Hospitality Secrets: Creating a Unique Space For Your Guests

Okay everyone, welcome to the latest episode of the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the trainings and most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get yourself some direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and I'm Mark Simpson's co host. Today we are going behind another host. So this is the Boostly behind the Host miniseries where we get to talk to interesting and inspiring hosts from all over the world. Today we're talking to Garrett Holden from Trippy Homes. We're going to be talking some various bits and pieces. We're going to find out a story and talk about how to host while creating some fun and unique spaces for your guests. So let's get started by you just introducing yourself a little bit about where in the world you host and what kind of model that you use and who tends to stay there.

Yeah, sure. So my name is Garrett Holden, as you mentioned, me and my wife Sherry, we have two kids, four year old and two year old, another baby coming in July, so we're super excited for that. We also have two dogs and yeah, we started our business Trippy Homes just to get more involved in real estate and specifically in short term rentals and to be able to quit our nine to five jobs. So we're actually in the great state of Texas in usa. All our properties are in San Antonio. Most people haven't heard of that city, but a lot of people have heard of Austin, Texas and Live Ma, live Music capital of the world and all the tech companies that go there. We're actually about an hour and a half south of there. So that's where all of our properties are located as of right now. It's where we grew up and we'll probably be here for as long as I can tell.

Who do you tend to host? Is it more leisure or is it some of these sort of tech companies or people working and things like that?

Yeah, so we find a lot of, I guess a mix of a lot of people that are coming here for work. Their companies will house them for a couple of months at times. We also find a lot of leisure people being so close to Mexico. We have a lot of guests that come from Mexico to visit San Antonio and visit family here. Yeah, that'd be two of the biggest, I would say that we host. We really try to focus our avatar though on families that are traveling. I can tell you actually funny story on how we got started if you'd like.

Yeah, definitely finish it. Yeah.

So I guess, spoiler alert, we wouldn't have gotten started if it wasn't for my wife. My wife's family, they gifted her a home in San Antonio, but we actually had to move to another city for my work when I graduated from university. So we had to figure out what we wanted to do with this home. We didn't want to sell it, and we didn't want to rent it out long term because we still wanted to be able to use it for ourselves, for family, or for times that we came to visit as well. So my wife decided to list on Airbnb. I thought it was a terrible idea. I was back in 2018, 2019, and I was like, no one's going to rent this place. I mean, why would anyone rent it? But as you can probably guess, she won that debate. And so we listed it and hoped to just make enough money to pay the property taxes and any other kind of maintenance that comes up, but it ended up doing a lot greater than that. The first year of hosting the house was fully paid off. We had no mortgage on it, so we could have just kept collecting that income and left it at that, but we just decided to grow the business from there.

Your model at the moment that you've got the seven units, is it all the same sort of model, or do you do a couple of different models? Is it. Is it rental arbitrage? Is it management? How do you do it? Or is it purchased homes?

Yeah, great question so I can walk through how unorganized we were. We started in the ownership model on that home that we owned. We then dabbled in rental arbitrage a little bit. We had three properties that we did rent that rental arbitrage master lease model with, and then we do some management as well right now. So currently we manage three properties. We own four. And we're almost done finishing up a renovated school bus, actually, that we're going to start renting out. So that's. We can talk about more of that later. But. So, yeah, with those three rental arbitrage properties, we just offloaded them because we just decided that model wasn't really aligned with what our goals were. Very profitable and all that, but we just found that we had less control over things like maintenance and doing some unique remodeling and decided to just focus on the ownership model. The properties we manage, two of those are for our mothers, so we just. We just manage those out of the goodness of our hearts. You know, they've helped us so much. We want to give back and help them a little bit. And we manage one other property for another family. But we, we decided that the management rental arbitrage just wasn't, wasn't in line with what we wanted to do. So. And we have to, you know, report back to landlords. Felt like we were just kind of in another job. So we just focused on that ownership model to create those, you know, fun and unique spaces that you can't really do too much with, like a cookie cutter home.

What has been the main benefit from that journey that you've been on is have. Do you feel as though looking back, do you think you should have always gone down the arbitrage route to learn what you have now, or would you say you'd rather avoided that altogether?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I feel like the arbitrage model, it's not wrong. You know, it's not a bad thing, the management model either. It helped us get to where we are. You know, it made us income to be able to buy more properties. So a lot of it's a lower, I guess, cost to entry than putting a huge down payment on a house and all that. So I have one of my best friends, he, I got him started in the arbitrage model and he's doing great and he wants to buy a home next year and hopefully with that income that he made from there, he can do that. So, so it's nothing wrong with it. I think it's a great model. It's just, you know, eventually you, you find what you want to focus in on and you know, you learn from what you've already done and decide from.

There when you've switched or when you're, you've got your career at the moment and you're looking to grow this business. What does success look like to you and what would. Where do you want this business to go?

Yeah, so I guess success to me is just really having the time to be able to design my time, how I want to use it, not someone else. So, for example, like I said, I work a 9 to 5 job. They tell me I have to work from 9 to 5 every Monday through Friday or whatever it may be. And at the end of this kind of feels like I'm just building someone else's dream. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate my company for giving me that opportunity. That's the stable income benefits. It's huge value and it's, it's helped a lot, just grow our business, you know, to have that income coming in. But, but yeah, I guess just having that time to be able to design my day myself. And choose what I want to do. And that's not saying I want to just be lazy and, you know, drink margaritas on the beach every day. I'm, I'm a, I'm a workaholic. Even when I'm off work, I'm always trying to do something work related. But just being, having the ability to dictate where my time is spent, that's what I really truly value and what I think success means to me.

What tech in your business do you use, which, which allows you to do that? Is there a favorite either system or app or piece of tech?

Yeah, I have a few systems and pieces of tech. So one of the ones I've been using a lot recently is Operto. They're kind of like, they do a lot of things. Smart locks, thermostats, all kinds of other noise monitoring. It's like a hub for all of those things. We use them for our smart locks to create unique codes for guests and that automatically gets sent out to them through our PMS hostfully. We also use them to control our temperature with our smart thermostat. So we live in Texas. It gets super hot here and it's not very efficient to leave the air conditioning running when there's nobody in the house. I've had months where our utility bill is like $400 and there won't even be anyone in the house. So their, their software basically changes the temperature when a guest leaves the property and will turn it back on to whatever temperature you set when they get when a next guest checks into the property. So it saved us a lot on electricity costs. Definitely better for the environment, I'm sure as well. So, yeah, we've been using them a lot and really loving their service. As far as project management, just, just.

Jumping in with Alberto. I mean, that is amazing. And I've heard of Alberto. It's not one that I use in my business. But that is an amazing time saver, isn't it? Because even today, I mean, before we jumped on this, I was talking about as we record this, we're in December 2022 and it's freezing where I am. It's not ever so warm where you are. And it's just so important, isn't it, to have some sort of way of having, when your guests check in it feeling welcoming and warm and at the same time not costing you the earth every time they've checked out. And then there's long periods of, of it being used without, without anyone being in. So aperto sounds really awesome. And certainly I'll check them out and I'm sure people listening will do. Just before we go, was there any questions that we missed or anything else? Any final thoughts before we finish? Garrett?

No, I. I don't think so. I really appreciate the time, though, and I'm looking forward to hearing this when it comes out. Yeah.

Thank you so much for spending your time with us today. And thank you, too. If you're listening to this on the Boostly podcast, we know there's a lot of places you can put your attention, and we really thank you for putting it with Boostly. If you do want to carry on finding out more about hospitality, more about Boostly, more about how you can get direct bookings, you can always go to Facebook, search for the group, the hospitality community, and you're welcome to come and join. That is a free, open group. There's lots of us in there, all sharing our thoughts on hospitality subjects. So feel free to come and along on that. And yeah, that's it for today. So thank you so much. That's bye from me. That's bye from Garrett. We'll see you on the next one, everyone. Bye for now.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee. Like Bruce Lee because it's so hard and the T is loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.