The Airbnb Secret No One Talks About – Boost Your Profits 4X!

Hi, welcome to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings. We do a behind the host series on this podcast where we can dive in to the innovative world of short term rentals. And we're going to dive in with somebody who has got experience that you need to know about. Today we've got Mike Sebastian. He's the founder of Hideaways the Hideaways. He transitioned from a high flying marketing career to revolutionize short term rentals by creating unforgettable vacation experiences. And you'll need, if you're listening to this on the podcast, you will need to go and check out some of those places. I've checked them out and they look absolutely amazing. So join us as we explore the ins and the outs of transforming these properties and how to manage a thriving rental business in general. So Mike, thank you for joining us.

Absolutely. It's good to be here.

So as we start the discussion, what's one thing that you'd like everybody listening to this to take away from this chat we're about to have?

Man, there's so things I think the biggest for me would be the value of standing out, the value of being unique and not. I think everybody has the fear that they're going to their. Excuse me, they get the natural fear where they're going to go in and set this place up and they want to appeal to everybody because if they don't they exclude people. But in reality I believe, I think the hideaways and build your hideaways teams believe that if you exclude people by focusing on one target market, you will double, triple, quadruple the profits that you make on that rental is.

Can you just give us an overview of the hideaways, tell us about your inspiration for starting the business and what sets your approach apart in the short term rental market.

Absolutely. So we tend to lean towards smaller rentals in national park type markets. That's just been our niche. You can do this anywhere, you can do it downtown, big cities, saturated markets, it doesn't matter. I would almost say that some of those are a little easier because there's more tourism and if you're getting the attention for those then it makes it good. But, but our thing is is basically find a way to be unique for your target market. So question one would be who's the person that you're going after? Right. We go as far as like a 28 year old female and her Boyfriend that want to rest versus that want to be active, hiking, that kind of thing. And we gear our houses specifically towards that individual and then we market to those people to bring them in from all over the country, all over the world if they see them. But having those things that stand out for that target market and the word unique I think is what scares people in that because it's an ambiguous term and it's different in every single market for every single target audience that you want to bring there. So our biggest right now is in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky and it's a big hiking, rock climbing, adventure, outdoors type market. And there's the age range of people that go There is from 25 to 60, you know, probably a little bit higher even. But there we pick subsets of target audiences for each house that we build in there. And then we find unique aspects of, for the audience. And with the geography that we were given, it's like one of our houses is a little two bed, one bath, 420 square foot where we were trying to install or going to install a hot tub. And we were out there working with our contractor, looking at ways to put it and wrap it and do all these fun things with it. And he said why don't we just put it on top of the boulder? And we all kind of looked up at this 30 foot boulder that we had and we built this like big walkway that goes up and overlooks the entire valley and whatnot. And we turned a two bed, one bath that was making about 215 on a weekend for ADR for, for a weekend and getting about 50 occupancy to upwards of 620 ADR. Yeah. For 70 occupancy for the peak season.

Nice. That would be the sort of idea wherever I suggested that to like somebody, they're just be like nah, don't be crazy. But with your marketing expertise, I think it's really important for the listeners to understand the background in marketing. Can you just talk us through a two minute kind of rundown of how the switch from marketing into the STR world and what lessons you brought with you from that?

Absolutely. I'll say it's a, it's a breath of fresh air and relaxing to be in the STR world from the marketing space they marketing. I feel like everything changes almost every single night. You've got all these different algorithms that you're competing with and nobody wants to tell you what they are. You've got different rules, you got other players coming in and everybody has to Be right at the top. And if you. As I was growing that company, I had it for about 10 years before I sold it in 2023. But as I was growing that company, I would try and build out these systems and processes. And what I found is as soon as an algorithm would change or Facebook would update on your phone or any of those things would happen, everything that I had built was essentially null and void. So I had to go redo all that. Says kind of one step forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back all the time. But I loved building systems and I loved learning how to make those algorithms happy, essentially, right? How to get them to favor me and the stuff that we were trying to do. So I got good at that over a decade. I got a little burnt out with it and I wanted to invest some of the cash that I had in real estate, found the short term rental side. I had been a bartender and caterer for a long time, so I had some hospitality experience. So I tested out the short term rental side and just fell in love with it and wound up from 2021 until today it's 25. Went from 0 to 19 houses that we currently have, all in the short term rental space, except for two, just because they're geographically far away. But yeah, it's been great. And I will say bringing the marketing knowledge into the short term rental space, I feel like puts me 10 years ahead of everyone in the short term rental space. Because most of the people that we've met with and talked to, they throw it on Airbnb and hope for the best, right? And they're like, I think it's pretty, like it's going to satisfy a couple people. And in reality, we've reframed the way that we do our business now where the TikTok and Instagram customers don't have price comparison. So when they see the reel, they see the experience, the emotion of the person being there, enjoying our rental. They think to themselves, I have to go there, right? There isn't another one next door. They don't even know what the location offers yet. They're just like, I have to see myself there and be seen there. And what that's done is that's filled over half of our calendar with these premium tier reservations. And then we use Airbnb and VRBO to backfill the rest of the calendar, if you will, as it gets a little bit closer to check in time.

Walk us through the process of how do you decide a property that you find is right for your brand and for the values and the things that you're looking for, what are the essential elements that you consider would be right for your, your, your brand?

Yeah, that's. It is a, that's a process. The, the things that stand out, I'll say they differ a little bit for the target market and differ a little bit for the geographic region that you're in. Just finished an hour before this walking through two eight bedroom, big like putt up courses, everything, short term rentals in Louisville, Kentucky. A friend of mine had and redid and he was showing me and they're just vastly different versus mine that are in rewards. The people that come there, the reasons that they're there, very different. So that plays in directly. But the underlying themes that we go for are, can the house be transformed into some sort of like secret room, game room, outdoor activity? Is there a location to do a hot tub? That's more than just a hot tub. Right. And the way that we come up with those is essentially research on the market and then research on the audience and figure out what our baseline is going to be. So you, you know, in the, in the gorge, you have to have a hot tub, you have to have a deck area for outdoor eating. You have, so that's our base, right? That doesn't get you unique. It gets you to the minimum. And then what we look at is how can we change the things that we implement there, right? So can we wrap the hot tub, can we put a deck on it, can we put it up on a boulder, those kind of things? Or can we add other things? Right? There's no pickleball courts in the gorge other than one at an RV park that you have to be in there to get to, right? So can you add a pickleball court and be the only place that has a pickleball court? And then if you have that, can you put fencing and a mural up around it to make it pop in photos, those kind of things? It is very much a deep dive into that listing with that audience that we do, with all the people that we work with to find out what the unique thing is, if you will. But the biggest thing for us, it's me and one other business partner that do all of the heavy lifting on that side. And that's two people out of however many millions of people that are going to see it. Like our last Instagram reel, I think got 14 million views. That's a lot of opinions, right? There's a whole lot of opinions that people are going to have on that so our thing is let's put this concept together and then let's reach out to people and have them vote. So again, leaning back on that marketing experience, we'll run Facebook campaigns that are just reach campaigns or engagement campaigns to see how many people are actually engaging with the two different versions of what we created and say, hey, I think for our target audience, who we can very clearly define in a Facebook ad, this is the way that we should go. And then what we'll do is execute that on the property. But I have found in the past year, I will say we found that building is significantly easier than finding properties that actually have those features in them. You can transform any property. Us personally, recently, because we've got such good relationships with builders, we've actually just started building. I think we have seven under development right now that are all built out of silos or up on hills or you name it. And that has been, it's been able for us to take the unique aspect to a whole different level because the house is actually constructed from our vision instead of transformed into it.

How do you decide? Is it a property which we could build and make it out of, or is it something where you would rather. Are we talking from ground up or is it always a conversion?

Basically, for ours personally, it's been ground up. There's a process of everybody learning this, including myself, for me and for Jordan, my business partner. When we started these, both of us got terrible investments, got in the short term rental space. We're like, we're going to kill this. It's going to be great. Both of our wives designed it, everything, and they did a fantastic job. But we did not have the education, the knowledge, anything that we do now about what stands up. So we did what everyone else does. We said, this is our market, but we're going to open it up to these people just in case, right? And then we, we had a generic run of the mill house that did generic run of the mill numbers. So as we transitioned into more unique, bolder, what we saw is our, our revenue and our profits just went higher and higher and higher. So learning that, having the confidence that we have now and understanding the markets that we're in, it gives us the confidence to say, look, I'm going to take this piece of dirt, right? Or in our case, these boulders, these cliffs, and I'm going to build houses around. And that's exactly what we're doing now is from scratch, from nothing. There's no electric, no power, no separate nothing out there. It's just Dirt or creek or rocks or whatever. And it's been there since prehistoric times. And we are building on there. The houses that we want to see, those have had the easily the most bang for our buck, right? They're very affordable, typically cheaper than buying to build these houses that we're doing because they're small, you know, two ones, one ones, those kind of things. But I will say the people that we're working with have not had that experience yet. And there's a learning curve that people, whether they say they're not going to go through it or not, they have to go through it, right? Because they see that first, that first proposal. And I'm like, this is the renovation. This is what we want to do. This is the furniture that we want to use. And it's, you know, 30, 40, $50,000 sometimes on a house that doesn need a whole lot of work, according to them. And I know that if we do that, it'll Crush it. It's 100, $150,000 str annually. Right? But if we don't do that, then you're sitting back in that, you know, 50, 60 range. And. And it's just getting them on board. So for the things that we build, it's going to be dirt ground up, right?

We're.

We're building everything from scratch. For the thing people that we're working with on the, you know, consulting, coaching side, we're working with their process. We're saying, this is what I think you should do if you're not willing to do this, let's scale it back a little bit. And what we'll do is we'll leave that for now, and then in a year we'll do some more. And getting them on board with that was something they can chew off.

Thank you, Mike. Thanks again for coming on the Boostly podcast. For you listening to this, if you've got value from this episode and you'd like to share it with somebody else to share the link to the episode. If you'd like to continue this conversation in a group, a Facebook group you can come across to the hospitality Facebook group on Facebook and we can chat about anything. Direct bookings, hospitality, or Mike's journey on there. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now.

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