From Bravery to Business: A Hospitality Success Story From An Ex-Firefighter

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives host the tools, the tactics, the trainings and most importantly, the confidence on how you can go out there and get some more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and today we are diving behind the host with another successful and interesting short term rental host. Today we've got Ryan Duffy from Duffy Home Realty and Ozark Mountain Vacations. I'm really excited to dive in first of all because he's got an awesome book direct sticker in his background. So I know he's, he's on board with the direct book and movement. But also he's an ex firefighter and he's got a really exciting project to tell us about as well as some awesome short term rental homes. So Ryan, welcome along. Thank you for joining me today.

Thanks for taking the time, Liam. Appreciate it.

So introduce yourself, your business, where you are in the world and what sort of model that you use and how many units.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Cool. Now I'll dive into that. So I'm a licensed broker in the state of Arkansas, Missouri. My wife and I own Duffy Homes Realty here in Branson, Missouri. We also own Ozark Mountain Vacations, which is kind of our branding for our own personal vacation rentals. And we're starting to branch off into a little bit of project or property management for some of our clients down in the area that we live in. So we live actually in omaha, Arkansas, about 20 minutes south of Branson. And at the moment we have two active rentals. We've got five under construction in various stages also. And then we've got some plans to do some other kind of cool, interesting developments, I guess.

What do you prefer to do? Obviously you've got developments like you say, you got two sides to the business. What excites you the most?

Doing something different in the short term rental sphere. So here in the Branson area, it's actually heavily restricted. If you're on the Missouri side, there's county restrictions or city restrictions. And with that, the type of rentals that we have predominantly in our inventory, they're all pretty similar. You know, you've got a lot of condominium, you've got a lot of the larger lodge complexes. And since they're restricted to certain zoning requirements, you know, they're kind of crammed on top of each other. So what I like to do down where we're at, just on the other side of the border in Arkansas is to really embrace the fact that we're not in resort settings. We're not crammed on top of each other and provide a guest experience that is, you know, just, just very different in that regard. You know, so you can have a larger yard, you can go out and look at the stars, not have a bunch of light pollution. Now, I grew up in Chicago and you know, I didn't see a shooting star for the first time until I was like 18, you know, in basic training. Looking up in Oklahoma like, wow, there's so many stars up there. So when I, when we first moved down here, you know, that was, that was one of the things that blew me away. You know, down in Arkansas, it's, there's no light pollution. You just look up and you see endless stars. And, you know, and so when, when we go on vacation, that'd be something that would really resonate with us. And that's one of the one small things that we're trying to integrate into our guest experience. You know, we're really hammering the fact that we're close to an international dark sky site and we've got all these, these outdoor activities that you can enjoy between Table Rock Lake and the various creeks and rivers and caves and all this stuff in our area. But we're also 20 minutes from Branson, which is a major tourist attraction that brings in 10.5 million visitors per year. So we can kind of have the best of both worlds.

What aspects internally of the properties attracts your perfect guest avatar? And who is your perfect guest avatar?

So predominantly we're hosting family groups and it's just a couple different avatars really. So we've got a four bedroom rental at the moment that sleeps 14. So typically it's like double family units. It'll stay there. We've got a large dedicated bunk room space and then a couple of different master suites. So that's what we're seeing. There is the family dynamic. There's a private hot tub, there's a big private fire pit area. And then our other rental we've got, at the moment it's just a two bedroom couples retreat. So two very different avatars. But that's kind of what we're gearing after is there's these two different main demographics that are coming here. We feel like they're couples and there's larger families and within that, just trying to identify what people would need in that space. And again for us, going back to privacy and separation and nature, trying to create spaces where you can lay out in the yard and you don't have to, you know, have cars driving by in front of you, you know, so that sort of thing.

I definitely want to dive into more about you and how you got started in the business, but I'm going to segue slightly into. Am I right in thinking you had sort of the real estate before the short term rentals?

Not really. My wife got into real estate before I did. So, you know, I. Before we moved here, I was. I was a Chicago fireman and I did that for. I had nine years on the job. I had a series of back injuries that led to a bunch of surgeries, and really that's what prompted us to change our life and uproot and come here when we did that. My wife, Shea and I have always had this dream and this passion to get involved in real estate and become developers in some capacity, but we just didn't really know how to manifest that. So she had a background as an interior designer and as a firefighter. I had no real practical real estate experience, but we moved here and I recovered enough to be able to get back to work. You know, the logical thing to do after recovering from back surgery, I guess, would be to get into construction, which is what I did. Made no sense. But, you know, I had an opportunity at the time to. To mentor under somebody who had a lot of construction experience and basically was able to just get taken under his wing. And we built two houses from the ground up, just me and him. So I got a feel of every aspect of the construction world, the processes that go into it. And in the meantime, Shea got her real estate license immediately and started trucking away at that. And with real estate in particular, it's really about who you know and your connections to the community. And we had just moved 550 miles away and started a new life. So we knew nobody here and we had no real connections to the community. So it took quite a while for that business to get up and going. But she was persistent and she, you know, she was pregnant at one point, you know, eight months pregnant in August, going door knocking, you know, trying to drum up business, you know, and so really bootstrapped, you know, that for her, her own brand and really learned a lot in the process. And throughout that process, she started working with short term rental investors and she started seeing P and L, she started seeing booking reports. And we reached a point in our lives where at this time now, three years after we moved here, two years, two and a half years approximately, we'd start out growing our house. And we had a three bedroom, three bath house that we kept telling ourselves over and over again. As we, our family grew like, this is a great place to vacation, but I wouldn't, you know, it's not really comfortable to raise our kids here. You know, we, you know, the kids bedrooms were on the second floor. We were in the basement. You know, so it was, you know, three times a night, run up two flights of stairs to change a diaper, you know, and there's no garage, no storage. But we kept having this conversation over and over. It's like, oh, do we build an addition? Do we build a garage? And she comes home from work one day and she goes, you know, I think if we put this place on Airbnb, we'd make like 30 grand a year. And I said, B.S. there's no way. And she's like, no, I'm serious. I'm like, well, we're in Omaha, Arkansas. No one's ever heard of Omaha, Arkansas. She's like, yeah, but we're 20 minutes outside of Branson. We're five minutes to table Rock Lake. We've got a full service marina at the end of our road. And best of all, there's no restrictions where we live. She's like, if you go 10 minutes north, you can't do that. You just can't. So she convinced me and a good friend of ours, we had a business partner at the time that I was doing construction with, convinced, convinced us to purchase another property up the road from where we were, Lyn. And it was a metal shop house, just a big metal barn with a two bedroom apartment built in the half of it. And the agreement was that we'd purchased this through our construction business and we'd use basically the open dirt floor shop spot to store construction materials and his tractor and all this. And then our family would rent back the two bedroom apartment so it would cash flow the thing so that we could convert our home into a full time short term rental to do that kind of experiment. And that was mid-2019. So we got up and running live right around Labor Day 2019, expecting to do about 30 grand a year in revenue. And the first year just blew it out of the water. I mean it was like 52, $53,000. Second year was like $82,000. I mean, just blew us away. And it was kind of like a watershed moment for us. We're like, wow, this isn't, this isn't like a little, you know, hobby. Like this is a real industry, you know, I mean within, within six weeks of going live on, on the short term rental platforms, I stopped taking bids for remodel jobs and I started real estate school and, and I just dedicated, you know, full time to taking care of and managing our one short term rental. And then within, within six months we were under contract for our second one. And then it just, it just snowballed from there, you know, as, as it does so. But that was an interesting progression.

Ryan, I've really enjoyed this podcast. There's, there's sometimes we're, we're sometimes struggling for, you know, sort of the, the questions and the flow, but this has flowed really naturally. What I've taken away, and hopefully the people listening has taken away from this is that first of all, hospitality really does give back all the things that people can do to ensure they have success from the start, which is things like the better quality worktops, labeling stuff up, making sure they've got touch day guides, making sure they're using dynamic pricing. I think that was a really important point, just backtracking to that, that you were worried that you had to use this outside company. Whereas as hosts, we've got all the power at our fingertips using some of the awesome technology. And of course, a lot of that is discussed in the book Direct Blueprint by Mark Simpson as well. There's a lot of the kind of tech that people could use in there. If you don't know what that is, go and check that out on Amazon. But yeah, thank you so much for spending your time with us this afternoon. That's it from. From us here at Boostly for this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. We know there's a lot of places you can put your attention. We really appreciate you putting it with us. So, yeah, thank you very much. Bye from me. And that's bye from Ryan.

Thanks, Liam. Have a good one.

Having a blast. Going to get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee because it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.