just get a little bit of a break. You get a breather from guest questions and managing maintenance people and cleaners and things like that. So. And my properties are too big to be able to get like what we call here in the States a snowbird, which is somebody who comes down from Canada to stay in Florida for the wintertime. Typically those types of people stick to like one bedroom condos or two bedroom condos and my places are four or five bedrooms. So they just aren't a good candidate for that. So I just make sure that I optimize my high season and then just do any updates or repairs and take a breather in the low season.

That's awesome. I love that it took me three years to learn that strategy, but I'm finally okay with making the money when it's good and then shutting down and enjoying my life in the off season. So. Yeah, I love that you feel that way too. A question just came in that I think is really relevant. As people are building their businesses and looking to hire vas. Do you have any good advice on how you were able to successfully, successfully find good VA's?

Yeah. Yeah. So there are a lot of offshore places. A lot of people get really hung up on it needing to be offshore, but there are. You can find great ones here in the States or like in whichever country you're in. I personally do use people in the Philippines. I've had the same one or two for probably three years now. So they're really, really good. Like Che, my. My main one, my number one va. Like I couldn't live without her. Like she orders our groceries. She. She does like everything. And I got her from my out desk. That's where we've hired Most of our VAs is through my outdesk. But that might not work for everybody because they're on a salary structure, whereas if you need somebody more hourly, part time online jobs, PH is a great one. Or there are several people on my team who have just hired like their friend who's been a stay at home mom and now all, all the kids are at school and they need a few, you know, they need something to occupy their time and make a little more money during the day. So if you're not comfortable with going offshore, there is someone in your circle that would be a good candidate. So it just kind of depends. So I would say check out those resources or think of somebody in your circle who, who is. Might be interested in another stream of income for, you know, not having to go sit in an office all day.

That's really helpful. I like to the idea of thinking outside the box. Is there someone in your network that you could pull in and use? Do you have any plans for another book?

Yes, yes. We are in talks for book number two. It probably won't happen until 2024 though.

Okay, awesome.

Well, and sooner than that. Jody has so graciously invited me to be in or have a chapter in her next hospitable host venture. So I'm really looking forward to that.

Oh, that's awesome. I loved the first book, so I'm excited for the second one. There's a lot of great people in that one too. It'll be fun to see it.

Yeah. And it's going to be a launch party in Nashville in 2023, which is going to be big. So. And there's going to be lots of people in this room. I'm eyeing up a lot of people who should be definitely getting in touch with Jody, Jody Sterling, about hospitable host 2024 for. There's lots in the coming because every host has got a story and every host should at least have that chapter in a book in some point in their life. And it's, It's. We've all got stories about the good guests, about the shitty guests and everything in between. So we need to. We need to definitely talk about it. Avery, I just want to say thank you so much for doing that. We sent over a couple of questions, but we've thrown a few curveballs in there and you've just fired them off and answering them perfectly. Miranda, as always, thank you so much for doing this, putting this all together, getting the questions together, getting the troops together. It is amazing. Can everybody please say thank you to Miranda and Avery in the chat? And if you want more of this, the Boostly Book club is up on Facebook. It's 100% free. I love doing this. It's probably one of my favorite things that I have ever put together on. On in the last six years. And I love just being able to sit back and. And listen and to be able to get Avery the author, to come in is like 100 times better. So I really hope you enjoyed it. And we're going to do it again very soon. The next one of these is going to come very quickly. It's going to be on December 14, same time. And this time it's going to be with the authors of the book Direct Blueprint, which I'm really excited to showcase and share with you. Some amazing humans who've helped me put that book together. But with all that being said, Avery, if there's anyway anywhere, any channel that you'd like to send people to, where would you like them to go to find out more about all of the things, all of the hats that you're wearing.

Yeah, yeah. You can join our Facebook group. It's the same title as the book Short Term Rental, Long Term Wealth. So you guys are familiar with that? Or Instagram? It's at the Short Term shop. We do a lot of posting on there, too. So those are probably the two easiest way ways. And then our website, the shorttermshop.com amazing.

All right. I can see loads and loads of nice things in the comments, which is lovely. So we will. We will leave it there. We'll let you all go. Miranda. Thank you again, so much, everybody. Thank you. If you could all just do me a massive favor. Always my phone. Let me get a nice little social media picture. So when I say go, I'd love you all just to wave at the camera, please. That would be lovely. And I'm gonna boomerang you all on the count of three. One, two, three. Ah, look at you go. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. All right, have a good night, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world, and we shall see you again very, very soon.

Thank you.