No such thing as AirBNB Bust with Bill Faeth

Okay everyone, welcome to the new episode of the Boostly podcast. And this is a podcast course which gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the trainings and most importantly, the confidence to go out there so you can go out and get some more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan. I'm lucky enough to be the co host here on the Boostly podcast in Mark Simpson's stead. And today we're going behind the host with a extremely successful and one of the thought leaders in the STR industry. I'm really excited to dive in. Today we've got Bill Faith and he is well he go and check out his website which is build str wealth.com. it is somewhere where you need to go and have a look at to really, truly understand the amount of value that Bill shares. But he's got 25 years of real estate sort of experience and also in terms of STR knowledge, there's not many people who will be able to outdo him. So I'm really excited to dive into this. So welcome along. Bill, thank you for being here today.

Hey Liam, thanks for having me this morning. I'm pretty excited outside of having to get up so early.

I know what time is it where you are?

It's not too bad at seven o'. Clock.

Seven. Well, thank you for joining us this morning, mid afternoon as we record this in the uk. So we're going out live on Facebook. So if you are watching us live on Facebook, just drop a message where you're watching from as I'd love to find out in the comments. So Bill, if you could just introduce yourself and your business, where your units are in the world, what kind of model you use as well.

Yeah. So I live in Nashville, Tennessee, kind of right in the heart of the Bible Belt here in the United States. And I started with a luxury beach property. I didn't know I was starting with a luxury beach farm. I didn't even know that I was starting into short term rentals. My wife wanted a beach house. We were everybody's heard of Destin. We were in Destin and one of my best friends and a groomsman in my wedding, we had lunch with him and his wife. He just happened to own over 300 properties at that time, 2015 in Destin. And I played professional golf all over the world together. And we he's like, how much money do you have? I said we have $127,000 to buy a beach house. He's all, we are not going to do that here. Go to this place called Gulf Shores, Alabama, which we'd never, we'd heard of it but we'd never been there. And you'll get a much, you'll save 30 to 40% because she had some restrictions, right? So just like when we're. It's interesting because a lot of the things that I teach now, proximity, views, uniqueness. We got so lucky. We flew down from Nashville to Gulf shores. We saw 10 properties in one day. The very first property that we saw was the property that we bought. It checked the box for all of those things for us as somebody that wanted a second home at that time. And then we were going to hire a property management company because we knew nothing about short term rentals. Even though I was been in the real estate space, commercial building, you know, doing duplexes, long term, all that stuff. It just wasn't the plan to get into short term rentals. Long story short, property manager sucked like most of them do. I'm total anti property manager. Like anybody that's buying, investing into real estate needs to learn how to self manage it. We'll probably talk about that later in the podcast. It's super easy. You just need, you don't know what you don't know, right? So we had a bad experience for three to four months with the property manager. Finally I said, you know what, you're not transparent. I don't know what my guests are really booking. I see all these bad reviews for cleaning the house is getting, you know, worn down in three to four months. Just all the stuff that just irritated me as an owner. I said there's got to be a better way. So I fired them. I took it on myself. I leveraged my skills in Facebook marketing doing at that time probably 7 to 9 million dollars of direct marketing ads on Google and LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and all this type of stuff. And I learned really quickly the hospitality is easy. You just need somebody to kind of, if you've never done it before, give you a little nudge down that path, give you a little bit of information and then you can do that. The hardest part is off platform marketing. And I think that's where I have the biggest advantage. So what I did is I bought property, I saved my money. So I want everybody and everybody says oh my God, Bill, if you know who I am, you've got these million dollar plus properties and they're all over the United States. You must be rich. Well, I wasn't when I started this. I am today. I am very wealthy today. I built my wealth over the last Seven years through real estate. I've had other successful companies before. I've done 27 startups, built 1 to 50 million, two to over 30 million. So I applied those business practices to scale here. But here's the difference. And I don't know if it's the same over there. I assume that it is, Liam, but on this side of the pond it's how many units do you have? Do you remember this? We're talking about this on Clubhouse, right? When you and I first met with Mark and Mike and T.J. and Sean and all these guys, it's like, how many units do you have? Well, let's don't let Bill have any time in the room because he's only got at this time like 13 units. We all got 40 and 50. Well, f you guys, I'm making way more money than you are with much less time. And that's the thing that I learned when I started building my portfolio with intention. I'm going to say that one more time with intention. So I believe we all need to have a plan, a future plan of what our desired outcome is. Because everybody that comes to me for coaching or comes to one of my events or whatever, it's like, yeah, hey, what's your outcome? Oh, I want to have 50 units. I want to have 100 years. I want to get to a thousand units. That's a bullshit outcome, right? There's nothing there. It's not substantial. How much money do you want to make by what date? How much cash flow do you need? How much debt are you willing to, you know, shoulder to be able to achieve that? And how much equity, how much wealth, long term wealth, do you really want to build? Answer those four or five questions now you can start to formulate a plan. So I built out my plan. I knew exactly when I was going to retire, is what I'm going to be 50 here in about four months. I was going to retire at 60 because of my investments into real estate. That plan has fast tracked to where I was ready to retire at the end of last year. So literally about three weeks ago financially. But I still got life events that I have to wait for. I've got kids, right? So I wait for my daughters to get out of high school and those things. But financially I've hit that because of that intention. So I only invest into larger properties that yield more cash. Some of them now could be slightly less cash on cash. Here in the US we talk a lot about cash on cash return, cash on equity, cash on cash flow. So for me, I believe, I don't even believe this because I know it for a fact. It takes the same amount of time to market, set up, manager, bill out, do your taxes for a two bedroom, 1100 square foot condo or apartment, as it does for me to do a $1.6 million, 2 acre, 16 person occupancy, 6 bedroom with massive game room, cabin or beach house or whatever it is. But that two bedroom might do 75 or $80,000 a year in revenue, whereas I'm doing $300,000 in revenue. So if I look at 75,000 versus 300,000, hmm, same amount of time roughly to manage that, I'm going with the 300,000 every single day. So I just rolled all of my profits that I was from property number one to get into property number two. And it took me almost two years to get to property number two. A lot of people think that I just started writing checks and growing. It's not, not the case. And then it was another year after that. So it really wasn't until 2018 that I had enough cash to really start to scale pre Covid. And then Covid, you know, it's just an anomaly. I mean, that's just through gasoline on the fire, right? So that's kind of how I got in and started that journey up to the, up to the COVID era, if you will.

You know, you're a breath of fresh air, Bill, because first of all, anybody who comes on and goes, you know what, hospitality is easy. You just need to know your outcome. Is, is, is so important, is it? Because most people do this and they go, well, I'm just putting my spare cash somewhere. I don't really know what I'm doing with it. I just, I just need something to do on the side. And especially that moment that we talked about just then on Clubhouse, where it's always stuck with me that it's not the number of units, it's actually the cash flow. And I guess what that cash allows you to do with your lifestyle, which is, is the aim. It's not like you say 150 units is. Is. Is a pissing contest, you know, really isn't it? You know, is. Whereas if you've got a select few units which are doing really well, well, then you know, that's, that's really all you need. And it depends on your goal and what your what your why is which. I guess that's a good question to pose yourself. What is, what is the desired outcome of this and what is your why, Bill?

So Before I jump in. And I just want people to understand the mindset. Right? You're 100% correct on what people think. Doctors, attorneys, professionals. I'm just going to park some money here. It's easy. Turn on Airbnb, turn on vrbo. Oh, that price lab thing, that'll do the pricing for me. So plug that in and 100%. That worked from about May of 2020 till about August of last year. Right. Just put it, set it and forget it. Autopilot, not going to happen. Moving forward, we're going, we're moving Back to like 2017, 2018 numbers now. So the mindset is what needs transformation, right? So I've done 27 startups, I can honestly tell you that, like two of them. When we started them, I used one, my Glow Golf business. Glow in the dark, miniature golf and shopping malls. It was topgolf before topgolf. And we actually sold our technology to topgolf so they could do all the tracking and everything. That was the only business that we, my partner Reg Booth and I did really, truly thinking of scale first. Now people come in and they buy a short term rental and a lot of us are putting fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, sometimes two hundred thousand dollars plus in cash to invest. Until I got outside of real estate, I've never invested more than $25,000 to start a company. One to 50 million plus, two additionals to 30 million plus four over 10 million plus. I don't even know how many have gotten to 5 million. Most of them have gotten to between 5 to 10 million, less than 25 grand. So the mentality for me is if I'm going to buy everybody, if you're going to buy the coffee shop or the scone shop in the UK on the corner, you're, you're thinking about, oh my God, I got to make sure this cash flows immediately because I'm putting my life savings and my effort into that. You're the one baking, you're the one behind the cash register. It's the total E Myth. If you, if you've never read the E. Myth, go to Amazon right now. Buy the E. Myth revisited by Michael Gerber. So we become the technician mentally when we buy that sandwich shop, that coffee shop, whatever it is. People don't think that way when they invest 100 grand to buy a half a million dollar property in short term rentals. And it doesn't matter if you're co hosting and it costs you nothing or if you're arbitraging or if you're Buying the mentality needs to be the same. Let's get our shit right on number one and let's get the execution down. Let's build systems, let's build an sop, let's get a track record to prove to ourselves, then let's go put our money into number two, right? And I think Covid really jacked that up because it was so easy. And that's where people are either gonna have to adjust now or they're gonna get, I don't wanna say get burned. They're gonna learn a tough lesson financially. So for me, I mean, today, the scale component, I actually, because of Clubhouse and those conversations, I got into co hosting and I wanted to try it. And I'm like, well, look, I'm, I'm not the guy that doesn't have any money to go and buy, but if you are that guy, co hosting is the absolute easiest in my opinion and safest place to get into real estate as a whole, but also short term rentals because you still have control of your outcome as opposed to getting into a syndication or a fund, or giving your money to somebody else, or borrowing money and going into debt or giving up equity in a partnership. So I quickly built a $1.9 million CO hosting business in less than 18 months because it was, it's the easiest place to be able to scale. And I could take everything that I learned owning and apply it to co hosting, right. So now I've got this asset to lead me to the desired outcome for more than one person. So I've got Chris who works with me. I don't say for me anymore, he's actually a partner and he's one that produces the SDR wealth conference and my boot camps and does everything for me behind the scenes. Well, the co I can't give him build short term rental wealth when I retire. Right. Because that's really the Bill Faith, you know, program. So what I can do is I can build this co hosting business to replace the income and increase the income that he makes through this business and then give that to him and create an annuity for myself. It's not just like I say, here you go, Chris, here's 100 of the business. It's like here's 5%, then 10%, then 25, then 40, then 50, and create an annuity for myself. So I'm about building long term annuities as opposed to start, build, scale, sell, right? And I've done that, but I prefer to start, build, scale and then sell with an annuity. Coming back on the back end for me. And I did that with my very first business, Belaqua Bikinis. And I sold in 1994. I was drop shipping Brazilian bikinis and swimwear and sarongs out from a family, a small family outside of Sao Paulo I met when I was playing the South American PGA Tour down there. And, you know, I sold to Venus swimwear and I wanted to take the lump sum and my CPA. Thank God I had a CPA because I was like 22 and a half, 23 years old. He said, bill, take a little bit of cash that was taking the $2.8 million. Let's take like the 350,000 and then take the annuity. I still get checks today. That was 1994. They're not huge today. They were huge when they started. But that's what funded my life. That's what funded me to be able to do everything. So I believe I would have never been able to do that, Liam, if I didn't have somebody that understood that I was too stupid at 23 to make the right decision and give me some of that guidance for that. I grew up with no father. So for that reason and many other reasons, as a golf professional and having to have a coach to excel, being a college golf coach and having so many mentors, I talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. I believe every single one of us needs a coach. Specifically in this business. If you don't, if you're not an expert in tax, you're not an expert in finance, you're not an expert in evaluating real estate, you're not an expert in banking, you're not an expert in hospitality, you're not an expert in marketing. You have to have all six of those skills to thrive in this business long term. And most people might have one, maybe one and a half when they get into it.

And their belief, like you say, that comes back around to that mindset is. The mindset is, you know, they either believe they can't do it in many cases or believe they can do it all. And both of those are incorrect, aren't they? So you picked up. There's a lot to unpack there, by the way. Bill.

Wow.

For the amount of value that you just provided. And when it comes down to that mindset, I actually watched a documentary with Richard Branson recently, and it's amazing to see all the amazing success. But how close these businesses are. You said about at the start of this shouldering debt, how close they were for foreclosure, and that side of things. But actually the gamble paid off for them. And you, you know, by getting the right people and doing the right things at the time. One of the things which I'd love to ask a bill is what mistakes do you see are the most common mistakes for people listening to this are going to be likely in the hospitality communities in both the usa, Europe, Britain, even Australia. What are the most common mistakes that you could say you see across the board?

I think number one is people think that they can just throw a dart at the map and invest into a property. And I say that everybody's in a default. Oh well, I arbitrage or I'm a property manager or I'm a co host so I don't have to worry about that bullshit. I mean there's pockets of London, London's a big, a big city and there's pockets that are going to produce one property on the same street can do completely different returns. Right? And that's what people don't understand. At the SDR wealth conference last year, I did a presentation about how you, how you basically just extremely what we call arv, right? It's how do you get more value out of your property? But it's not about renovating and stuff like that. It's about the marketing, the value increase, the decor, the design. But it all starts with the location. And I have a property, the exact new construction, same house, eight houses down, same street, same location, same builder, same design, same bedroom count, same everything except for the design, the marketing and the view, right? That house did roughly $190,000 in revenue the previous 12 months prior to the conference in June last year, I did 257,000. How is that even possible? It's possible because that house was what's a property management company and the owner did nothing. Right? Which is okay if they just want passive income. But I treated my property like a business and the biggest thing is the location. Their house had houses in front of it between it and the beach. My house had open views of the beach. So you know, we're all looking in the boostly world, you're looking for opportunities to market your property, to drive direct bookings, right? It's the same thing in my world. I actually don't care where the bookings come from though. So I just want more bookings and I want to be able to increase my value. So I look at, I paid more money. The only difference for the lot that had open views. Does that make sense? So it's the same thing when you're Looking for that flat that's at the end of the road or in the middle road versus the flat that's on the corner that sees, you know, into the, the open area in front of it or the park or whatever that is, or when people are walking by that visibility that they can see your property or they can't really see the property where the signage is going to go. It's these very small details that becomes super important and it affects the co host, the manager and the arbitrage or just like it does me as an investor because we only have so much bandwidth. So it's the same model. Like for my management company, my co hosting company, I only take on property that started with properties. I can only do $100,000 in revenue or more right now. Then it went to 150. I just bumped that up to 200. Because as I max out the maximum number of units that go into my portfolio, I continue to raise my commission. I started at 18%, I'm now 22% plus I charge you 299amonth retainer because my pot, my refrigerator is getting filled. You can only put so much stuff into the fridge without starting to pull stuff out. I also pull stuff out of that fridge, right? So I bought 13 properties between June of 2020 and June of 2021. I only had a net hold of three. That means that I sold four because I was scaling those up. I had those $400,000 properties that turned into $700,000 properties. And I could use a 1031 exchange to sell and then buy into $1 million property. So there's a lot of strategy that goes into this. But at the end of the day, I think we all need to understand we only have so much bandwidth personally and professionally. We need to max out. We need to 10x every single thing that we can do inside of that bandwidth that we have.

You know, the point you're making there is so true because at the end of the day you are building the right kind of portfolio. And this is one of the things which I really take from you, Bill, which is first of all the due diligence and treating it as a business. You know, like this isn't, this isn't somewhere that you're just buying to go and stay in and you're renting it out on spare time. If you're buying a place, you know, as an investment, it needs to be treated as such, but also the, the ability that you've got there to maximize it. Like you say, don't, don't hedge your bets by having four different places. Go for the one which is really, that you can really max out the one with the best views. And you remind me of one of the properties I've just taken on.

Beautiful big house.

It can sleep a lot of people. You know, it's a mini mansion, but there's no parking. And instantly that is such an important aspect of it. And that'll drop that revenue so so far down just by not having that one amenity which is needed for that type of stay. So.

And I believe I kind of got off track on your question. I apologize. I think you just kind of jogged my memory. One of the things that I think the biggest mistake, because I didn't answer your question is what kind of what you just said. It's the evaluation of the property. And people don't understand. They look at just the property as a standalone. The mistake is, is they're not taking mental notes and leveraging how they're going to position and market that property. Right. That's one thing that I'm looking at is what, what are my statement pieces? What, what do I get? What do I have to do? What's it going to cost me? How am I going to market this? Because if I don't have everybody for the last two and a half to three years has been able to buy an average property in an average location to make money. Well, before COVID and now after Covid, it's going to be, what's the marketing? And we, we've all seen how we can absolutely be annihilated by one little algorithm change. And it's come back, you know, at least if you're doing the right things. I mean, I've taken more bookings in the last six days than I have in the last three months combined. But what I'll tell you is, is that when you evaluate a property once again, arbitrage, co hosting, property, it doesn't matter. You got the four major, you know, investment styles into str. You have to know how you're going to market it. And that could be something unique interiorly, it could be something unique externally. But if you don't see something you can mark, and then if you see an issue like Liam identified with, hey, I can have a problem that can sleep 10, 12, 16, 20, but I've got limited marketing. You better make sure you can get over that hurdle either before you sign the contract to work with the owner, or you buy that property on your own 100%.

I really love the inspiration there. You know, I'm certainly. I'm learning a lot here. So I'm sure people listening are. One of the things you mentioned is you get more bookings at the moment. And we talked about the algorithm, obviously, change back in May for Airbnb. There's a lot of talk in the communities as we record this January 2023. There's a lot of talk and there's a term being flown around called Airbnb bust. I'd love to get your opinion on that and also what you think the future holds for hospitality in general in. In the market. What are the opportunities?

I guess so I'm going to start with those of you that are listening to me for the first time. If you like my style, go listen to Str Unfiltered. That's my podcast. It's strunfiltered.com. you can catch it everywhere that podcasts are. So I'm going to give you about three to four minutes of it. Airbnb bus. The hashtag is bullshit. That an influencer started in our industry. That's fear mongering, you know, his community and students and people to buy his shit, you know, then immediately he starts the hashtag and then he goes in and he sells, you know, an algorithm, you know, changing webinar course or whatever. That's fucked up, Liam. And you can bleep that out. I have a. Sorry, I'm just get passionate.

You can say what you like on the booster podcast.

Responsible as influencers. You're an influencer. You have a lot of people that listen to this podcast. Mark is. I am. There is no Airbnb bust. There is an Airbnb bust if you bought in bad locations that were not able to produce in 2018 and 19 pre Covid because they're not going to be able to produce afterwards if you don't know how to do the things that we've talked about. If you just are parking cash, if you can afford to park cash, great, so be it. But if you're one of those guys, you don't. I'm going to back up. I'll bet 90% of your listeners, maybe 99, have never heard of a company called Stay Alfred. Stay Alfred was an arbitrage company at massive scale that had raised like $110 million in 2019 in the US and they went so fast into scaling and growing arbitrage, like thousands of units. But they were out of business by the end of March 2020 because they didn't have enough cash. They didn't have Runway to be able to sustain. Right? So that's why you have to treat this like a business. Not millionaire stuff. Not driving high end cars, having $100,000 pianos, and all the bullshit that attracts Gen Z to come and buy your stuff on Instagram and YouTube. You need to treat this like a business. You need to have at least six months of full carrying costs and operating capital. Right. Don't invest if you don't have that money. So when I'm running a perform, I'm under property, I'm under contract right now to buy my first property since April of 2022. I'm going to close on February 20th. That's going to be nine months, by far the longest period of time I've gone since 2018 buying a property. I mean, about 13 in one year. Why? Because the economic climate has changed dramatically since Russia invaded Ukraine. Right. Which we're coming up on that one year anniversary here in a few weeks. It's still not stabilized yet. The short term rental space is stabilizing now, but it's not stabilized yet. We don't know what that outcome is. So I think that people react and everybody has reaction. We all get emotional. The algorithm update for Airbnb happened on December 4. For most people, it really started back in late October and November for people that really paid attention to Chesky's address that he released prior to the algorithm being updated. Sure, we all got hit with it, we all saw some things happen. But if you've been making changes and doing them through iterations and tracking and benchmarking, like I use a program called Rank Breeze and I know we'll get into the tech in a little bit that I love and then I can see what actually works and doesn't work. So I'm going to go back. If you're, if you're doing the fundamentals, the right thing really, you know, how to evaluate proper markets all the way down to properties. You're using STR Insights or, you know, one of the data tools out there to help you identify a strong market bedroom count. Then you go in and you learn how to optimize your listings. Take professional photos, write copy. Liam, we have so many, you know, tools to help us like Chat, GPT and Jasper AI for the copywriting. If you're not a copywriter, you know. Yeah, professional photographers don't just use, you know, this thing, if you're not a professional photographer, all these things to go in and boost your listing. See what I did there? Boost Lee. Boost Lee.

Yeah.

Get your direct booking sales pages or websites, you know, set up. I'm sure Mark and I are going to debate that in at the SDR wealth conference in our marketing workshop. Not a pitch, it's sold out. Just FYI. If you can go in Tom, and if you can do things the right way, like what the top 10 or 15 percenters are do and model them, you're going to be fine. I'm not worried about anything. If bookings been slow. Yes. Are bookings coming back for like here in the US at least for spring season and summer season? Absolutely they are. They started later this year. Where we're going to lose and why are our profits going to go down year over year if you book it as a calendar date? Tom is most of us are really slow. If we're a summer based market here in like January and February, things are picking up. Spring breaks in March, then we're into the summer season, concert start, summer, all that type of stuff. I think that's going to be fine. But it's making up the delta for how slow it's been really from November, December, January and February. That's one of the reasons that I think you look at the smart investors and they diversify geographically. Right. So you guys have huge climate changes from the UK to Ireland to Paris to Spain. Right. Kind of just think about in that four country area that's kind of like the, the Southeast or the mid section of the United States. So there's a reason that I'm invested at the beach on the, on the, the Gulf of Alabama. There's a reason that I'm in the mountains of North Carolina. It's ski season right now. There's a reason I'm buying in Montana right now. So I'm diversifying in Scottsdale, Arizona, a lake property, you know, close to Nashville. Not everything is confined into one geographic location honestly because of weather patterns, drives, traffic. Right. And I want to make sure that I've got cash flow in the winter with peak season. So I have two owned properties actually my biggest property is owned. I own a smaller Property I paid $500,000 for and I have a ski and ski out $2 million chalet that I co host. Right. So I've got this revenue coming in to offset the slow season at the beach. So I think that geographical, you know, kind of investment strategy to really how that's going to impact your cash flow on a 12 month cycle becomes super important if you do a handful of those things and if you listen to the smart investors, they're all doing the exact same Thing. This isn't just some secret that I'm sharing with you today. To be honest with you, there is no Airbnb bust that is a marketing tactic to sell a product and services.

You know, it's refreshing to hear and I'm sure there's a lot of people just going, yes, Bill, you know, is. Because what you're saying there is, you know, there is always ups and downs, isn't there? There is, you know, the market may start a little bit later, but the key thing is having a good product in a good location and you know, treat it as a stock at the end of the day, having the benefit of having properties in the different areas and having that cash flow coming in, you know, it's high season. Well, this one's low season. Well actually these ones are high season. And then I move into the next one. Is just such a genius way of looking at it and something which is, is everybody listening? Should take in under advisement.

I think, I think the other thing. So Everybody's looking for 12 month markets, right? And most year round markets are in urban areas because of the tourism, the business travel, the combination of all these factors, you know, downtown London would be amazing. One of the best year round markets is where I live in Nashville, Tennessee. I don't own a property here. So what happens is those markets are very heavily regulated. Manhattan, New York, you know, London and the pockets that they have, Asheville, North Carolina, you know, Barcelona, Spain, all these heavily regulated markets, none of them are closed. A lot of people say they're closed and you can't get in. You can get into every one of those markets that I mentioned and when you do get in, it's strong. The question is, is do you have the mindset or the cojones to spend the time and the effort and the work to figure out your way to get in one of those markets? Right now, literally today, like I'm in Montana of all places in the US you would not think that it would have stringent regulation. It's tough to get an STR permit and like I've got to put in a new septic tank and it's going to take me three months to go through permitting at a local level and a state level, which doesn't happen in most states. But that's the barrier to entry, right. That keeps a lot of people out that don't want to do that work. So I look at investing in the heavily regulated markets. One, because they have a history, it's not going to change dramatically. But two, it Keeps the weak out. So if you're a strong person that is willing to do the due diligence, jump through those hoops to be able to get into a highly regulated market. It's typically stronger once you get inside of it. So that's a strategy that I think people that are willing to do the due diligence should be looking at moving forward.

It's a nice way of looking at it. So many people are looking at regulations fearfully. Whereas because Airbnb short term rental is a short, it's a low barrier to entry, people can just put, you know, any property, especially where I am in the uk, there's no regulation at all. But actually because of that, the number of listings since last early last year has gone up by over 100. So there's a lot of supply and having regulations actually means for a lot of people listening will have been involved in hospitality short term rental in some way for four years as opposed to months. And actually if you're already in it and there's regulation coming in, well, you know, that will stop others from, from being your competition at the end of the day and that will help to make it a little bit harder, which makes the supply potentially drop and then the more income for each of the hosts which are already here, which is cool. So we mentioned it earlier on that you talked about tech and we're going to dive into tech. But before we do, one of the questions which got written down here is what are your thoughts on AI technology and how it's going to affect the hospitality industry?

I think AI is affecting everything, to be honest with you. I mean, I know Dave Roganmiller who is the founder of Otter AI, which then turned into Jarvis, which then, you know, MCU didn't like that a whole lot. So Casper AI, which is probably still today one of the best copywriting tools available. And I, Chris and I have been using it since beta. We use it for every single thing that we write. Except for my personal emails that go out to my community just because I want that to be personal. I don't care if there's spelling errors or whatever. It's. I want my voice to be 100% in that. The interesting thing about AI and how it affects is, you know, Google's already catching up to be able to identify AI written copy because it leaves some type of a footprint. I'm not techie enough to truly understand that, but as an SEO for 15 years, I would be apprehensive if back in the day there used to be Tools that were like content spinners. You'd write something, a blog, then you'd spin it, spin it and distribute it everywhere. And that was black hat SEO. And, you know, the algorithms for Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo are going to be, you know, smart enough. But I think, I think AI is like, I'll be honest with you, I would hospitable hosts. You know, I'm writing in the book right now, and you know, Mark wrote in it last year. There's a lot of great people writing, but a lot of those people are not professional writers. And I'm in the Facebook group and we all struggle with writing. Right. Well, if you really would just do a brain dump, like, here's a trick, get Otter AI. It's a free app. You can get up like 600, 800 words, or you can buy it. Just go in and voice over what you want to say in your listing, right? Then take that and copy and paste that into chat GPT, which is a free app, and watch what happens with the copy that pops out. So I believe that copywriting, Liam, and our in any industry is one of the most important skill sets that we need to have. If I took 60 seconds to read you the copywriting from my very first beach house, you would say that's the best copywriting ever, because that was somebody that was professionally trained to copyright. That was on my, my marketing agency's team at that time. So I'm a huge fan of AI as it exists today and how we can use that in any business, specifically with the amount of copy that we should be writing, meaning our descriptions in our listings, maxing out every character under every image in our listing for our direct booking sales pages and websites, our posts that are going into Instagram or Facebook for social media, our Facebook ads, whatever. We're doing email marketing. Most of you don't do email marketing, and you're missing the boat tremendously because that's the number one place to generate revenue, you know, outside of like, Airbnb, which is Google. That's the search engine. But when you want to do it on your own, don't waste time doing TikToks and all this other crap. Focus on writing an email, building an email list, and then writing emails. Well, your hurdle is. I don't know what to say. I mean, literally DM me@billface73. That's F A E T H on Instagram. And I'll give you seven topics immediately that you can write about to send to your past guests. But you need stay fi or you something to be capturing and building your email list. The mental hurdle is I, I can't write. Well, go spend 99amonth for Jasper AI and let it write it for you. I can type in six to seven, five to six sentences into Jasper AI now because it's learned our stuff and it'll write me 500 to a thousand words that I could literally would be confident enough to copy and paste an email to pass guests. Now I probably need to write one or two sentences to drop in a call to action inside of that, right? Not a problem. Boom. Email's done in 15 minutes, as opposed to taking a day to try to write an email. Now, the flip side, you probably know if you follow it, Liam, like I do ChatGPT, I just saw like $10 billion, you know, Microsoft valuation on Chat GPT yesterday. It's like quadrupling or 10xing its intelligence on a daily basis. Right now, five weeks ago, when nobody knew about Chat GPT, it couldn't write a lot of stuff about our industry. Today, it can write a book about our industry five weeks later. So I think that's exciting for us as marketers and business owners and how we can use it today. It, I don't want to say it scares me, but it does give me pause, you know, moving into the future of how those tools are going to be able to be leveraged as they grow and they get smarter. And I think a lot of that's the fear of the unknown, right? You just, you, you don't know. But when you look at arguably one of the smartest, most successful men on the planet, Elon Musk, he's investing into AI for Twitter extensively, and you look at what's at least what I personally experienced since the launch of otter and Jasper AI, and I see what's happening with ChatGPT at some point, I don't think we'll write anything. It's going to be like, you know, Wikipedia, you know, information or, you know, basically you have it all at your fingertips. You're going to just type in a question and you're going to get a fully written answer. The question will be is how good is a company like Google being able to identify that? Because as a marketer, I don't want everybody to have a one click and be able to develop the same quality of content that like Neil Patel or myself or Danny Sullivan can create on our own, because that would level the playing field. That's my concern, you know, moving forward. But right now I think it's a Great thing.

You know, there's. There's so much to unpack there. And thank you again, Bill, for how much value you share. And because that, that AI is something which I have used, I, I can't write to save my life, but I can talk. I can talk into an app and as long as I've got a very basic outline, then I can go to town with it. And like you say with Chat GPT, I've used it today for one of the listings. It's an amazing tool and you just have to ask the right questions, don't you? You have to know who your mark is, because that's one thing it can't do is it can't identify, you know, your guest avatar. You've got to give it the right kind of few sentences or the right hints. But it's just such an amazing thing. And like you say, it's learning all the time, which is, is like for.

Your, you said for your listings, right? So let's just look at titles. You know, type in a title, type in our normal crappy title for a listing and give it the character limit into Chat GPT, but then copy and paste that into Jasper and that's where the magic happens, right? Like combining those two apps. So you think if you're setting up a listing today, is a $99 investment worth it for you to nail your copy in a listing? 100%. The process, in my opinion, is what I just shared with Liam. Do your. Do your title and chat GPT, write the copy for your, you know, whatever it is, 120 characters under every image in chat GPT, then paste it into Jasper because you can select the tone and how you want it written, right? And that's kind of where the magic happens. And you'll end up with tremendous copy.

Jasper is much more for marketing in general, isn't it? Whereas Chat is a little bit more functional, I tend to find. But one thing I'd love to ask, and I want to be respectful of your time bill, is what is your tech stack? What are the things which you use in your hospitality business and that everybody listening should, should know about?

So, I mean, my PMS is Owner Res. It's hands down the most robust PMS in the industry, in my opinion. I love that it's got direct API access into Facebook and the Google. So I. If you don't use Owner res, you truly cannot track your roas, which is return on ad spend or your ROI return on investment. You're guessing with any other platform that's out there. So that's really the reason I migrated to OwnerResearch. But it's so robust, you know, I've got QuickBooks API integration. It does everything that every other, you know, PMS does and then you know, a lot of other things as well. It's challenging. A lot of people stay away from it there. If you're one property, I don't recommend Owner Revs. I would actually start with Hospitable. I actually use Hospitable on top of Owner Revs because Hospitable has AI built in to their messaging replies so they have automatic replies. So I have like three or four different, you know, wi fi is down or wi fi doesn't work or Internet's out kind of keywords that Hospitable can track and then send information to the guest automatically. If I'm on a plane or I can't get to it immediately tells them how to reset the router. And by the way, if that doesn't work then you know, message me back and I'll call the service company. So it saves me time. So I have Owner Res with Hospitable on top just for the AI, some auto responding messaging and stuff like that. Getting the granularity of the apps I think is what becomes important. Back to that process real quick. All the apps I'm going to share with you. The technology I'm going to share with you is a deal breaker like from a co hosting standpoint or a property management standpoint. If they don't want to use my tech, I'm not going to use Schlage and Yale and August locks. I'm not going to use Ring and three other security cameras. So I am a ring camera guy. One of the reasons I love it is I can install it or you know a not very educated handyman even a cleaner can install. I use the battery powered and I always have a solar panel with it, right so that way I don't ever have to. And I love the interface, you know, on phone. So my tech stack has been built. I do 99.9 of my work from this thing. I never want to sit in front of my imac, you know or do any of that type stuff. So it's built with intention just like my portfolio around how I'm going to manage Owner res, Hospitable Ring cameras, Ecobee thermostats, Schlagen code locks. So those are kind of the core, you know, inside the house. Now I do have add ons from Ring that go in. I don't even know what they're called to monitor the CO. The CO2 or whatever in the house that monitors water breaks. So they have the little things to put down, you know, around the water mains and leaks and faucets and stuff like that. One big one for me is I bought properties with pools and pool heaters, is I use Aqualinx. That's kind of the communication system that's built into your heater, tied into the Pentair app here. What else am I missing from a text?

What does that do? That. That. That Aqualink.

So I can make sure that the heater's on. I can schedule the heater. So, like, as an example, if it's during the winter, everybody pays. So I charge $50 a day to have the heater. It's super expensive. If I run it for a month in December, it's like 800 bucks. So I charge $50 a day when people stay. So immediately when they book, I just pull out my phone and I. I've taken four bookings since we've been, you know, recording the podcast. If somebody wants to pull it one, I got to send the payment request to get paid for it through Airbnb or vrbo. But then I just go in and I add it to my calendar inside of Pentair, and it will automatically turn it on and turn it off at a specific date and time, control the lights, control the pump, all of that type of stuff to where I don't have to. Most people, hey, handyman, go turn on the heater for whatever, and then you have to pay the handyman, and it's just. And then you think about your time to have to manage that. And the one thing that is critical for me is you forget. So, like, just having a calendar sync for even one property between Airbnb and vrbo and not having automated messaging, you know, is a huge deal. So, I mean, I send out an average of 7 to 10 messages to my guests for every stay. You got to remember, my average stay is like 4.5 days, and my average booking lead time is like 61 days. It's a little bit shorter than it used to be because people now are booking for the summer. Right. If you're in an urban market that's a little bit different, you're probably going to have shorter booking lead time. So adjusting your messaging and being able to control that based on the lead time is very, very important. So, like, I'm. I. So I'm a big believer, and I don't want to keep me on track here, Liam, but this is something really important I want to share with everybody. You need to understand your cancellation policy. So a lot of you are probably thinking, bill, well, why would you send out six or seven messages or emails before somebody checks in? Because I have a cancellation. I used to be strict. So after 48 hours, they're losing 50% of their deposit because of the ranking algorithm. I have a much more flexible policy to where they can cancel up to 30 days for free and up to, I think it's up to 15 or 14 days and still get 50% back. So that means if Liam books with me today for June, there is a four month sales process. Liam is not my customer. Let that sink in for a second. I have four months of Liam being a high, highly qualified lead because he's booked. But Liam can go and book another property and cancel me with no penalty up until 30 days. So for me, I'm still in a sales mindset. So I have an email funnel just like click funnels, Russell Brunson, all that type of stuff. I do that stuff. It's built in from the time that Liam books till the time that he gives him 30 days where I'm adding value, not trying to upsell him into anything, but just saying things like, hey, Liam, you know, here's what you need to pack if you forget these things, by the way, we have these, so we have to earn the right to get into somebody's inbox. We have to earn the right to communicate with them. So no way am I selling anything to Liam. But what I'm letting him know is, or a lot of the small things that can make or break Liam's or his wife's, who's more important than Liam? Because usually, at least for me, it's mostly females that are booking. But so, like the little things of, hey, if you stayed at other short term rentals and you're worried, you think you have to pick up toilet paper and paper towels. You don't have to do that. We've got you covered. I'll send them a picture in the laundry room of a case of, you know, toilet paper so they don't have to worry about that starter pack. Then the next email will, hey, mom, we got you covered. We got tampons, we got Tampa. We got pads, we got makeup removers, we got extra toothbrushes when your kids forget to pack it, toothpaste. And I take a picture of the little wicker basket that we have, everything really nicely organized and send it to them in that message Right. So I'm nurturing right through that funnel essentially is the way that I view it because Liam is not a customer until they're inside the cancellation policy. So customize your messaging to be able to deliver during that period of time. And that's what I really love. Hospitable. The most important reason I use hospitable single inbox A lot of these PMS is when you have multiple properties how you have to use multiple inboxes and that sucks for efficiency. Right. So outside of that I'm using Facebook business manager. You know I run Facebook ads. Active campaign is my email and CRM. I was a huge HubSpot guy. Customer number 33 HubSpot Partner Agency at HubSpot. It's overkill for what we do. So most of you can get away with mailchimp for email marketing if you're just starting free account, up to 2,000 contacts and one email a month for free. And you should be emailing your past customers and your your leads because you should be generating leads with Stay5 for all the non bookers that stay in your property and everybody that gets a quote you should have in your lead funnel as well. So I like mailchimp for that. Am I forgetting a chat GPT Jasper AI. I use Otter for just about every everything. Oh God. And a big one. Touchstone. I love Touch Day and I'm and I'm using TouchStay differently today. So a lot of video going into Touch Day, a lot of how to stuff for my guests. But one of the big problems that really frustrates me and my wife is our staging. There's something as simple as like your beds. Right. So our average bed, I counted it when we were on vacation or we were workation. Sorry After Christmas going skiing at one of our properties. My wife averages like seven pillows per bed. That's a lot of pillows. So you got decorative pillows, you have shams. And most cleaners don't know the difference between a sham and a regular pillow. So the regular pillow ends up in the sham in the wrong spot. So we're using pictures but also how to videos to identify and we even give them a process. We don't know if they use it. But here's how you take everything out. Here's where you put the pillows, here's where you put the laundry. So we're communicating with our boots on the ground team using touchstay now as well. And most people don't think about using it and that type of an asset because staging gets all wonky you know, you guys know, you walk into a property and the coffee table supposed to be here, but it's over there. And you know, somebody moves stuff in the kitchen and all that type of.

What that lamps are the worst one. Lamps go walk from places 100%.

I my, I have a big house in North Carolina. It's got a guest house, right? The only problem I have a guest house on furniture moves between the two houses. So like, you know those infinity game tables that are like a thousand bucks. I have like 500 games on it. We've got one in our main house and literally when we got there the day after Christmas, the previous guest had carried it through the snow up the stairs and put it into the guest house for the kids. And I'm like, there's a whole fucking game room, you know, three car garage, game room underneath you. You didn't need to do that. But you know, it's crazy. And the cleaners don't know where to put that stuff back because they don't pay close enough attention on the front end, right? So those are things that we kind of just use that in a different way. I use resort cleaning for all of my cleaning, even though a lot of these PM say that they get access to the calendar. But one of the big things for me is there's no accept and decline features inside the PMS, right? So what I love about ResortCleaning.com is it cost me nothing. Cost of cleaners like a buck to a buck 50 per clean. But every PMS integrates with resort clean. I have a dashboard for all my properties and I can see when they accept and when they decline. And I can leave special notes and there's maintenance records. I can run all of the maintenance and everything through resort cleaning. And the cleaners can bill. So instead of them, you know, sending you a text saying, hey, send me money, I can, they can bill me and I can pay directly through resort cleaning. So it checks a lot of boxes for management and also payment processing and accounting by using resort planning.

You know, thank you, Bill, for sharing. I mean, that is one amazing tech stack. But also I feel like, I feel like we've been given a lesson on, you know, sort of some of the things that you need to do for that sales process. You've mentioned before, somebody actually stays. I've never thought of it like that. You know, many hosts, including myself, I'm probably quite guilty of. I've got all my messages and they're just up to, you know, to fire out. But the Journey's different, isn't it for everyone. And so making sure that you're hitting their fears about the reasons why they might cancel is just so important, you know, like, and just making sure they feel valued at the end of the day, which is, is amazing. So I want to, as we reach the end of these, just ask two very quick questions. The first one, Bill, is you've, you've provided so much value. Where can we come and find out more information? Where can we foliar, you know, where can people go and learn some of the stuff you're talking about?

I mean build str wealth.com the website. The most valuable asset that I have is my Facebook group. It's Build short term rental wealth Facebook group. We have 25,000 people in there and it's not like the other Facebook groups. It's, there's no bitching, there's no complaining. We do our best to keep all the telegram and forex and you know, the crypto spammers out of there. I know I own the group but it's the best Facebook group in our industry. It's so packed with value. My suit, I built the STR super team. They're in there adding value. Like less. Yes. Every Tuesday Ryan Bakey and I are doing tax Tuesdays live broadcast Q A. Just answering questions as we get prepared through tax season. I'm Bill Faith. That's F a, e t h73 on Instagram, every other platform, Twitter, you know, TikTok, whatever. It's just B Faith with an E instead of an I. And also you know, the build str wealth on YouTube. But I would say the Facebook group is the most value because of the amount of free education that is dropped into that group. If you like short doses of content and you like the way that I deliver, some do, some don't. You got to find your, your, your person, your tribe to follow. STR Unfiltered is one of my two podcasts and that is the unbridled truth about short term rentals. I dropped a couple of, you know, truth bombs a few minutes ago here. It's 10 minutes. I mean some of them go a little bit longer. It's not your typical vendor interview type of stuff, you know, that we're doing. It's trying to keep it at 10 minutes or less. I just did one really important one that's coming out probably next week and we'll got to like 15 to 16 minutes. And then those of you that struggle for like evaluating properties and the investing side and the data Side, Kenny Bedwell, the founder of STR Insights. Hands down, in my opinion, the best data analysis tool in our industry. And I have STR and Nomics podcast. We host both of these with slickers at the Hospitality Network. Love him. We drop STR Unfiltered on Tuesday. So that came out yesterday. And then we drop STR anomics every Thursday. And you can give them@sdrnomics.com sdr unfiltered.com or anywhere that you listen to podcasts. We're on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, all of them.

Nice. Nice. And finally then, Bill, what is the mantra or saying that you kind of live by or one that really resonates with you?

Oh, that's a, that's a tough one. I don't really have one. I'd say it's more of a, of a mentality of to many times, subconsciously, I'll pick the more challenging path to go down as opposed to the easier path. And so actually, and you know, I do have one, it's, I want to be different when people are going down the easy path, I go down the hard path. When people are making investments in Gulf Shores, where we have, my wife and I have been investing there forever. We're out. I'm not investing there anymore. So one of the things that I look out is you got to be different. How you host different, how you stage different, how you design different in the properties that you buy, different and everything. Because by the time you're getting information on social media and you're following people, it's too late. It's like the stock market. If you watch CNBC and you're investing in what Ron and Sana tells you to invest this morning at 9:00am that, that ship's already sailed. Right. So carve out your own path. And when, when you see the herd going this way, you need to go the opposite direction. That's kind of my mantra.

I love that. I love that. And Bill, this is, this has been amazing. There's been so much value. I'm sure the people watch on the Facebook Live. I mean, if you are watching on the Facebook Live, please drop a thank you to Bill for sharing this information. Go and check out his Facebook group. Go and check out the, the webpage as well. That will be in the show notes if you're listening on the, on the podcast. And so, yeah, thank you very much, Bill, for, for spending your time with us today. And thank you too. If you're listening in on the Boostly podcast, I know there's a lot of places you can put your attention. I really thank you for putting it with us and hope you've enjoyed the interview here with Bill. And Bill, once again, thanks very much.

Awesome time. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you, buddy. And yeah, we'll see you in the next one. I look forward to the. You've got a few conferences coming up this year, haven't you? So we look forward to seeing you there.

Awesome. Thank you, Liam. See you later.

Bye for now.