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[00:00:05] Sarah: Hello. Welcome back for another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

[00:00:09] Annette: I am Annette Grant, and together we’re–

[00:00:11] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:00:12] Sarah: Let’s kick off this episode like we do every week, and that is sharing a short-term rental, but it might not be one of yours.

[00:00:19] Annette: One of you or one of us.

[00:00:22] Sarah: We are taking the liberty this week of sharing the Instagram account of our brand new project, Rich Hollow Retreat.

[00:00:30] Annette: Sarah, I’m the one that does the short-term rental.

[00:00:32] Sarah: [Inaudible] go into it.

[00:00:33] Annette: You just said it.

[00:00:34] Sarah: Okay.

[00:00:36] Annette: This is how it goes, ladies and gentlemen. This is how it goes. Steals my thunder. Thunder stealer. I wish I had a sound effect on my soundboard. Always stealing thunder sound.

[00:00:45] Sarah: I was going to say, why don’t you–

[00:00:46] Annette: All right. Well, you cannot steal my thunder because this week we are sharing @richhollowretreat. Again, that’s @richhollowretreat. And this is our new property, and we want you, please, go to the Instagram, follow, like. We might have a few pictures up for you, but really, this is just going to serve the purpose of sharing behind the scenes, everything that’s going on, and is something we share all the time, is please, build your account before you’re ready. You’ll see we have a logo on there, a logo that Sarah had a friend of hers design. Who is that friend, Sarah?

[00:01:25] Sarah: Oh, I was like, no, I didn’t Annette. Their name is ChatGPT.

[00:01:30] Annette: Right. So we had ChatGPT create a logo just so we can have something there and present. And then just really want to start showing you, build in front of you. And so we want to share that this week. And what I want to highlight about this account is that they went for it, and they got started.

[00:01:47] Sarah: Well, because we get that question a lot, of do I have to start the Instagram, or should I start the Instagram once I have my property ready? The photos are beautiful. And we see a lot of the viral properties show the before, show the renovation journey, show the–

[00:02:03] Annette: Before, during, and after.

[00:02:05] Sarah: Completely authentic, organic, not curated content about building their short-term rentals. So we got ours up and running because we have to do as we–

[00:02:15] Annette: Do the thing.

[00:02:16] Sarah: As we say. Yeah.

[00:02:17] Annette: So you will see it there. Follow along. We are going to be uploading content. We’re going to be consistently uploading content, which we always share. And guess what? The name might change, the photos might change, but we remain the same.

[00:02:29] Sarah: I was like, where are you going with this?

[00:02:31] Annette: Again, give us a follow @richhollowretreat. And we’re excited to share with you.

[00:02:36] Sarah: And maybe you are new around here. Maybe you are a first-time listener of Thanks for Visiting podcast. Thank you for tuning in. There are a lot of podcasts out there, and they’re all amazing, and we’re glad that you chose ours today.

[00:02:47] Annette: Are they all amazing?

[00:02:48] Sarah: Well, they all put effort out.

[00:02:51] Annette: That’s like saying every short-term rentals are amazing. And I know you have feelings about that.

[00:02:55] Sarah: I do. But if you’re new around here, check out Episode 349. That is where we introduce the concept or the project that we are embarking on with a partner, Mike Navarro. And my husband’s a part of it, and Annette is a part of it. And we bought 134–

[00:03:13] Annette: Mike’s wife, Ingrid.

[00:03:15] Sarah: Mike’s wife, Ingrid.

[00:03:15] Annette: My sister. Again, along for the ride.

[00:03:17] Sarah: We bought 134 acres in the Hocking Hills area. And we actually bought the property first, and now we’re going to come up with the concept. A lot of people have a concept first, and they try to find the land to match, so we’re going to be very clear and transparent about how that goes.

[00:03:34] Annette: As we move along the story, what we can share, before the deal even got started, we almost lost $40,000.

[00:03:41] Sarah: Did we talk about that in the episode?

[00:03:42] Annette: We haven’t yet, but let’s hold that. We’ll hold that one back. We almost lost 40 grand before we even got started. I like how we’re laughing now because if you don’t–

[00:03:51] Sarah: Only because we didn’t lose so now we can laugh about it.

[00:03:54] Annette: You’ll cry.

[00:03:55] Sarah: We did almost lose 40k, and I can speak to this. So Mike, our partner in it, was definitely the driving force in getting the deal done.

[00:04:07] Annette: Yes.

[00:04:07] Sarah: And his reasoning for that was between Dayton, Cincinnati and Columbus, this area, Hocking Hills, has been appreciating in value, has been the beneficiary of the growing cities.

[00:04:24] Annette: Drive-to destination.

[00:04:26] Sarah: Right. So outside of Columbus, we have other small cities like Lancaster or Canal, Winchester, and there are bigger businesses that are coming there. Google, for example, is going to have a hub there. And so it’s just driving more human beings to our area, and they need places to get away for the weekend. And so Mike believes in, as we do too, very passionately about this land appreciating in value over the next, what, 5, 10, 15 plus years.

[00:04:57] Annette: And him and his wife, they’ve been hosting for quite some time, if you go back and listen to their story in that episode, and he is a buy and hold, for sure.

[00:05:08] Sarah: Oh, yeah. He’s not selling anything.

[00:05:10] Annette: He is not selling anything. But we want to dig in a little bit. We’ll share more of the “almost losing 40k” story in another episode. Sometimes you do things backwards almost, and you guys, we are not completely backwards, but we’re now doing some competitor analysis as we’re getting closer to breaking ground and building.

[00:05:33] And Sarah and I can share. Of course, we know Columbus. We know this market, so we haven’t really done a deep dive into competitive analysis. And to be honest, when I got started, I didn’t even think to do any competitive analysis. I was like, let’s just go with my first short-term rental. So this was a great exercise. Sarah and I had fun. The way that we did it is we divided and conquered. Yes, we’re going to share this with you guys.

[00:05:56] We gave each other homework. Literally, I can share with you. This was homework on my plate. Sarah and I had a meeting set to go over this competitive analysis. This is how serious we take it. After church, I went to a coffee shop by myself because, I’m telling you, homework and me, I have got to stay focused.

[00:06:15] It was a Sunday, and I was like, I am not leaving this coffee shop until my competitive analysis is done. And it was fun. I think I got into it. It was very eye-opening, and so Sarah and I did competitive analysis of land, some concepts across the US, and then some right in our backyard. We did three each, Sarah?

[00:06:40] Sarah: Yes. And we got the properties from obviously Airbnb, Vrbo, and then Google, were the three different platforms that we made sure that we did analysis on, and we divided it up.

[00:06:52] Annette: Yeah, we divided and conquer. So Sarah had two or three.

[00:06:53] Sarah: At least three each, I think.

[00:06:54] Annette: And I think we got excited, so we did three. Actually, I was getting excited–

[00:06:58] Sarah: You did bonus.

[00:06:58] Annette: Right. I did a bonus one of like, I found this while I was researching. I think I was even texting. We have a group chat with all the owners, and I think I was like, check this out.

[00:07:07] Sarah: Well, because I’m not lost on Hocking Hills is a great market to invest in, but also, there are currently a lot of amazing short-term rentals already down there, rocking and rolling, and they have been for years. So we have to bring our A game, but I’m telling myself this because I tend to overthink, and then I over deliver in a way that doesn’t actually bring more money. I think that is something that I have to be very careful of.

[00:07:31] Annette: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:32] Sarah: Because I see my friends and people I used to work for, people that I’ve collaborated with, rock it, and I’m just like, I want to be as incredible as they are, but having these grandiose, whatever it is, let’s put a house upside down, or whatever it is, it’s like, is that going to bring more money? What do travelers in our areas actually want, and what is not being served currently in that area?

[00:07:58] Annette: So let’s share with them what we did in this competitive analysis. So we looked at their rates. We looked at their weeknights, their weekends, and any other, like, do they have extra guest fees. Do they have pet fees? We dug into pricing, and we looked at like their key messaging of their property.

[00:08:19] Sarah: And the benefits of coming to stay there.

[00:08:21] Annette: We looked at what were the same in all of these properties, and then we also was like, what’s the difference in the properties? This is where it got really fun for me. We looked at both their positive customer reviews, and their negative customer reviews. What are the frequently asked questions of their guests that we thought they were asking a lot of?

[00:08:47] We could see that on their direct booking site or on their OTAs. We could see, hey, you might ask this. And just the way that they are messaging to their guests and what those takeaways were. And so this was really my thought. I just went through all those bullet points, and believe us, we literally went through each property and did these exact same bullet points. And we just did it for six different properties, and it was really eye-opening.

[00:09:11] Sarah: I can tell you this, we already know. We know very little, but we do know this, that we do not want to do at this point big properties that sleep 10 plus people. We already decided that as a crew.

[00:09:23] Annette: Yes. So that’s good to know. That was not even something that we– in this competitive analysis, we did–

[00:09:31] Sarah: Filter.

[00:09:31] Annette: Filter on what we think our concept is. And we’ll share with you. We do think we’re going to do smaller units, one to two bedrooms, none of the large cabins. And one of the reasons why is just sheer speed to market and overall cost of building out those properties.

[00:09:48] Sarah: Yeah. And the ROI on those properties, it’s easier to get. Yeah. It’s easier to get our cash back.

[00:09:53] Annette: We have more flexibility. And you’ve heard us say at the beginning of the episode, we have 135 acres, so we have plenty of room down the line. If we want to do some of those bigger properties, we can. We’ll still have room to build those, if we so choose.

[00:10:09] Sarah: That is another thing that I’m working on, is knowing that there are going to be phases, and that’s okay, because I like to do the thing and do it full out all at once. It’s hard for me to layer on step by step, but with a project like this, we don’t have millions and millions of dollars at our disposal.

[00:10:30] Annette: We already spent a million dollars.

[00:10:32] Sarah: Yeah, we already spent $1 million plus. So there’s that. And so, yes, I’m also having to learn from the people that I have decided to do this project with, Annette, Mike, my husband, Ingrid. Be patient, listen to their ideas, and just trust that we are all smart. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we are going to come up with a great product. And that phases are going to be okay.

[00:10:56] Annette: Yeah. And so with competitive analysis, we know this was round one of that, speaking of phases. And as we hone in even closer, because like we said, we did do some of these nationwide. But as we get closer to actually that decision of one-bedroom versus two-bedroom versus exactly what our amenities will be, we will even do a second round of competitor analysis, and then really hone in what are going to be some of those things that we can stand out in the crowd, get those positive reviews. 

[00:11:29] And I’m going to say, one of the things I am still absolutely shooketh over in this competitive analysis is still, what in the world are some of these photos that people are putting out? I am like, I guess it’s like, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I don’t know. It is a rural area. People have been doing really successful there for a really long time, but that was something that was very surprising to me still, in some of the photos that were commanding, to me, a high [Inaudible] rate.

[00:12:03] Sarah: And in one hand, you’re like, so then why do we try so hard? But then you think, well, how much money are they leaving on the table?

[00:12:10] Annette: Absolutely. Mm-hmm.

[00:12:12] Sarah: So there was that. We also leveraged– Annette quickly mentioned this in the beginning when we were talking about the Instagram account and how I used ChatGPT4 to create our logo for us, mostly because that’s not something right now we need– we don’t need to be spending money on the logo.

[00:12:30] And even the name, we took the street that it’s on for now. It might stay the same. We might change it down the road, but right now we are focusing on the concept and really building out the financial model of how this is all going to map out so we can back into our financial goals with the properties that we bring on.

[00:12:50] But I go back to ChatGPT because we also use ChatGPT. We copy and pasted all of the reviews, put them in ChatGPT, and ask ChatGPT to bring out the positive remarks, bring out the negative customer reviews.

[00:13:04] Annette: And what that theme– it’s like our own data analyst.

[00:13:07] Sarah: If you have the paid version of ChatGPT, you can create a custom GPT. And so what we can start doing is honing in on this concept, and ChatGPT will start to learn who we’re serving, because we’re also honing in on the kind of guests that we want to serve.

[00:13:27] And this custom GPT will take all these positive, all these negatives, other concepts we come up with, all the ideas, the product, the project itself in terms of what the unit’s going to look like, how many people’s going to sleep, what the key messaging is.

[00:13:39] All this will go into the same ChatGPT, and it’ll start to learn who this person is. And so then down the road, when we want to create newsletters, we want to create special offers, we want to create special events, whatever we want to do, ChatGPT will start to learn who that guest avatar is and help us deliver marketing strategies that will attract that person. So that’s cool too as we build this out.

[00:14:02] Annette: Yeah. And an advanced marketing strategy, but that will soon become the norm.

[00:14:06] Sarah: It will.

[00:14:07] Annette: We’re going to continue to roll these episodes out, but I’m just going to go ahead and hook for the next one. Rest of this episode, we’re going to talk about what’s currently on the land, but at our next episode, I want to share all of the tech and the foundational, digital platforms that we are working with and the roadblocks that we’ve incurred there.

[00:14:32] I want to save that for an episode where we can go through exactly buying our domain name, like Sarah said, deciding on this name, if this will be the interim name, and then us trying to set up some tech around that. So everything from our banking to our domain names, to our email provider.

[00:14:49] Email marketing.

[00:14:50] Annette: To even Facebook. We’ll share. And we’ll go through that. We’ll bullet point that list of how we are taking that journey for our digital real estate side. But the next steps on the physical property, while we’re doing this competitive analysis, while we’re deciding what to do with all of the land, there’s already some current buildings on this property.

[00:15:09] Sarah: This is why in addition to the land being a really great investment in terms of us really believing in the growth of Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Ohio itself, this property already had utilities on it. So we’re talking septic tank, electric, water, because it has a small cabin. It’s about 700 square feet. And then behind it are two garages. It’s a really cool story.

[00:15:34] Annette: Large garages too. They’re not even two cars. They’re like two and a half, three.

[00:15:40] Sarah: No, no, no. They’re like four. Yeah. They’re quite big because the gentleman who used to live there, this used to be his full-time home, and he had two garages where he would work out of. Looked like he had some tractors in there, potentially, just like he took care of the land himself.

[00:15:55] This land is well cared for, well-manicured. It was on the market for about a year, and then we went through the winter, and so now we’re having to backtrack a little bit in terms of getting her back into good shape.

[00:16:09] Annette: And we think the story goes, we don’t know exactly, but that the prior owner just took meticulous care of this land, thought that probably his family would continue, it would be a legacy property, and they would enjoy the land for a very long time, but that was not the case.

[00:16:26] Sarah: They sold it.

[00:16:28] Annette: They wanted to sell, I think, pretty quickly after, unfortunately, he had passed. But that’s the story, I think, of the land. But you can tell that the land was just cared for so deeply by the full-time owner and the person that lived there.

[00:16:41] Sarah: I know. I foresee us doing some small nods to his efforts.

[00:16:46] Annette: Paying homage.

[00:16:46] Sarah: Yes. Paying homage to him. So going back, there is one small cabin, about 700 square feet. This was his home. It’s little quirky, and then two big garages. And that’s it on 135 acres.

[00:17:00] Annette: Well, maybe a shed. There’s a little shed too. There’s a actual shed, and then a little wood storage place. I’m going to talk about something quirky. I think we’re going to get rid of it. I’m a little sad about it, but the kitchen is elevated right now.

[00:17:13] Sarah: You take three steps up the kitchen.

[00:17:15] Annette: Because there is a bed–

[00:17:18] Sarah: Oh, that we’re getting rid of. Yes.

[00:17:20] Annette: There is a bed, and maybe we can get video of this and put it on Instagram.

[00:17:23] Sarah: We got to do that.

[00:17:25] Annette: Oh, I would, yeah. I got an action shot for that one. The bed rolls underneath the kitchen. And I know it sounds crazy, but the kitchen is elevated, and so the kitchen is right next to the living room, because it’s tiny. It was, really, a roller bed, a hideaway bed.

[00:17:43] Sarah: There’s a bedroom too, so this was for his guests.

[00:17:45] Annette: Yeah. It was a really smart idea though. It tucks underneath the kitchen, and then you pull it out, but also quirky. I’ve actually never seen anything like that before.

[00:17:54] Sarah: It’s crazy because when you put it in underneath the kitchen, it’s exposed to all the kitchen plumbing pipes around it. You know what I mean? It’s not like it’s–

[00:18:01] Annette: You got some grease.

[00:18:03] Sarah: No, it’s interesting.

[00:18:05] Annette: But it was an engineering feat of some sort. It was actually smart though, the thought process. It was space saving, let’s put it that way. It was space saving. The other quirkiness is, yeah, just how you do walk up to the kitchen. And then for the size of the cabin right now, there are actually two bathrooms, and one of the bathrooms has an outside door. The door opens into the bathroom, which I don’t know if that was when he was out working outside or something.

[00:18:30] Sarah: It’s like a [Inaudible] maybe. Yeah.

[00:18:31] Annette: Yeah, maybe that is–

[00:18:32] Sarah: Very, very tiny. But here was the conundrum. I say was because we did decide– sometimes you just have to decide and move on. You can’t vacillate for too long. But the conundrum was, do we focus on– so behind the two garages is where we’re going to put build our new cabins, our new units. Do we focus on that and all that infrastructure, or do we renovate the existing cabin and get some cash flow going?

[00:18:56] Annette: So we decided, renovate the existing cabin. Sarah’s husband is an architect, and like I said, Mike is a builder. So they went out, assessed everything, checked everything out. Everything’s good to go. The bones of the cabin are good. So we are like, wait a second. We did some numbers there on what it would take to rehab the cabin. Once the rehab is complete, when we could have the cabin open. And honestly, it just gave us some breathing room. Because we can share with you guys, we started making our payments in April.

[00:19:26] Everybody here knows that first of the month comes around quick. And so we’ve got some money in the bank to pad for a while. But again, once that first comes around for several months, and there’s nothing coming in it, it goes away. It evaporates very quickly. So that’s our plan, is to get this rehabbed and open as soon as possible so we can have some of those positive deposits coming into the bank account and not just outgoing.

[00:19:53] And not only that, it helps us start to see how guests are going to respond to the location. We can start to work out some of those kinks and work on getting some of our providers up and running. This is already a good exercise. We’re working on our Wi-Fi. We’re working on our gas, electric. Who’s going to mow the lawn? That type of stuff, we’re working on that.

[00:20:11] Sarah: I foresee some episodes where we talk about– because we will be renovating the garages, I think eventually tearing down one, converting another one, and of course then getting the infrastructure for the units behind the garages. And so how we’ll want to get cash flow from this cabin that appears first when you drive in to all that work we’re doing, not too far behind it and all that noise, so that’ll be fun.

[00:20:34] Annette: What happens to the cabin.

[00:20:35] Sarah: What happens to the cabin.

[00:20:37] Annette: But we also–

[00:20:38] Sarah: Eventually.

[00:20:39] Annette: Yeah. And we’re going to share as much as possible. And if there’s any details that you guys want to know that we’re not sharing, email us. Let us know. But we are meeting. We meet twice a week as a meet. We go over what we’re doing, and we found also we needed this cabin to anchor us.

[00:20:58] We were going wild with ideas and what are next steps, and just going down that runaway train of, wait, let’s have something anchor us while we can dream, but have an anchor to like, again, be that anchor, have us focus on something, and creating revenue.

[00:21:16] And with that, we also know our bandwidth is limited. And so I’m going to have Sarah share already who we’re outsourcing things. I know she said we outsource to ChatGPT, but we also started outsourcing some other things. and I’ll share who I’m outsourcing. You share who you’re outsourcing.

[00:21:32] Sarah: Yeah. This might make some of you cringe, but I’m okay with that, because the entire team, we’re all in the short-term rental business full-time, but we’re doing other things. So Nick and I manage short-term rentals. We have our own– Annette and I obviously run Thanks for Visiting, which is very much a full-time situation. Mike and Ingrid have their, what, 15 downtown giant homes.

[00:21:54] Annette: I thought you were going to say kids, but they only have four of them.

[00:21:56] Sarah: And four kids. Yeah. So we all have our full-time gig. We sympathize with all of you out there who have full-time jobs, families, and you’re also trying to get your hosting business off the ground. And I say all this because we needed to design the cabin. We needed to come up with a concept for the cabin.

[00:22:13] And I’ve been there before, and actually it was not too long ago. It was last year. My husband and I had three renovation projects going on, a buy and hold, a flip and our personal home. And how messy it got, because we were way over leveraged in our time–

[00:22:28] Annette: How is your hair not gray?

[00:22:29] Sarah: No, the amount of money we pissed away. I remember myself saying like, I don’t care. Just make the problem go away. Just make this decision. Just spend the extra money to get it done.

[00:22:42] Annette: Yeah, I remember you had some serious decision fatigue. It’s just like when you’re choosing every single last detail of a house. So with that being said, you–

[00:22:50] Sarah: So with that being said, I outsourced designing the cabin. Do I love designing? Am I good at it? Yes, and yes. But what I did instead was I came up with a concept, a vibe I was going for.

[00:23:00] Annette: Yeah, you didn’t give it all away.

[00:23:01] Sarah: No. I went on Pinterest. I did the whole mood board things. I got some ideas together. I made sure my team liked the direction in which I was going. It’s definitely a vibe. They liked it. So then I went to Upwork, and I interviewed, I would say, 10 designers. Decided on one who actually was probably the most expensive one of all of them. And when I tell you she knocked it out of the park in one day.

[00:23:24] Annette: In record breaking time.

[00:23:26] Sarah: One, no. And listeners, she has a mood board with three different concepts that support my vibe, and then a designer’s choice.

[00:23:34] Annette: All the pricing too, right?

[00:23:36] Sarah: All the pricing.

[00:23:36] Annette: For the materials.

[00:23:37] Sarah: It’s all linked. Once I told her which ones I wanted to go with, I told her the next day. She then had an entire spreadsheet for us to give to our builder and our contractor so they can order and shop for things. And she stayed within budget, like I told her. I was like, hey, I need you to really focus on getting materials.

[00:23:55] I want them to be quality. But big stores is great. She knew that we were in Columbus, so she would source it from things that are local to here in Columbus. So when I tell you in a day it was done, great choices, everything.

[00:24:08] Annette: I want you to actually share with me because I haven’t asked you this yet, and then I think this will help a lot of listeners. Did you make a job description and people applied, or did you– so listen to this, because I can share with everyone, I do this the wrong way.

[00:24:24] When I go on to Upwork, I actually reach out to people, and you shouldn’t do that. You should actually post your job listing or what you’re looking for. That way, you know the people reaching out to you are hungry. They’re ready to go. You are very descriptive in that. Correct, Sarah?

[00:24:40] Sarah: Yes.

[00:24:41] Annette: Okay.

[00:24:41] Sarah: Descriptive. I want them to have previous vacation rental design because I want them to understand the kind of materials that you need. I don’t have to tell all of you.

[00:24:52] Annette: Well, how long did it take you to come up with this job description though?

[00:24:55] Sarah: Thirty minutes. I definitely use ChatGPT to help me. I also went into some job boards that were specific to short-term or hospitality and got some ideas there.

[00:25:04] Annette: And then from when you put the listing out– and this is free.

[00:25:10] Sarah: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:11] Annette: But from when you put the listing out to you made the decision to hire our designer, what was that turnaround time? I felt like it was fairly quick.

[00:25:18] Sarah: It was because Mike was like, I need this design by X date.

[00:25:22] Annette: So he could start.

[00:25:23] Sarah: Annette, like, you and I are about to go to London. Do you know what I’m saying?

[00:25:28] Annette: So it was a matter of days.

[00:25:29] Sarah: I had to, yeah, get with it days.

[00:25:32] Annette: I still am floored at her turnaround time.

[00:25:36] Sarah: No. I hope she has a bunch of drafters doing all this work for her.

[00:25:41] Annette: Did you request a 48-hour turnaround time, or did she just deliver that?

[00:25:45] Sarah: No, I told her that we have to have the final design by this date because our contractor’s going to be ready to go. And actually, in the job description, I said, “This is a tall order.” So everyone who reached out had availability. And sometimes you get nervous. You are like, well, why do they have immediate availability? And I think she just has a well-oiled machine.

[00:26:04] Annette: She has a team.

[00:26:04] Sarah: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:06] Annette: And can you share what the total of that was?

[00:26:08] Sarah: $1,000.

[00:26:10] Annette: Ooh. And guess what? That is, you are teeing me up for where I am outsourcing.

[00:26:16] Sarah: Where are you outsourcing, Annette?

[00:26:18] Annette: We are starting our books immediately on our short-term rental. In the past, we can be very transparent that a lot of times I didn’t hire a bookkeeper until after everything was ready and we listed on the OTAs and money was coming in the other direction. That is not fun.

[00:26:38] It is way behind the eight ball. And I’ll share, we just started working with this person, so let me get some more reps in with them, and hopefully we’ll have them on the show. But I specifically hired a new bookkeeper, short-term rental specific, because I’m interested in just trying diversification.

[00:26:53] I can share, like Sarah said, we have a lot of different businesses, properties, and I use the same bookkeeper, and for this one I wanted it to be separate, because things get lost in translation. It’s all under the same email. So I separated this one out. This is a big project, and I wanted to test a new short-term rental bookkeeper for everyone in our world.

[00:27:12] And I’m working on that right now. So our QuickBooks is up and running, and any expense is already being tracked, because this, again, like ideas, can be that runaway train where– and we’re already. There’s already a lot of transactions just buying the purchase and all of our partners. There’s a decent spreadsheet already on.

[00:27:31] Sarah: Who contributed what and when.

[00:27:32] Annette: What does that catalogue look like? It’s pretty extensive already. We have different percentages, and so I want to do that now before it gets too far. We could have done this even earlier. But the thing is, we do have them on monthly retainer now, so I can also just share that it is hard to pay for things monthly, recurring.

[00:27:51] Sarah: All the money’s going out.

[00:27:52] Annette: And especially on that tech, we’ll share with you on that tech episode. We’re starting to pay for things that we’re probably not going to use for quite some time, but you’ve got to start somewhere. And so the bookkeeping and designing, which, and I can share, I’ve done bookkeeping for the last 20 years and some capacity, but I always want someone looking over my work.

[00:28:12] I always want a sounding board, especially when there’s– it doesn’t matter what amount of money it is. It’s so nice to know that I have someone else helping you. We have a lot of people helping us with books, just looking over, at different capacities, from CPA to bookkeeper, to accounting assistant.

[00:28:29] Sarah: Can you share how much you are spending on that retainer?

[00:28:31] Annette: Woo. You know what? I had to pay a little bit upfront because it was the setup. I’ll share with this because I do want us to be as transparent as possible. There was an overall get your book started, set up, which I believe was 750, but that included like also your first month of books

[00:28:50] I’ll have to share this with another episode. I’m pretty sure it’s 250 a month, or it might have went up to the 350. It depends. I think we’re in a lower bracket until we actually start having reservations. That was part of something that we worked on, is like, hey, until you’re at the actual bringing money– because we’re not going to have any income for a little while. There was a different tier that I could choose in the interim, and I think I went with that lower tier, and then we’ll upgrade once there’s the income.

[00:29:15] Sarah: That makes sense. Yeah. So that’s where we’re at right now. I think we shared with you that we decided to renovate the cabin. Oh yeah. Because we talked about the designer. So we decided to renovate the cabin, get that up and running. We’re going to be as sensible as we can with a renovation.

[00:29:28] So that is obviously behind our brand of quality products, furniture that’s comfortable without breaking the bank, because we really don’t know how this cabin will necessarily fit into our future concept. We’re not quite sure.

[00:29:42] So my husband’s architecture team is working on the master site plan, so it’s not like we’re not thinking about it, but there’s just a lot of factors to take in. We want to back into like the goals that we want to hit in the next couple years. And it’s just one of those things where it’s like we just have to see how it plays out. But I was thinking, Annette, our next land update episode, let’s talk about how we’re going to get money for when we do bring units into the property.

[00:30:08] Annette: Which one are we doing next? The tech or the units?

[00:30:11] Sarah: We were going to do the fundraising.

[00:30:13] Annette: And then we’ll talk about all these that I misspoke.

[00:30:16] Sarah: And we might even be able to talk about the tech during that episode. Because the tech and the funding go hand in hand.

[00:30:24] Annette: Yeah. And we can share with you guys, the day that we had the tech roadblocks, we literally were like, someone just wants us to quit before we even start. It was getting blocked all over the place. But we’re excited, but we’re on the rollercoaster. And there’s already been a rollercoaster, and we haven’t even, like, I don’t know.

[00:30:40] Sarah: Welcome our first guest.

[00:30:42] Annette: Or even swung– is it swung a hammer? Swing a hammer? Swung?

[00:30:47] Sarah: Before she keeps going and says swang next, let us know if you found this episode interesting at all. If you have questions, if you have concerns for us–

[00:30:56] Annette: If you want to be a guest. Well, we have a waiting list. Oh, we should start a waiting list. I have a lot of ideas today too, listeners, so we’ll get our website up and running so we can get a wait list.

[00:31:06] Sarah: But with that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:31:08] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:31:10] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:31:11] Sarah: Talk to you next time.