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Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:05] You’re 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: [00:00:15] And Sarah’s extensive hospitality management and interior design experience, we have welcomed thousands of guests from over 30 countries, earning us over a million dollars and garnering us thousands of five-star reviews.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:28] 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. My name is Sarah Karakaian.
Annette Grant: [00:01:04] I am Annette Grant, and together we are–
Both Sarah and Annette: [00:01:07] Thanks for Visiting.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:08] This conversation, I can already feel it, is going to blow your mind. So get ready to talk about generational wealth and what that means to you and your family. Before we dig into that, we are going to share someone who is using our hashtag on Instagram, that is STRShareSunday, if you’re using it, we are looking for you so we can give you some love here on the podcast, on our YouTube channel, in our email blasts, and of course, you’re in the podcast. Netty, who are we sharing this week?
Annette Grant: [00:01:34] Today we are sharing @ Jame Staging Co., again @ James Staging Co. You might think, “Wait, Annette, you’re remixing this up. Why is there a stager?” Well, Sarah and I just got back. We spoke at the real estate staging associations event in Las Vegas. Shout out to all the stagers there. They were amazing.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:01:52] They work so hard.
Annette Grant: [00:01:53] But the reason I want to highlight James Staging Co. is she specifically does help real estate agents stage vacant homes– unoccupied homes, but also short-term rentals and model homes. So if you are a stager listening or you’re a homeowner that is like, “I don’t even know where to start with staging or designing my own property, please, real estate stagers are a great resource for you to use and have them help you create an amazing space.
And I think James Staging Co., well done to you for putting that in your actual bio so people know because Sarah and I have people reach out to us all the time, like, “Who can help us design? Who can help us design?” So we just want to give some love back to all the amazing stagers that we just met. This is a way to do that. Listeners, if you need help with design or staging your short-term rental, please look at that real estate stager in your area.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:02:43] Especially if they sat on Annette and my sessions at REISA Con.
Annette Grant: [00:02:47] So @ James Staging Co., well done. We appreciate you out there creating these amazing spaces for short-term rental owners.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:02:54] All right, let’s dig into today’s show. We’ve got Jameelah Jordan, who is a biochemist turned real estate investor. That’s right, biochemist turn real estate investor, broker, and digital nomad. For over six years, she has been honing her real estate skills, growing her portfolio which has enabled her to pursue her dream of helping others build generational wealth through real estate. And that’s what we going to talk about today. Jameelah, welcome to the show.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:03:23] Thanks for having me, guy. I’m excited.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:03:25] So excited to dig in. So tell us your story. How did this all start? Your biochemistry things, and you’re [Interposing voices] I don’t know. I’m an actor from real estate investor.
Annette Grant: [00:03:34] That’s your professionality of talking about chemistry.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:03:36] So many, many, many moons– what are too many moons, but many moons ago, I graduated with biochemistry. And fortunately for me, I graduated during a time where we hit a little bit of recession on 2008 to 2011. I couldn’t find a job. I had friends who were engineers working at McDonald’s. We’re getting hit with student loans. So I took on a position as a lab tech and I was so frustrated. Back in that time, I come from an area and the family’s like, just stick with math and science and play your instrument and you should be good to go.
So for me, I was like maybe I should go down the doctor route or that path. So I started going towards that path, and I was completely miserable. I started in research and I was doing late night shifts in research in labs. And I was starting to talk to petri dishes and they were talking back. So I really started losing my mind. Fortunately for me, I had an opportunity. So I got married. My husband took a new position and we moved overseas. And he was like, “Well, do you want to move overseas?” And I was like, “Do I want to stay in biochemistry or do I want to live elsewhere in Italy?” So I was like, “I quit.”
I went overseas and I realized that I am not a stay-at-home person at all. I was driving him crazy. I was driving myself crazy. And he actually suggested virtual assistance for me. He was like, “Look into virtual assistance.” So I started doing work for people back in the States, virtual assistance and the people who are reaching out to me were real estate investors and agents. And I started learning from them. I was working with agents from like Keller Williams, Realty ONE, Coldwell Banker. And then I was working with investors. And meanwhile, I’m getting paid 25 an hour, but I started to see the insides of what they were doing and seeing that at-home check come through. And I was really excited off of it.
I didn’t know about furnished rentals at that time, but I started learning and honing in on it. And that set me on the path towards real estate investing. So when we came back home to the States, we actually moved to Memphis and I decided from listening to all of– it wasn’t really podcasts as much as I was listening, reading books, listening to people and networking, I decided my first property that we purchase will be a fixer upper.
And that was the biggest goal that I realized during that time. Start with where you’re at, not everyone has 20% down payment. Not everyone has those things. So we started with a fixer-upper. We got a home. I believe we paid 150,000. We got a 203k loan, FHA 203k loan. That’s a loan where it allows you to pretty much put your renovations and your mortgage payment all under one and you don’t have to worry about having all these separate loans out there.
So we were able to put in about 100,000 into the property. And yeah, that’s how we got started. During that time I graduated from YouTube University and it was the flip from hell. It was bad contractors, lenders. I didn’t know what I was doing. And after we put $100,000 into the home, a tornado came and a tree fell on the home and destroyed the front part of it. So I was like, “Oh, my gosh, what is going on here?”
Annette Grant: [00:07:12] Did you ask YouTube University for your money back from this education?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:07:17] No, it was 399. So it was my fault. I didn’t have a mentor or coach at that time in which that’s rookie mistake number one, but we went through it. We have so many stories. I could probably do a session off of that alone, off of the stories. HGTV came out to interview us. It’s sad, but right before she came to us, there was a mishap downtown. She got mugged in Memphis. And yeah, it was so much going on. I was like, Lord, all these trials they were going through, I was like, there must be some type of blessing off of it. So yeah, we kept on pushing it. We were in a really good neighborhood Midtown Memphis. But we were living there. We house hacked. So the house has four bedrooms, four bathrooms. So we rented out upstairs. That paid for our mortgage, and then some.
And then when we decided to move, it was literally like, I can’t be here anymore. I’m going to pick up and move. I thought about doing long-term rentals, but I realized that I would only net like $200 after all of my expenses. So this was probably around 2013 or so. Airbnb was out there, but we didn’t know that much about it. Someone was like, “Well, how about you rent it out on Airbnb, because long term, you’re not going to make any money?”
So I rented it out. I literally left all of our stuff there. We packed up all of our clothes and two dogs and drove to North Carolina. And I put it up on Airbnb. Within 24 hours I was booked out for half of the month because I was close to downtown Beale Street. And we on average net a little over $3,000 for that home after all of our expenses. So I was like, dang, I am onto something here. So we moved back to North Carolina and the rest is history.
Annette Grant: [00:09:15] So when you were house hacking, were they short-term rental guests or were they long-term renters?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:09:20] Long term. They were there for a while. So we were able to house hack with them and have them upstairs. The awesome part off of it because it was like a 1921 home, every room besides the master had a bathroom. So there was a study room in front of one of the bedrooms. We tore that down and created a master suite with the shower and the tub all encapsulated within the glass. It was really nice. And yeah, we were able to pretty much have everything paid for. I was like this is something to do. We were able to actually save money so we can actually possibly start going after other investments. So that was a blessing.
Annette Grant: [00:10:02] I know our listeners are going to ask and then we’ll get on to all short-term rentals. For the virtual assisting for the real estate agents, were you doing cold calling? What type of tasks were you doing for these agents?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:10:12] Everything. I was cold calling. The only thing was I wasn’t licensed at that time, so I couldn’t do certain things like contracts and things like that. But I was assisting with certain things with investor. So I was cold calling, I was skip tracing, I was researching properties. I actually started doing wholesaling because of it. So I pretty much learned the ads and ends off of real estate as an agent and as an investor. So it really opened my eyes. There’s so many different avenues within real estate. You don’t have to just go the broker side, you don’t have to be a flipper or wholesaler, it’s creative, and you can mold it to where you want it to be.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:10:52] And I want to commend you too because you said you were a VA for real estate agents. But I have learned over the years that just because you’re a real estate agent does not mean you understand investing in real estate. Those are two different things. And so we’ve always been advised that if we’re going to move to a new market and find a real estate agent to work with to make sure they’re investors themselves because otherwise, a lot real estate agents don’t know what a good deal looks like.
So good for you for– not only did you move back to Memphis and you bought an investment property, then you’re like, you know what, I’m going to offset my living costs by house hacking by having– you essentially had roommates, which isn’t an easy thing to do when you’re married. You think you’re going to– you know what I mean? Have this adult life, but–
Jameelah Jordan: [00:11:34] Like fairly newlyweds like that–
Sarah Karakaian: [00:11:36] Good for you. Would you do it all different? Knowing what you know now, would you still do it that exact same way?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:11:42] Absolutely. And honestly, I would have done it earlier. It’s like hindsight is 2020. I didn’t have this type of knowledge. Within my community, we didn’t know these things. For my parents’ generation, the biggest thing for them was to get a good job, have a good pension, buy a nice house, and then work until you’re 70 years old and retire and then figure out, “Okay, do I want to go to a nursing home? Or do my kids love me and I’m going to stay in this house?” So it wasn’t that many things. And just to have those type of opportunities and be able to learn those type of things, it really just opened me up to so many different possibilities.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:12:24] Yeah, good for you. So okay, you moved to North Carolina. How did you navigate? At that time, there weren’t a lot of podcasts or blog posts about hosting remotely. What did you learn about managing your Memphis property while living in North Carolina?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:12:38] So it was a year later. Memphis is a whole another ballgame. I wasn’t from Memphis. I’m from New York but grew up in North Carolina. But fortunately, I was part of a very big startup community in Memphis. And I got plugged into a lot of things. I had created somewhat of a team like a property manager, cleaner, and all those things. So I was able to manage it for a long period of time. The only reason why I really sold it, yes, good workers are hard to find. But two, we use short-term rentals to build out our dreams. Short-term loans aren’t a dream, it’s just a means and an avenue for us to obtain generational wealth.
So when we were going towards that, it made more sense for us to sell it and wish we may close by 100,000 profit off of it at that time. And then we reinvested that right back into other things. So now we have a little over 10 properties. We’re going after multifamily properties now. I’m a broker in the area, and I coach other people to do this same thing that I’m doing. So it was a little bit hard. I tell everyone, before you even start thinking about remote, you really have to do your due diligence. If you can’t lay eyes on the property or if you don’t have trusted individuals there, it could go sideways so quickly. And of course, the horror stories with Airbnb is like I had sand in my property and we’re not even close to a beach. And it was like the whole entire first floor was full of sand, so things that you just need to navigate.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:14:13] So let’s talk about then you moved to North Carolina, and you know that building generational wealth was important to you. So how did you really embody generational wealth then from that standpoint and moving forward? What was your why? What motivated you to keep on going because real estate is a hard industry?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:14:28] It is. I love it, but it is very, very hard. And until you get your systems in place, it can be time-consuming. What really resonated with me is that I am going to be the first millionaire within my family. And that’s something that’s big within my culture. A lot of people we don’t know about these things. It’s like the power of land, the power of property. So not only was I looking to actually build generational wealth for my future generations, I’m bringing people behind me back up. So now it’s so funny, my dad is in the 70s, my mom is up there as well, and they have short-term rental properties now. I have them doing Turo business. This is funny because they’re not tech-savvy when it comes to apps.
And now they’re building things. And the biggest thing for me was my parents are getting old. And I’ve seen the hardships off of having aging parents, and I want to make sure that they’re not just trying to make it on their retirement on small checks. I want them to live life abundantly. I want them to be able to take a vacation because they worked so much just to make sure that we had better thing.
So it’s so much fun just having my parents off the ride. My dad is retired now and I actually hired him. So that’s a little bit of a journey on itself. But he who works for me now. But it’s a beautiful thing, because now he’s learning the business. He wants to pick up more furnished rentals. We are very big believers off of upsells. So we have a car rental company that partners with our short-term rentals. So he manages that for us. So it’s such a good thing to make sure you have in the family and just to give back as well.
Annette Grant: [00:16:18] Oh, I love this. We haven’t had a guest talk about this yet. I know Sarah, and I have mentioned Turo on the show from time to time. But can you talk us through how are you doing it? Obviously, are you using Turo as the rental platform for the vehicles?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:16:31] Yeah, I am as of now. I always look at scaling and make sure we have different verticals and things like that. So eventually, I will be doing my own direct booking just like I do with my furnished rentals. But we use that as well as one of the biggest things that we do. And all of this was pretty much on the fly. I had cars when I was living overseas and I was like, “I am paying this payment and I’m not even taking advantage of the car. Let’s put it on Turo see what happens.” As a real estate broker, I am able to make sure I get money on multiple areas. So I have people relocating to the area, I have them stay on my short-term rental, my team is helping them find a house or sell a house. And then they need a car rental, they’re able to go through it. So I’m getting money on multiple different avenues.
I just turned a four-day rental that would have generated maybe 700, $800 on Airbnb to over $3,000 for the day based off of the upsells. So we are strong believer of that. We even have a romance package, which was very funny how that one came about. It was Valentine’s Day and I had so many people booking and I was like, “Well, are you interested in a romance package?” And they were like, “Oh, what does that mean?” I was like, “Well, I was thinking okay, crap.” Now I need to figure out how much is this going to cost and then how much of a payment percentage I need to put over. I charge 500 and $25 for a bottle of champagne, some rose petals, a box of chocolate, and swans towels. So it was like petals leading up to the bedroom with swan towels. Now the biggest problem was the swan towels. My swan’s net was like it was broken. And I literally had 30 minutes before my guests arrived. I was like, “Why did I tell them [Interposing voices 00:18:19].”
Annette Grant: [00:18:19] You’re watching YouTube University, the cruise ship of the animal. Oh my gosh, that’s so amazing.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:18:25] But it turned out great. And now that’s one of our leading packages within our app. So people love it. We only put about maybe $125 within the romance package and then we net like 300, 400 after that. So it’s always about what you can do to make sure you go to the next level, whether you’re co-hosting or you’re arbitrage. We do all of those things. But how can you elevate the experience for your guests? And how can you elevate the experience for you and your employees as well? I’m a strong believer that the people that work for me, they should have short-term rentals and investment properties because I’m not the only one who should be building generational wealth for my family.
Annette Grant: [00:19:11] Love it. It sounds like you have more than just the romance package as upsells. What are some of these other upsells that you are providing or offering your clients? Can you go into some of those?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:19:20] Yeah, so we have the car rentals in which I always provide them a discount. If they booked through us for furnished rentals or Airbnb, they automatically get a percentage off of our car. We pretty much do a full suite service. We’ve had people to contact us directly for us to go through and set everything up for them. So we’ll have the car there on arrival or at the airport. We do baby gear, which is the easiest thing to do. My team use baby quip because one, contracts, insurance, all those things.
Annette Grant: [00:19:50] And insurance, yeah, for safety for sure.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:19:52] For safety. That’s something that I don’t want to have to create a whole new business entity for. So we have that. We stock refrigerators for people. I’ve had people list out some of the weirdest things. I’m trying to think what’s the weirdest thing I heard. I had someone who only could sleep on black sheets. I don’t know what that was. But they paid $135 to sleep on black sheets. I threw those sheets away. I didn’t know what was going on there.
Annette Grant: [00:20:21] You’re like, what are those going to do? Well, you accommodated them though. I like that you did that. How do you communicate? I know a lot of our listeners are going to say okay, with Turo, essentially, it’s the same thing car sharing like Airbnb. How are you communicating that the Turos are available? I know you’re a huge proponent of direct booking. Is this just something you do through your direct bookings? Or is this something that if someone’s booking via Airbnb, are you letting them know about the car rentals?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:20:48] Yeah, so it’s all across borders easier sometimes with direct booking. But with Airbnb, I’m a firm believer of automation. So when we’re going through, and we’re sending out, “Thanks for booking our home. We’re so excited to have you.” we send them our digital guidebook. And we also add a couple of questions like, “Hey, do you need a car rental?” Now, of course, you’re not supposed to be giving them a 10-page paragraph when you’re going through. But we give little helpful links, like, “What brings you to the area?” And they’ll say, “Oh, I’m looking for a house.” “Hey, we’re full brokerage team. We can definitely assist you with that. And we’ll give you a discount on your midterm stay.”
And so we go through, and we put it in all of our messages. And we even within our guidebook and within our platforms that we use, we’ll sometimes send out text messages. Now we don’t bombard them with things, but it’s touchpoints that should be needed. And I’m telling you you’ll get by the time they check-in, they’ve given you $400 extra off of the upsells that you’ve given them. So it’s all in the systems that you use to automate. And that’s what has really helped us to grow.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:21:58] I love that. And it’s a way to wow your guests and it’s like, wow, I’m going to tell everyone know because they are full service, not just full-service accommodations, but can really take care of my stay. And then, of course, it’s a great way to get additional income from that one stay. We say people all the time will brag about having your 90% occupied and 100% occupied. And that’s cool, but we only have 30 days in a month, 31 days in a month, 365 days in a year. How can we serve our guests, but also increase that revenue for our businesses and not be capped at once you’re at 100% occupancy? And maybe for at 100% occupancy, your daily average rates is too low or what have you, but you’ve really tapped into adding more services, whether it’s brokerage services, car services, upsells in terms of their stay, and the sheets and the chocolates, it’s very smart.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:22:51] Yeah, and then two, you have to differentiate yourself. You hear people all the time like, “Airbnb is not working. It’s overly booked, it’s overly saturated. I can’t get anything.” But what are you doing to stand out from the crowd? I got hit 2020. I think it hit everybody who were in the short-term rental business when COVID hit, thousands of dollars of cancellations. And I literally had to sit down. I was like, okay, strategize, we’re going to have to pivot.
I switched over to corporate and midterm very quickly. I was able to book out, but then I also realized, like, you really have to differentiate yourself. I have returning guests. And I put things in there like a QR code, like, “Hey, if you liked this, if you book directly with me, you’ll be able to save X, Y, and Z. Or I’ll do giveaways. This $50 I’m giving away if you tag me on a picture of your stay.” So now you’ve really taken care of your branding and your brand awareness. So now you don’t have to put thousands of dollars into the property.
Annette Grant: [00:23:48] Hold on. If you don’t mind doing this hot tip for– that’s what I like to call it a hot tip for our listeners right now. Can you go through this giveaway? So is this an inster– this is a social media giveaway that you do.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:23:58] Yeah, I do like a–
Annette grant: [00:24:00] It’s for anybody that stay in your property?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:24:05] Yes, if they tag us. So you can do like three different things. So one of the things I do that really helps cut costs with the biggest thing for me when I’m going through and staging my properties, the most expensive thing that’s in my home are the accessories and paintings and things like that. Those are the things that break the bank sometimes because I have a certain look for the home.
So one of the things I do is, you’ll see a lot of hosts who will put like, do not smoke and they have like these huge unattractive things and they’re like everywhere, covering the wall sometimes. I’ve stayed in the Airbnb like that. But I’ll put things in there and I actually have templates where I create for each property like it’ll be a QR code, and I’ll have Instagram on there and I’ll be like tag us at Mosaic Suites or tag us there and have a giveaway. If you put a picture on there with you in the home, you’ll enter in to get a $50 gift card. I’ll even do things like if you come back, we’ll have a gift. I always like to partner with local restaurants because local businesses will help you grow.
So I’ll have like a local business, a local restaurant with their gift card and their own meal or something to them. So I’m really starting to get into giveaways now because one of the things that I’ve learned throughout these years, your brand is everything. Why are you rapping VRBO and Airbnb? If God forbid, something happens, or they close and things like that, you’ve tied yourself to another business where you have no control.
And yes, I still have Airbnb. All of my properties, unless if they’re designated for midterms, they’re on Airbnb. But that’s not my only source. That’s not my only channel. You want to make sure you diversify that channel because you never want to be in a place where you’re not powered or you’re powerless and you can’t control if there’s regulations or the analytics of now you went from the first page now you’re 30th page or disgruntled guests have given you three stars because you won’t let them check out at 1:00 when your checkout is at 12:00. So you have those things and you don’t want to be in a position where your business is solely dependent on someone else’s.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:26:09] Yeah, you are directly relating more value to your business if you’re not just leveraging one channel. But I want to get back to this conversation about generational wealth. Talk to us about explaining furnished rentals, short-term rentals to your parents, and how did you have a successful conversation where they were like, “You know what? We’re going to learn from you, daughter, and we’re going to try this thing that we hadn’t grown up doing.” So what was that conversation like?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:26:36] So the funniest conversation was arbitrage. They were like, “You want me to do what? You want me to rent out a home, stage it, I’m not going to own it.” My parents are pretty much like, “I want to own all the land and property that I have.” They were like, “I don’t get this, Jameelah.” And I had a little board. And I was drawing houses and trying to show them those type of things.
But we actually started off in the house I grew up. They decided to get another house, and it was just sitting there. I was overseas, so I couldn’t really do anything with it. But when I got back, they were trying to get long-term tenant in there. My dad is a numbers guy. He used to be a business consultant before he retired. So he’s a numbers guy, and I broke down all of the numbers, and then I compare it to him what I’m making in the properties that I’m doing. And I was like, “You’re missing money off of it.”
So that really helped him go through and he’s like, “Yeah, I want to do this.” Being the child, when they say they want to do, it means you’re doing it for them in the beginning. So I walk them through on how to stage the home, how to make sure that you have certain things in there that is not just thrown in there. A lot of times people just want to just throw things in there, but you’re actually giving your property a disservice by not staging it appropriately because you could charge more and then you attract what you put in. If you put in crap, you’re going to get receive crap.
So I went with him and showed him, walk through off of the staging and we fixed the house up. And this was all during COVID, by the way. So he was like, “I don’t know about this, Jameelah, I don’t know what we’re going to be doing here.” And I was able to get two nurses in there for six months. So then we started going after insurance adjusters and claim. So after that, we had someone in there for a year. So we have someone in there. They’ve been in there for a little over a year, paying over $3,000 in which long-term rental that area’s only, I would say 16 to 1,900.
Annette Grant: [00:28:37] Your dad giving you a monthly commission on this?
Jameelah Jordan: [00:28:40] He is, but I’m not going to lie, sometimes I don’t take it.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:28:48] He raised you right.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:28:50] Yeah, he’s giving it to me. And when I do take it, I put it in their account, I call it their fund. So we manage their Turo and I put it into a separate account. The only thing that comes out of there is the expenses because I want to make sure that they’re secure and safe. If anything happens or old age kicks in and you may not be able to do the things that you want to do, so I want to make sure that they’re settled.
I’m very family oriented. So I always tell people, start with where you’re at. With my dad, he started with my childhood home, and he bought that we house hack. And then we were able to go through and take that money, and we arbitrage off of it. Because that was quick, so we own property now. But we found different ways to go through, for example, arbitrage is one of the fastest ways to get started.
Now we’re able to then take that money, save up, and go after things that we really want to go after, like apartments. That’s our biggest goal right now is to acquire our first apartment complex. So these are the things that we did. Just take steps. Just start baby steps at a time. I know a lot of times when you see on Instagram and things like that, you’ll see people already at their Canaan, but if you’re not there, it’s okay. You don’t know the journey that they had to get through to actually get there. So I tell people just make sure you just start and try to be consistent with starting every single day trying to reach that goal.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:30:21] So good. That’s like a mic drop right there.
Annette Grant: [00:30:23] That’s good. So what’s next for you? And how can our listeners if they want to get in contact with you, they want to see how you’re doing this Turo game and just stay in touch? Talk to us about what’s next for you and how people can follow along on your journey.
Jameelah Jordan: [00:30:36] Yeah, so we’re still picking up properties. But our biggest thing, and we actually started going overseas to look at international properties for vacation rentals. So we’ve been playing around with what’s going to be our big step like first apartment complex or international properties because when you look at the math, yes, acquiring homes, single-family homes, it’s awesome. If you can acquire more than four doors, your occupancy rate and all those things just skyrocket. You don’t have that much dependency off of just one home. So for us, that’s that multifamily.
And then two, I started teaching others because I’m a firm believer, especially for my community, I shouldn’t be the only one succeeding. There is enough for all of us to go around. I don’t have the shortage mindset or mentality. So I started teaching others to do the same exact thing and coaching them through the process.
Another thing that I recently started, and this is coming from my virtual assistant side and marketing side, I started something called Host Etiquette where all those tips I was telling you about, like with pictures and templates and giveaways and things like that, I’m a very strong supporter of elevating the experience like you guys are, your guests come first. So making sure host is not just about getting the door, it’s about giving them experience. So I assist them with going through that journey, and little live courses off of how to elevate the experience, but how to learn to build wealth because you can’t really build wealth off of just one property, at least not the wealth I’m trying to go after.
Annette Grant: [00:32:10] Right. We know what you’re trying to get. I love that. Awesome. Where can our listeners follow along or reach out to you?
Jameelah: [00:32:15] Yeah, so my Instagram handle is IAmJameelahJordan. First name J-A-M-E-E-L-A-H. Last name Jordan. My website is www.jameelahjordan.com where you can find all of my information on there. And literally, if you ever have questions or anything like that, just DM me. I am always a DM away to chat with individuals about real estate and about furnished rentals because it’s my passion.
Annette Grant: [00:32:53] Awesome.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:32:54] What amazing empowering story. I’m going to talk to my parents. We got this call like listen, you guys, let’s think bigger here because it’s never too late to get started. Love your story. Thanks for inspiring us today. And real quick, listeners, we want to let you know too, if you have any questions popped up on today’s conversation, Annette and I have a new episode out and it’s the Ask Me Anything episode. So if you go to thanksforvisiting.me, in the upper right-hand corner there is a big red button and you can ask questions. And even if you have a question for Jameelah, we could DM her, ask her whatever her answer is and let you know on our podcast episode.
Annette Grant: [00:33:28] You have to use your voice. So we want to share your voice on the podcast so everybody can hear your questions because what seems so personal to you is actually very general. So we want to help as many people as possible with these questions that are swirling around in your head.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:33:40] But Jameelah’s handle and her website will all be in the show notes. Thank you so much for showing up today. My name is Sarah Karakaian.
Annette Grant: [00:33:47] I am Annette Grant, and together we are–
Both Sarah and Annette: [00:33:49] Thanks for Visiting.
Sarah Karakaian: [00:33:50] And we’ll talk to you next week. 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.
