Secrets to Successful Hospitality Management of Luxury Properties

Hi, welcome to the new episode of the Boostly Podcast. This is the podcast that helps give you the tools, the tactics and the training and most importantly the confidence so you can go out there and get some more direct bookings. Today we are doing the behind the host series. This is the mini series on the Boostly podcast with myself, Liam Carolan and we dive into a successful and interesting short term rental host journey. Find out all about their business and see if there's stuff that you can take from their experience that you can go and implement into your business to help you with, with hospitality and getting those excellent reviews. And today I'm really excited. We're joined by Julian Foster, he's from the. Hi Julian. He's joined from the Richmond Property Group and his speciality is managing luxury properties. And it's something which I'm interested in because I know there's a huge demand for high end properties at the moment and also in general just we're going to find out how you've, how you actually go about managing properties which are both international but also very high end and what's involved in that. So Julian, welcome along.

Hey Liam, how are you doing? Very good, very happy to be on the podcast.

I'm excited to have you here. Thank you for joining, buddy. So let's start off if you can introduce yourself, tell us a bit about yourself, where the, where the business is based, how many units and that. Cool stuff.

Yeah, cool. Also like you were saying, my company's Richmond Property Group and we've got a portfolio of properties that are, they're mainly luxury properties and they're located globally really. So we've got properties down in, in Cornwall, in central London, in Bournemouth, Amsterdam, a couple of properties in France and a couple of properties in Chicago in the USA as well. And yeah, the thing that binds them all together is that is their luxury properties. So I think that's the main thing that I want to kind of talk to talk, talk to you about today really about how I managed them, how I found them and to give you guys some kind of tips and tricks if you want to approach luxury property yourself.

That's amazing. I know there's going to be a lot of people listening with ears very much open to this. So let's start off with more about your journey. Julian, how did this come about? What did you do before this at the moment, before hospitality and how did this opportunity of managing luxury properties come about?

Yeah, so, okay, so my background was originally was actually working in, in events when I was kind of, you Know, fresh out of college, I was working in the events industry and that pivoted. So eventually I was working in selling commercial office space. That's what my background was, was selling commercial office space in central London. And that was an incredibly boring thing to be doing. I, I look after some commercial space now. It's part of the process portfolio that I look after. But there's no doubt that that is the most kind of boring part of what I do. And it was about 2019 when Covid was, when that crept in as well. I was already looking for kind of a way out and something new and something exciting to do. And first opportunity came up where it was just this one person who had quite a large portfolio of properties that he needed looking after and he brought me on board with just to, just to kind of look after those. And that went from strength to strength. And eventually we decided that it would be better to structure it as a kind of personal company, my own company. And that's where it started from. So I really had this kind of base portfolio of luxury properties and that's where the kind of fun and games started really. It was really about kind of being kind of thrown in at the deep end. So having to manage luxury properties was, was a challenge and something that was very new to me at the start. And having to manage properties in more than one location likewise was just something that I had to kind of get used to and work out solutions for all of these complicated problems, you know, like not just the kind of classic ones you might think of, like working with different time zones and all that kind of stuff. But even looking after propert in, in foreign countries was something that was new and exciting. You know, I could speak a moderate level of French, but I don't really know how to. What the French is for changing the internal ring of a pool cover or you know, changing hot tub filters in, in Dutch. It's, you know, it's all new kind of stuff that I had to kind of work out. So that was part of the, of the fun and games.

Let's go for the international aspect. First of all, how. What tips would you have around managing like an international portfolio, I guess, instead of just a local portfolio? What are some of the things that, the challenges that you've met, but also the things that you've done to overcome that?

Yeah, well, so I think the key thing here is like the systems that you have in place because every business is going to have its own systems that it has. And with the, the portfolio that I manage, we we have our own set of, set way of doing things and it's not that complicated. WhatsApp is the absolute king for, for what we do. And every team that we have in every different location, the communication is still in, in its kind of purest sense is through WhatsApp. So every cleaner, every, you know, like client, guest liaison, every handyman that we have, regular maintenance men, they're all in on these WhatsApp groups. It's really key to what we do. Link to that. I'm pretty sure most people that will be listening to the podcast will have a property management system, a PMS that they choose. We use the guesty PMS system and it's really, really great and essential for kind of providing super reliable calendar functions and guest communication that everyone that needs to can kind of jump in and out of. So that's really key to us. It's just about having systems in place as a project management tool. We use trello and again, that's super invaluable for us. Like really. Again, what I'm trying to say at the core is that it seems super difficult, but it's actually not that difficult. It's just about getting people on board. You know, we find that a lot of people in the, in the US they don't actually use WhatsApp. I find that really strange. But you just kind of coax them into it and say, look, make sure you get this on your phone and, and then everyone kind of, everything kind of all falls into place.

Let's talk about these big luxury properties. My thoughts are a lot of the time you must get people who want to, you know, have an event or basically have parties, you know, sort of. So is there anything that you've got in place where you'd prevent that happening in some of these amazing properties? Because I imagine the last thing you'd want is to, to have breakages. And I can imagine some of the interior is quite expensive.

Yeah. Oh my God. I mean, I swear this would be my TED Talk if I had to do a TED Talk. It would probably be on, on Party Prevention. Because this was one of the biggest challenges that, that I had coming into this kind of luxury property market. Because like you said, they're very desirable places and a large proportion use vacation rental platforms. They're not always the, the people that are your ideal guests. They're people that they want to use them to, to host parties or even just to have like a kind of once in a lifetime stay at a luxury property where they do crazy things. They just Kind of, you know, they ride inside the properties on bikes or, you know, invite other people over to like brag about how good the property is. You know, there's just, people want to do extreme things and we had massive problems right from the start with, with trying to prevent parties. You know, we start, you know, we started in the middle of COVID and at that point in time, bars and nightclubs were shut down. Some people were actually just using platforms like Airbnb maliciously to, to get spaces where they could host illegal parties. And, and then also more recently, I don't know about you, I've had a huge backlog of weddings and you know, I, I've been to nine weddings in 2022. That's 18 different stag and hen that have to be accommodated for around the.

World and party central happening after covert, isn't it?

Yeah, it's, it's chaos. And so we get so many different inquiries for people that want to stay at the properties for stag and hendus. Now that's the latest kind of problem have. And some of them are honest and say that they want to do that in the inquiry form and then other people, they're more kind of malicious and sneaky about it. So what you need to do, what we, what we've done is really gone in depth into preventing parties happening. The main ways that you do that. Well, I would say there's two main things. The first, and like I said I could go on for ages about this, but the first is to set up your property in a way that makes it really hard for parties to actually continue. I don't know if you talked to, if you had the guys for a minute on the podcast, the minute sound recorders, but they are absolutely essential. Yeah, absolutely essential. And combining those with Google Nest cameras that we have in the properties in the correct locations to monitor who's coming in and guest activity generally without being intrusive is absolutely key.

Awesome. Thank you so much. So that kind of brings us to the end. Is there any last closing comments or anything I missed question wise along the way?

I don't think so, Liam. I just think that I want to tell people not to be scared of approaching luxury property. So throw yourself in there and you'll be amazed at what can come out of it.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Julian. And thank you too. If you're listening to this episode on the booster podcast, we know there's a lot of places you can put your attention and we really thank you for spending it with Boostly. If you haven't done so already, go and check us out on Facebook at the hospitality community. And that's a group, a free group where you can come and join in the conversation about hospitality. Definitely go and check out Julian's website. We will add that to the show notes as well. And yeah, any. Any questions or anything like that, feel free to get in touch with Bruce Lee as well. So thank you very much, everybody. That's bye from me and that's bye from Julian. See you on the next.

Bye. Bye.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard on the T is loose leaf Making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.