Lydia Patel’s Playbook for Smarter STR Systems

Virtually managing your property is very doable. You've been doing it for years. You can still travel to Hong Kong and India and all these places.

I didn't realize just the quality of life. All of that is like such a precious part of the experience that I didn't get to have before this.

I can tell by your videos you seem pretty well organized.

I don't know, it's a forced function.

How do you stay organized with with everything you got going on?

This is something I had to learn to do because of how disorganized I am and I would tend to forget things.

How do you build a stress free our business when you have kids a job in zero time in today's episode we're breaking down a real life story. We interview Lydia and unpack her journey, her systems and the lessons she wishes every host knew from the start. There's a lot of gold nuggets, a lot of tips in today's episode, things that I never thought of even after over a decade in the short term rental industry and managing lots and lots of properties. So stay tuned, you are not going to want to miss this one.

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Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm excited to sit down virtually with Lydia Patel today. She has a fascinating story. She is a busy mother. She has a full time job, but she is of course also in the real estate world. She has her own short term rental. She used to have another one and so she's got a lot of things going on. She also has a fantastic YouTube channel. If you haven't seen it yet, head over there and check it out. Excited to chat with you today, Lydia. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Tim. Good to be here and excited to talk more.

Yeah, I'm excited to dive into real world stories. You know, a lot of times on this channel we talk about just pieces of the full operation with short term rental. You know, whether it's tools we're using or how we're managing things virtually, but we don't actually sit down that often and just kind of talk about real world stories other than my own. And so I'm excited to have some other ones on the channel and excited to dig into your yours. I think the first thing I wanted to ask so as a content producer, again with great content on your channel, nice work. I know that's not easy. It takes a lot of time. I wanted to ask you how do you go about choosing content that you decide to listen to because there's so much of it out there, how do you decide if it's credible or not?

That is such a great question. I think there is an element of trust that builds over time. For me, I am almost 100% only looking at long form content because I like the nuance and the way someone can go in depth about a specific topic and you can hear their entire thought process. Like, I don't want just the list of what to do. I want to know, how did you arrive on that list? Why do you think this? And then I can decide do I agree with this person or not. I will also say a lot of the content that I end up choosing to watch, it doesn't necessarily mean I fully agree with them. And I'll take everything that they're saying. It's just a good starting point. And I think the more you consume from the same creator, you can start to get an idea of, okay, this is their worldview, this is their perspective, and this is why they might think a certain way and kind of have that backstory. And so I'm not necessarily too picky on the type of content that I'm watching. I'm open to hearing all different ideas. As I was getting into short term rental, for example, I consumed content from a variety of people. Like some of them, I kind of feel like I don't love the vibe of, and that might just be a personal preference, but they might still have really good content that really actionable information. So I would encourage anyone who is trying to decide like who to listen to what content to pick. It's less so about that versus you critically assessing where someone might be coming from and piecing together different items from different people, hearing the different perspectives and forming your own opinion.

Yeah, some, some great points there. I think that, you know, one that certainly the more we listen to someone, talk to someone, I mean, trust is built over time and consistency basically.

Right.

The other point there, which I totally agree with, is that, yeah, you don't actually have to really vibe or like the person that you're learning from, you know, and if I think back to like college days and stuff, there was certainly a lot of professors that I had that maybe didn't like, you know, the, the personality, but I learned a lot in those, in those classrooms. Well, let's talk about your. How you got into short term rentals.

So we have been guests on the Airbnb platform throughout our travels for over a decade. At the point when we started our actual hosting journey, we never really thought to do the hosting side of things, but we happen to actually have a guest house in our backyard that we did not build for Airbnb. It was built for my parents when they come stay, for our friends when they come visit. And this was in 2021. It was kind of at a time when we just started our long term rental and started getting an interest in real estate. And then we, we finally connected the dots. Like we could also do short term rentals in addition to long term rentals and we already have a space. So we started learning a little bit more of how that might work. Obviously, top of mind is the risk associated with that, like having someone in your general backyard space. How would that feel? What are the ways I can protect myself from liability? Some of the logistical stuff, some of the more operational software type stuff, we were just gathering data. It all sounded like very doable, honestly. And so we took the plunge. We figured, you know what, we'll just try it out in this backyard format. Worst case scenario, it doesn't make any money, but we get a great excuse to renovate, put up some pictures. Finally, we've lived here for years and just never fully decorated the space. Best case scenario, this is money we can put towards other things. It provides cash flow. So we put that up on Airbnb and it was a really successful thing. It also kind of coincided with the pandemic where people couldn't travel a whole ton. And so just the escaped to a tiny house somewhere, even though it's in someone's backyard, was kind of a retreat that people were looking for. It turned out to be good revenue. And we did it for a few months before it was the summertime and we would use the backyard a bit more. We just didn't want folks infringing on that privacy or we being too loud for guests who were staying there. But that ended up being a really good kind of pilot for exploring more short term rentals. Now that we know how to do it and learn some pitfalls of, you know, managing the space. Sped up some of that initial learning curve with an easy test subject. Then we figured, you know what, let's look at different markets, let's look at other places that we might want to travel to as a family. Wouldn't it be really nice to have a second home, a vacation home that is also funded, plus maybe offers some additional cash flow and appreciates over time and offers some diversification to the portfolio. So we started looking around to places that we might like to go since we're in Minnesota. We looked at warm places to escape to during the winter. And so naturally like Texas, Florida, those came up. We studied a few different markets and then eventually landed on the northern bits of Florida, kind of by the beach. It's a very family friendly area. Less spring break party crowd than parts of Florida. This, this seems suitable for us. And we honestly just went with what we would enjoy as a family. And when we travel, we bring grandparents, we bring friends, we're usually a giant group. And so that's kind of how we narrow down our search on like what size of house, what amenities we want, how close to the beach. And also kind of helped us identify what our target demographic is, ideally someone who has similar needs to us. And yeah, that, that's kind of how we narrow initial search. Obviously it's supported by numbers. We analyzed a lot of data on air DNA and compared it to price labs and did a lot of that background numbers running. Yeah, after a few months we got a property and it's been three years. It's been three years since we've done it and it's been great.

Time's flying. Time is flying.

I know I kept like after that one we kept saying, oh yeah, we're going to get another one. But we haven't rushed into it quite yet. We just haven't found another market that we are like we really itching to travel to. Because I think for us the enjoyment of it is such a big thing. I think obviously as a business it's making money. Like that part is nice too. But I found that just personally that hasn't really motivated me to keep looking. You know, it's the enjoyment piece that really gets me going and thinking, imagining, you know, what kind of place we can get enjoy and enjoy together with family.

That's awesome. Well, I mean short term rentals are really an awesome segment of real estate. You know, I was in traditional long term rentals, I still am today. But when I first got into short term rentals, like they're just more fun, you know, that was part of it. Like I was staying in them, traveling. I know you've traveled a ton, so we're going to jump into that a little bit as well. I'm curious though, you know, a lot of the places that we want to travel to and that we see ourselves enjoying and with our families and staying there don't always make for the best investment market. So you mentioned that you were going through air DNA and all that. How much of this acquisition was like investment based versus personal based?

Yeah, I think jumping back to where I was in picking a market, the Reason, we ruled out a lot of California. We would love to have a place in San Diego, but just from a regulatory standpoint, that's not a possibility. Honestly, we love a lot of West Coast. It just doesn't work on the numbers. It is maybe initially based on family interest kind of focus, a vacation focus, but then the final narrowing down of which market to go with that one is purely number based. Even though we really want a vacation spot for ourselves, if it can't be supporting itself and making money on its own, then that's not really a business that can't be supported as a business decision. And at the end of the day, it still needs to be a good investment.

Well, you mentioned you're in Minnesota and the property is in Florida, which last time I checked is not very close to Minnesota. So, you know, we, we talk about virtual management a lot on this, on this channel. But I'm curious how that has been for you as a mother, as someone that's working almost full time, it sounds like in the pharma industry. How have you found that virtual management process, maybe in the beginning and how it is now for you?

Yeah, I think in the beginning we definitely made a bunch of mistakes because we were beginners. And even though we did host our tiny house for a little bit and have some of that background knowledge, it was still a lot. Learning different things about even just different states. Right. We've never lived in Florida, so I'll give an example of just, even the utilities. Right here we just have public utilities. You plug it in to the service people and it's all done there. It's like private gas tank rental companies, which I had never heard of. I didn't know that that could be a thing that you need to figure out which company owns your gas tank and you're leasing from them and they come and fill it. It's just one of those many seemingly small bits of learning curve that we had to figure out. And it's a little bit harder from afar to figure out, yo, where is this gas tank? I don't know, I'm not on the property. What we really relied on is we found a local assistant and we found him through upwork. And our main thing is just having this available person on call locally. And he happens to be like one of these really responsible dad figures that just like is really handy, knows his way around houses, he audits for insurance companies. So there's that bonus. Yeah, he's been instrumental in helping figuring out those pieces that really just can't be Managed remotely. For anyone who's looking to do this, I think this has been really a lifesaver for us to just for those mistakes that you end up making somehow. Otherwise. I'm sure you talk about this on all the time on your podcast. There's all sorts of software and really the bulk of the work, like the messaging, the pricing adjustments, all of it is done remotely. Anyway, you're doing this on your phone, so most of it you really don't have to do in person. And that aspect has been fine. I think that has been fairly streamlined and easy. I will also add because of our market being in northern Florida in a fairly like vacation rental heavy area, that the cleaners, the handyman, they are used to working with short term rental owners. So just us giving them a door code to enter a place like no one is freaked out by that. Everyone's just used to this is how things are done. When they're done with their work, they automatically send me messages. It's not even something I have to communicate. I think if you were to set up shop in a different place where this is less common of a practice, there might be a little bit more of an up ramp in explaining what you need. Case in point, like here in Minnesota when we did this tiny house, even in person, it was so hard to communicate to a cleaner. Like, no, this is not like a bi weekly cleaning thing. I need you whenever the calendar requires. There's just a different level of work depending on your market too.

Great points there. And yeah, there, there definitely is a difference between long term, you know, housekeeping and short term rental housekeeping. You know, there's a lot more details, a lot more things that we got to, to look into. You ment that you found your sort of handyman assistant on upwork? We've used upwork a lot in the past and you know, a lot of the other virtual places where you can find contractors and. But I never thought of upwork actually as a place to go for someone I guess in the U.S. maybe that sounds crazy, but I was kind of thinking that it was more like international. So you had good success using upwork?

I did. And it's funny you mentioned that because I also use upwork for like an assistant from another country to help with my content, do other things. So yeah, when we tried to look for an assistant locally, it definitely took a lot of filtering out by location and talking to people. But yeah, it can be done and there's actually plenty of people up there. I don't remember exactly how I Found this person. I just kind of posted a gig that says this is, you know, on call. We'll pay you every week regardless. A bunch of other people applied. I think there's, there's also general interest in real estate and so perhaps the hope from the applicants is that, hey, this might be one way I can learn a little bit about this business without having, you know, my own risk, own property on the line.

I can tell by your videos and just the fact that you've got multiple things going in life that you seem pretty well organized. And so, I don't know, it's a forced function for, you know, you mentioned filtering down, you know, candidates and stuff, which we definitely need to do. So how do you, how do you stay organized with, with everything you got going on?

Yeah, multiple ways. I think by default. I'm not actually an organized person. I know I come across organized on my videos and that's what people tell me. But this is, this is something I had to learn to do because of how disorganized I am and I would tend to forget things. For general life. There's this app called Structured App and it helps me plan out my days. And the thing I like about it is that once you've planned out your day in advance, like down to like at this time I'm going to be doing these to do items. You don't think about it, the next day is set in motion. You get reminders, okay, now you're getting up to make coffee before you have to go get the kids or now you're going to go start recording your video because you have exactly this number of time. That has been a game changer for me in terms of like, as a parent who's working and has side hustles, there's just always too much to do do and a lot of time is wasted in the deciding of which thing to do amongst the 100. And so setting it up in an app has really helped me. And then the other thing I will say for my, just for my short term rentals. I have learned throughout my hosting journey that there are things I love like messaging with the guest or interior design elements or studying pricing, doing stuff on the computer. That's stuff I'm, I like and I'm good at. There's stuff that I'm terrible at, like remembering to change a Wal water filter or like remembering to check in with my cleaners whether we're due for deep cleaning. Stuff like that is just so incredibly boring. And then I don't think about it. And then I miss it. So now I've built a dashboard on ClickUp and that's what I rely on. I integrate, you know, all the pieces to automatically send me notifications on my calendar so that if I think about it once it's automated, I will be reminded when I need to be reminded. I don't get like I get to not think about it for the rest of the time. And that has offloaded so much mental space. And then for content I use a different project management system with Asana to just plan out my ideas, write the scripts and figure out the content calendar and the cadence, that sort of thing. What do you use?

We use so many things and my, my team probably hates me. Like I feel like every week we're like hey, like look at this cool new tool, we gotta use it. So we use all kinds of things. But I would say from like productivity or organization standpoint, one of my big go to's is notion. Not sure if you've used that one ever before but the way I explain it to people, it's basically like a visual dashboard that connects all the places you would store notes or store files. So like it's connected to Google, they even connect it to your email now and it's just got all kinds of connects to Slack. We use Slack a lot for, for our communications and stuff with our team. But yeah, we use, we use a whole bunch of programs. Well, let's see here. So you, you mentioned that the assistant that you hired, I'm curious, how'd you go about the housekeeping side of it? Did you also use upwork for that or did you.

Yeah, for our housekeeper we actually just got a recommendation from our Realtor who also operates short term rentals herself and so that was kind of our starting point. We interviewed with them, they seemed you know, very professional and I think just having experienced the non short term rental professional housekeepers locally and where you have to explain like make sure you're like lint rolling the pillows, that no hair is on it. Some of the smaller things like compared to meeting with a professional company that has a team, if one person is sick they will find another person even though they were a little bit more expensive. That peace of mind was worth it for us. I know there's also apps like Turno where you can kind of place your bid and connect your calendar and find a cleaner for each time. But we also in just thinking about requiring our cleaner to help us with the inventory restocking. Having that ongoing communication with the same people has been really helpful.

Yeah, that's what we found too. I mean, when you have a good housekeeper, it just makes the whole thing so much easier. And there's lots of great housekeepers out there, and a lot of them are willing to do these extra sort of tasks. You know, you mentioned helping you keep inventory. Of course we want to compensate for that. Well, what would you say? Let's see. So this was quite a few years ago when you started. Is there any, like, big change in the way that you've managed it versus when you started versus now?

Yeah, I think the biggest change is just being a lot more systematic. In the beginning, everything was new. Like, every time I solved a new problem, I kind of treated it as an isolated problem. But then as time went on, I realized these things just kind of recur in a different flavor. So if there is a method where I am documenting how I solve this problem for my future self or finding a way to prevent this problem from happening in the first place, over time, the operations just get a lot smoother. And that's not like a mindset I had going in. So now I just kind of built everything into my dashboard. Some of the beginning things that I felt like were, ah, it doesn't matter, like, inventory. Who cares about that? Like, someone will tell me if it's low. Thinking back, I wish I kind of started with roughly what inventory we have. Like, roughly. I don't know which remotes would use which batteries. Just to. Just to have a general idea. Like, honestly, nowadays if a cleaner tells me, hey, this battery remote isn't working, I can immediately know, oh, yeah, we do have this in the pantry. Just can you please go swap it out? That is so much easier than like, asking someone to, like, check it and then go buy it. Like, it just simplifies the process a lot. That's just one example of the many things that, that I've decided is worth spending that initial time to make more systematic and have sort of a standard operating procedure around that. Yeah. And as a beginner, I think I just probably thought, that's boring. It's all going to be customizable things that won't repeat again. And that's absolutely not true. Even with just one property.

Yeah, great, great points. I mean, we see the same thing. You know, it's weird. Built a lot of systems and you mentioned the batteries and. Yeah, batteries can be tricky. What I heard on another Jasper Rivers podcast, actually, a long time ago, he mentioned that's get paid for your pad. For anyone out there that hasn't tuned into a Jasper. We've had him on the show as well, so I highly recommend his content. But he had what they called an ammo box. So it was basically like, you know, a box or, you know, something that you kind of hide up in a cabinet that has all those batteries and it has all those like little things that you might need at some point. And then you just sort of replenish the, the ammo box every once in a while. And then that saves you from, I guess, calling you because they can't turn the TV on or, you know, the door lock doesn't open because the batteries died or whatever it happens to be.

Yeah, such key, like such important pieces that you probably don't think about in the beginning. Yeah.

And if you, you know, if you think about it like, how many guests do you have in a year? Right. Let's say you get your first short term rental and you have maybe four guests a month or something like that. That takes a long time to kind of work its way through all of the potential things that could happen for you to be able to know how to handle them. So having, you know, following content like yours and tuning into what's out there to have kind of a game plan going in can make the whole process a lot easier. Tell me about your travels. How do you, and do you travel with your whole family all the time?

Yeah, we've always, even before kids, we would try to take a big trip, you know, three, four weeks a year to experience different cultures and just be uncomfortable. Basically. That's the whole point. There's a special feeling of getting to a place where you don't know the language, you don't know the customs and you're trying to watch people and adapt. We come back always just so re energized. And so that's something that we valued from day one and something that we hope to share with our kids because I think having that adaptability is such an important skill and you can't really teach it without exposing, just putting them into that situation. And so, yeah, we've taken our kids to Hong Kong a bunch of times now. It's a long flight from here. And now, now they are actually like, we've also done India for three weeks and that was also an incredible trip with them and also just kind of all over the U.S. now they're just really used to the whole getting on the plane routine. You know, they know exactly what they're supposed to do. They find their seats or hanging out, they get their tablets, you know, they're eating at the right times now. It's like so much smoother. And I feel like coming back from India, me and my husband, we were talking like, man, it's finally paying off all this effort of bringing these people places. Effy yeah, it's fun to share different world with them, expose them to different cultures, try different foods, hear different languages. And I think sometimes using India as an example, like the concept of time is different. What is normal there is different. I found it very family friendly. People are just approaching us and chatting with us and the kids are fully free to be themselves and loud in public, like no one bats an eye. And. And that's a very different experience to maybe another country in East Asia where, you know, you can't be loud in public places. But that would also be a fun thing to be exposed to, to like be on a train, Be like, oh, wow, this is a completely full train. That is quiet. How do you exist in this world? Like, what are the unspoken rules? I don't know. That aspect is really fun. And also obviously the food. Food is. Yeah, you can't get that stuff here. So you gotta go get on a plane and get the good stuff 100%.

You know, I love traveling for all the reasons that you mentioned there. I mean, you're in a different world, different language, different smells, different, you know, environment all around. I think it's really good for just learning in general. And the nice thing is that traveling's easier than it's ever been. You know, I remember way back in the days, like showing up somewhere, you know, a different country maybe, and with like a printed out MapQuest guide and not knowing how to get there, you know, and no cell phones. And so it's a lot easier these days. It's great to see that you're out there traveling, you've got a whole family and a full job and the short term rental running at the same time. And I know there's a lot of people out there that think that that is not possible if they acquire property and they set it up or that it'll be more challenging than it actually needs to be. So what would you say for some of those people out there that haven't quite pulled the tr, They've wanted a short term rental for a while. Maybe they already know exactly where they want it, but they're just a little intimidated maybe.

Yeah, I, and I will encourage anyone, obviously, run your numbers, make sure it actually works financially for you, that this is not going to add stress to your life that like on In a financial sense, because it will at some level of stress, operationally, you are learning something new. You're going to make mistakes. It is kind of intimidating. You do have this property that you need to maintain that's far away and there are going to be things that you can't predict. But I think kind of just accepting that that is going to happen. I have definitely on many occasions felt like a complete idiot. And I'm like, oh my, how did I not know there were two ACs in this house and only been maintaining the one? Like, you will have moments like that, but you will also get through them. You will learn from them and you will now figure out, this is how I'm going to prevent this from ever happening again in the future. All these mistakes are recoverable. And as far as like the other part of this whole process being intimidating, I have learned all of this kind of just watching videos and watching other people's podcasts and getting information that way. It's definitely very doable just from a self learning standpoint. Obviously you can reach out to people if you need help. There's other ways you can get additional assistance in that process as well. But you know, having self managed this this whole time, it's very doable. And then lastly, I will add, if you have all these other things going on, like kids and work and you know, you want to maintain your travel, we haven't found it to be that big of a deal. Like, the quantity of hours that you're actually spending on it is not crazy. The difficult thing comes with maybe the unpredictable times of when this would happen. I think I recently gave an example of like, I don't know how, how I'm always getting these guest messages when we're on like a long road trip and my husband is driving and listening to his podcast and he's not looking at the messages and I'm in the backseat taking a nap. And that's like 100% when we would get like a random problem coming up. So you can't predict when this will happen. But if you haven't have systems in place, for example, when we go on a really long trip, we let our local assistant know because we would be on a different time zone. Obviously messages would be on a lag. It's helpful to have like a backup person. Also, it has been really helpful to do it with a business partner. In this case, that's my husband. But if you have another person that can offload some of those tasks and maybe they can utilize their strengths where you focus on yours. That. That really helps lessen that load and that learning curve a little bit.

Yeah. And as you know, we're. As much as we'd like to fully disconnect, that is. That is a challenging piece. Right. You know, people go on vacation the same times. A lot of times we want to go on vacation or they do it on the weekend and you just never know. You never know when, when the phone will ring. But having those systems in place, as you mentioned, makes the whole process smoother, ensures the guest experience is better, which we know. The better the guest experiences you can offer, the better reviews you're going to have and the more money you're going to make with your property, because that's how your property shows up on the listing sites. The more reviews and the better they are, the more visibility you have. Awesome. Lydia. Well, hey, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's really great. I always like hearing everyone's stories, you know, and also another story that's proof that virtually managing your property is very doable. You've been doing it for years. You can still travel to Hong Kong and in India and all these places without things falling through the cracks or, you know, ruining your vacation. I like to ask everyone that we have on the show the name of the. The podcast is called Short Terminal Riches. But a lot of times when people think of the word riches, they think of it just like in the financial sense. And so I'm curious if you have any sort of habits or anything you've changed in your life recently that's enriched your life in a, in a non financial way.

I. That is such a, that's a profound question.

This is going to sound super cheesy, but it's like in the day to day, like recently, if I've scaled back hours from work just from a little bit with help with income from YouTube and from our real estate. And I didn't realize just the quality of life that I am now able to go drop off my children at school and pick them up from school just hearing about their day immediately or even just like getting that sassy like I'm getting in the car, I'm dropping my backpack off and I'm just immediately chatting with my sibling and ignoring mom. Like all of that is like such a precious part of the experience that I didn't get to have before this. And so I think that is such a big piece. I think travel we've kind of talked at length about, but that is another big thing that I would say is an enrichment in my life for sure.

Yeah, it can be a game changer, a life changer. Well, awesome. Well, you've got an amazing YouTube channel. What's the best way for people to find you? Follow you.

On YouTube, I am just Lydia Patel. And, and on Instagram, I'm idiapatel with like three Ls at the end. And yeah, on Instagram I post mainly like just personal, fun stuff that I come across. YouTube is where all of my more educational, useful content goes. So, yeah.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Great tips today. And yep, if you're out there and you're not yet tuning in to Lydia, make sure you check out her channel and hopefully we can do this again sometime in the future. Thanks, Lydia.

Yeah, it was great chatting with you, Tim.