Jason Living explains how he got started in SA

Jason, welcome to the Boost hospitality podcast. If you could please just take a couple of minutes and introduce you your business and how you got started in serviced accommodation.

Sure. Thanks very much Mark, and great to be here. So my background is very much from the property side. I qualified as a chartered surveyor sort of more years ago than I care to remember, sort of early 1990s and worked as a commercial planning consultant in London and had a property there that I'd originally bought, then moved out of and rented out and I moved up to Yorkshire and worked in the northeast from the sort of late 90s. And when I got there I started buying investment property, residential property to let out and built that up to a pretty significant scale through the 2000s. And as everybody now knows, back in 2002, 2007, 8, 9, all became rather difficult and we sort of scraped through by the skin of our teeth and, you know, really then set about, I suppose, climbing out of the hole we'd fallen into. And part of that was really looking at the properties we've got and trying to, trying to find ways of maximizing our return from those properties. So it's really self catering accommodation, but not necessarily unlike a lot of the hospitality industry, not necessarily in either holiday or pure leisure destinations. So these might be, you know, city centre or even just generally urban areas, anywhere where people are going and, you know, working away from home. So a typical clientele would be people who might otherwise stay in budget hotels, certainly contractor only things, budget hotels, you know, smaller B&Bs, family establishments, those sort of things. So it's a bit of an intro to me and a bit of a lead into what serviced accommodation is all about, which as I say, we've been doing some of our properties for about five years now.

And how many properties do you look after in the UK?

So total properties all over rental stock is about 185, mostly in the northeast. We've got a couple in London and about a dozen in Merseyside. But the short stay stuff, the serviced accommodation is just in Sunderland where our office is and we've got 18 flats or apartments that we use for serviced accommodation. I increasingly sort of, I verge towards calling it short stay accommodation because I think it's a more, it's a more inclusive term I think. I think service accommodation has particular connotations about it. Some people will say to you service accommodation is, you know, where that, where it's being serviced every day, sort of hotel style and there are no doubt sort of establishments of that nature in larger cities. So we probably sit somewhere between that and your typical self catering accommodation where people are staying for a week.

The general misconception and the assumption with serviced accommodation is that it is mostly contractors, business people that are staying at these but it's not, it's you get holiday goers, you know who are also staying, you know people that are just looking for two nights away like say short stay accommodation. Where was the term serviced accommodation from? First coin do you, do you remember or is it just.

No, I'm not sure. I think it's one of those things I've been about for years and I think another misconception is this is something that has just happened in the last few years and that's absolutely not the case. I can remember staying in a service department in London 30 years ago so this sort of short stay accommodation has existed for a long time I just think for a number of reasons it's perhaps come to the fore, become more prominent, it's a significant growth area.