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[00:00:00] 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 start this episode like we do every week, and that’s sharing one of you, our incredible listeners, who’s using our hashtag on Instagram, #STRShareSunday. Annette, who are we sharing this week?

[00:00:22] Annette: This week we’re sharing @littlecottageonthefarm. Again, that’s @littlecottageonthefarm, and it’s Matthew and Elizabeth, and I just love this story. So they bought a farm for Elizabeth’s speech therapy practice to incorporate horses. It had two houses on the property, and one of the houses was going to be her clinic, but she thought, wait, there’s more. And she converted part of the house into her clinic, part of into a short-term rental. And they did not stop there. Just to get everybody’s thoughts flowing on what your property could be, they also do other events. So they do mini photo shoots. They do food and wine pairing events, painting classes, girl scout and boy scout troop visits.

[00:01:14] And she wrote a book called Udder Chaos. Haha, udder, U-D-D-E-R, which is so cute. And she does book readings there. So I think the first thing that I want you to go to their Instagram, like all their pictures because all their animals are so cute. They also do goat cuddling sessions.

[00:01:31] Sarah: I would sign up immediately.

[00:01:32] Annette: Yeah, so goat cuddling. And this is not for adults. This is for children.

[00:01:37] Sarah: Oh.

[00:01:37] Annette: I guess the adults could do it too, but that might be udder chaos. All right, I am really getting away from myself here, but please go, like all the animals. They have so many animals on their farm. So cute. But I love that they started with one idea and they just kept the momentum going. And I think they only rent out.

[00:01:57] What I love also is they control their calendar. So they only actually have guests on the weekends because she’s practicing speech therapy during the week in the home and then they can switch it to the weekends for the guests. So I love this. They’ve really taken this choose your own adventure, and they’ve created their whole property. They’ve really taken the term working farm into a whole other level. So Little Cottage on the Farm, well done. Maybe go hang out with them. Go do some goat cuddling if you live nearby.

[00:02:29] Sarah: Let’s go back to just a few weeks ago, Annette, when you and I took our first, actually not our first international trip together because you’d come on my 40th birthday to Columbia with me, which was so fun. But this was our first international work trip. We went to London. We talked about the mastermind we attended with other short-term rental professionals at the Castle. But we also went to the Short Stay Summit, which is a one-day event in London. And I don’t even remember how we met Lisa, today’s guest.

[00:02:59] Annette: We just bumped into her. I think we were working at the AI booth.

[00:03:03] Sarah: When Annette says working, what she really means to say is she commandeered our new friend’s booth.

[00:03:08] Annette: He had to go to the bathroom. Had to take control. Had to help him out. I was selling.

[00:03:13] Sarah: We connected with Lisa, and she was and is incredible. So she has, everyone, a storied background of being a real estate investor herself in her 20s to starting a property management company on an island where she did not live, the island of Cyprus. And over the years, she grew that company to 175 properties and then–

[00:03:37] Annette: In five years.

[00:03:38] Sarah: In five years, which is incredible. And we won’t spoil how it all ends up. But something to look forward to in this conversation is her hot, hot tip on how we as small business owners tend to get in our own way by being a bottleneck. For me, it was like, yes, I know that is a possibility, and I am always trying to be out of my body and aware of when I’m getting in my own way, but it’s good to get back in there and to see what are ways that I could just remove myself from a situation and let the systems work and do what they’re supposed to do? So she’s got a great tip there. But let’s get onto our interview with Lisa Roads.

[00:04:22] Lisa, welcome to the Thanks for Visiting podcast.

[00:04:25] Lisa: Hi. Great to be with you.

[00:04:28] Sarah: We are so excited to dig in with you today. Let’s get our listeners up to speed with how the heck you got started in the short-term rental industry and when.

[00:04:36] Lisa: Like so many people, it was very random, and not particularly planned. I think it goes back way into my 20s when I started investing in property, typical buy select properties in the UK and then 2000s, I started looking at diversifying my investment portfolio. So I started looking a bit further afield internationally, outside of the UK. And I stumbled upon Cyprus, which was, at that time, very, very immature emerging investment market. And without my other half, I disappeared on a inspection trip and bought three properties off plan, as you do. As you do.

[00:05:09] Annette: No, no, not as you do.

[00:05:12] Lisa: No? Doesn’t everybody do that?

[00:05:15] Annette: The dream is. So Lisa, we got to go back. So you’re investing in long-term rentals. Is that–

[00:05:24] Lisa: From my 20s, yeah.

[00:05:25] Annette: Okay. I want to go back even further. Where did you get bit by just the real estate bug in general?

[00:05:32] Lisa: I blame my dad. So my dad was an entrepreneur, business owner, and I can remember him being quite tough on me and my sister as a child, saying, you need to stand your own two feet. You need to make your own money. And he brought us up with a really quite strong work ethic.

[00:05:48] And he said to me, you need to buy property. You can never be poor if you own property. So I was like, okay, dad. So I think at the age of– I was under 20. I was a civil servant in the UK, and I was earning very little money. And I walked along the road to a bank or a mortgage lender, and I said, how much money will you lend me? I want to go and buy a house.

[00:06:08] And they was like, are you serious? I was like, how much will you lend me? And I think they lend me something like 25,000 pounds. It was such a small amount of money. I said, yeah, I’ll take that. And they gave you a certificate in those days and said, here you’re. There’s your 25,000 pounds. Go buy the house.

[00:06:22] So actually, I couldn’t buy. I couldn’t afford anything where my parents lived in Suffolk. So I went up north to a really pretty part of County Durham. And I bought an old mining cottage. That was my first property, and it was a long way away from where I lived. And I renovated it with my parents’ help.

[00:06:36] And I sold that. I sold that quite quickly and made my money on it. And I made more money on the next property and the next property. So I did the typical do some improvements, make more money on it, sell it, and buy something else. So by the time I met my other half in my early 20s, I’d made more money on properties than he had, and he was 10 years older than me.

[00:06:54] Annette: Love that. So in the US, we call that flipping, what’s the term–

[00:06:58] Lisa: Yeah, that’s pretty much what it was.

[00:07:00] Annette: Is the same in the UK? Flipping?

[00:07:01] Lisa: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:07:02] Annette: When did you decide, wait, I don’t want to flip any– did you go straight from flipping to Cyprus or did you go from flipping to buying and holding?

[00:07:11] Lisa: So we were living and working abroad in Saudi Arabia. I was in export promotion for the Middle East for the government for a few years. So we had some [Inaudible] in the UK while we were living outside of the UK. They were traditional [Inaudible], and they did their own thing. They didn’t really need a lot of maintenance, but I was very much kind of like, oh, look, there’s other stuff going on in the investment market.

[00:07:30] Maybe we need to diversify. I need a pension pot. Primarily, I need a pension pot. So that’s why I started looking. And my other half had no insight into it whatsoever. He left it totally with me. I can remember going and buying these properties and then people saying, well, if it’s good enough for you, then it’s good enough for us too.

[00:07:46] So my sister said, okay, I need some of that too. So whatever you are buying, buy me some too. So I ended up buying my sister two properties unseen while I was buying property in Cyprus as well.

[00:07:57] Annette: The year that you were doing this, podcasting wasn’t big. The internet wasn’t big. How are you researching and knowing that maybe Cyprus is the next place? There wasn’t Zillow, and I don’t even know what you use in the UK, but now we just have everything at our fingertips. How are you getting, first, the information on the investing and then, two, meeting with the realtors, getting this international funds wired, all of this stuff that today is at the snap of our fingers?

[00:08:26] Lisa: I was quite a big business networker. I always have been. I’ve been a really big collaborator in business, and I was a member of a number of networking forums in the UK, and I stumbled across a number of people that were in property investment, and that’s who took me to Cyprus. So I went on an inspection trip with one of those people that I met in business and did my own due diligence when I got there.

[00:08:48] I didn’t take for granted what someone was telling me. I did all my own homework. And in fact, I remember being offered a job by the estate agency that was telling me the property saying, you are really good. I grilled them to the ends degree before I signed on the dotted line. He is like, do you want a job? And I’m like, no. I actually said to him, you couldn’t afford me, and he thought it was really funny.

[00:09:07] Sarah: You’re like, I’m not joking.

[00:09:08] Annette: That wasn’t a joke.

[00:09:09] Lisa: I still remember that day. He said, do you want a job? And I said, I don’t think you could afford me. And it was just such a funny moment. It was a very flippant comment, but I think he thought it was quite funny. And he continually tried to get me to work for him. Actually, I did some marketing work for him because I had a marketing agency in the UK at the time with a business partner. So yeah, my marketing background, my business networking background, all came and helped me in my research and what I actually bought in the end.

[00:09:37] Sarah: Okay. So you purchased properties in Cyprus, and then what did you do with them?

[00:09:43] Lisa: So they were built in about 18 months. And when they came for completion, I was probably as naive as any other overseas investor, and I assumed that all these other services that I was going to need as an owner would be there. Got a bit of a wake-up call, and I realized that they weren’t. There really wasn’t any really established property management businesses.

[00:10:01] There was your next-door neighbor offering to key hold for you, but there wasn’t the level of support that I really wanted and needed. Equally, there weren’t your big furniture stores, your big furniture package company. They just didn’t exist. This market was very young. And I thought, well, there’s an opportunity.

[00:10:18] I need those services. And instead of all these other investors that are coming behind me, let’s go make that happen. So that’s what I did. Primarily because I had my own properties and my sister’s properties and a number of other people in our complex needed the service, I said, well, if I create the service, do you want it?

[00:10:34] And I called it my Investor Complete Service, which was take an empty property, interior design, pull together the furnishing inventory, the budgets, the buying, the installation, the project management, and get that empty property furnished within about six weeks from start to finish.

[00:10:49] Bearing in mind, most things had to be purchased outside of Cyprus and shipped to Cyprus. So there had to be allowances for that to happen as well. And I pulled together a team to primarily just deliver that service, and I would arrive in Cyprus having done all of the legwork in the UK with clients. And then I’d land on the island to oversee the project management with this team doing all of this installation of everything so that by the time we left, heads were made, curtains were up, photographs were taken, and it was ready to go. Someone could have stayed in.

[00:11:18] Annette: And we’re just passing by the fact that we didn’t have to Google where Cyprus was before this podcast episode. Can you share with the listeners where Cyprus is, and like you said, those shipping challenges to the locations?

[00:11:32] Lisa: Cyprus is in the Mediterranean. It’s off mainland Greece. It’s about four and a half hours flying time from the UK. We’re very lucky that we did– it’s been a very established holiday destination for many years particularly very popular with the British and the European market, the Germans, the French.

[00:11:48] And so it was very well known as a very good holidays destination, but it had pockets of what was well known. So Paphos area, very well known. Limassol, very well known. But where we were buying properties were fairly unknown parts of the island. So again, not an established tourist market for those locations actually.

[00:12:07] So that was one of the next challenges we were going to have, was not only did we not have OTAs, not only did we not have really established markets there. We didn’t have a lot of things. We then had to create that market, and that’s where I leveraged my marketing background to identify strategic partners and all the things we’re going to need to get those properties out there into the marketplace to get them rented.

[00:12:29] Sarah: Let’s go back the team you built really quick because I think a lot of our listeners can parlay this into, maybe they want to start a remote management company where they invest, which might be out of state for them right here in the US. So those team members, were they from the UK, or did you hire locally? How did you get that team together?

[00:12:47] Lisa: So I had a bit of both actually. So in the UK, I started employing locally for people to support me administratively because this was quite a big undertaking. You know IKEA’s a store. So imagine if you went to IKEA and you had to buy 50 shopping trolley loads worth of stuff and bring it back to your house, and then pack it into boxes and ship it for each client.

[00:13:08] That’s the undertaking we are talking about. And then all the customs paperwork, all the purchasing paperwork. And then when it arrived the other end, I needed to meet it in customs in Limassol. I was the only woman I remember seeing in the customs place at the shipping port in Limassol with a very, very long in the tooth very experienced customs clearance guy.

[00:13:32] But I pulled that team together by talking to people on the ground. I would turn up at places and say, who do you use– as big companies go in Cyprus, I made friends with a very good furniture company who did actually help me build some packages eventually.

[00:13:46] But I said, who do you use for shipping, and who do you use for clearing customs? And who do you use as an electrician? Who do you use for this? And these people were so incredibly helpful because they signposted me to some really, really good people and said, I know she’s only a small business, but please look after her. And they did.

[00:14:00] I was so very lucky for those relationships, really. And interestingly, I spoke in Barcelona very recently on a subject, how to successfully scale with successful strategic partnerships. And that was really so key to my business scaling in Cyprus, was I wasn’t there on the ground. I didn’t live there, and I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t built those relationships that were so very helpful to me to deliver that business until I did start growing and employ my own team on the ground.

[00:14:25] Sarah: And I agree with you. As an entrepreneur, you see a problem, and if it’s a big enough problem and you can solve it, you know there’s going to be a payday. So you knew there was a problem. Did you map out payday for you? I’m seeing you having to pay the administrative people and paying these people to help you unbox and load.

[00:14:41] And I’m sure your clients are giving you deposits, but did you even begin to anticipate how much investing you’d have to do in the business side? And how did that all end up working out and mapping out for you?

[00:14:53] Lisa: It’s very funny, isn’t it? Because I think I’m a very logical thinking, planning, organized project manager. And I think when you map, this is what the process looks like and these are the components you’re going to need for it, I clearly had in my mind that I was going to offer a service that although owners were going to pay for it, it was going to be cheaper than them trying to do it themselves, easier than them trying to do it themselves.

[00:15:13] Trying to do it yourself, you’d never get it done in a couple of weeks because you ever turn up on an island and expect them to have 12 of anything or furniture in supply when you need it now? It just doesn’t happen. Add to that, the cost of your flights, your accommodation, your car, and your time off work.

[00:15:29] I knew the amount we were charging for the service was a no brainer for most investor owners so just to hand it over and say, just take it off my hands and make it happen. Equally, I understood the target clients we were going to rent to, so I knew about what we needed to furnish those properties to look like, what they needed for inventory, how we need to cover health and safety.

[00:15:48] And when we were educating investor owners, some of them had never invested in property before. So this was quite a big education piece for a lot of owners to say, we are going to take care of all of this for you. You don’t need to worry about a thing. And we will make sure that we have a product that’s going to work for the clients we want to invite to stay when it comes to getting them onto the market.

[00:16:07] Annette: Can you share with us what that pricing– was there a pricing to set up the home?

[00:16:11] Lisa: As a property.

[00:16:11] Annette: Yeah. Can you talk about the way that you–

[00:16:15] Lisa: So we had a fee per size of property for managing the process, and then we basically provided owners with a budget for an inventory for quality of types of– we never went lower than mid-range furniture for anything. And basically, you are costing up the furnishing an entire house, including air conditioning, and solar panels, and smoke detectors. You know the whole inventory, your garden furniture, your barbecues, everything.

[00:16:42] You are giving them an entire inventory, and you are going out and buying those items for them. So it was a significant investment for these owners, but it was worth doing properly for making sure that we had quality control of staff, that it was right for the market, and it was going to do the job it needed to do.

[00:16:57] That’s something I found that owners that did it themselves didn’t quite understand. Everyone was saying, I’m going to go and buy second hand. Yeah, but there’s second hand, and there’s second hand, isn’t there? It doesn’t always work. From a quality perspective, it doesn’t work from a practical perspective, health and safety.

[00:17:13] So I was very hot on all of those things to really say to owners, we are the experts in this, and we are going to take– and also, I’m like you. I’m an investor like you. I needed the service, and if I can do it for my own, I’m going to take care of your properties as if it was my own. And that’s exactly what we did.

[00:17:27] Annette: But what I heard you say is this is a newer market. And you obviously didn’t have PriceLabs or AirDNA and being able to do all of this forecasting. How are you forecasting for your clients, crossing your fingers and writing down numbers? Honestly, with a new market like that, where were you even going for data to try to understand the market and what you could command?

[00:17:52] Lisa: We market trawled. Yeah, we market trawled what we knew was available in terms of finding out. We spoke to state agents for what they were renting for. We basically did as much benchmarking as we could to get a figure. We explained to owners that the first year your business is going to make a loss.

[00:18:09] You cannot expect to make a profit in the first year. And most investors understand that actually. If they’re property investors, they understand that. Let’s build a business plan that says, this is a big investment. You’re not going to get your returns for two to three years, but we did get it back eventually.

[00:18:22] I think the thing is you have to manage expectations, don’t you? In any business plan, you have to manage expectations. And I think that’s something that perhaps some newer owners coming into the market perhaps don’t quite understand that you are running a business and it doesn’t always make a profit right away.

[00:18:36] Annette: You went from zero to 175 properties in five years. Were you competing with yourself? I’m just thinking like, if I already know you have 100 properties and you want to bring on mine, why would my property at 101– it seems like it’s maybe a smaller market. Did you start almost competing against yourself and your own investors?

[00:19:00] Lisa: No, because our core market were only investors, and we were working with estate agents that were only selling to investors. And because these companies in the UK, outside of the UK, were selling the investment product and they needed a partner that could deliver the bit that we did, they were always referring clients to us because we took a problem off their hands, and we made sure that their owners had a solution that was going to work for them once they bought the property.

[00:19:25] Because they didn’t offer that service. It wasn’t really their core business, and we already did it. The only thing I knew we would probably anticipate with any business is there will always be owners that might want to flip and sell. You are always going to get that. But actually, I have owners that worked with us for 18, 20 years that bought and eventually decided to just keep because they wanted to use it for themselves when they retired.

[00:19:47] I didn’t lose a lot of clients through any other reason other than the odd one that might want to sell because they want to buy something else, but I had clients that had properties all over the island, not just in Paphos, in Limassol, Larnaca. So we were looking after properties in three areas, not just one.

[00:20:03] And most of them held on for quite a long time because it does take a while for a market to mature. So actually, they’re not looking for short-term flipping insight, whereas they’re looking for long-term investment return. And I would say the market’s really only now maturing 20 years later. It took quite a long time.

[00:20:19] Whereas markets in London, other parts of the UK, they’ve matured, or they already matured. But when you’re buying into a new market, you might have to look at for the longer term view rather than a short-term flip.

[00:20:31] Sarah: Once your initial properties were all set up and now you can use the computer, use marketing efforts, whether they’re mailers, what have you, to get guests in there, were you back home in the UK? Did you stay in Cyprus?

[00:20:46] Lisa: I never lived in Cyrus. I never lived in Cyprus. Never lived there. No. Never intended to live there. I had a marketing agency in the UK, which I ended up selling to my business partner because I couldn’t juggle the two things. These both had legs, and they were both very busy businesses. So I sold out to my business partner on the marketing agency, and she took that and ran off with that.

[00:21:05] And I then focused on just doing this business, and I always lived in the UK, and I would only visit Cyprus every month, every couple of months until I established a management team in Cyprus where I didn’t need to go over quite so often. Thank God I had that management team during the pandemic because I couldn’t get on the island.

[00:21:24] Sarah: What made you choose property management over your marketing agency?

[00:21:28] Lisa: I just always had had a passion with service and property, and if I hadn’t done that, I think it would’ve been travel because they combined the two really. People always said to me, why are you not a travel agent? Why are you not a boutique travel agent? I was very tempted many, many times, but I quite like the blend.

[00:21:46] There’s something about property and property management and getting it right and being really proactive about it and caring about people and looking after guests. I just really find that something I just love doing. So even though I never met many of our guests, I felt like I knew them really, really well because I’d spent a lot of time talking to them.

[00:22:02] I didn’t just leave it to the rest of my team. I was in the thick of it like everybody else was. I do remember bumping into some guests at the airport, which I just actually stepped in to offer some help, and turns out they were our guests and they were like, oh my God, it’s you.

[00:22:15] And I’m like, yes, it’s me. I really exist. They said, well, we didn’t think we’d see you inside. I’m like, I didn’t expect to see you either, but I’m here. I do come here. So it is quite funny dealing with a remote business. But I was just as engaged with them even though I wasn’t on the ground.

[00:22:29] Actually, to be fair, when I did go into Cyprus, I would take some of the responsibility off the local team. So for example, I would sip in and do the out of hours responses. That meant I did meet guests, and I did feel what the team were going through, and I did appreciate some of the challenges that you have as a 24/7, 7 day a week business. So it wasn’t like I was so far removed from that, I didn’t understand what we were dealing with on the ground. I absolutely did. Yeah.

[00:22:53] Sarah: Let’s talk about that. Can we talk about your experience with not only starting up a property management company and how much work it is to start any business, let alone something that’s open 24/7/365, but then you’re also remote, and you have a team? So now you have guests. You have owners. You have a team. How did you handle burnout, and how did you help your team handle burnout?

[00:23:17] Lisa: Yeah. And the time difference. So we had a couple of hours time difference as well. So what I’ve found with the business is that most of the clients support owner, landlord owner support. They wanted outside of normal working hours because they had full-time jobs. So I flex my hours around that.

[00:23:31] I would tend to be available to the team first thing in the morning because they were already up and working ahead of me. We would have regularly weekly team meetings. I generally believe in empowering your team to do their job. And I employed people because they were good at what they did.

[00:23:48] And I never wanted to be the person that had all the ideas. I definitely encouraged my team to think for themselves and to come up with the ideas. And I said, I’m here as an escalation point if you need me, but I know you are good at what you do, and you are really good at doing this, so you don’t really need me unless you really need me.

[00:24:03] In which case I would always step in and support. We rotated our team, so the out-of-hours was always rotated. We had out-of-hours support calling, and I was always there the last escalation point. So if a guest ever really got stuck, I was always there middle of the night. I didn’t really care. As long as those guests were looked after, I made sure somebody was available to them.

[00:24:21] Annette: What is a piece of technology that once your team and you started to use it, it was a game changer in your business?

[00:24:31] Lisa: WhatsApp.

[00:24:33] Annette: Oh, okay.

[00:24:33] Lisa: Yeah. When WhatsApp became available, even with guests, I know that Daniella Devlin is the queen of WhatsApp in my Bay Apartments in Spain. But once some messenger or any messaging facility came along, made instant messaging so much quicker to get hold because people are on the road, aren’t they?

[00:24:52] My people are on the road all over the island, and you needed to be able to keep in touch with you. I needed to know there was a particular problem, even down to, did you know they’re digging up this road and guests can’t get through. We in the UK who managed the rental side needed to know that kind of stuff, and that’s why WhatsApp instant messaging was so, so key to us to be able to keep on top of the stuff that’s happening right now.

[00:25:14] Annette: In the field. I think that’s the important– and were there boundaries? Were there group WhatsApps? Was it just a free for all WhatsApp? If someone WhatsApps something, was there somewhere else you had to write it down? How did you start to use it with your team?

[00:25:29] Lisa: When I started the business, the property management systems that are now available did not exist. And I had to have a company, and I’m going to use the word fudge, something that existed that didn’t really perfectly fit what we needed to do, but it did the job, bearing in mind we were working with Sterling Pound, Sterling and Euros.

[00:25:47] When I first started working in Cyprus, they were not in the EU. Then they suddenly joined the EU. So we had a lot of currency fluctuation to deal with. So that ran the back end of the business. That was the operational side of the business. And then of course, we were running the rental side of the business as well.

[00:26:02] When we started, it was just spreadsheets and stuff. It was as simple as that. It really wasn’t basic as that. And then we evolved our systems to be much better as everybody does. But we had groups put for the management team, so I had a manager in each of the three areas. I had managers.

[00:26:18] And then the management team had their own housekeeping teams, which I didn’t get involved in. They managed those teams. I didn’t want to micromanage anybody. We had our maintenance teams. So we had groups that would call in to us and say, you need to know about this.

[00:26:33] There’s a problem with the pool there, or there’s an issue with this property, or that kind of thing. So we also had what I’d call standard operating procedures. So people knew what the process was. The housekeeping team knew what their processes were. They knew what the escalation points would be.

[00:26:48] The management knew what the escalation points would be. So I didn’t want to be a bottleneck. I didn’t want everybody to come to me. There was no point in me being the bottleneck. We had a lot of properties to manage. So I was very hot on making sure we had the systems of processes, the escalation, deciding points that needed to be passed up if there was a significant problem. And I think getting that in place early on was key to scaling. Because you can’t scale if you don’t have those in place really.

[00:27:14] Sarah: I think that’s such a great moment just to pause for a second. Anyone out there listening who is interested in growing their own team or starting their own co-hosting or property management team, I think that, Lisa, for so many business owners, it’s really hard to reframe your brain around you as a business owner not being the bottleneck. Because if you have to be there for anything to continue to move forward, that’s when burnout happens too.

[00:27:39] When you are, they need to go through you because you haven’t set up systems for them to not need you. Lisa, how did you make sure– I know you hire people because they’re good at what they do, or they had experience, or they’re showing really, great promise.

[00:27:54] The five-star reviews are coming in, and the guests seem happy, but what other ways did you verify that your team was operating under your procedures and they were doing the things they were supposed to be doing? How did you trust them but also verify that they were showing up how they needed to show up?

[00:28:10] Lisa: It’s interesting. So the first thing I invested in was team training. So every member of team that came onto the team was properly trained in the way we did things. So we standardized what we did in every property, whether it’s our preventive maintenance procedures, our inspections, our pre-inspections, our post inspections. They were standardized, and we had checklists to make sure–

[00:28:28] And I know you like checklist, but we had checklists, so we didn’t miss anything. In terms of team issues, if someone had a problem, we said no problem is too small to mention it if you are worried about it. If you think it’s going to impact on a guest or an owner, we’re there to represent them.

[00:28:41] Please flag it to somebody so we can do something about it and support you with it. I supported my team like they were family actually. I looked off not just the team members, but their family, their extended family as well. If somebody has a problem and it’s going to have a ripple effect on how they do their job, then I think we as employers have a responsibility to take care of them.

[00:28:58] And that’s what I tried to do. So it wasn’t just the key team member. It was their entire family actually. If somebody got a sick parent or a sick child or something, then we needed to make sure we could accommodate that with the way we worked with our flexibility of our teams. I used to allocate properties to specific teams.

[00:29:15] So I found that if I tried to have different people going to different properties, it didn’t always work because they didn’t know the property. They didn’t know the nuances of the property. They didn’t know the inventory of the property. So we started saying to them, well, what’s going to work best for you as a team?

[00:29:27] And they said, we’d like ownership of specific properties. So that’s what we did. And that worked really well for us, so that they knew it inside out. They’d know instantly if there was a lamp missing or something was broken or whatever. And they took real personal care over those properties like they were their own, which was fabulous for me because I thought that’s exactly what I wanted, people to really care as much as I cared about our owners.

[00:29:49] We also had to educate our owners about how we wanted them to communicate with us centrally, not directly to every team member. We had a system of them coming in. You report something to us. We can log it somewhere. We can manage it. We can make sure we progress it.

[00:30:03] So we educated our owners, and we educated our guests. So if guests had a problem, they had a central number to call, or a central WhatsApp system to use. And that went centrally to something. So we didn’t get lost, and we didn’t not do something about it. So I think that was something else we learned, was funnel people in and educate them about the best system to best support them rather than having a free for all because that just doesn’t work, not without many a properties. Just doesn’t work.

[00:30:27] Annette: How would you deal with upset or underperforming properties for owners?It is their investment. You’re the person managing it. Did you have a script for those conversations? Were you doing monthly reports? How did you deal with those investor relations?

[00:30:46] Because 18 years is a long time, and I want to share with our listeners, if you can get that contract, a decade is very doable if the client and yourself are in alignment. But I know you had to have some difficult conversations and maybe explain some revenue. What’s your secret sauce in keeping alignment with clients for so long?

[00:31:07] Lisa: I think for the property investors that came on board where we took the empty property and we furnished it and got it to a product we wanted, we never really had any problems with those. I’d say the properties we had the most challenging was with the owners that had furnished their own properties, who were having a hand in stuff, who had an opinion on stuff, who thought they were the experts.

[00:31:26] We’re all going to meet those type of clients, aren’t we? And yeah, I think sometimes you have to be brave enough to be honest and have what is quite a difficult conversation. But I think I went at it from a, every month they had their statements, and every time we got a booking, the owners got notified about it.

[00:31:42] That actually reassured a lot of owners that there were a couple of things that were not happening. One is that there was no dishonesty in them not knowing about their property being occupied. And that was a real concern in Cyprus where there was companies that would rent properties out and not give the owner the revenue.

[00:31:58] So we nipped that in the bud by saying, okay, every single time there’s a booking, you will know about it. They got their statements every month, so they knew what they were going to get, and they got paid quickly. I then introduced a newsletter, a newsletter, which was not just to tell them we were doing a great job, but a newsletter that told about the market, what’s happening in the market, what could affect the results that we’re getting. What’s really going on?

[00:32:22] Because a lot of these owners were not there. They wouldn’t have known what was going on in Cyprus. And Cyprus is a unique market. Like any areas, a unique market. And so I found that if I was proactive in communicating in a newsletter to our landlord owners, it stopped a lot of that kind of ni ni ni ni ni, you’re not doing a good enough job. Why are you doing– it stopped all of that really because we were being more proactive about stuff.

[00:32:43] Annette: I love the newsletter too because also, if every owner knows that you’re giving the same forecast to all the owners, it reframes, wait, I’m just getting my payout in this report, but it’s like, oh, I see every owner is communicated with, and it’s the same story. Lisa’s not getting on the phone with me and trying to switch it up a bit. That, oof, the newsletter. Now, would you do that monthly?

[00:33:09] Lisa: Yeah, monthly. Or if there’s anything significant. So for example, and I learned this, we had a couple of fairly significant events that happen in Cyprus. It’s an area of earthquakes. We had a 6.4 earthquake hit Cyprus at first. I think it was one in 20 years. It was pretty big. It was literally nine miles out to sea directly in front of my apartment block. And I was there when it happened. It was pretty scary.

[00:33:32] But the first thing I thought of is I’ve got all these owners that are suddenly going to hear this on the international news, and they’re going to be panic stricken about their properties. So I did two things. First and foremost, we took care of all the guests that were staying in properties by getting somebody around to make sure they knew we were there if anybody got any problems.

[00:33:48] And the next thing was I sent something out to every single owner, say, don’t be worried. We will be checking your property within the next 24 hours, and if there’s any issues, we’ll let you know. And that stopped them from everybody piling in on you going, what’s– and the switchboard effect of everybody phoning you. So we literally had to deal with it as quickly as we could and do as practically good.

[00:34:07] The other one we had was the single biggest electricity station in the island blew up. It blew up. There was some badly stored explosives not far from it. Who’d have thought? They went up. Lots of people were very sadly killed on the motor way, but it took the electricity off the whole island for six weeks and at the time when every property was occupied.

[00:34:30] Annette: What! What did you do? We have to know.

[00:34:33] Sarah: I’m eating popcorn right now.

[00:34:34] Lisa: The first thing, nobody could call you because there was–

[00:34:37] Annette: Right, sorry.

[00:34:39] Lisa: So again, I said to everybody, we’re going to print these notes out. We’re going to shove them under every single property door so that people know we’re aware. And then when people do start calling us and they’re saying things like, you need to move us in a hotel, I’m like, but they don’t have electricity either. I don’t have electricity either.

[00:34:55] So in those situations, one of the things we first started doing with guests when they first started booking with us, making sure that insurance pick the books. Have you got travel insurance? Because if you’re on an island, things do happen. People get sick. Things happen, and this was one of those things.

[00:35:09] And we basically said, we don’t know how long this is going to happen or go on for. We can’t guarantee when electricity’s going to be restored. But if you are worried, my first point of suggestion would be your insurance company because they should be able to get you off the island if you need to.

[00:35:24] So there were things like that that happened. And I think as property managers, they are your biggest test. They’re the biggest test of how your team systems work, the biggest test of how you take care of your guests. And equally, how do you manage when those things happen that you can’t possibly plan for? They definitely grow you as a property manager.

[00:35:44] Sarah: What ended up happening? Did the six weeks went by and–

[00:35:48] Lisa: It took them a long time to get some temporary electricity in place. We would end up with like some electricity for a couple of hours a day, and then they got to substations up running on and off, on and off for about several months. But these things happen. Major disasters happen all around the world. And as a property manager, I think a business continuity plan, I definitely encourage people to think about that. Definitely think about that.

[00:36:13] Annette: What does that mean, Lisa?

[00:36:14] Lisa: Business continuity?

[00:36:15] Annette: Is that if–

[00:36:16] Lisa: Business continuity, when something goes wrong, really badly, wrong, and it impacts the whole of your business.

[00:36:21] Annette: When it goes wrong?

[00:36:22] Lisa: Yeah. When it goes wrong, if it goes wrong. I think it’ll happen to most people. I think people are naive if they don’t think something major could happen. Cyber-attack on your website, your emails, everything, could take your whole business down. If there was a cyber-attack on some of the OTAs, what would happen? You’d lose all your bookings. So I think people have to have a continuity plan.

[00:36:48] Annette: So now I’m just thinking about a bunker. I need a bunker, Sarah. We need a bunker.

[00:36:53] Lisa: But I think if you’re in business and you are looking after other people’s assets, could be floods.

[00:36:57] Annette: Yeah.

[00:36:59] Lisa: The earthquake caused problems with a number of swimming pools, major cracked pipes underground. Swimming pools having to be dug out. It happens.

[00:37:06] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:37:07] Lisa: The pandemic, who would have thought?

[00:37:10] Annette: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:37:11] Lisa: We all had to adapt and be flexible and cope with those very unusual circumstances. And I think it educates a lot of people to think that maybe you do need a business continuity plan. You do need cyber protection on your insurance. You do need to have systems and things in place with your team. Should you not have internet, or email, or electricity, how are you going to communicate people if you can’t get hold of them?

[00:37:32] Annette: I think this is a moment though to talk about why property management is a smart business. Because when something like this happens, it’s not like you had a brick– maybe you had a brick and mortar office, but most property managers, there isn’t a brick and mortar office that they are paying rent on.

[00:37:53] If the owner isn’t getting bookings, you’re not getting bookings. I think just financially it’s not as catastrophic potentially as some other businesses could be, obviously it’s catastrophic. You still have your team, and you need to work through that, but you don’t own 175 of these properties, so it’s not like 175–

[00:38:13] Sarah: Mortgages.

[00:38:14] Annette: Mortgages were due on the first. You can spread that and diversify it. And Sarah and I always like to just share with everyone, especially in the US, a lot of people like to do arbitrage, but that’s all on their back of like, this is really a way to scale your business and diversify the risk when you are sharing it amongst all of your owners.

[00:38:35] So I think that’s just another point of it. It is a great way to be able to diversify, still be with the properties earning money, but reduce your risk. You talked about scaling as far as having these relationships with the real estate agents. What is another way that you were getting new clients and able to scale that quick?

[00:38:56] I have to do math here. If you did 175 properties, how many owners? That’s 35 a year. That’s like three a month. How are you getting all these new clients? We have people asking us every day.

[00:39:10] Lisa: Well, actually, other owners referred other people to us because if they’d stumbled across us and we looked after them and then say they on a complex and they were moving into their property and they would meet other owners who are new, and they’d be going, do you know a property manager? Can you recommend a property manager?

[00:39:25] So a lot of business came from referral by either happy owners, or from other services. So photographers, gardeners, electricians, plumbers, all those people, if they were working with us and they bumped into new owners, which they often did, they would always refer them to us.

[00:39:44] Annette: Oh, I love that term too, bumped into, because you’d be surprised how many people you’re going to bump into, and you’ve got to be the person that rolls off the tip of their tongue and they’re ready to give your information first.

[00:39:55] Lisa: Yeah. And it’s really interesting, although it wasn’t on the ground. And other property management businesses obviously came onto the market. Interestingly, I stayed below the radar of the competition. I don’t think they took me very seriously because I wasn’t there in their face.

[00:40:10] I wasn’t there with the big billboards. I just quietly got on with the work and just quietly got on with the referrals and just got on with my own stuff. And I’ll tell you a very funny story, and that was, I remember going to a charity ball, and I sat next to another property manager. He said to me, I do not understand how you could possibly run a property management business here in Cyprus with not being on the island.

[00:40:29] I said, well, I do do it. A couple of months later, on a complex where we both manage properties, one of their properties was burgled. I got told about it, and I rang them and said, you might want to go and check this property. It’s been burgled. And I’m not even on the island, and I knew about it before they did.

[00:40:46] Sarah: I’m doing the whole snapping in their face action.

[00:40:54] Lisa: It’s about relationships. It’s about people knowing who you are coming to you.

[00:40:56] Sarah: Right. And systems, and having systems that work so that when people know that they can trust to come to you because you get it done. Yes, it’s good to have relationships, but you’ve got to have them. And then once you have that relationship, how do you work it? How do you prove that you will take the guest, the property, the owner, whatever, the team from A to Z and have them feel held and supported that entire time? I think that’s really how you uphold your reputation so that people continue to refer you.

[00:41:26] Okay. So let’s fast forward a little bit because you are no longer managing these Cyprus properties, correct? What happened?

[00:41:35] Lisa: I think I always intended to sell the business. I’d obviously grown it. It had value. I had a great team. You talk about burnout, I definitely felt in the last– there were other things in our lives. I had elderly parents that needed looking after, so there were other things in our family life that was starting to pull on me a little bit.

[00:41:54] And then there was Brexit, which was a whole big bag of worms really that challenged the business structure because up until that point the business had been registered in the UK. I had a satellite business in site because it worked well. Brexit is going to change all of that and was going to add a whole other layer of bureaucracy, and accounting, and stuff.

[00:42:13] So about three years before I sold it, I started thinking that now was a good time to sell it. I was looking for a slightly better life work balance and not working seven days a week. I basically tensibly tested the water to find a buyer on the island. And I had three buyers.

[00:42:29] And I spoke about this again in Barcelona about the preparation for selling your business and being serious about getting your ducks in a row ready to sell your business. And there’s a few things I think you should think about in terms of good financial health, good systems of processes, good contracts with your owners, a value in your brand, and all of the things I think are really important before you even think about selling your business.

[00:42:52] So I had three buyers on the table, and what was really important to me was I had this huge value in loyalty from these clients that’ve been with us for a long, long time, and I didn’t just want to hand them over to somebody who wasn’t going to continue looking after them the way we did. So the first one I discounted because it just didn’t feel a good fit.

[00:43:10] The second one, I got a bit further along the road, but I didn’t feel that– they came from an accounting background, not a property management background. And again, I did think it was quite a good fit. And strangely enough, it was a lady that took it over in the end. And she came from a facilities management business.

[00:43:23] She was very personable, good people skills. And she shared the same passion for looking after people that I did. And that’s why it was a better fit for us. And it wasn’t always about what I was going to make from the business. It was about, it needed to be as good a fit for the sale for the owners and for the clients as it was for me leaving the business because I really struggled with that bit quite a lot.

[00:43:45] It needed to be right. I couldn’t morally just hand it over and just not care about it anymore. It’d been a big part of my life for a long time, and that was really important to me and the clients. And I felt so bad thinking, what are they going to think when I hand them over? And Kai’s going, they’ll be fine. And I’m like, I know, but I just feel so guilty about it. And actually, they were brilliant. They were all really good about it actually.

[00:44:05] Sarah: It goes back to just you and your character and how much work you clearly did. It wasn’t just about getting out and piecing out as fast as you could. It really was being hospitable until the very end, and there’s no way you could have not been cyclical.

[00:44:21] Lisa: And I still have clients I work with now. There were a few clients that whilst they have gone to the new management business, I still keep in touch with them. They became friends. I get emails from rental clients even now. Dave and his wife contact me regularly and say, we’re going on holiday back to Cyprus, and they want to tell you, and I think that’s great.

[00:44:40] Those are what those relationships are all about. And a couple of weeks ago through Facebook, there was a Facebook post in Cyprus. We’re looking for Lisa. Does anybody know Lisa in the Coral Bay area? We’re looking for her. We rented a villa off of her five years ago. I don’t even know where she’s. And I got all these people going, Lisa, there’s this guy looking for you, Cyprus.

[00:45:00] And I’m like, that’s so funny. And so many people signposted me to him to say she doesn’t do the business anymore. But I just said, I’ll signpost you to somebody else that can look after you. But that is the power of establishing a brand locally, that people know you. They trust you. You’ve done a good service.

[00:45:17] You can walk away knowing that your reputation has been left with a positive input on the local community because that was something else I mentioned in Barcelona, is it isn’t just about what we can get out of things, suppliers for our business. It’s what can we give back to the local community as well? Where can we add value to all these other businesses that they need the industry?

[00:45:38] And so an example of that is Avis, my car hire supplier. I worked with him for 20 years. It was a little family business. And when I sold the business, he said to me, Lisa, if it hadn’t been for your business, my business would’ve gone under years ago.

[00:45:51] Sarah: Wow.

[00:45:52] Lisa: Yeah. And I think that’s equally important. As a property manager, we have a local community responsibility to give something back to. It’s not just about what can they do for us, for our bottom line. What can we do to help them?

[00:46:04] Annette: That’s a mic drop moment there because that’s where it’s very hard for all hosts to show economically the impact, the trickle down impact that their business has on everyone in the economy. Those are reports I know people try really hard to put together, but they fall short very often.

[00:46:22] My last question I have for you, Lisa, and this is something that you and I chatted about in London, was about just women’s voices in this space. I can share that. I don’t know if Sarah and I have met anyone, any female with as many properties under management? Some of them, yes.

[00:46:40] But your own business, you being the full owner of 175 properties, I’m just going to share, I feel like a lot of times we see the guys touting it online, or we hear about men owning these businesses. Did that ever hold you back? I feel like it’s a superpower that women have for hospitality, but do you think that was something that edged you out over competition?

[00:47:01] Lisa: I think entrepreneurial spirit obviously is the foundation of all of us going to business, whatever gender you are. But it is interesting. I know there are so many women in this sector, but I don’t hear their voice. I don’t see them putting themselves out there, and I don’t know whether that’s a mindset or a confidence thing, or they just feel like it’s a very male place to be the people who are speaking at these big events.

[00:47:21] And we know that when we went to Short Stay Summit. When I was at Scale Barcelona, it was very obvious that there weren’t that many women there. And I know that they’re working really hard to get more women on stage to speak and educate and get our voices out there, which is really great because it’s a great platform for doing it.

[00:47:37] I did meet a few other people, Rebecca Crippen from Australia. She has a very large business. She’s a lovely lady. I didn’t meet lots of people who had lots of properties. I think they exist. I’m not sure why they’re not going to these industry events to be seen or to– I’m definitely encouraging women, if you get a speaking opportunity, go and take it.

[00:47:57] Go and talk to people because we definitely have different skills for sure. And I hate to think it’s stereotypical in terms of hospitality, but there are so many so many women employed in the hospitality space, whether it’s hotel or short stay rentals. And they should have a bigger voice for sure.

[00:48:14] Sarah: As we wrap up this episode, I want to share with listeners how they can reach out to you. But before we get there, Lisa, what do you say to someone who’s starting a short-term rental property management company today? What would you share for them in terms of what you learned looking back and what you see looking forward?

[00:48:32] Lisa: I would say have a clear business plan about where you can be different in terms of what type of properties, what audience you’re trying to target, and build a brand around that. We’re all just being the same as everybody else. I’d say really think about your business model. There are various different models now for property management, and some of them are higher risk than others, so be aware of how you feel about risk, financial risk.

[00:48:56] Because without that financial foundation, it’s quite difficult to scale a business because it’s going to get quite money hungry. When you’re employing most of people, there’s a big responsibility to pay a salary bill every month. So if your business model’s not backing that up, it’s quite tricky to raise that cash every month to pay those salaries.

[00:49:11] I’d say get your systems and processes in place. Take on only really good properties. Don’t take on anything. Just don’t take on anything. Bad business is not worth buying, and I’d say your landlords are as equally important relationship as your holiday guests are. They are different, but they’re equally important.

[00:49:29] And you mustn’t ignore your landlords. Don’t forget them and put them in a black hole and forget about them because they tend to think you’re not doing anything for them if you don’t communicate with them. So that was something that I think people often forget. They focus on the holiday guests, and they forget about the landlords.

[00:49:43] So that was something I would also say. So yeah, niche down. Be clear. Have a brand, build your brand, build value in your business. Employ the best people you can and train them to be your brand ambassadors for your business because they are an integral part of your business growth.

[00:49:59] Sarah: Absolutely. Lisa, I’m sure people are going to be clamoring to learn more about you, how they could potentially work with you, because I know you’re helping property managers build their brands.

[00:50:09] Lisa: I am.

[00:50:10] Sarah: Where can they find you?

[00:50:10] Lisa: They can find me on LinkedIn, Lisa Roads, The Holiday Property Coach. They can find me on Facebook, The Holiday Property Coach. I also have a private Facebook group, which is the 101 of Holiday Letting Support and Success. I’m on Instagram as a holiday property coach. And you can email me at lisa@thepropertymanagementcoach.co.uk.

[00:50:28] Sarah: You’re incredibly impressive, Lisa. We’re so glad we bumped into you while we were in London and engaged in a conversation, and we were immediately impressed with your presence and with everything you’re doing for the industry. So thank you so much for your time today.

[00:50:42] Lisa: Thank you. Thank you so much. I’ve watched your journey. I’ve admired everything you two have done. It’s so nice to bring people together that have got a similar synergy in terms of our passion for hosting. It’s been a real pleasure, and thank you very much for inviting on your podcast.

[00:50:57] Sarah: 100%. Thank you. With that, I am Sarah Karakaian

[00:51:00] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:51:02] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:51:03] Sarah: Talk to you next time.