What is Serviced Accommodation? With Jason Living

Hey, welcome back to the Boost hospitality podcast. This is a brand new season. This is season number six, episode one. And for this season I wanted to do something a little bit different and I wanted to talk about the world of serviced accommodation. So over the course of this series, you're going to find out everything that there is to know about serviced accommodation. First and foremost, what's it all about, how to get started, the do's and don'ts of getting started, how to grow a service accommodation business, the differences between hospitality and service accommodation, and also how you can increase direct bookings for everybody in the world of service accommodation. So that's going to be the series for episode one. I wanted to start right at the very start and I wanted to go through in this episode and talk about what is service accommodation, how is it affecting the world of hospitality hotels? And most importantly, just find out a little bit more for the people that are making a difference in this industry. So this season compared to the other ones, I've got guests that are going to come in every single episode and I'm going to speak to the people that are really making a difference and in this industry. Today we've got a gent called Jason Living who is coming on to this podcast. Jason has got a long history with property and service accommodation. I'm going to let him introduce himself in a second and we're going to go in and we're going to talk about service accommodation and everything else that you need to know. So sit back, relax and we will get on with the show. So, Jason, welcome to the Boost hospitality podcast. If you could please just take a couple of minutes and introduce you your business and how you got started in serviced accommodation.

Sure. Thanks very much, Mark, and great to be here and hello everybody. Yeah, so my background is very much from the property side. I qualified as a chartered surveyor sort of more years ago than I care to remember. So early 1990s and worked as a commercial planning consultant in London and, and had a property there that I'd originally bought, then moved out of and rented out and I moved up to Yorkshire and worked in the northeast from the sort of late 90s. And when I got there, I started buying investment property, residential property to let out, and built that up to a pretty significant scale through the 2000s. And as everybody now knows, back into 2002, 2007, 8, 9, all became rather difficult and we sort of scraped through by the skin of our teeth and really then set about, I suppose, climbing out of the hole we'd fallen into and Part of that was really looking at the properties we'd got and trying to find ways of maximizing our return from those properties. And one of those that I became aware of was people letting property out on what was termed serviced accommodation. Now that is typically just taking a residential rental property and letting it out on a shorter term basis. So typically if you want to rent a property, you know, most landlords or letting agents, it's six months minimum, you've got to sign up and also it may well be unfurnished and you've got to pay the bills. Serviced accommodation is where it's a much shorter period. Now some people will do one night stays. In our own properties we do minimum of two night stays and they're fully kitted out, they're fully furnished, obviously they've got Internet, all the bills are covered, they've got crockery, cutlery, toaster, kettle, all the same stuff you'd have in any self catering property kitted out to quite a high standard. And people come and stay for as long as they wish, you know, short stay, anything longer than a week we will normally clean and you know, refresh the linen and the towels which is all provided on a, on a weekly basis. So you know, we do get quite a lot of broadly term corporate guests. So people working in the area, often contractors on construction projects, you know, and they might stay for two or three months and we go in and sort of do a light clean and a refresh of everything once a week. So it's really self catering accommodation but, but not necessarily unlike a lot of the hospitality industry, not necessarily in either holiday or pure leisure destinations. So these might be city center or even just generally urban areas, anywhere where people are going and working away from home. So a typical clientele would be people who might otherwise stay in budget hotels, certainly contractor and things, budget hotels, smaller B&Bs, family establishments, those sort of things. So it's a bit of an intro to me and a bit of a lead into what service accommodation is all about, which as I say, we've been doing some of our properties for about five years now.

And how many properties do you look after in the uk?

So total properties all out of our rental Stock is about 185, mostly in the northeast. We've got a couple in London and about a dozen in Merseyside. But the short stay stuff, the serviced accommodation is just in Sunderland where our office is and we've got 18 flats or apartments that we use for serviced accommodation. I increasingly sort of verge towards calling it Short stay accommodation, because I think it's a more inclusive term. I think, I think service accommodation has particular connotations about it. Some people will say to you service accommodation is where it's being serviced every day. So the hotel style and there are no doubt sort of establishments of that nature in larger cities. So you know, we probably sit somewhere between that and your typical self catering accommodation where people are staying for a week or more.

Because the general misconception and the assumption with serviced accommodation is that it is mostly contractors, business people that are staying at these. But it's not, it's you get holiday goers, you know, who are also staying, you know, people that are just looking for two nights away, like say short stay accommodation. Where was the term service accommodation first coined? Do you remember? Or is it just.

No, I'm not sure. I think it's one of those things I've been about for years and I think another misconception is this is something that has just happened in the last few years and that's absolutely not the case. You know, I can remember staying In a service department in London 30 years ago, you know, so this sort of short stay accommodation has existed, you know, for a long time. I just think for a number of reasons it's perhaps come to the fore, become more prominent. You know, it's a significant growth area at the moment. But as you say, I think we have a very wide range of visitors and that's often very much location driven, as I say. Where our own short stay accommodation is in Sunderland. Yeah, we definitely get some leisure visitors and that's whether they're coming for specific events such as the Sunderland Air show which is on in July, or you know, the Great North Run which is on in September, or people coming to visit family and friends or coming for a wedding or a christening or all that sort of stuff, you know, from those to people coming, as I say, working in the area on contracts either in whether that's local factories, refitting shops, you know, bricklayers building houses, all sorts, you name it.

Yeah. So what has been the boom in serviced accommodation? When I say service, I mean like short stay. What is, what was the catalyst for this? So where you see now all over the country and in towns and cities, you've got, you've got people that are taking a residential home and changing it to short stay accommodation.

Sure. Yeah. I think it's probably very difficult to pinpoint and I think, I think it'd be right to say that, you know, there's never sort of one Specific factor. I think it's a number of things. I think the rise of, say, Airbnb is a significant factor. You know, that certainly kicked off the idea of people renting out a room in their home on a short stay basis. And that business model has morphed into people letting whole properties. The origin of Airbnb was very much someone staying in your home. It's clearly moved on from there. And I think you've then got the likes of Booking.com and the other typical platforms starting to embrace this. Booking.com originally was very much a hotel platform. Now they've embraced the idea that actually people are letting out residential properties. When you do a search on there, there's a specific apartment box you can tick. If you speak to the guys at booking.com, they have a, a whole department now called home, their home department. And I think, I can't remember from something like three years ago, they went from sort of like two people to 20 people in about 12 months. You know, they, they recognized, you know, the growth in that sector and the fact that it was a significant growth sector for them. I think it's been partly driven from looking at it from the property investment end. There were some changes to the tax rules which sort of came in two years ago now, about the ability to offset mortgage interest as a cost. And the ability to do that within a standard rental property is now, is now limited, particularly for high rate taxpayers. Whereas if you're doing short stays, that's effectively regarded as a business activity rather than investment activity and you can offset all of your interest. So there's a significant tax advantage in doing short lets versus versus normal, longer let. So I think there's, there's been a series of things and then I think just with that growing awareness, I mean, and I would class myself within that, you know, if I went to stay somewhere, you know, I'm in North Yorkshire, typically might get out to London every couple of months. In the past, I would always have stayed in hotels. Now it depends, you know, I wouldn't always stay in service accommodation, but it would certainly be on my radar and certainly if I was going with more than one person. And I think that's the tipping point for me. If I'm just going for a night on my, you know, business or whatever. Yeah, probably just going to hotel. As soon as you've got two or three people, you know, where you can rent one apartment for those two or three people, I just think service accommodation is just so much better, so many advantages.

So walk me through the simplicity of it. So right now, if you are a homeowner and you were currently doing a long term rent model where you had tenants come in and stay for say six months to a year, they now have got the ability to change it up because of these new rules that have come in and they can offer it as a short stay accommodation. You've also got people now that can start up businesses as management companies and then they can look after properties. So they would approach a landlord or an estate agent and just say, I want to potentially take on company of property that is for rent and turn it into a service accommodation and I have a short stay. People come in like business people, etc. Is that how it is basically working? Or explain to me the different types of service accommodation, explain the different types of businesses that are coming into this, which can sort of maybe explain why it is booming so much.

Sure. I guess at the simplest level you've got somebody who owns a property that they want to look at maximizing their income out of. And as you say, rather than doing six month plus normal tenancies, they say, look, I think there's a market here for doing short stays. So that's the sort of owner operator, if you like. The one thing I would say as a caveat to all of this and it is a fantastic business to get into and I think it has some, I think it has some real positives as a business, it's highly systemizable. You're dealing with an awful lot of repeat tasks, which means it's very systemizable. You can write procedures for everything. It's very easy to outsource. But I would say unless you're doing it at a certain scale and there's no magic in the number, but I always think about sort of doing 10 plus units. Unless you're aiming to get to that size, you're probably never going to get the real economies of scale of enabling you to properly outsource. I think if you've got one rental property and you want to do that as short stay accommodation, it's quite a lot of, you know, there's a lot of moving parts to this business. You've got people coming and going on a very regular basis. You've got the cleaning to sort out, you've got the linen to sort out, you've got marketing to sort out, you know, you're going to be managing your prices, there's a lot of moving parts and if you're doing that for one unit, it's probably an awful lot of work for the extra income. But, you know, not saying, don't start with one. But I think if you think you're just going to do one and only do one, you know, I'd question whether that really, really makes sense. I think you've got to look to scale. But coming back to your original question, so you've got your owner occupier doing it with their own properties. And a lot of people are getting into this market by renting properties from a landlord. It's typically terms rent to rent or, you know, I think I prefer the term leasing a property. So rather than you owning it, you will go to a landlord who's got a property to let and you will say, look, I will be your tenant, effectively I will rent that property from you. But it's not going to be me or my company that's going to be living in it. I'm then going to be using that to accommodate guests, you know, short, medium, medium term guests. And the great thing, you know, there's lots and lots of positives from a landlord point of view in the sense that, you know, provided that person knows what they're doing and they're generating the income, then you know, the rent should keep coming in. It's not like that person, like a tenant could lose their job, you know, and then they struggle to pay the rent. But that shouldn't happen. As a, as an operator of service accommodation, you're going to want to keep that property to a high standard. You know, you're probably going to want to typically go in every two or three months and touch up the paintwork and, you know, maybe thoroughly clean the carpets and all those sort of things, which is far better than any tenant will treat a landlord's property. Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of positives around that. So that's another model sort of renting or leasing. And you know, if you look at hotels, I mentioned Travelodge earlier, basically that's what Travelodge do. They don't own the buildings they operate in, or in the vast majority of cases, there'll be an investment company that owns that building, they will lease it and then let out the rooms to their guests. So on a much smaller scale, that's what you're doing. You're basically letting the property from an investor landlord, you're acting as the operator and then you're getting the guests in and looking after those guests. So that's one way of doing it. Leasing, or as you mentioned, you can manage, you could approach landlords and say, look, rather than getting 600 pounds a month on a rent, you know, I think we could, you know, we could get an extra £300amonth or we could get an extra £600amonth and we'll then split that, you know, we'll take half as the management fee, you know, and you can take the other half as extra profit. So again, working with landlords to maximize their profit, you could either do that on a pure management basis where you say, well, we'll just charge your management fee fee, which might typically be anything anywhere between sort of 15 and low, 20% of the income for a fully managed. So you might do a pure management model or you might do some sort of part management, part profit share, the sort of. Every variation, really.

It seems to be like lots of different variations of getting into this business. But you can see, fundamentally.

Yeah, I mean, fundamentally it comes back to you, whether you're acting as the owner, operator, leased operator, management company, effectively, you're doing all the same work.

It's just under a different type of thing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, there are various pros and cons with each of those different ways of doing things.

And a question that has just come up whilst you've been talking is, how easy is it to get started? Save it. Me, never done it before. This sounds really good. I want to get, you know, I want to start approaching landlords like, how easy is it for me to get started? Is there any rules or regulations I have to go through any accreditation, or can I just simply just start doing the research and get started now?

And it's surprisingly unregulated. And whether that will, whether that will continue in the same vein, you know, I perhaps, perhaps doubt, you know, I think regulation in some form may well come. And it's one of, I think to some extent part of the hotel industry's gripe about the growth in this type of accommodation is that they are subject to much greater regulation. You know, you are obliged to undertake, for instance, a fire risk assessment, but, you know, there's no, there's no strict certification of anything that needs to go on. So from that point of view, yeah, it is, you know, it is relatively easy. And in terms of approaching landlords, some people, I would say, because you're approaching, whether it's a land, you know, from a rent to rent leasing point of view, you're approaching the landlord, you're approaching a letting agent and you're trying to sell them an idea that something that maybe they've got no understanding of and that can sometimes be a little bit challenging. Some people find it easier than others. Just like, I suppose, any sales job. Some people are more natural in terms of their aptitude for selling. I mean, they are selling a concept rather than a. Rather than a product. So. But in terms of, as you say, in terms of regulation, in terms of barriers to entry, really, there aren't any. And certainly when I got into this business with properties we owned, but one of the things that struck me in terms of. In terms of getting out there and marketing is because you can immediately jump on the likes of booking.com and Airbnb. You can start this with nil marketing budget because you only pay those guys when you get a booking. Okay, you do pay, and it's a decent commission. But. But to me, I hadn't got an issue with that, because I hadn't got to. Let's face it, most businesses these days, before you even open the doors, you've got to have a website. You've got to think about your digital marketing and more traditional marketing. Whereas with this, you can start day one and just as your first step, get it on Airbnb, booking dot com. And I'm not saying that's where your business starts and ends, but you can start, you know, with, you know, with very little capital. Yeah. You know, just get it on and get going. Yeah. Of course, you then want to build on that and have a website and, you know, do other marketing and those sort of things, but it's not perhaps unlike other businesses.

And that's when they come to boost Lee, and that's when they come get a website. I know that's how. All right, so next thing then that I'm really interested to know is that if people do jump on this, you know, there's no accreditation, there's no regulation that they literally do jump in, they do a bit of research and they get started. What is the most common mistake that you see people making in the industry when they're getting going?

There's a number, to be honest, I think one of them is probably depending on what their background is. I think if people have come from the hospitality side, then they probably don't make some of these mistakes. But one of the big mistakes, particularly coming from the property side, is not understanding that you need to actively manage your pricing. Your pricing should be very dynamic. And the easiest way to explain that to people, because everyone understands it, is, you know, the EasyJet model. EasyJet. Launch a flight in November and the, you know, and you can get on that flight for 30 quid, but that price gets actively managed and, you know, and if, if they launch that flight in August, it won't be 30 quid to start with anyway, so there's a seasonality to it. But, you know, they, they basically run a sort of two pricing models, but they basically run an occupancy pricing model. So basically they have thresholds that when five seats get sold, the price goes up five quid, another five seats get sold, it goes up another five quid, and so you go on. So unlike a sort of rental property where it's £600amonth and that's what it is, you know, you'll have, you know, you might have. And typically you would have, you know, different, different prices for almost even every day of the week. You know, typically within the hospitality industry, Sunday is always your quietest night. So if you're pricing by the night, you know, Sunday needs to be your cheapest night. Typically Friday and Saturday are probably your busiest nights. But equally, there are locations where your midweek market is stronger than your weekend market. And you've got. So you've got to know your market.

Yeah.

You know, your Monday might be one price, Tuesday might be a bit more. So it's that initial pricing is, you know, you don't just say, right, it's £70 a night across every day of the week, every month of the year, you know, you've got a different price for every day of the week. And then what you've got to do is constantly review those prices. Yeah, I would say probably at least every week to see, you know, what's the demand in the area, what are my competitors doing? You know, are they. Yeah. And whilst, if you like, you're not directly competing with the Travelodge down the road, they're a useful indicator because, you know, if they start putting their price up, it's because they've seen an increase in demand. Now, you may not have seen that increase in demand yet, but you can pretty much guarantee if they have, you will. So you can afford to start pushing your prices up even before the demand hits. Yeah. So that whole dynamic pricing thing is something that's particularly. People come from the property investment side is something that's. That's sort of wholly new, I guess.

If as a service accommodation owner who's listening to this and thinking, well, how do I even get started? That one of the simplest things that you can do is look at your calendar, go on, say Sunderland, go to what's on in Sunderland and just box off the next three Months or six months, and just look for any big events, any concerts, anything that's big, that's come into town. The example in the story that I can give you from a hospitality point of view is based in Scarborough. My family business has got a farm, stay hotel, guest house, cottages here in Scarborough. In 2018, we had Britney Spears play in Scarborough and it was announced in January and the event and the concert was sold out pretty much within 24 hours. So being a bit proactive, you go on, you instantly close out any dates to the online travel agents via your channel manager. So whether you're using Tokeet or free to book or who. So that's totally blocked off the dates on there. So you're guaranteed to get your direct booking. And then what you do is you put the rates up because you know that when that gets announced, there's two things that people do. They book the tickets and they look for accommodation. And if you're savvy and if you've got a good presence, then people will naturally come to your website and book with you. And then all you need to do is just again, like what Jason is saying, assess it every week or every month, and the closer it gets to the date, if you still got availability for those dates, you just start to slowly put the price back down to what your normal rate is and then you start to open it back up to the ota. So like Jason said right at the very start, make these booking.com make Airbnb work for you and not the other way around. So if you have got anything that needs selling last minute, put up on those and I can guarantee that you will get those bookings. So that is exactly it. And we sold out like for those dates pretty much within 48, 72 hours. And this was in January. The concept was in August. Money in the bank, guaranteed bookings coming in. And we were able to manipulate the market, you know, assess with the market. So that's 100% something that everybody should be doing. And it's. And I think, you know, if you're a service accommodation owner, definitely looking at your pricing is one.

Those things can make a huge difference. And again, to use a similar example, we had the Spice Girls in Sunderland in early June this year. We did exactly that. As soon as we heard, we just blocked the calendar off. And then we don't normally do one night stays. We knew there would be a demand for one night stays. And the reason we don't is because obviously you still got your fixed cleaning linen turnaround cost and it generally makes, apart from the fact one night stays are a bit of a pain in the neck, it makes it. Your profit margin is much thinner on a one night stay. So. But knowing that we would get premium prices for those nights or for that night, we opened up our calendar for one night stays and I think they, we were getting so I think the best week. So. And as we got booked, as we booked each time we got an apartment, but we just put the price up on the whole lot. Every time a booking came in, we just pushed the price up again. And I think we got up to, for a, for an apartment that we might normally get something between say 60 and 80 pounds a night. We were getting 275 pounds a night.

You've covered your way. You're thinking, oh, I've got to do a one night stay. But realistically what you've just got is a five night booking for the price of one.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you can get somebody in the next night who's going to then stay, you know, two nights. So it's again, it's a case of not just looking at the singularity, not just looking at, as a singular event, looking at an overall series of events and it just makes so much sense. So if you're being proactive over it instead of reactive, then yeah, you'll win. You said there's a number of mistakes that you see people make. What's maybe one of the other ones that's on top of your mind apart from pricing and knowing your market?

Yes. So pricing is a big one. There was one. It slipped my mind. Now.

You said about knowing the markets of, to me that doing your planning and your preparation. Is that sort of what you meant alongside that?

Yeah, I guess. Well, I guess the other thing actually is very much feeds into the marketing side. As I said, you know, starting as a sort of first port of call booking.com Airbnb, you know, will get you a level of bookings. I think where people make a mistake is that they think they can completely rely on those, you know, for all of their business, you know, and they're going to consistently get 70, 80, 90% occupancy just from being on those platforms, on those OTAs. And it's not the case as most markets are competitive market, you've got to start to go above and beyond. They will give you a base of business, but you've got to get out there. And whether that's direct marketing to local corporates, whether that's online marketing, website digital marketing, email marketing, all the things that you talk so much about. And again, I guess, because certainly from the property side, those are things that you wouldn't normally have to do. Yeah, you have to do some marketing to let a property, but you might just give it to a letting agent or you might just stick it on rightmove and Gumtree, and the chances are that will get you your letting. But, you know, with service accommodation, you're constantly trying to, as with any business, squeeze the margins, you know, so the difference between, you know, being 70% occupied and 80% might mean you're doubling your profit.

Yeah, 100%. And like I say, if you can, and we spoke about this before, we came live on the call, if, you know, you build your house on somebody else's land, it's going to fail if you just rely 100% on booking.com and Airbnb. But what happens if they turn around one day and close your account for the simplest of things and then you're stuck? So it's always good to be, like you say, being proactive, trying to increase your. Your amount of direct bookings, because at the end of the day, you're instantly making at least 15% more money, more profit, which, over a singular booking, may not seem all that much, but if you base it over a year, that's a hell of a number. All right, so coming back to the.

Mistakes, I remember what I was going to say now. So I think a lot of people get into this, and I think this is interesting because I think it may equally apply to other areas of the hospitality industry. And I think people look sometimes at their operational side far too much from their own perspective, in terms of what suits them, in terms of when do I want people to check in and out, when non refundables, deposits, cancellation periods. Because in an ideal world, from an operator point of view, you want everybody paying 100% when they book, you want them paying a deposit, you want them all turning up between 3 and 4 in the afternoon and all leaving between, you know, 10:30, 11:30 in the morning. But, you know, if that's the way you approach your business, then effectively what you're doing is you're massively constraining your demand. Because if your property sat alongside three others and someone's looking yours, and it says you can only check in between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, and someone says, well, what if we're late? You know, And I know that's a slightly extreme example, but you do see examples of significant constraints, you know, where, as I say, where you know, all rates are non refundable, you know, so I want to book somewhere in six months, I've got to pay now. And you're just going to sit on my money? Yes, yes. So I think that's a mistake. Where people look at it and the way it's been described to me is, you know, you need to look at your business from the outside in, from the guest perspective, whereas too many people I think look at their business from the inside out and say, I'm going to run my business to suit me rather than actually thinking about the whole guest experience.

Yeah, I mean it's a great bit of advice that I think so many people overlook. But at the end of the day, if you're not appealable to your guests, then they're never going to come back and they're never going to talk about you. But if you make your business and you base it around your guests and you suit it around your guests and you and you develop a system and structure where it does meet your guests, then they are going to recommend you, they are going to come back and they're going to be your best customers. I mean, one of the biggest mistakes that I see, hospitality owners, service accommodation owners, business owners in general, is they're always looking for new customers when if they just spayed a bit of attention to the people that have already given them money, that have already built up, that know like and trust, then you could make much more money and have much better guests. And there's a fantastic blog everybody should go read. It's A Thousand True Fans by Kevin Kelly. A free blog. You can go out and find it, look at it on Google and it's a prime example that somebody should be looking at into their business every single time. Alright, so we've talked about common mistakes and I think, as you know, I know everybody that is listening to this who is in the essay world is. There is a lot of advice given at the moment. There's obviously with this becoming a big booming industry and more and more people are getting into it, there is of course loads of people that are starting to give advice. There's lots of people that have started up mentoring in this industry. There's a lot of people that are basically saying, I've done this, now follow my advice. A lot of it is good advice, a lot of it is bad advice. But what is the one bit of advice that you've seen in the industry that you don't agree with? Mm. What would that be?

I guess, I guess some of the, some of the bad advice around planning about planning use classes, because basically a residential property to get into sort of bit of geeky planning is use class C3. And use class C1 is hotels, guest houses and boarding houses technically, which obviously includes B and Bs and sort of similar establishments. Now there are people who are going around saying that to run a, let's say just a bog standard house as letting it as a whole house to a family, that you require C1 planning consent, but absolutely you don't, you know, it's not a hotel, guest house or boarding house quite clearly. And I would say to people, you know, most holiday accommodation, it's just a standard residential use class. There have been a couple of planning appeal decisions which I think are questionable, which start to go down the route of saying, well, if you've got different people staying there every night, have you not materially changed that use in planning terms still doesn't make it a Hotel or C1. It then strays into a use class of its own, which again, to get a bit geeky, something's called sui generis, which means a use class on its own. I don't believe. So it's difficult because there have been a couple of appeal decisions, but they're not court decisions, they're not legally binding. It can only be used as sort of advice or indicative advice on other things. But certainly when I first got in, there were a lot of people saying it needed to be C1, or in order to put your property on business rates, it needs to be C1. I mean, that's just total nonsense. Any property that's let for short lets commercially for more than 140 days a year should be on business rates. You know, most holiday accommodation, assuming it's being commercially let rather than just, you know, occupied as a second home, it should be on business rates. There's another big tax advantage called capital allowances, which hopefully people in the more commercial world, The B and Bs, the hotels, pubs of this world, should know something about that. And if they don't, I'd encourage them to go and find out about capital allowances because it may actually significantly reduce your tax bill. Certainly if you've bought a property or renovated your property at all, then go and find out something about capital allowances. And again, you don't need to, as a short stay operator of a residential property, it does not need to be C1 to claim capital allowances. So there's a lot of bad advice around that.

Yeah, definitely. And I can see why so many people would Fall for it. Because as soon as you started saying those letters to me, my head just glazed over with what? So I can see that if you get somebody that is up there on the stage or, you know, in a horse you are a part of and saying that, then you're going to do that. So thanks for sharing that. I mean, personally, for me, from what I've seen and I've researched into service, accommodation, rent to rent, whatever you want to call it. I think there's so many people who are getting into this industry under the false pretenses because they get told this magical word, passive income, and they get sold. The dream, and I've heard this from a lot of people, is that they're basically being put down this route by saying that when you do this, when you open up the doors and you get your first rental, you whack it up on Airbnb, whack it up on booking.com and that's it, your job is done, you're going to be making a grand a month or whatever it may be. And I think for a lot of people, they have to realize that this is probably one of the most stressful jobs that you are going to have because like you said, so many moving parts, you've got to a get people through the door, then you've got to then start looking after your guest and then once the guest leaves, you then got to sort out the clean, the changeover to get ready for the next guest. And there's so many things that change and alter and the things that could go wrong, do go wrong. And you've got one property. Just imagine when you build up and you've got two or three or four. Now, it's not like a hotel or a guest house where you've got 14 bedrooms in one property and all you have to do is go up and down stairs. Imagine if you've got four or five properties spread out around Sunderland or around town and you've got to literally get in your car 10 o' clock at night, because for whatever reason, you've got to get across town to fix something because you haven't got the systems and the structure and that lot built up. So, yeah, I mean, that's the thing that I've noticed and say there's so much advice out there that you just got to be really careful that you make sure that you are working with or working alongside or investing in somebody that knows what they're talking about, which does lead in nicely to what you do. So you've got your Background, you've done this for many years, you've built a big portfolio, you're looking after over 150 properties, which is amazing. So what are you doing now moving forward to help the industry, help sa, help people who want to get into sa?

Sure. Well, for a while now I've held various sort of events for people to come to, but we slightly sort of moved on from there because what I found is with those events, you know, it's an awful lot of time and effort to put them on. And also people have got a, obviously a cost for people to attend, which is related to the cost of putting them on. People have got to travel, they've maybe got to take a day out of their week to come to that event. And, you know, and all of those things are a constraint. So I thought it'd be far better to try to help people online in a way that they can access that when they want to. That works for them. So, you know, they can catch an hour, early, morning, evening, whatever. So I recently launched the Short Stay Living Academy, which is an online membership platform. And each month what we do is we have a guest, an expert guest, and Mark's been our most recent guest talking about marketing. So we've had a guest on talking about working with letting agents and landlords. We've got a guest coming on next month talking about the whole pricing thing I was talking about and how to manage your prices. So an expert focus each month and we do live Q&As with those experts so people can digest the content, digest the information, come back and, and ask questions. And you know, my whole focus with that really is to give people massively valuable but implementable information for a relatively low monthly cost compared with a lot of the sort of big headline courses out there. You know, we're talking a much, much smaller level of investment. Now off the back of that, what I want to do, particularly for people who really want to get started and really want a lot of information that sort of A to Z, we will be launching an online course alongside or as part of the Short Stay Living Academy and hopefully that should be launched by the end of the month. Sorry, not end of the summer. There's a lot of information to pull together to launch that again, really to give people real nuts and bolts as to how to launch, run and scale a service accommodation business. To be honest, like you, I just really enjoy helping people and seeing the results that those people can achieve with the right help and support and knowledge.

That's amazing. That's really Good. So if you're listening to this in, say, September or October 2019, because the beauty of podcasts is that it is evergreen and it sits there forever. So if you're watching this, this is being recorded in June 2019. So if you're listening back in October 2019, you can already head to what Jason is talking about and be able to sign up. So if they want to go and find out more about you, more about the ssl, more about anything really, to do with yourself, where's the best place for people to head to, Jason?

Probably the best starting point is I've got a Facebook group, a service accommodation group on Facebook, which is fantastic. Got nearly 10,000 people there, called the Service Accommodation Network UK. What I'd encourage people to do is come along and join that. That's free, and there's some really, really helpful people on there. What I would encourage people to do, rather than just launch in and say, because you get people coming on and their first question is, how do I run a service accommodation business? What I always say to people is, look, just spend some time trawling through, there's an awful lot of information on here and then come back with some specific questions. So that's a free starting point, but from that, you know, please come on and ask questions. And we talk about the Short Stay Living Academy on there and put forward various offers. People will get an offer when they join the free group to come on board for the academy. And if you can contact me, Jason living on Facebook via Facebook messenger, that's probably the easiest way and I'll certainly do everything I can to help.

So you're on Facebook, LinkedIn, most platforms. If I just type in Jason Living Property, Service Accommodation, I'm sure they'll be able to find you. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about that. And hopefully by now, if anybody's never heard of service accommodation, they have a better idea of this and moving forward. And like you say, if you want to get started, the best place to do it is the Service Accommodation Network. Is it uk?

Uk, yeah.

Because there are. If you type in Service Accommodation Facebook, there is a lot you're going to get presented with. So it's Service Accommodation Network uk. Just look for Jason is the admin of the group. And, yeah, that's a perfect place to start and then to find out more about the SSL as well. All right, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you very much for tuning in to the Boost Hospitality podcast. This is season six, episode one. If this is the first time that you have listened to to one of my podcasts. You've got five seasons that you can now catch up on. Go to boostly.co.uk podcast. We've done so many different variations of seasons from how to run the perfect Facebook competition to explain about what hospitality owners are doing on a day to day basis to boost their bookings and also as well just breaking down some of the jargons and the myths and showing you five steps that you can take to boost your direct bookings today. But my name is Bean Mark Simpson, Founder of Boostly. If you want to go find out more, go to booster.co.uk and if you'd like to leave a review, please head over to itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave one of those lovely five star reviews for us. But thank you very much for tuning in and we will catch you for another episode of the Boost Hospitality podcast very soon.