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Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:05] You are listening to the Thanks for Visiting Podcast. We believe hosting with heart is at the core of every short-term rental. With Annette’s background in business operation–

Annette Grant: [00:00:14] And Sarah’s extensive hospitality management and interior design experience, we have welcomed thousands of guests from over 30 countries, earning us over $1,000,000 and garnering us thousands of five-star reviews.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:27] We love sharing creative ways for your listing to stand out, serve your guests and be profitable. Each episode, we will have knowledgeable guests who bring value to the short-term rental industry.

Annette Grant: [00:00:39] Or we will share our stories of our own experiences so you can implement actual improvements to your rentals. Whether you’re experienced, new or nervous to start your own short-term rental, we promise you’ll feel right at home. Before we dive into the content, let’s hear a word from our sponsor.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:01] Hello listeners, welcome back for another great week. I am Sarah Karakaian.

Annette Grant: [00:01:05] I am Annette Grant, and together we are– 

Both Sarah and Annette: [00:01:07] Thanks for Visiting.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:08] If it sounds noisy, if it sounds a little like– 

Annette Grant: [00:01:12] There’s commotion.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:13] A commotion, it’s on purpose.

Annette Grant: [00:01:15]  Right. 

Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:16] We are recording from VRMA from the Breezeway booth. We were so excited. We asked Breezeway. We’re like, it’d be really fun to just set up shop, recap our event this weekend. And Annette, what else are we doing?

Annette Grant: [00:01:29] We are celebrating drum roll. I wish I had it. Our 200th episode. I can’t even believe I’m saying that. Our 200th episode. But Sarah, let’s kick the show off like we do every time.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:40] All right. So we’re going to kick off the show like we do each and every week. That’s sharing one of you our amazing listeners and viewers, but instead of sharing one of your properties this time, we want to ask for your help and we would like for you to STRShare us, Thanks for Visiting.

Annette Grant: [00:01:56] So we are our own, STRShareSunday is @thanksfor visiting_. And if you are one of our listeners that we absolutely adore and love, what we ask this week is that you share us with either one of your hosting friends, someone that wants to host, or even someone that just uses vacation rental, short-term rentals. That would mean the world to us. 

So we’re going to give ourselves a little love this week. But because we love you so much, we want you to continue to hopefully spread our message. You can make some more hosting buddies and yeah, just give us some likes, give us some love and share on the podcast with the world.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:02:32] All right. So if you guys know or don’t know, Annette and I had a live event this past weekend, the weekend prior to VRMA. If you don’t know VRMA it’s totally fine. It is the Vacation Rental Managers Association. It’s an international event. So if you want to belong to a professional organization like VRMA, it’s a really great educational place for you to be around other like-minded collaborators.

Annette Grant: [00:03:01] This is their international event, but they have regional events across the country all throughout the year. Some of them, I believe you do need to be a member, and then other ones you do not need to be a member. You can get a ticket still. But Sarah and I, cannot support education and finding your people. And this is exactly the place that you could do that. So we want to give VRMA some love. Check them out vrma.org.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:03:27] Yes, and of course thank you to Breezeway not only for sponsoring our podcast, but thanks to Ben at Breezeway for allowing us to crash their booth here at VRMA. We think it’s a really good opportunity to just recap our first live event this weekend. We would like to give you our top takeaways from our speakers who so generously shared their time with us.

Annette Grant: [00:03:51] And their knowledge. And if you don’t know what we’re talking about, we had our first live event, TFV live in Las Vegas at the Sahara on October 23rd. We had around 175 amazing host speakers, sponsors, and it was a blast. It’s still a blast. People are still here hanging out. And we’re going to go over that. What was one of your biggest takeaways from our morning sessions about–

Sarah Karakaian: [00:04:14] Real estate.

Annette Grant: [00:04:15] And like analyzing deals, the properties? What was something that just really you were taking notes on, Sarah?

Sarah Karakaian: [00:04:21] So first of all, we asked our members, our HBMM members, if we do a live event, what do we want to cover in the live event? And so we structured the education around what they requested and they wanted real estate, operations, and marketing. So in the real estate portion, we had Kenny Bedwell from STR Insights, we had Tony Robinson from the Real Estate Robinson’s. He’s also the host of the BiggerPockets Rookie Podcast Panel– 

Annette Grant: [00:04:48] In the morning– 

Sarah Karakaian: [00:04:48] Creative funding panel.

Annette Grant: [00:04:50] We had Joe Vieri talking about taxes and cost segregation.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:04:54] Yes, so my biggest takeaway was I think I’m going to go with cost segregation and depreciating our assets and being able to pull out money that I– the short-term really benefit from all the tax but benefits and shelters that are short-term rentals are properties bring us and there are people like Joe that can help us–

Annette Grant: [00:05:17] You need to make sure– and the key there is don’t just stop at the first person that is a CPA or a bookkeeper. You want to keep searching, searching, searching. And we can tell you, Sarah and I, on our business journey, I think we’re on our second bookkeeper, our second CPA. We’re always making sure that we’re keeping up to date. 

And it’s nothing about the bookkeeper CPA. It’s we want people that are in their zone of genius ad we’re in that same zone of genius. So please make sure that’s on the top of the list because we’re getting towards the end of the year. Don’t delay. Work on that today.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:05:53] What is your biggest takeaway from the real estate portion?

Annette Grant: [00:05:55] The biggest takeaway, again, it just keeps coming back to me over and over again. And it was Kenny Bedwell and it was that when you’re analyzing deals, it’s still logical and emotional. And you can have a spreadsheet all day long and run the numbers, run the numbers. But if that property’s in a town that you don’t have any sort of an emotional draw to, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are. 

And we don’t want short-term rental homes just chasing the cash on cash return or chasing where they think they’re going to have the biggest tax deduction. So I love that he continues to bring that up. And it actually, to be honest, it just makes me feel good about how I feel about investing and that– Sarah and I are backyard investors in Columbus, Ohio. And we’re not in the Smoky Mountains. We’re not in Joshua Tree. We’re where we know the property. And not to say we won’t go to those places, but he just reassures us– because I also don’t like the emotion and logic is like, how many doors do you have? And it’s quality over quantity.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:06:55] Yeah. If I’m going to sneak one more takeaway there, we had a creative funding panel. And number one, I love that of the four seats, three of them were sat in by women because–

Annette Grant: [00:07:06] Tanya Rooney, Ashley Gallagher–

Sarah Karakaian: [00:07:09] Annette Grant, and then, of course, Mike who is probably the king of creative funding. But the message from the entire creative funding panel, which I know all your listeners and viewers are going to really appreciate, is like Annette said at the beginning of this whole recap of the real estate portion is don’t settle on the first bank you call, the second bank you call. 

I’m actually in a situation right now where I had the first bank let me down. The second bank was also not helpful. And all of my friends at this event reminded me, call bank three, four, five, and six. Get it done. You have to be tenacious.

Annette Grant: [00:07:41] And by the way, again, Sarah and I are also going to start working with two new banks and we’re going to introduce you to them hopefully soon because we need to diversify that also. Another thing from the creative funding panel, a takeaway from that is you always need to be planning your next deal before it’s anywhere in your world. You need to be making those connections, asking people, do you know anyone who– do you know anyone who would want to invest? Do you know anybody who has money to invest? 

And that’s a nice, soft way to ask that person directly, but indirectly, and ask them if they want to invest. And so that’s just the way– because there were people asking questions during the panel and they were trying to get the funding together while the deal was on the MLS and it passed them by and I was like, you need to prepare for that before you’re ready. 

Speaking of the MLS, it was time and time again at our event. We asked our panelists, our speakers, our attendees, when they were talking about a specific property where they found it, MLS came up over and over and over again. So I don’t want you to think– a lot of people think that things have to be like this magic off-market deal that they found to make the numbers work. And that was something that was really reassuring for me that, okay, things can be found on the MLS, they can be found on Redfin, they can be found by driving through your neighborhood and seeing “Not for sale” sign in the yard.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:09:12] Yeah. All right. Let’s move on to the next pillar of our aggressive, all-day learning intensive event was operations.

Annette Grant: [00:09:21] Oh, Sarah just lit up.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:09:22] I did. I did light up. So we have the real estate in the morning. We got it. We secured the property.

Annette Grant: [00:09:27] We had an amazing lunch. Thank you, Sahara. Our lunch was amazing.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:09:31] It was good. It was very good food. But that’s the thing that we feel sometimes is missing when people talk about short-term rentals and acquisition is what to do with it afterward. I know all of you know that it is a far more difficult than just hiring a great professional cleaner and then going to the beach and sipping on your cocktails. So my biggest takeaway is I was very excited. I found I got introduced to Sean Kemper of ETI Solutions.

Annette Grant: [00:09:55] And we are going to do more work with him in the future, so whole time.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:09:57] We are. So he manufactures cleaning products down in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and his products are safe and they are effective and they are inexpensive because of the way he is created the packaging system for them.

Annette Grant: [00:10:14] Yes. And we were sitting there, I was like taking notes on mold and I didn’t understand what bleach did to mold. Here’s the thing, listeners. If you have a cleaning team, you still need to educate yourself, know the products that they’re using in your home, supply them the products. If you’re going to have an opinion about what’s being used in your home, on your marble countertops, on your hardwood floors, don’t just let– you need to have a partnership with them on that. And if you’re asking for certain things, you need to support them with the right tools and right products.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:10:49] And protect your materials. A lot of you are doing amazing builds, unique situations, unique materials inside your property so that you stand out. You don’t want those to get ruined by having the wrong chemicals.

Annette Grant: [00:10:59] It’s an investment. So Sean Kemper was awesome. Like I said, we are going to bring him back to talk about his amazing products and just give us some of the chemistry. We learned a lot of chemistry, and that was important to the cleaning.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:11:12] And I will tell you, if you want to get a hold of Sean, he will actually get on the phone with you like a Zoom call and build out a cleaning program for you with his chemicals. So you can describe what you need and he’ll tell you of his products what will work best. So I love supporting Sean. He’s a good guy. He supports our industry.

Annette Grant: [00:11:28] He’s doing the most important work.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:11:30] Of course, we had Justin Ford there.

Annette Grant: [00:11:32] Yep. Another shout-out for Breezeway. He is Breezeway’s safety– just he’s all their safety.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:11:38] Yeah. International safety expert Justin Ford and he, of course, if you are new to our podcast, thanks for being here. Justin’s been on our podcast more than any other guest because safety on our spaces is the most important thing. Of course, to protect our assets that again, we’ve invested so much money in, but also to protect our guests and us from liability. And no one wants to get sued.

Annette Grant: [00:11:59] So awesome. And my biggest takeaway from Justin this time, which every single time I learn something is just how insurance companies are not looking at accidents anymore. These are incidents. You can’t just say, oh, sorry, there was an accident in my house. There needs to be preventative things going on. You are a commercial business and people are paying to stay there. So your safety standards need to be up to speed. If you have not checked out Breezeway safety certification, please, please do that.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:12:32] It’s free. It’s free for you to do. And if you work with Proper Insurance, who also here at the event, you will get a 5% discount off of your insurance. So that’s pretty cool. So then we moved into marketing because you know that Annette and I champion direct bookings and building a business.

Annette Grant: [00:12:48] And then we did Kyle Stanley.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:12:50] Oh, that’s right, we had Kyle, thank you. And actually that was–

Annette Grant: [00:12:52] She should because she took so many notes.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:12:54] That was next level.

Annette Grant: [00:12:56] Yeah, so Kyle @FearlessKyle talked about team building. And that was really important because there was a lot of people there that were maybe new. They were just getting started, but other people that were veterans and he did a great exercise of just reaching out on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram saying, hey, I am hiring somebody at 2 to $500 a month to help me with some real estate endeavors. And people were taking action on that and that was one of those things hire before you’re ready. Start to plan your team. You should always be hiring.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:13:29] And you can put their resume, quote-unquote “on file” and discuss what they want out of real estate or at what they want out of short-term rentals. And even if you don’t use them right then and there, you can reach out to them in the future and know you want to deal with them.

Annette Grant: [00:13:40] Yeah, for sure.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:13:40] Kyle’s presentation was next level and everyone was taking action. People are coming up to us, even still here at VRMA and being like, oh my God, I got comments. I have a coffee date this Friday, so thank you. Thank you, Kyle.

Annette Grant: [00:13:53] Maybe we’ll try to put his little call to action in our show notes so people know what to put on their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:14:00] Okay. But then we went to marketing because again, we champion direct booking. We do not want to leave our businesses in the hands of Airbnb. They are great lead generator. We appreciate them.

Annette Grant: [00:14:11] Or Booking.com.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:14:12] Or VRBO, yeah. So we started with social media. We talked about– Emily Mentzer who was on the show before, we talked about making sure your bio is really dialed in. She talked about collaborating with local media outlets and how she paid to collaborate with local media outlet. But her ROI on that investment was like–

Annette Grant: [00:14:36] Yeah, the stats are insane. The email list grew. The giveaway actually brought her in revenue because they ended up staying longer than just the two nights stay that they were awarded so she ended up making revenue from this giveaway.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:14:54] She did twice with the same media outlet in her area. So that was great. And then we had Arthur from StayFi.

Annette Grant: [00:15:01] If you don’t know what StayFi is, please check them out. Go to our website. You want to know what StayFi is.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:15:06] Yeah, we’ll put the link in our bio. It is where you can collect email addresses from your guests, just like when you go to a hotel or a café and they ask you for your name and email.

Annette Grant: [00:15:14] A splash page pops up and you can get that. And the key to this– Sarah, what’s the key? It’s not just the guest that booked.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:15:21] It’s all of the guests that booked because to get online, they also have to give us their name and email and, of course, accept the terms and conditions and if– 

Annette Grant: [00:15:30] No spam. 

Sarah Karakaian: [00:15:31] Yeah, no spam allowed here. But with StayFi, it also has an email marketing software or email marketing abilities within its platform, so you can send it. They already have templates, so all you need to do is create a message, select automation flows and it’ll go right out to your guest once a month even. Just invite them back, have a little code. But anyway, that was wonderful. He actually sat at the AV booth and was doing email–

Annette Grant: [00:15:58] He was doing live-action emailing.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:15:59] He was showing them how to create a template because I feel like we make it more difficult than it needs to be.

Annette Grant: [00:16:03] Yes, for sure. And then we had an amazing panel that I got to host, and it had four amazing humans on them, one of them being Sarah, my lovely co-host, and John Hayes, Megan Morgan, and JL Napolski. And this panel was all about direct booking. Oh my gosh. So it went all the way from Sarah has a property that is 100% direct booking. John I think he said–

Sarah Karakaian: [00:16:33] John and Megan had 30%.

Annette Grant: [00:16:34] They were at 30% and they just started their direct booking. Megan literally, I love this story. Maybe we can have her on. She listened to one of our podcasts about direct booking. She did not even have a website. She stayed up all night just building a simple Wix website and she is now at 30% booking. Can I tell you my takeaway from her? 

Sarah Karakaian: [00:16:53] What’s up?

Annette Grant: [00:16:54] We asked her one of her keys to success. She’s in Texas, where high school football is huge. She says for a couple of hundred bucks, she advertised in her local football program and the local football like on the field. And she is getting so many bookings from–

Sarah Karakaian: [00:17:14] She’s like at like $100 so throw her logo in there, her business email, and phone number. And it’s as simple as that. It was simple as that.

Annette Grant: [00:17:20] Yes. And then I’m trying to think of some other huge takeaways there. Oh, the one John was talking about is reusing content. So he writes blogs. He does a lot of like listicles. So a listicle is something like 10 best coffee shops in my town, 10 best hiking paths, five best places for brunch. 

And what he’ll do is he’ll make that a blog on his website for search engine optimization. Then he will send that out to his email list and then he will make those TikTok Instagram and Facebook posts. So he can just create that one idea. And it’s probably a question. He said his blogs and his content, he’s answering questions that his guests are asking. And they’re helping him with that.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:18:05] And then we closed off the event with a really great happy hour. We had a Stefan repeat. It was a lot of fun.

Annette Grant: [00:18:09] It was a blast. We may or may not be already–

Sarah Karakaian: [00:18:13] Planning next year?

Annette Grant: [00:18:14] Yeah, okay. Sarah, I’m going to on the fly. What was your takeaway from just having a live event and having all the hosts and the listeners in one room? We haven’t had a chance to talk about this, right?

Sarah Karakaian: [00:18:25] Well, and I don’t– listeners who have been listening for a while now maybe you know like Annette and I are very much yin and yang and I am a perfectionist. I get very nervous that if I do something and it’s not perfect, that I’ll be judged, I’ll be whatever. Who knows? I don’t know. It goes in this crazy brain of mine, but we did it. And could it have like, can we make tweaks, make it better next year? Always. I think you can always be better, but just never be afraid to get started.

Annette Grant: [00:18:50] Yes. And that’s for anything. That’s my biggest takeaway from this week is like, holy smokes, I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s going to your first event and putting yourself out there. We’re doing our 200th episode here, which is crazy. So start the podcast. 

But there were people there that were veterans ready to learn. There are people that are just getting started, ready to learn, and that I just feel when you start to take action on whatever that is, even us planning the event, things start to go in your favor. And have there been some hiccups?

Sarah Karakaian: [00:19:22] Yes, there were hiccups.

Annette Grant: [00:19:23] But that’s part of it. That’s part of it. And you got to get going. And guess what, though? It got Sarah and I so super fired up to support you even more. We have so many things like ideas for 2023. One of them may be taking our podcast on the road, so be on the lookout for that. But it just got us really fired up to see everyone that was there, meet them in person, hear their story, get our picture taken with them, do some social with them.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:19:50] Thanks for Visiting is bigger than Annette and myself. We want to serve all of you so that our whole ecosystem of short-term rental hosts, owners, operators, we can all thrive up level.

Annette Grant: [00:20:00] The whole industry. The whole industry.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:20:02] Yeah. So we have to get going because lunch is about to hit. The Breezeway booth is about to get slammed with people interested in their products. We want to make sure that we can let them do that. But we really appreciate you celebrating the 200th episode with us. Please, again, leave a review.

Annette Grant: [00:20:15] If you want to help us celebrate, leave us a review on Apple, on Spotify, follow us on YouTube. And last but not least, if everything that you just heard got you fired up, we are going to have the recordings for sale from our live event. We videoed it. We got the audio. We are preparing that now so we can hopefully release that to you if you’re interested in it. We are hoping to release that soon once we get home and get back to work. But we want to make sure that you can participate in the event also.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:20:46] So with that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

Annette Grant: [00:20:48] I am Annette Grant, and together we are– 

Both Sarah and Annette: [00:20:50] Thanks for Visiting.

Sarah Karakaian: [00:20:51] We’ll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening to the Thanks for Visiting Podcast. Head on over to the show notes for additional information about today’s episode. And please hit that Subscribe button and leave us a review. Awesome reviews help us bring you awesome content. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to hanging out with you next week.