How to get more corporate bookings - FULL INTERVIEW with Kevin Poneskis

What it'd be interesting to know would be what are the common mistakes that you see a lot of your delegates or mentees make when they first get into sa? And particularly, let's try and focus this question around reaching out and getting new bookings.

People do not make as much money as they could make with their serviced accommodation properties, certainly, and that comes largely out of apathy. It comes out of laziness, taking it for granted. Take the bookings for granted and just putting them on Airbnb. Some people only do that. They don't even put it on booking.com, so you actually want to target the corporate guests because they're the people that are more likely to book for longer periods of time.

Boost Hospitality Podcast My name is Mark Simpson. I'm the founder of Boostly. Welcome to Season seven, Episode four and today we're going to be talking about how to get corporate bookings. You're going to learn all about the routine that Kevin Paneskis of the Property Soldier went through on how to get business bookings, but most importantly how to uncover how every booking that came in, whether it's from booking.com or Airbnb, was actually a business booking and how he then ensured that they came back, but not only came back, but how they came back directly. Kevin is a fantastic guy. He is doing amazing things with progressive property and his own brand, the Property Soldier. You're going to find out how he came out of the army with property already on his portfolio, how he turned that into serviced accommodation or short stay accommodation as I like to call it. And we're going to find out more about how he is future proof in his business moving forward. So sit back, relax, have a drink, have a cup of tea or if you're watching this while on the move this, then enjoy the latest episode of the Boostly podcast. Please make sure that you rate, review and subscribe so you can check out more. And as always, go to boostly.co.uk podcast to find out more. Okay, welcome to the Boostly Podcast. We are in season seven, we're in episode four and today we're going to be talking how to get those business bookings.

Sam. Yes, my background, why and how I got into property. Well, actually I joined the army aged 16 and I've been investing in property ever since I left the army aged 40. But because of the portfolio that I built I was able to leave the army with without the need to get a job, which is nice. And so I left on Remembrance Day 2011. So 111111 and I haven't had a job since. I'm now completely unemployable. More recently recent years, I'm focusing more on service accommodation than anything else. And I'm a trainer and a mentor for property, so I teach people how to invest in property and I mentor people too, and I partner with Progressive property to deliver the training and the mentoring.

So if you're wondering there what Kevin was mentioning when we're talking about the different types of properties and he mentioned that Service accommodation world. If you want to find out more, if you go to the boostlead.co.uk podcast, check out season six, because that whole series was dedicated to service accommodation. You can find out a bit more about that terminology, but this is a really good chance to chat about corporate bookings and business bookings. Prime focus on that is getting those corporate bookings. And that's what we're going to talk about today. What was the one bit of advice that you wish that you had received from your peers when you were getting started into this essay world with anything?

Go and get training. It's not simply a case of getting a property and just whacking it onto Airbnb. There's an awful lot more to it than that. Getting the right training and potentially having a mentor as well has always been fundamental to my success, and I notice it in the success of others as well.

What would be interesting to know would be what are the common mistakes you see a lot of your delegates or mentees make when they first get into sa? And particularly, let's try and focus this question around reaching out and getting new bookings.

People do not make as much money as they could make with their serviced accommodation properties, certainly. And that comes largely out of apathy. It comes out of laziness, taking it for granted. Take the bookings for granted and just putting them on Airbnb. Some people only do that. They don't even put it on booking.com so you actually want to target the corporate guests because they're the people that are more likely to book for longer periods of time.

I love that sort of the way that we go down. And have you got any success stories from your properties? We haven't really unraveled about how many properties that you have in the essay world and whatnot. But have you got any success stories from doing this method that you can think of? There's not a top of your head that you'd like to share with us about how you did that and what.

Were the benefits on the back of it? Well, in terms of getting direct bookings, yeah, we've had, you know, we've got properties scattered all over the country now, SA properties. So our main personal gold mine areas are Swansea and Plymouth in terms of sa, but with SA management with jv, with people all over the country now. So it's in excess of 60 SAs in total. That doesn't include our other properties in the portfolio. But the point I'm going to make here is that somebody. There's lots of work to be done with service accommodation. It's just you shouldn't be doing it. And so meet and greet, we pay £15 for somebody to go and do a meet and greet. The main people that do it are ex cleaners of ours. 15 quid is a lot of money for somebody that's used to scrubbing toilets for an hour and they're quite happy to go and sit in a lovely service accommodation unit with WI fi and the heating on and watching telly, waiting for someone to knock on the door or to send a text or to ring or what, because they need to be let in. Now what the meet and greet person then does is have the conversation with the guest. Why are you here? How long you here for? What's the contract? Oh, wow. Would you like to book for this direct from now on? Here is the website and here is the discount code that you can use to get the discount, etc.

Do you have a system and a structure set up in place where they report back to you after the meet and greet just to say, hey, so we've got a business guy who is.

Staying in the area, but they're looking.

To get more, or do you simply trust that person then to do the upsell, so to speak, and to get them to come back more?

So depending on the meet and greet person, some of them are more experienced and more skilled than others. So our main sort of meet and greet person, yes, she can do an awful lot. Otherwise if it's just one of her guys, they can just obviously let us know that what they've gleaned from the guest and then one of our team can just reach out.

So do you have the systems and structure in place then, Kevin, to recognize business bookings before they even arrive? Or are you gathering all of this information on the fly with the check.

In process, by the way, just in case any of your listeners or viewers are wondering what happens if the guest is arriving at a really unsociable time? Well, that's fine. In those circumstances you can issue the key code, access because you literally don't want someone doing it at 1, 2, 3 in the morning. Clearly, with Airbnb it's a lot easier because you're able to open dialogue with your guests with Airbnb a lot easier. And quite often they will inquire to you and ask you questions. But yes, with Airbnb you can open dialogue with people and establish why they're coming, etc. That's core. And so you know before they come that they're business. It could be quite often the PA to the MD or whoever in HR is tasked with booking accommodation for the team, for the contractors, etc. And often they're just using Airbnb as that platform in order to source essay. With booking.com it's a lot more of a sort of faceless transaction because people don't need to open up a dialogue, they can just book you direct. So with Airbnb you can be inquiries only, that sort of thing. Whereas with booking.com, basically you just get told you've been booked and someone's come in.

You've grown from having a handful of properties to now having a lot of properties and you've done joint venture with SA management companies. How much actual day to day running would you say that you have right now within your SA business?

I'm going to say maybe about two hours a week. Everything is outsourced to the team.

Were you really nervous when you started to hire because you're into like relinquish control? What was the progression from going from sort of the startup stage of this process to grow?

For us, we went on whatever training we could get. So we were already experienced and established with traditional property investing, HMO buy to let etc. But we wanted to get into service accommodation because of, you know, don't know if many of your listeners have heard of Section 24, the Anti Landlord tax. Well, that was going to bite us on the bum big time because of the amount of mortgages, interest only mortgages we've got and the government were going to be removing the mortgage interest rate relief. Well, the reason why we wanted to get into service accommodation is that if the same properties or if you're using property as service accommodation, you can still offset your mortgage interest, even owning them in your own name. You don't have to put them into limited companies. So service accommodation is trading income, whereas isolate and HMO is investment income, so they're treated differently for tax. And so that's why we wanted to get into sa. And so we were learning the ropes ourselves initially, before we start outsourcing the meet and agree and actually I was shocked to the core to discover that even bog standard terraces work perfectly well as service accommodation. Mainly because of the trades, mainly because of the corporates who want to save money on hotels. And when they're going on booking.com and Airbnb and this, well, booking.com, let's just isolate those guys. When they see how much it's going to cost for them to stay in your town, in your city, for X number of months, then they can see a service accommodation unit that could be, that could accommodate them just as well, could be a two, three bedroom house and there's a significant saving for them.

Like you say, getting into an expensive hotel where you've got to then worry about food and whatnot, you can come in, you can get in, you've got your own kitchen, your own lounge, you can relax. What I would like to finish on then is that you've grown this, you've gone from your own property portfolio, you've moved on to doing sa, you've grown that with Caroline and now you're at the level where you're teaching people how to do this. What is the plan for Kevin Paneskis? What is the plan for the property soldier moving forward for the rest of 2019 into 2020?

Property investors should always future proof themselves and not have all their eggs in one basket. And so, yes, we still do buy to let, we still do HMO and we do serviced accommodation. Obviously, I earned money from teaching people how to invest in property and service accommodation as well. So there's literally, to you, to coin the progressive phrase, multiple streams of property income going on here. Your question was in a couple of different parts, but future proofing. One of the things that we're also doing now is acquiring guest houses and B and Bs and using those as serviced accommodation. Now, the reason why that's cool is because, don't get me wrong, I haven't gone start raving mad. I've got no intention of providing bacon and eggs first in the morning and be checking people in at 12 drunk at night and all that stuff. But the thing is with a guest house is that it's C1 planning. So you should target ones that are C1 or have got grandfather rights to do to do guest house and you can acquire that and turn it into studio rooms. So all you need to do is put a little kitchenette and sometimes depending on local, you know, building control regs and fire regs, you Might just put in something that's got a sink, kitchen unit, sink, might just have a microwave, it's. But ultimately all of a sudden you don't need to be doing baking and eggs now. You don't need the owner's accommodation, you don't need the dining room, you don't need the kitchen. So you've just freed up a huge area in that property and guess what you do with those, you turn those into studio rooms too. You can significantly increase the commercial value of it by converting this extra space into letting rooms. And then once you've significantly increased its commercial value, you just refinance that it's new commercial value and pull all your money back out.

So if there are any bed and breakfast owners watching who are looking to sell, where are you looking to purchase at the moment?

Personally, Kevin, we're actually using people that come on our trainings to go out and they source deals because they go back to their area and they can form the relationship. They might be family members or friends or the local bnb.

Thinking about the marketing side of things is if you do purchase a guest house and all of that, then you have access to all of their past guests. So again, that's when you buy the property, then you get access to that. So then you can do everything that you need to do to rejig their memories and tell them about the new owners. So Lovely. Right, well, we will leave it at there. But Kevin, we know that you do the Progressive, you do training and whatnot. If anybody wants to find out more about you, more about the Property Soldier, where should they go? Where are they going?

Online. Okay, so they can Visit my website, www.propertysoldier.co.uk the propertysoldier.co.uk will take you to my website and if people want to come at the moment, people can come on a half day training of mine for nothing. It's hosted at Progressive. So it's all via Progressive. Someone wants someone you basically, you know, give us your details. Someone from Progressive will contact you and book you on. I do often charge for those when I'm doing my own webinars or my own networking events. People need to pay to come on those. But if people do it direct to my website, then they can come on for free. And then my Facebook page is the Property Soldier. You'll find me on Facebook if you just search for Property Soldier. That's how people can contact Lovely.

And I will make sure in the show notes and in the blog post that wherever else you're watching or listening to this. I'll make sure we've got all the links there. And thank you very much for everybody for tuning in. Thank you very much for Kevin for doing this. I know you're a busy guy, so we really do appreciate it. If this is your first time that you have tuned in to the Boostly podcast, what I'd love for you to do is just go and rate, review and subscribe wherever you are listening in. If you're watching this on the YouTube, you're watching this on Facebook, make sure you stick around and go back and look at all of the back catalog of interviews that we've been doing recently. Season six is all about service accommodation, which is the world of Kevin. In season seven, we're reaching out to industry experts to chat about everything from Instagram self checking. We're talking about technology, we're talking about the guest experience. We're always going to be talking about those direct bookings. Do you want to find out more? Go to Boost Lake b o o st ly.co.uk forward/podcast. If not, if you've done that already, please go and like I say, rate and review. We will see you for the next episode of the Boostly Podcast.