Jason Living explains the catalyst and Different types of Service Accommodation

So what has been the boom in serviced accommodation? When I say service, I mean like short stay. What was the catalyst for this? So where you see now all over the country and in towns and cities, you've got people that are taking a residential home and changing it to short stay accommodation.

I think it'd be right to say that, you know, there's never sort of one specific factor. I think it's a number of things. I think the, I think the rise of, say, Airbnb is a significant factor. You know, that certainly kicked off the idea of people renting out a room in their home on a short stay basis. And that business model has morphed into people letting, you know, whole properties. The origin of Airbnb was very much someone staying in your home. So I think there's been a series of things and then I just, with that growing awareness, I mean, I would class myself within that. You know, if I went to stay somewhere, you know, I'm in North Yorkshire, typically might get out to London every couple of months. In the past, I would always have stayed in hotels. Now it depends, you know, I wouldn't always stay in service accommodation, but it would certainly be on my radar and certainly if I was going with more than one person and I think that's the tipping point for me. If I'm just going for a night.

I online, then, you know, so walk me through the simplicity of it. So right now, if you are a home owner and you were currently doing a long term rent model where you had tenants come in and stay for say six months to a year, they now have got the ability to change it up because of these new rules that have come in and they can offer it as a short stay accommodation. Is that how it is basically working or explain to me the different types of service accommodation. Explain the different types of businesses that are coming into this and which can sort of maybe explain why it is booming.

So I guess at the simplest level, you've got somebody who owns a property that they want to look at maximizing their income out of. And as you say, rather than doing six month plus normal tenancies, they say, look, I think there's a market here for doing short stays. So that's, you know, the sort of owner operator, if you like. The one thing I would say as a caveat to all of this, and it is a fantastic business, you know, to get into and I think it has some, I think it has some real positives as a business. It's highly systemisable. You're dealing with an awful lot of repeat tasks, which means it's very systemisable. There's. You can write procedures for everything. It's easy to outsource. But I would say unless you're doing it at a certain scale and there's no magic in the number, but I always think about sort of doing 10 plus units. Unless you're aiming to get to that size, you're probably never going to get the real economies of scale of enabling you to sort of properly outsource. You know, if you look at hotels, I mentioned Travelodge earlier, basically that's what Travelodge do. They don't own the buildings they operate in, or in the vast majority of cases, there'll be an investment company that owns that building, they will lease it and then let out the rooms to their guests. So on a much smaller scale, that's what you're doing. You're basically letting the property from an investor landlord, you're acting as the operator and then you're getting the guests in and looking after those guests.