The MUST KNOWS before jumping into Boutique Hotels

So a couple of weeks back I did a podcast interview with TJ Tajani, who will link it here. And in that episode we talked about boutique hotels and we went through things from branding to advice, etc. Etc. But broke down exactly what a boutique hotel is. Now I know from the responses, from your messages, from emails and dms, people saying, I want to get into boutique hotels. Now, before you go all in, I wanted to get on Mike Sojourn. Mike is somebody that I've known for about two years now. We met in the clubhouse days and one thing that Mike has done is he's just always growing and always expanding and he's just purchased a 57 bed hotel, boutique hotel in Salem, Massachusetts. And this is number three. He talks about the things that he wish he'd knew before getting started. He talks about the tech stack, he talks about the what is implemented about again, what he wished that he had knew and how he's going to market this. If you're just getting started in boutique hotels, and I know from following a lot of you on Instagram that you currently are, or if you're looking to get into it and you want to know potential pitfalls, this is one for you. Mike also drops a link to his Instagram. He gives a sneak peek on what the handle is going to be changing to and also as well, make sure you stick to the end. I'm not going to tell you exactly when, but make sure you stick to the end because you get a special link for a dealer analyzer world which will help you before investing into potential boutique hotels. This is one of those do not misses so get the pen out, get the paper out, try and figure out what my key takeaway from all of this was and you'll get that about three quarters of the way in and leave that comment below. Really excited for this. Let me flip straight in. Let's go with Mr. Mike Shojan, the boutique hotel guy.

Oh my, my Urbich is basically, I'm a, I'm a short term rental operator and the reason I do that and I keep it so tight, a lot of people like, oh, I'm in Airbnb or whatever. One, you, you and I know we don't have an Airbnb business, but two, more importantly, it kind of peaks. They're like, what does that mean exactly, right? And then I can have a little bit more of a dialogue around. You know, we operate short term rentals. So like we're little hotels. Vacation rentals is what most people are. Non str people are used to calling it. So I just throw out, I'm in short term rentals and a lot of times it just sparks conversation because they don't even know what the hell that means.

Let the conversation go from there. But you touched upon something that we're obviously going to talk about today, which is, which is hotels, boutique hotels. So where I grew up, the family business, we were a small hotel. And you know, I love how this industry is sort of taking an eye at it, looking at it and sort of going down the route of going from short term rentals to, to hotels or boutique hotels and putting in this, this method of what we've built to be structures and systems and into short term rentals, into hotels. So can you, can you just talk to how you personally went to venture down this route? What's the story behind it? What sort of caught your eye with it? And, and how did you get into.

Actually somebody brought it to me. So my, one of my business partners, somebody I was co hosting for, he owns a real estate brokerage and he actually brought the first one to me and he was like, hey man, you know, you've been doing great with the single family stuff. Would your systems work at scale on this like little hotel? And I was like, I don't know, let's go check it out. So we went to go look at the property and the more I thought about it as we're walking around, I'm like, I think I can make this work. Like, and I didn't know anybody that had done it before. And so I was like, I bet I could do this. Like the locks, like I could use the same locks, I could use the same cameras, I could use the same pms and like it's pretty much the same. I'm like, all right, I think we can do this. I drastically under underestimate how much it was going to cost to do it. But either way it, it worked out and I'm happy to talk numbers as we get into it. But yeah, it kind of just came up through a referral. Commercial real estate, at least in the US is an insider's game. It's all about relationships, right? If you go to buy a single family house, you go online and you search for all the inventory of single family homes. Anything that you see online that is a commercial piece of property has already been picked over by 50 other investors. Because when somebody goes to sell that property, they call up their broker and then that broker goes through their phone of the last 30 people that they've sold deals to. And they're like, hey, would you want this? Would you want this? Would you want this? And if they all say no, then it ends up online. Yeah. And it doesn't mean it's a bad deal. This deal was online, but the person that sold it was motivated enough after a while that they needed to let it go for substantially less than they were asking for it online.

Did you. With this particular one, did you find out the story about why people turned it down? As in, did they think that they were going to buy it as a hotel, etc. Or did they just not go for it? And you came into with a different mindset to say, hey, I can do this to this place. Is this how you got it over the line or is there, like, something else to it?

I'm not really sure, to be honest with you around. Like, I. I think the other thing is it's kind of. I don't want to say it's remote, but it's a good hour outside of Boston, so it's not near like a major hub. But the location was. It's oceanfront, it's on the beach. Like, the real estate itself is prime. And the gentleman was just. He was just asking a lot. He was asking 3 million for this property. And the location was great, but the property itself was really rough. Like, it needed a lot of work. And so, you know, we went in, our initial offer on it was 1.7. And my wife Kristin, like, looked at me in the eye. She goes, are you seriously going to offer that? Like, she was embarrassed. And I was like 100%. Like, the worst I can say is no. And we ended up closing it. You know, we went back and forth. We close it at 2.25. So by us offering it 1. 7, it saved us, you know, $800,000 off of their asking price just because we went in low and they needed to sell it.

This is something that's happening a lot in the UK the way that it used to happen, say back in the 80s, in the 90s, you'd have a couple, a young couple would move from, say, the city to a coastal location, Scarborough, where I'm from, and they would go and buy a small hotel, they would change the careers and etc. And the sort of. The way that, the sort of the mindset worked back in the 80s and the 90s is that they'd start with a small hotel, they'd work their way up, and then they would sell that small hotel and then purchase a bigger one in the town. And the Problem is is that that happened 80s and the 90s, no problem. And then what happened was it changed. As in they would normally pass it down to their kids and their kids would run it. But the what would happen because hospitality was so full on and like kids were able to sort of the world was expanded in the early 90s and you know, early decade of 2010. And so people, kids were like growing up and saying I don't want to work 247 in hospitality, I want to go travel, et cetera. And so these, these deals and these hotels that they were buying, they would be kept hold onto and they'd get kept hold onto and they wouldn't sell. And then it just became came to a point where they just wanted to get out. And so many people in the sort of the back end of last decade, start of this decade are now going in and using the systems and the structures that they learn from serviced accommodation, short term rental accommodation, whatever you want to call it, and plugging it into hotels and bed and breakfast because the models there and you know, the properties of ever all on site and they just have to, you know, they're very tired, like with your purchase, very tired, you know that you can do a lot of work to it and it will be able to turn it into a boutique hotel. And it sounds like this is happening a lot in the states at the moment as well, which is really clear. So when you were looking around and you were thinking I could do this, what were you particularly knowing to believe that you could do to the property but would just make it, make it work? Like what were you looking to plug in from what you've learned from shelter rentals?

I knew I could run it more efficiently from an expense side. Like I knew I could get the expenses down because they were just super high and they had a lot of staff and just a whole bunch of stuff that was completely unnecessary. And I was also very confident that I could get the revenue way up because this Gentleman was getting 160 to 180 a night like on the beach, like and again it's all context of where you're located. But I'm like, I bet we could double that, like easy if we do it right. And then the secret sauce is, has nothing to do with me. It's all my wife Kristen with the design. Because again like there was nothing else. And I bet it's probably similar to some of the stuff in, you know, where you grew up. It's just that older New England vibe. That's just the cute mom and pop like grandma style looking place that like people were just used to and there was nothing new and modern. So like we went in and really changed up the look and feel of the whole place and there was nobody else in that area that was really doing that. So it really stood out. Yeah, that, that was the key.

I love that because you're so true. I can think about my parents place, my dad with no nails, you know, it's all diy, everybody's dni wine and not bringing experts in, you know. And you're talking about the rate. I guarantee they're not using things like air DNA or price labs to look at like the, you know, if it's anything like our property, which sounds like a lot of these are at the end of the year you just put the pound up the, the, the price up by a dollar, a couple of dollars and you have it set for the year, you maybe peak it for like summer and if it off rate and summer rate. But in terms of what you can bring in with your knowledge on pricing, with your knowledge on the systems and the text that you're putting into place, you add that with a fresh liquor paint, proper design and you make it stand out then yeah, 100%. So when, when we talk about the tech stack, what is the tech stack that you have in the short term rental business and then what have you brought into the boutique hotels and has that been anything else that you've added in that you didn't have for short term rentals?

Yeah. So I mean the pms, we use Guesty, Guesty Pro as they call it now, just because they have a ton of integrations, we use them, we use links for all of our lock automations. We use that with the Yale Shore Locks. We use Noise Aware which again integrates with Guesty. We use the Ring cameras, Rice Labs. And I think the thing that changed and you and I were talking about this offline that I did not expect was just the volume of phone calls that you get. With hotels, you know, as short term rentals least here in the US you really very rarely get phone calls unless something is bad. Like unless something's bad. If you, if your phone's ringing, it's usually something real bad. With hotels, you know, we're getting anywhere from four to 600 phone calls a month inbound per hotel. That's a lot of phone calls. So we had to really ramp up our, our guest support team and get them trained up very quickly to support all of those. And we use Ring Central primarily because Ring Central allows you to do the voice, and there's probably other companies that do this, but it allowed you to do a reverse phone number lookup. So. Meaning when somebody calls, my team can tell if they're calling the COVID if they're calling the Beverly, if they're calling the new hotel, if they're calling one of the vacation rentals. So they know how to answer the phone the right way. So it was more about like getting them the information so they would know how to answer the phone. And it can be redirected to whichever one of my team members is on shift during that time period.

So what you're saying is you brought a call center in, a team in, but they're not just looking after the code, they're looking after several properties at once.

They all are trained on the entire portfolio.

Amazing, because I assume with the previous owners of the property you were talking about, when they've got lots of staff, they would just have staff for that one property. So you can again optimize this, cut the cost. Because then that, that team isn't just sat there like behind a reception desk. Wait, and they're, I assume they're virtual as well, is that right?

Yeah, the whole. Well, I do have some local people and we can break that down. But that team that I'm talking about is all overseas in the Philippines, and they all used to work at Airbnb's call center, so they already know how to like handle guests and all of that stuff. We just had to train them up on our properties and our systems.

Talk to us then about the mix between virtual and on site. Now, obviously everybody who's here, who's listening to this, who's got short term rentals, you will have a cleaner, you will have a property team there obviously have to be on site, on town, et cetera. But what else have you got on site when you're doing the hotels on the Salt property, so to speak?

So it's going to depend on the type of property. Again, this was all learning lessons for me. I was anticipating it's only 13 rooms, so it's not a massive complex. So I was anticipating running it remotely, just like we do with the short term rentals. But what I found was at that price point of four to $600 a night in our prime season, and the way that the building was laid out, kind of like that old mansion that got chopped up into a, a little inn, it's hard to navigate guests to their rooms, especially the older demographic who had been coming to this place Forever. So what we found was we had to have somebody on site. There's no front desk, like it's still self check in, but somebody on site that was coordinating the cleanings which we ended up taking in house. So all of our cleaners are like full time employees for us. So they're managing that team and then they're handling any guest issues and coordinating any maintenance. But they're in an office that like isn't even guest facing. They're just on property that can float around. They can manage the inventory, they can manage the merchandise, they can coordinate the parking lot kids. We have a bar now we didn't have that at the beginning, but we got our liquor license. So we have a seasonal bar on the deck. So that that first one has a bunch of staff but we have the revenue to support it. Right. The second one that we did that was a 21 unit. It's more like you're a part hotel, right, where it's like two, three floors, seven rooms a floor and it's easy to get to. Like you pull up and it's like all right, you go to room 201, right. It's very easy to run that one without staff. We brought in an in house cleaning team recently for that property as well. But we don't have anybody that's there like during the day. We'll float. We've got a local person that floats around the whole portfolio but nobody's like manning a desk over there.

So next question is laundry. Now obviously you've got cleaning on site. Are you doing laundry on site or how does that work?

I've, I've. And again it could be different in different markets but I did not have good luck outsourcing the linens. I found that stuff would come back stained. I found that stuff will go missing. It was just, it was a pain in the butt. So the first thing that I look for now, like on the deal that we just closed, the first thing I looked for was what does their laundry site look like downstairs. And this place has, you know, four commercial washers and dryers that are as big as my office, you know, like because you need that at scale and it makes a huge difference and it helps your team out so much.

We've got somebody in the UK that we both know Mutual Connection purchased, well not purchased but started to do rent to rent management in a, in a big block of apartments. And the main reason why they, they went for it was in the ground floor there was a laundry facilities and started to use that for the properties that are in there. But because they were walking in and out the building so much with laundry bags that were branded. They had other hosts came to them and were like, oh, you do laundry? Can you do our laundry? Which is, is really interesting. You know, I'm a big fan of watching Cody Sanchez and what she talks about, about boring businesses and whatnot. And laundry is something that can you look at extra revenue streams by having in house laundry. You never know what can potentially come around. You might have some host knocking on your door, especially at the new property saying hey, can you also do it? Let's quickly talk about the new property. The, the, the, the, the, the place that you purchased. So this is new. If you head over to Mike's Instagram and we'll link all the Instagram up, there's a real, just literally posted very recently talking about it. Can you just give a bit of a breakdown on, you know, you've got experience with the COVID the Beverly and now this. Like what stood out about this? Why have you gone for this? And, and like what's, what can you sort of talk about in terms of what's to come?

So I know this area very well and my two business partners grew up in this city and they live in this city. So like we knew the location was phenomenal. Like for context, like my little 2 bedroom strs in this community will do over a hundred thousand a year. Like it just rips. And so they've been following up with this seller for five years. Like hey, whenever you want to sell, just give us first dibs and just that consistent follow up. Five years, five years. Think about that. And eventually she had some personal reasons that she needed to sell and we got our, we got first dibs on it. And so I was actually in Florida with, with one of my mastermind members looking at some property down there when my partner called me and he's like, hey, I think we can put this thing under contract. And I told Chris and I said sorry, we can't buy this really cool house. We're going to go buy another hotel. And she was excited and annoyed because the house we were looking at down there was pretty awesome. So it's our biggest one yet. It's 57 units as a big, big property. It's on almost four acres which again depending where you're from, is a lot or a little around here that's a lot. It's one of the biggest lot sizes left in this city, which is Salem, Massachusetts. Just for context, if anybody's familiar with the area, very, very deep history. You know, one of the earliest places to get settled back in the 1600s and then obviously the witch trials happened, which they're probably most famous for. Really, really cool city. And again, the place needs a bunch of work. But knowing the numbers and just analyzing the deal, it has a massive amount of upside. So it's definitely our largest property, are by far our largest investment. But I'm very, very confident that we're going to turn it around.

Exciting though. Exciting is a sign of progression, which is, which is epic. So let's talk about filling these places. Like he's talking about 2157. Like lots of, lots of rooms, lots of heads on beds. When it comes to marketing, what have you found different or what have you done differently when it comes to marketing compared to a short term rental? How does it work differently for these boutique hotels?

No, honestly, part of it's probably my own. I don't say laziness. Our short term rental portfolio is just so dispersed. We're in five different states and we don't really have. If I was going to go back and do it again, I would have dominated like two markets instead of going so wide so fast. Yeah, so like we've got one or two over here and one or two over there. So like it's, it's tough to spend a lot of energy building the relationships in those communities when you only got two or whatever in that area. So the big thing that, that we did for the first one was we just got really involved with the town because it's such a very tight knit community. And so like we joined the local chamber, we joined the local innkeepers association, like all these things and just like really tried to add as much value as we could. Like we've hosted galas for different fundraisers and just tried to give back to the community and get as involved as we could. And we built a really good reputation in town and we get a ton of referrals just by being involved in the local community. And then we pay somebody, you know, fairly short money to just really do handle our Instagram for us. Like she's local, she goes around, she takes a bunch of pictures, she does forget how many posts a week. And that was pretty much it. And it's just been like a lot of referrals just through like the community. And the place has been in business for over 50 years. So it had a ton of repeat guests. Like we have a woman who's literally been coming last year was her 50th year coming in a row like five zero. That's crazy, right? So it's. That one was a lot of word of mouth. The second one, the Beverly, you guys did that site for us and then I hired a local SEO company because again we, we've rebranded every property that we've taken over and so this one completely different market, much more urban, much more extended midterm type property. And we just invested with an SEO company to really get us in ranking for certain search terms in the area. And we've gotten that up to I think like 55 or 60% direct for that one. And the COVID is about 65 to 70 depending on the seasonality of it. So they both do very well with direct bookings. Just kind of different approaches.

This is the one thing about when you rebrand some that you buy because obviously there's a ton of existing SEO already done and that's not to mention like Google Business listings, etc. So that is definitely something that I picked up was when you do the rebranding it would definitely help to find somebody that is very solid on SEO because they're going to have a lot of work to do. It's like needles in a haystack when it comes to, when it, when it comes to Google. But that's. That, that is really good. And the, the thing, my business is.

Huge, not to interrupt you, but like that, that alone. And again I'm, I'm much more the operator brain, not as much the marketer brain but the, the Google my business reviews that is crucial because when somebody's going to travel somewhere, they immediately go to Google and they go hotels in some Salem and then it shows them all the hotels and how many stars. So think of that like your Airbnb review score. So you want to dominate on Google for reviews. So I'm never asking my guests at the hotels for reviews on Airbnb. I'm asking them to review us on Google. Yeah, every time. And just fill those Google reviews.

Just fill it up. No 100%. And anybody who's in short term rentals thinking, oh, let me tap into Google business listings, you got a whole fire. Because they're changing everybody over. Hotels are great because they've got a check in or a self check in as such. So when you've got a hotel you can get away with Google business listing because that's what it's there for. But for short term rentals it's moving over to Google vacation rentals. I see so many people at the moment talking about Google business listing, but they're just not getting verified. The other thing that I pick up is relationships. That is the key to acquiring the property. Obviously five, five years of hard work and it's the key to filling these properties is by the relationships that you can build. But that goes for like short term rentals and, and hotels. What's the plan with the, the Clipper? Is it going to be obviously you're going to rebrand it and all those cool things. You're going to basically go down the same route of SEO, build relationships and just tap into anybody that's previously stayed. Is there anything else that you sort of thinking at the present moment in time?

Doing more with like press releases for sure and more like pr, especially with like the deep roots that we have in that community with my partners and everything else. So October is obviously our biggest month because of Halloween. There's.

Yeah.

And the goal is it's basically this project is in two phases. So phase one should open by June, phase two ideally by September. And so we're just kind of debating do we do we basically want to throw a huge banger of a party for like the, the whole town and just everybody come and check it out. We'll do room tours and everything else, get a beer truck, all sorts of good stuff. And we're just debating whether we do that after the first piece is open or just hold off till the whole shebang is done and then do it right before Halloween. So getting more involved with that and then anytime you're going to do a project like this or even a short term rental, I'm always analyzing my competition and asking myself, how can I do this better or how can I offer a better product? I can't compete on location. There's other properties that are like right in the heart of downtown. But I'm like, what can I do better? One, we've got parking and we've got a ton of outdoor space. So like, we're just, we've got a bunch of ideas that we're throwing against the wall around. Like, how can we maximize this outdoor space and make this really cool? And then leveraging a lot of Kristen's experience with the theme stuff that we've done near Disney World. We're going to do like eight really cool themed rooms. Like, really cool. Like trees coming out of the wall, haunted forest, glow in the dark type stuff that like, nobody does that around here. And I'm super pumped for it. Like, I can't wait to see it. So.

So like it's screaming to me like weddings, like events. You got 57 places. Yeah, that's amazing. And this is the cool thing about what happens when you can get so many things, units, doors, beds, whatever you want to call it, on like a, in a very close proximity on the same land. It just makes things like that of things that you can do. And it's like that is literally our farm. Every year we would put on at least four or five big events. We had a farm fest. We had all those things. Weddings, because it was all able to do, which is so cool, so very exciting. Okay, so there's going to be a lot of people. Last time I did a topic on boutique hotels, I had a lot of people message me saying, and now I want to get into boutique hotel. So obviously there's a big thing here. Obviously you've got people in your mastermind, in your training, in your Facebook groups and your podcast community who are probably coming to you and talking about the same thing. What's that one bit of advice that you wish you had had before going all in on, on the COVID Like, what's that one bit of advice that you wish that you had that you can pass on to anybody else who's thinking of going down this route and sort of pivoting and diversifying their portfolio into boutique hotels?

So I think the thing that I didn't realize was just like, I was talking about like the staffing for like phone calls was really threw me for a loop at the beginning and I was like, oh, damn. Like, we had to hire up pretty quick to handle that volume. A lot of folks will send me DMs now. I didn't do my first hotel till I had 15 units in five different states. So I was pretty seasoned on the short term rental front. I'm not saying that you can't jump right into it, but if you're going to do that, do it with a partner or get educated with a mentor. Like, don't jump in blind. And I don't say that to plug me or any other educator. I'm saying that because it's just financially dangerous. Like, you can lose a lot of money. And I've just seen people drastically underestimate, like, for context, just the renovations on this project are four and a half million dollars. Right. That's a big budget to manage.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? And like, that's just the renovation, that's not even the purchase. And we're already running into a couple issues that are going to swing that up to 300,000 more. So like you just need to know how to, like, estimate costs and plan for certain contingencies. So I'd encourage you to partner with people that have experience. Like, my two partners have a lot of development experience. So I bring the operational expertise, they bring the renovation expertise. So just think about that before you jump into some of these bigger things, because you can make a lot of money doing this and you can lose a lot of money doing this.

Bigger stakes, bigger gambles, bigger rewards. Well, yeah, definitely comes back to relationships, partnerships. So know your numbers. As somebody I know who might say that. Know your numbers, do you? So, one thing I do want to say. How is the best place? I know you've got a really good deal analysis sheet. How can people get. Get hold of that? Where's the best place to go for that? Where. Where do they contact you for that? Because that is one of the best that I've ever seen.

Yeah, they can go to strsecrets.com resources so you can grab my deal analyzer, a bunch of training on how to use air DNA, how to use STR insights, a whole bunch of stuff that's just going to at least give you a good foundation so that you get in. I just don't want to see anybody get into a bad deal right. Like that, because if you do that, it's just really hard to fix that. So just. Yeah, strsecrets.com/resources, bunch of good trainings and ideal analyzers in there as well.

And for the Instagram to see the reels and the progression of the latest property, where's the best place to go for that was to handle?

Yeah, it's at the Airbnb guy, which I am changing in the near future. There you go. To just my name.

There you go. Nice. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much. And there's so much more going on in the world of mike events, masterminds and all that cool stuff. But if you go check out the Instagram, you'll be able to find out so much more. Really appreciate this, buddy. And I shall see you very, very soon in. In Nashville for. For a little event I hear that you're putting on.

I can't wait, man. I'm excited. I am very, very excited.

So, yeah, brilliant. All right, thank you very much for this and everybody, thanks for checking in. Go check out those links. They'll be in the show notes and all the cool places that you normally find it. And we'll be back very soon for another episode in just a couple of days time.

Thank you.