Bill Faeth Reveals TOP Secrets to Mastering Super Properties

Welcome back everyone to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Happy you're here with us again. I said us because this time I have an expert guest on the show today we have Bill Faith. He's best selling author, eight figure business builder. He's been in the industry, real estate industry for 25 years. Today he focuses more on exclusive luxury properties. He's the host of a couple podcasts. He has one of the industry's largest events. He has a ton of experience, ton of background. I'm excited to dig into it today. Welcome to the show, Bill.

Thanks for having me, Tim. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, there's, I know there's a lot of ways we can go with this conversation. You have a ton of experience, so why don't you just give us a brief recap where you started, where you're at today.

I actually got into real estate. Ironically we were talking pre, pre roll here about, you know, you being in South America. I played the South American PGA Tour, played golf down there in 92, 93 after dropping out of UCLA with a full ride golf scholarship. And I made about 300 grand in my first year. I was just about ready to turn 19 years old and man, I was going to go to Vegas and you know, play some craps, play some golf, probably go to some strip clubs back in the day. All the stupid stuff that you know, young 20 year old was a teenager would do after making some decent money. And my CPA who ended up being the best man in my wedding 25 years ago was the voice of reason and he said, man, look, you're 19 years old, you just netted 300 grand, let's do something with this money. And you know, instead of putting it in the stock market, he convinced me to buy a duplex in Bakersfield, California where I grew up. Actually owned that property for almost 19 years as a long term rental. But I mean I had the largest ground transportation company in Nashville and build a gold lead certified commercial 45,000 square foot building with 15,000 square foot of office on five acres. I've been in long term basically my entire adult life, almost 30 years. I don't like to say that because that just dates me on how old I am. But I got into short term rentals and really in 2015, my business partner from Wichita, Kansas and my Glow Golf business, we kind of created an industry, a Glow in the dark miniature golf and shopping malls. In early 2000s bought a place in Estes park. And initially that was going to be just for him and you know, for I. But then we started letting our district managers, regional managers stay there. It was big enough to where it sleeps 24, to where we could have our corporate events by region. And then it got to be where we ran through all that. What do we do now? And that's when we started short term renting it. Well, then he bought a condo in Destin in 2016. And then really I bought my first place in Gulf Shores, Alabama on my own and kind of turned it into our first super property. And my wife had a contingency that she wanted to be chosen kind of lifestyle asset. But we had such a bad property manager that, you know, back in the day and even today, I guess you buy from an agent, you don't know what you're doing. The agent says, oh hey, my company can manage it for you. Oh, perfect. That sounds great. Completely hands off. I had like four or five other businesses going on. They just did such a shitty job that after about 90 days I ended up taking it over. And behind me I'm in my Montana property or one of them now, and there's a mural on the wall. And I remember we had a hand painted mural in 2015, which was just I almost painted over it. And I think about how sacrilegious that would be today to paint over a mural. It's one of the things, you know, that goes into building a super property that we see people doing from Joshua Tree to Beach properties, you know, all across the world really. And that was kind of the first thing for me, Tim. 90 days we had a property manager. You know, I'm anti property manager because I don't as the owner, you know, they own the listings. I don't really get to see the transactions. All the hidden fees, they're reactive, they're not proactive as many new co hosts are today. All this stuff that gives me disdain for them. I lived it as an owner and at the time I had a multimillion dollar marketing agency and they couldn't give me social media reports, email marketing reports. So I took it over and took it from like a $44,000 a year property to a $98,000 a year property in year one. And then we did like 112, 115,000 by adding the paddle boards, adding a golf cart, the murals, you know, that type of stuff, you know, back in the day. And that's kind of what set me on the trajectory, you know, to where I'm at today. With about 18.8 million in assets in the SDR space.

That'S awesome, Bill.

Kind of ton of experience, ton of background and love what you're doing. Thanks for all your education. By the way, I've listened to your SDR unfiltered podcast quite a bit and you have really good actionable advice too.

So listen to it in the car together.

Hence the unfiltered part, right?

Yes.

Well, you mentioned this word, super property, and I know what that is because I've been following you for a little bit. This is a term that you coined. But why don't you give our audience just a little more about what exactly a super property is?

Yeah, I think almost every business venture I've done in my life, I've tried to what now I'll refer to as super, just I try to go after the high end, the luxury space. But I learned about halfway through my career, I can't pinpoint the exact time that you don't have to overspend. You don't have to, you know, you don't have to spend $200,000 on furnishings and a property. I mean, if you can see right behind me, the view is stunning. And, and so all the way back to that very first property I bought on my own or really what my partner bought, Nestus Park. Its location, its proximity, and then it's views. And for a lot of people talk about views first, location second, and those are the two things that you have to buy. I think proximity is actually probably the most important. Or it's one, you know, location would be 1A and proximity would be 1B. So like right behind me is the Stillwater river. Literally, it's 15 steps off of my back deck. I can be smoking a tri tip, cooking burgers with my fly rod and casting right into the water. It took me two and a half years to find this property. Plenty of river places. You know, I could even get on the Yellowstone River. I could get on, you know, the Madison river because I want. My dream was to, you know, a river runs through it, be standing in the middle of the water. Fly fishing when I'm 50, when I retire. Well, now I can do it off my deck. The other rivers were on the more famous rivers, but they didn't have the access that I have. Right. So we look at the Smokies is one of the biggest vacation rental markets and people talk about in their listings, oh, it's only a 15 minute drive to get to Dollywood. Well, I don't want to drive 15 minutes. If you tell me it's 15, it's probably 30 or 45 with all the traffic. Then I get to the parking lot, then I got to park a million miles away, then I got to walk. There's no proximity, right? So proximity is huge. That's why beach properties, I've only invest into beachfront and tier two lake properties. I only buy on the lake. And I know there's certain markets like in Table Rock and you know, the Lake of the Ozarks and stuff like that, where you can make money, you know, being off the lake in tier two. But if you want to have a super property, it's about really buying proximity and it's about maxing out the marketability for your ideal buyer to have the desire to buy from you versus your competition. It's really that simple. The second layer of that is, is that you do. There's a one of the best marketers in the history of the world. His name is Jeff Walker and almost nobody's heard of him unless you're deep into it like I am. And when you're writing copy for an ad, a social media post, an email, he has this saying, you say everything that you have to say to your customer, but not one word more. So when you build out a super property, you do everything that you need to max everything out from an ADR standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, from an attraction standpoint for that ideal guest, and you don't spend one penny more. So there are properties all over this country that have more amenities, more stuff in them than what I put into my super properties because I start by buying location and proximity first, hence right behind me. The second step of that is, is to be very, very conservative with what you're doing Now. I see a mural here. I've got one in that master bedroom. I've got hand painted stuff upstairs. My wife did the hand painted stuff. We're in a million dollar cabin here. I paid $980,000 for this. I've got our house furniture behind us, if anybody knows what our house is. But I saved my 40% by buying it from a known right. We probably have. We did renovate. I'm actually going to do a reel on this in the master bathroom. We spent $24,000 in the master bathroom. Because the other component about building a super property is focusing on the person, the ideal buyer that matters. And that's the booker for me and my properties at the luxury space, the high end of adr, my entire portfolio averages about, I think I'm at about $1,180 ADR right now in My portfolio. So I'm going after wealthy Wendy, right? And wealthy Wendy is, as a mom, that she could be a stay at home mom, she could be an executive, she could be an entrepreneur, it doesn't really matter. But wealthy Wendy's family probably is making $500,000 a year household income. Plus that means wealthy Wendy doesn't want to come to a cabin like this and have the old formica countertops and have the, you know, a shower that I have to duck to get into that, you know, has, you know, the insert and it looks yellow because it had been here for 17 or 18 or 20 years. Wealthy Wendy wants her rental vacation, rental property to be just as nice as what she's accustomed to at home. And I think that's a thing that people miss, right? So upstairs I did a slight remodel in the bathroom, but we saved the insert and I spent $300 to have it re glazed white to where it's crystal clear. You know, it looks like Rob Gronkowski's teeth with whatever that thing is that he puts in his mouth to make his teeth white. And I update hardware and a lot of this comes from my wife who's an interior designer. The number one thing I want to send the message to, to people about super properties because the terms being used incorrectly on social media is a super property creates marketing capability for you to be able to max out your return on investment without overspending. That's really what a super property is, right? And if you're looking to buy an underwrite, it starts with location and proximity. Those are the two most important things. The hundred thousand dollar game rooms that we see in Orlando, the bowling alleys that we see in the indoor mod pools in Gatlinburg. I don't invest there, Tim, because I don't want to spend that kind of money. I'm making financial, sound, financially driven decisions for my retirement to build my super life into the future. When I started doing this eight years ago in the short term rental space, that was. I was supposed to retire at 60, right? So I started at 40. I had 18 years. Well, that's accelerated because of the decisions I've made. Because of the investments that I made. I'm financially secure now to where I could retire. Today. I'm just waiting on those life events like my youngest daughter to graduate from high school and go to college. With that being said, if I go and I spend 200 grand and put in the mod pools and the bowling alleys and the driving, two person driving race car games that cost 50 grand just to compete like you have to in Gatlinburg, like you have to in Kissimmee or Davenport, Florida. That's crazy. That's why I went to Western North Carolina. That's why I'm here in Whitefish, Montana, with two properties now, this one and one my wife's actually setting up 45 minutes from here at Glacier national park, as opposed to being in Bozeman, opposed to being in Big Sky. That's why I'm on Smith Lake in Alabama, as opposed to being in Lake Martin. It's right. So I don't follow the trend. I was early into Gulf Shores before Gulf Shores became what it is. Gulf Shores is going to blow up because of the airport stuff that's going in right now. International Airport just went from Jack Edwards Private to Gulf Shores International. And people are just starting to talk about on Facebook because they haven't listened to me in the past. I moved my assets from Fort Morgan, Alabama, because I even wanted to be Tier 2 tertiary market, not be in Gulf Shores. When I first went down there, that's what the better deals were. And at the end of the day, you and I and everybody else listening to your podcast, we make our money on the entry. We make our money on the underwriting and the purchase, because that is a huge component of what that marketability is going to be to maximize your adr. It's not just the dollar amount we're purchasing, it's what's the marketability. I wish I had the ability to show you this, Tim, because when I walked in here on December 21st of last year with my wife, it was minus 4 degrees. Everything's covered in snow. The trees that you can see behind me are snow capped. And. And I walked straight from that front door, went to that window, and I didn't even know this. I stood there for five to seven minutes, she said, just staring out the window. Next morning, we're flying to Scottsdale to go look at Scottsdale properties. Right here, to my left of the stairs, going upstairs, there's a bathroom, a loft and two bedrooms upstairs. And we're on the flight. It was like a 6am flight. My wife's tired and she's like, what do you think of the upstairs?

I don't know. What'd you think? She's all, you don't know because you didn't even go upstairs. I'm like, what are you talking about? She's all, what's up there? I couldn't. I said, I guess I didn't I don't know. I just stood there and watched and looked through the windows the whole time. I didn't care about anything else. I walked into the master suite, I saw sliding glass doors and I saw the same view out of the master suite. I knew that's what I wanted. I wanted the proximity. I wanted the views. You can see all the way past the dam, the lake and into the Canada to see the Canadian Rockies on a clear day. That's where I was going to make my money. That's what I wanted as that discerning middle aged man that's willing to look at the competition and say, okay, I can get a place kind of like this for five to $600 a night, but I'm willing to spend to pay bill. 1500 to 1700. Sure. We added some our house furniture. Sure. I renovated the bathroom to go after, you know, Wendy, no question, wealthy Wendy, because she's my buyer. 70, roughly about 71% of my bookings come from females when my ADR is almost $1200. Those aren't people with a household income of 100 grand unless they're going to a bigger property and they're splitting that two or three ways. Right. So understand like having an intimate relationship with the buyer that you want before you sign the contract to put an offer in is the most important part. You got to see the vision of how the property, what it's going to be turned into, into that super property, what it's going to take. You got to budget it and most importantly, you have to know how to market it.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Great points there. Great advice. Bill, I definitely want to dig into the marketing a little bit more here just in a, in a second. But I want to ask you, you know that that's one of the exciting things to me in the short term rental space is that we can have two properties. I say this all the time, but they can be right next door to each other and one can be making twice as much money because that person knows who their guest avatar is. They know how to market it. What are some of the things that you do to make sure that you absolutely nail that guest market, that guest avatar that's going to be staying at your property. Or is that just because. Are you nailing this? Because these are the types of properties that you yourself really enjoy staying in?

I mean, I'm part of it. I'm not discerning, you know, hard to please traveler. There's no question my wife would tell you I'm an ass when it comes to that stuff. I'm a hotel snob, though, and I don't stay in short term rentals ever. Excuse me. The only time I stay in short term rentals is when I rent them for my Mastermind meetings. Bigger ones, to be honest with you. And the reason that I don't stay in them is they're not consistent, you know, because you have independent owners, you have property management companies. There's no standardization with it. I'm a Bonvoy guy. I'm a JW ma'. Am. I'm a Marriott guy. I know exactly what I'm going to get when I stay in the Marriott. It's the same. And I like that consistency. I like the digital key. Once I book with Marriott, I don't have to do anything. I click a button in the app, it fires up my digital key at most of the hotels and I walk in and I know how many towels are going to have, I know how the bed's going to be made, I know what the room configuration is, all of that stuff.

So I'm probably a little bit different than most. And it's interesting, there was a thread in my Facebook group because we just were starting the market for my conference right, in February, and we're gonna have 3,000 people, and everybody's talking about what hotel to stay at. And then there's people like, you're going to a short term rental conference, an Airbnb conference. Why are you guys not staying in Airbnbs? And I think a lot of it's for the same reason. So I also try to be super consistent with how I'm setting up my properties. The, the products that I'm using, I use the same Cuisinart all in one, you know, K cup and pot, you know, coffee pot. At every single property, we use the same toilet paper. At every single property, the same amenity kits, the same tampons and toothbrushes, and, you know, all sewing kits and all that stuff that goes in our, you know, bathroom amenity kit. We try to stay as consistent as possible so our return guests will get the same experience in Gulf Shores or Banner Elk, North Carolina, or Estes park or Montana, you know, the same deal. With that being said, value stacking is the number one thing. Value stacking for that ideal buyer is the number one thing that will separate, right? So even though I've got all of that stuff there and this, you gotta understand, this property took me two and a half years to find, I wanted that proximity, I wanted something in Montana. I fell in love with it two and a half years ago. So this is kind of. This is lifestyle asset that's turning into a super property, if that makes sense. So I actually added on the deck very intentionally outside this door, and then I added a hot tub, and then I added the barrel sauna. There is not one barrel sauna in this market. And I spent the extra 3, 4, 500 bucks with a full glass door on the barrel sauna. Why? Because it's looking straight up that river. The views from over there are better than what are out these windows. So I strategically put the deck in the spot to where I created the marketability, I created the experience to be able to see through that glass door, to be able to see from the hot tub, to see the mountains, to see the river, to see all of those components. And the fire pit is strategically located to where they could start a fire and see that. Not have to sit around the fire pit, see the fire pit, see the views and be in the hot tub drinking wine or be in the hot tub. But then it's the small things, right? I mean, I'm 30 minutes, not even 30 minutes, 24 miles from the Canadian border. If, you know, nobody knows where whitefish, Montana is, It's almost Canada. We get a ton of snow here. So literally, I've got right at my front door, four boxes of heat track. So I'm laying the heat track down, spend about 600 bucks. I've got robes in the master closet. So when people come and stay. And this is all the marketability, right? And what I call the usability, the hospital people refer to it as hospitality. I look at it more as function, more as usability. How many people would stay here when there's two feet of snow and not want to walk through the snow on the deck to get to the sauna? Probably almost everybody. Oh, that looks cool in the photos, But I don't really feel like it's 21 degrees or 4 degrees walking through a foot with the snow. So I spent 600 bucks to get heat track going from this door and also the master suite slider to go to the hot tub and to go, you know, to the sauna. So now that will keep the snow melted and keep their feet warm. Those small little details that stacks on top of the milkshake bar, that snacks on top of extra towels, that stacks on top of the coffee bar. All of those things that are. I don't want to say they're low cost because those are high cost items for somebody in a one or a two Bedroom, you know, condo or an apartment. But for me, correlated to purchase price and adr, they're low cost items. And I think that value stacking is really important. The super property, the property that's turning into a super property literally started this morning. My wife is at a two bedroom condo with a loft that we just purchased, 950,000 bucks almost at the entrance of Glacier National Park. She's turning it into a super property. Now, it's not seven bedrooms, it's not 10 bedrooms, it's a two bedroom. It will be a super property. Air DNA tells me that I will do $88,000 a year in that property. Air DNA is dead fucking wrong. Because once I turn that into a super property and I create the marketing opportunities, then I'll be good. So I'll give you. I did not come up with this. One of my mastermind members who bought the unit right next door to me did. But we're both putting in E bikes. We are 4.2 miles to the entrance of Glacier National Park. If anybody knows how Glacier national park works, the gates don't open until they get all the snow removal done on the one way in, the road to the sun and one way out, essentially. So once that's plowed all the way up to like Avalanche Trail, Avalanche Lake, all that type of stuff, you are past the McDonald Lake, which has all the hotel and that stuff. Well, it's still not open to cars. But you know what, it is open to E bikes. And you can E bike from here all the way up to McDonald, all the way up to Avalanche and go hiking and trailing and get this exclusive access that you can't get if you're trying to get in in an suv. So we're putting E bikes into that two bedroom. Sure. They're fifteen hundred dollars apiece. Sure, I'm going to do six of them. So we're talking like ten grand after tax. But I believe based on being able, and this is the critical part, to extend the season, I'm going to be able to add somewhere between six to 10 weeks to my season of them being able to my guests being able to gain access with E bikes because they can't drive in and drive out. Just like the park closes next week. But we have no snow here yet if we don't get any major snow. You can access via E bike, but you cannot access via vehicle. Those are the types of things, the creative component that is going to turn a two bedroom into a super property.

Great, great wisdom here, Bill. Really is. But I Think really what you're getting down to is like you really know your properties, you really know your market, you really know who's going to be staying there and you really know how to create an experience. I think the challenging thing are a lot of people maybe that haven't jumped into the industry yet are thinking about the management end of things. And you mentioned yourself that you prefer to stay in hotels most of the time because they're consistent and that's something that hasn't yet made its across the board with short term rentals. I mean there's people doing a really poor job at managing. You mentioned co host versus traditional property manager. I want to get to marketing here in just a quick second but I just want to get your opinion on how you make these experiences consistent in terms of management.

It's really hard, there's no question. So I mean I've got probably 90% of my CO hosting so I own my own properties and I co host as well. So I treat my co hosting exactly like I treat my own properties. Everything's an owner res with hospitable and all my same technology. So I've tried to just from a tech stack and also a communication stack that's all pretty much standardized with the exception of the unique value propositions that goes into each one of those communications with the guest.

A big part of that is just hiring the right crew. You know, I don't really call it my cleaning crew because typically my crew, the cleaning and like the handyman services and the receiving. So they are my UPS store, they are my cleaning team, they're my quality control team, they're my handyman team and a lot of times they're my guest interaction team. And what I mean by that is I just had an issue at a property I co host two days ago. Guest checks in, what's today? Wednesday, Monday I think they checked in down in Fort Morgan, Alabama and it's a property that's just stellar. Well there was the guests didn't, you know, let me know and my quality control guy was not able to make it in the turn and he didn't tell me that. And I didn't get a report back that anything was damaged or need to be replaced. Guests show up, they want to go out to the beach, the umbrellas are broken. What else is broken? Oh, half of the, you know the toaster that you put toast inside of it, half of it didn't work. She literally texted me. I'm very disappointed. The house is beautiful but I'm very disappointed we tried to go to the beach. We have no shade, no umbrellas, I've got young kids, blah, blah, blah, and your toaster doesn't work. And I just replied, and this is where taking action quickly is super important. I was one. I get pissed. I'm pissed at my quality control guy. I'm like calling him, why the F did you not tell me you didn't get there? Blah, blah, blah. Why didn't you have somebody else go? Why were you an idiot not being responsible? I go through all those same emotions that everybody else does. And then I take a drink of my Diet Coke, I calm down, and I replied to her. I think her name was Rebecca. Hey, Rebecca, this is Bill. I am so, so sorry. And then most importantly, I give them some empathy. And like, if that would happen to me and my family, I would be so upset. And I'm sure you're handling this better than I would, right? So now I'm making this connection of anger and, you know, disposition that's really critical from a psychological marketing and, you know, really just decompressing somebody's situation because they just want to be heard, you know, most of the time. But the second part of this was, is, hey, I've already. And I took me about 10 minutes to get back to her. Usually I reply instantaneously. I already called my cleaner, Michelle down there, who owns a cleaning company, and I said, I need two umbrellas and I need a new toaster within 60 to 90 minutes out to said property in Fort Morgan. And she's like, I'm walking to the car with my keys right now. And she went by Target. My wife pre ordered it. She checked to see if we could get it delivered faster than Michelle picking it up. No, she went by one of my other properties, grabbed two Tommy Bahama umbrellas, and within about, I think it was probably like 50, 55 minutes. It was under an hour she was there. She gets there, she says, can I go in? I said, no. Knock on the door, she's like, nobody's there. And she didn't reply back. And I'm texting where, you know, leave everything on the doorstep. She walked out to the beach to figure out who the guests were and took the umbrellas out to them and set them up for them and personally apologized even though it was not her fault. She also accepted the accountability that it was her fault. That's how you rectify those types of situations. That's the type of crew that you need, right? The boot. We all hear the boots on the ground are super important, but yet people compromise. And people won't put in a coffee bar because their cleaner refuses to stock the K cups or the to go cups. God forbid you have a milkshake bar, you know, with all the stuff that I've got in this house. And people won't do it because their cleaning crew won't take care of it. So that is really the critical thing for me and how I standardize is with those teams. I do have everything documented for them. We go through zoom calls. But once they nail it, I am not the guy that requires images every time that we do a turn. All I ask is that they're implementing the quality control, and I need them to understand that I've got trust in them, because if they feel like they're walking around on eggshells, they're on the defensive as opposed to the offensive. They know what my standards are. I go to my properties at least every three to four months, and we do walkthroughs, and I show them, you know, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. They know the quality that I want to deliver. And for us, one of the things about a super property, Tim, the property has to look new every time a guest walks in. So I'm one of the crazy guys that pays my handyman in every single market from Banner Elk to Montana to Gulf Shores to walk in and touch up paint, specifically during the season, after every single turn. That's what, like, one of the strategies. You talk about consistency. We paint every one of our walls flat. Most people don't. They do an eggshell, they do a sheen. And then you have to use a magic eraser. Or if a kid goes in with a Sharpie or drags a bag through a hallway, you got to repaint the whole damn wall. One, it's expensive. Two, it takes way too long when you do flat. Literally, your handyman can have a foam brush and just boop, stripe it, and it's gone. Boop, stripe it and it's gone because it will blend in, and you don't see the sheen, you know, differential that's on there. So that's a huge trick, in my opinion, to have all of your walls in flat. So we do what's called the 48 inches and down after every turn during the season, whether it's ski and ski out in the winter or whether it's beach during the summer, and they're doing 48 inches and down. And he's also equipped with a magic eraser to do corners and that type of stuff. The other thing that's really important to me from a consistency standpoint is our entryways. So, like I've got a beach house that you walk up and it's exterior but it's enclosed, right? So you walk up like eight steps, then you go to a landing, then you go up another six or seven steps, then you go up to the front door. They don't think about that. They remember the cleaners are thinking inside the house. Like, oh, I don't have any responsibility outside. Well, yes, you got to check my storage room, you got to check the pool area, you got to check my grill, you got to check my bikes. You know, you got to check the Connect 4 to make sure all the pieces. You got to check all that stuff. And that's the first impression. It's not walking in and seeing this view. It's like when I drive up, if those steps are rickety or if there's spider webs all around the front door or whatever, that's the first impression. Whether it's consciously or subconsciously that the guest, specifically the booker, wealthy Wendy, is thinking, oh my God, look at how dirty this is out here. Is this the way that the house is going to be? And a lot of you don't understand how important that is. Because if Wendy is thinking that when she walks in, she's looking at every nook and cranny to make sure inside does not look outside. If it is freaking nails, like spot on, like HGTV, last 30 seconds of every reveal show, then she's going to be much more relaxed when she walks in. So nail your entryway and let that experience start there.

Yeah, totally, totally agree. First impressions are everything, aren't they?

It is, but people take it for granted, Tim. They don't really focus on it. Right? And you know, it's. I did, I was, I did a deal down at the beach last summer and I walked up and down a road that I have three properties on in Fort Morgan, Alabama. And just showing people how ugly the pilings are, how ugly the, the landscaping is, how ugly everything is. And these are million dollar properties that look like they're 30 years old. And then I show them my properties. And it's not an ego thing. I'm not any better than anybody else. I just pay fucking attention to what people want. And that's all I'm asking for you guys to do is pay attention to what your guests want, pay attention to how your property looks compared to your competitors. And I'm not talking to property right and left or across the street. I'm talking about your top eight or 10 competitors that you're looking at in Air DNA or in your price Labs market report or in Rank Breeze or whatever you're using to track your competitors.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the.

It's great to, I mean, to know our entryway and how that looks at night too. I think that's one time that a lot of people overlook it. You know, some low voltage landscaping lighting can go a real long way at making an entry look amazing.

Well, great, great advice, Bill. Gosh, we're going to have to have you on in the future. Again. We try to keep these episodes relatively short. And I want to just pick your brain real quickly on marketing because it is very important. It's becoming more and more important as certain markets are more competitive. Can you give us just a couple few minutes on marketing and how you view its importance?

I guess in the industry, it's the most important thing. Not in the industry, in any business. Look, I've done 29 startups. I've built a $50 million company, two $30 million companies. I've had 18 exits. Steve Jobs will tell you if he would roll over in his grave if somebody said marketing is not the number one thing. He knows. He did not have the superior phone with iPhone one or two or three or even four. But he had the best marketing behind it. Same with Nike. Nike shoes suck, in my opinion. Outside of my Jordans that I own, you know, I get they have great running shoes. They were a running shoe company. They became a brand, right? Just do it. And that's because they revolutionized their brand and their marketing. Marketing is everything in our property. The problem is, is you can't ET Syndrome it. And it's what I mean by everybody thought ET was going to be the greatest movie in the world. All their friends are saying, then you don't like it, right? So you can't. You don't want to like stage everything in your house and not have it. You got to depict exactly what's in your property, but you need to learn how to market it. That's one of my biggest superpowers in this industry. There is a core component. One, everybody needs StayFi. I get no commission off that. Just look up StayFi that captures the emails, helps you build your email list faster. The most valuable asset that you can have is your email list. You should be emailing every one of your customers after they've stayed with you. You should also be doing buy, sell trade groups. There's this core four of components, right? Email marketing, buy, sell, trade group strategy. Go to Google Trends and look at where people are traveling to your market from. Pick your top five cities, go join 10 to 20 Facebook groups, read the rules, don't violate the rules. A lot of people allow us to do that stuff and then rotate and post. So like for Gulf Shores, I post in Nashville, I post in Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, Knoxville and Dallas. My number one markets where I live in Nashville. Number two is Dallas, number number three is St. Louis. So I rotate posting in 10 to 20 properties in a different city every single week. And I'm probably doing about 15% of my overall bookings coming from there. I also run Facebook ads for every one of my properties. It's low cost going into those exact same markets. I'm not trying to do the entire country. I'm looking at the top markets where people are driving in or flying into my different markets. And it's harder when you're in Orlando or something like that. But you still have to go and do your research. Google Trends, you can find out. Go to your local convention and visitors bureau. You can go to Placer AI, you can. There's a lot of places that you can find out where people are coming from and be very specifically targeted into that. The second one is stop sending traffic whether it's earned social media, email marketing or it's paid. TikTok ads, Instagram ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads. By the way, if you're into MTR and you're in an urban area, you should be putting all your advertising dollars into LinkedIn. I can talk more about that later but you need to make sure that you have. Just like when we buy a property, one property, one LLC, one QuickBooks chart of accounts, one debit card or credit card, we keep, we should be keeping everything siloed for asset liability protection. We need one sales page per property. That's where vacasa and evolve. You know, fuck up the whole marketing process is they're marketing their brand and their business. They're not marketing the individual property. I annihilate them with my co hosting clients. I annihilate them with myself. Because whether it's earned free social media or paid traffic, I'm sending them to a specific property sales page. No navigation, no social media icons. They either book or they leave. And when you go up to that top left red circle to X out and leave, then I hit them with a pop up and give them another reason to book. Or at least give me their email address so I can Continue to continue to email market to them. That and then I do a lot of text message marketing. So that requires for most of you a lot of different platforms. You know, you got mailchimp or constant contact for your email marketing. You know, you have your website. How do I do sales pages? There's lead pages, there's unbounce. You know, how do I do text marketing? You got simple texting, you know, all these other different components, Facebook ads, you can do it all under market. My str, that's what I use now. Every single thing is under one platform. It's cost efficient, it's cheap, and it saves me about 70% of my time. That's my marketing secrets.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I could ask you a million more questions, but let's go ahead and try to wrap it up here. One last question that's not actually related to short term rentals. And I like to ask this when I, when I do the interviews, because the name of our podcast is Short Term Rental Riches. A lot of people think about the finance side of things when they hear the word rich, but we know obviously that life is not all about our finances. There's a lot of super wealthy people that are not happy at all. So is there one sort of maybe life habit or thing that, that you've changed maybe recently, Bill, that's enriched your life in some way in a non financial sense?

Yeah, actually.

I got to honor this gentleman or at least acknowledge him at my conference, the SVR Wealth Conference last year. He came for the first day and his name's John Barden and he, he taught me about one. He changed my mindset and then taught me how I can architect my outcome. In 2015, right when I really started getting into short term rentals, I was in eo, the Entrepreneurs Organization and dropped out because, you know, if anybody's in that, you're in a forum. I got recruited in. There was nine of us, there was three of us that were high achievers. There were six other lazy people, let's just call them that. So I got sick of it. I left. I started spark. We hired this gentleman and he taught me how to build a life plan. He taught me that I could take control of my daily decisions and make them 10, 20 times more valuable if I architected my outcome and I had to be able to keep score with it. So I had to be very, very specific. Everybody defines retirement by I want financial freedom, I want to travel the world. Well, those are just dreams. You know, there's no substance to that whatsoever. So I determined that I was going to retire at 60. I wanted to have $500,000 a year in income.

I knew what my debt ratios would be. My wife and I decided how we would live our retirement life, blah, blah, blah. Went through that whole plan.

And it allowed me to distill down to the daily decisions that I was making. And the reason it's important, sure, there's this whole financial component, but most importantly, I went through this exercise and then I put my wife through the exercise and then we came together. So I've been married for 25 years. At the time it was probably 17, 18 years. And I've never slept on the couch, I never had to go to a hotel. You know, we've had our arguments, but we'd always. We made a deal. Her best friend's father was our pastor when we got married, that we would never go to bed, you know, mad at each other. And we stuck to that for. We've been married for 25 and a half years, but we weren't completely aligned. I'm the quadruple type A ADD OCD entrepreneur, you know, that's trying to max everything out in business. And I was neglecting what she wanted at home because I was. I felt like I was doing the right thing. I knew I was doing the right thing for me to take care of the family, make more money, build wealth, all those things. When she just wanted me to be there with her and with the kids. Right. And once we got unified, we intentionally re architected our outcome so that 60 years old went to 50. That, you know, $500,000 in, you know, annual income is significantly more than that. We've already exceeded all the financial goals and our relationship stronger. And it's like definition of intimacy. It's scheduling time, you know, being present without this thing. When you're with your kids and having your kids, you know, grade you on certain things that you should be doing with your children. All of these things to where life and business commingle because there's no separation. People are trying to separate, you know, work life balance. There is no work life balance. You have a life and if you want it to be a super life and has to commingle and you and your spouse have to be 100% aligned. And some of you are sitting at home. Yeah, me and my wife are, or me and my husband are. If you haven't gone through this exercise, you really don't know. That's the deal. I thought I was with my wife. Everybody I put through this in my mastermind, in my couples retreat. They all think they're aligned and some of them are if they've been through something like this, but about 98% are not. That was a life changing experience for me. It was not a program by John. It was just his experience as a two time Fortune 500 CEO, his experience as an angel investor, his experience being 15 years older than the gentleman that were in there and being divorced multiple times and having life issues as we all have, and him sharing with us. And that was probably one of the biggest moments in my life.

Well, thanks for sharing, Bill. That's good stuff. That's awesome.

And I know you have much more to share and you are sharing a lot in various different ways. Where can people go to learn more about everything that you're doing and just learn from you?

Billfaith.com that's f a e t h billfaith.com build strwealth.com my Facebook group. Over 30,000 investors just like you build STR wealth on Facebook. I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok. I'm pretty much everywhere and I kind of pride myself on being one of the most accessible. So if you have a question, just DM me. Might not be able to get back to you within an hour, but I'm pretty good at doing it within 24. That's. That's for certain.

Awesome. Well, it was a pleasure having you on today, Bill, and we'll hope to have you back sometime in the future.

Awesome. Thanks, Tim.

Take care. I've dedicated years figuring out how to manage my personal portfolio remotely and it wasn't always easy and it took a long time. But now my amazing team can professionally manage my properties without me. And good news, our team can also manage yours. Let us save you the stress and headaches and some money by offering you an industry low fee. To find out more about partnering with us, head to stritches.com, hit the property management button, answer a couple quick questions and meet with me personally. That's strriches.com rest easy knowing that with my team your properties will be in excellent hands.