One Couple's Journey Of Hosting Guests And Travelling The World

Hello and welcome to a new episode of the behind the Host podcast. On the Boostly Podcast. My name is Liam, I'm the co host and we've got a special guest on today, or special guests, I should say. Today is really exciting because these guests are hosts who have managed to do the. What many of us hosts will find impossible is to travel while hosting the business. And you know, they're traveling with their young family and seeing some awesome sites and that side of things. So today, for the next sort of 20, 30 minutes, listen in and really discover from another host how you can pick up tips and things that you can do in your business and in your hospitality sort of places and in the properties, things that you can do to allow you to have that freedom to travel while you're hosting. So this is going to be a really cool time and a really cool podcast. So I'm excited. I've been looking forward to this for a little while. So I'm going to introduce to you Alyssa and Al Sadhgarvesh from Drava B Properties. They've got four properties I believe at the moment, but they may correct me on that in just a second. And they're sort of based not just in one location, but actually some in west coast, some up in the mountains. And we're going to dive into their business and see what tips they can share with us. So welcome along. Alyssa and Al.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

Cool. So let's get started. First of all, for the people listening in and on the YouTube as well. What, how did you get started in hospitality? Where did this, the hospitality bug begin?

Yeah, so I worked for a resort in Australia, the one and only. I worked in a day spa in a resort and then kind of. I've always been in five star hospitality for at least 10 to 12 years. I worked in that industry and loved it. But after having my first daughter who's almost five, I stopped working and became a stay at home mom. And then we've kind of dived back into in the last year. Ish.

Nice, nice. So hospitality allowed you to, you know, sort of work from home while you're. While you still got an income, is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

She's a little bit modest too, I'll add. She worked at, I would say the top resort in all of Australia. And we have an interesting backstory, which we won't have time for in this call, but Alyssa and I met In Dubai about 8 and a half years ago and she was contracted to the Atlantis Resort in Dubai to help Manage that spa and to train a lot of their staff. So her background is heavily in five star hospitality with guests, with guest interactions with WOW Service, five star service, but also in sops building standard operating procedures and training staff which has been huge for us to be able to scale our business and as you'd mentioned, be.

Able to work remote to know that is such a good background just in general. But we often talk about what transferable skills from previous careers. But that is, you know, that is the, the number one thing isn't it is recognizing how to host and how to have a good brand and that side of things which is definitely transferred to your, your places at the moment. So talk me through where did it go from there. So once you've decided to do hospitality, how did you get the proxies and, and for the people listening, you know, let us know a bit about where the properties are and what sort of avatar they serve.

Sure. So I've had a background in residential real estate for 12, 13 years now. I kind of built my career in residential mortgage lending for the first 12 years. And then about, probably about a year before COVID actually hit my brother who's also in real estate and I decided to start flipping properties so local to Southern California. So myself, my brother Fred, Alyssa and my sister in law Johanna basically started a family flipping business. Alyssa was helping project manage. I was handling all the money. With my background in finance, like I was very comfortable with money and raising capital and all that fun stuff. And you know, we started working through that and flipping properties and you know, we did great, especially through Covid. But then eventually we got to the point where we realized like, you know, we can make 50 to $100,000 on one standalone transaction, but wouldn't it be awesome to have passive income so we can eventually break out and be able to go do the things that we want to do on this earth while our kids are still young enough to where they enjoy spending time with us and we are mobile enough to where we can enjoy it too. So that was kind of where it started. And then we had a couple friends around us that were buying short term rentals. This is back in probably early 2021, just beginning of last year. And we kind of started to get the short term rental bug. Right. Like a lot of people started to. It kind of became, started to become mainstream over the last two, three years, especially during COVID at least in the states. Lots of places were locked down, lots of people started to travel locally and go, you know, enjoy short term rentals right. Get out of the whole hotel scene and kind of isolate and then remote workers and all this stuff started to come up. So we started looking at this, going, man, I think there's an opportunity here. So we bought our first property last year, just over a year ago. And we just basically fall in love.

With the industry with that first one. How did that help, you know, sort of, you know, generate towards your or get you towards this kind of dream of being able to travel. So as you, you got that first one, how long was it until you got the second, the third, the fourth? And what's that sort of journey look like?

So we launched the first property November of 2021. So we're closing out on our first full 12 month cycle. And I mean within 30 days of launching it. The revenue was just, it was pretty wild, right? Like the revenue net targets on these short term rentals, I mean they're double, sometimes two and a half times you can get on a long term rental. So we launched that first property. We obviously had a couple friends that were doing it and we were very intrigued about how to set up systems. Like I love systems and scaling and staff and leverage and all that fun stuff of building and growing a business. And coupled with Alyssa's just like innate skill set with, with hospitality and standard operating procedures. Like we complement each other well. We've had our challenges working together, which we've worked through, but at the end of the day we feel like we compliment each other well. So we got to the point where that first property hit. We bought the second property and closed on it before the end of 2021. And then third property, we ended up closing about four or five months after. So about midway through this year. We just launched that one about two months ago. We just brought on a, I suppose a fourth property. Yeah, we just brought on a fourth property over the last few weeks while we've been out of the country traveling. And then we have our eyes on a fifth one right now. That's actually a unique deal and if we get, if we have time for that, I'll talk about it.

Talk us through some of those systems or some of the tech that you're using in your business that other hosts listening in might go, hey, that could be something that could help us.

So we first brought on. So our property management software that we use is guesty for host. So we kind of started off of that. We'll say, obviously we lived through the school of hard knocks. Alyssa read a couple of books to start to better understand. Yeah, Your book included or Mark's book included, I should say. But we, we just kind of got to the point where like, okay, we're starting to understand the guest interactions, all that fun stuff, but how do we break away from constantly being married to the phone? Mainly Alyssa, as we mentioned, I think we mentioned on the call, we have two daughters. We have a almost five year old and we have a three year old. And it's really important for us to be present with our daughters. That's one of the things that we hold true in our family is we want to be the ones to raise them at the end of the day. So I've, I've got a heck hectic work schedule at times too, even when I'm working remote. So this is with our girls a lot during the day. And we wanted to create a business so that we have the leverage where we can still do it. All right, make additional money, scale the business, be present with our family, go travel. So guessing for hosts. And then we started to plug in different tools to be able to help that, that process. One of them is a smart pricing engine, which we think is super crucial to any short term rental business. We learned this the hard way. We probably would have cleared another, I'd say minimum of 10, possibly 15% revenue off of our first property in the last 12 months had we had the smart pricing engine incorporated from day one. So we use price labs for that. No bias towards it, but I highly recommend just getting some form of pricing, smart pricing involved. And then there's a couple of tools that Alyssa uses that she absolutely loves. So I'll pass the torch over to her.

Yeah, My absolute favorite is Turnover bnb. I could not do anything without that. Just the communication between the check in, check out and the cleaning. I know the property's been cleaned, everything's been taken care of and I didn't really have to do much. The automation there is what got our business to the next level.

Yeah. And that was a recent switch. We learned that because we had one cleaner on one of our properties who just. He was a nice guy, but he complained a lot. Right. And he charged probably 25 to 30% more than what we found the market was charging. So we were kind of put between a rock and a hard place. And then we're forced to move over to Turnover bnb. And it was the best decision that we made on that sector of the business. So two things that that did. As Alyssa mentioned, it streamlined the process with cleans, but it also allowed us take home 30% more revenue on that one property in the cleans per month. So that was huge. We also have smart tech on all of our properties. So everything pretty much everything. We can manage remote smart locks for the property. So we prefer to use Slage is the provider that we use. I got it on the first one worked great. We had it on our primary home. So we just started to scale using that. One of the big things we love about Slosh and I know Yale and a couple of other other providers will offer that now too, but they'll do automatic door codes per guest. So all of it's automated. A unique door code is is generated, sent to the guest automatic. It expires after they check out of the property. So it's safe, secure. All that fun stuff. In America we have ring for our for our security camera security cameras. Thank you for for our alarm system and our security cameras. So we like to have security cameras around the perimeter of the property for safety reason. Some. You know I won't go too deep into that, but we do enjoy that.

Well, thank you so much for your time today. I hope hope this has been fun for you. And did you have any closing comments before we close off the the podcast?

Just don't get into I call it mental masturbation. Delete that out of the if I'm not allowed to say that.

But you can say anything on the Boostly podcast as well.

Limit the mental masturbation. Like you're literally going to be in a place where you can overanalyze every aspect of this business and never take action. Get some books, get some knowledge on it, get into a mastermind group of some sort and just take action. Like I don't think when we started this, we didn't think we'd be in this position 12 months later. But just take the first step and then the second step and the third, and eventually you're going to have a few properties and that would be all gravy.

Love it. Love it. Thank you very much, Al. Thank you very much, Alyssa. I want to speak to you again.

Bye bye.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast.

Bruce Lee.

Like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the T is loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.