Turning One Property into an Entire Portfolio by Doubling Down on This Niche

Dave:
Imagine a nice relaxing weekend in the outdoors, waking up to bird calls, hiking in a national forest, enjoying a sunset around a campfire. But instead of pitching a tent and crawling into a sleeping bag, you spend the night in a luxury cabin with a nice septic system, solar power, and even to starlink internet. It’s this concept called glamping, and today’s guest has used it to create a unique and very profitable short-term rental business by offering a taste of wilderness paired with the comforts of home. Hey everyone, Dave here. It’s Monday, which means we have an investor story for you. And today’s guest is Garrett Brown. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because Garrett recently joined the team here at BiggerPockets as a content creator and a short-term rentals expert. So if you’ve seen maybe some of his writing or our new short-term rental newsletter or talking on TikTok about short-term rentals, this is your chance to hear his amazing investor story, learn a little bit more about his background, what’s motivated him and gotten him to the point he’s at in his very successful short-term rental investing career. In our conversation today, I’m looking forward to learning more about Garrett, specifically how he went from producing music to operating one of Houston’s premier short-term rental experiences. Seems like a big career jump. I’m also curious about why he believes customer service is so important in real estate and really sets him apart from other competitors and how generating direct bookings through social media impacts his monthly cashflow in a really compelling and positive way. Garrett, welcome to the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. Thanks for being here.

Garrett :
Thank you for having me. It’s definitely an honor.

Dave:
Oh, it’s super fun to have one of my colleagues, a fellow BiggerPockets employee on the show today. I’d love for you to just start and tell our audience a little bit about you and your history. So what were you up to when you first got into real estate?

Garrett :
So I actually, I owned a music studio for a long time and did full-time music pretty much, but realized that I wanted something a little bit different out of my life and wanted real financial freedom if I could find it. Real estate happened to be that tool I found. I started being a real estate agent, like a lot of investors that have been success stories. I found BiggerPockets and it changed my life, actually learned a lot of the things that you would not learn in real estate school. Started working with investors, flipped a few houses, but now I am predominantly short-term rentals. I have a couple long-term rentals, but I am fully baked into short-term rentals and I have a hospitality and restaurant management degree. So I kind of lean into that mixed with a little bit of real estate and here I am today.

Dave:
Well, I know I’m supposed to ask you about real estate questions, but I’m very curious about this music studio that you owned. Were you a producer?

Garrett :
Yep, I produced and engineered. I did it since I was about 13 years old. I was in high school. I was skipping parties and doing all that extra stuff and I was recording people in my bedroom, shout out to my parents for letting me be an entrepreneur when I was about 16, 17 years old.

Dave:
Wow. Yeah, that is super cool. So how long were you doing that before you jumped into real

Garrett :
Estate? 20 years and I still do it for fun now. It was my main job for a while, but I did it for about 20 years almost actually getting paid for it, which was kind of wild that people would pay me to click record sometimes. But that’s what happens when you can build up a market and get your skillset right.

Dave:
That’s super cool. I mean that’s basically what I get paid for is people just click record and I just start talking for a while. So don’t get anyone wise to the fact that this isn’t hard.

Garrett :
I know I shouldn’t allow the secret.

Dave:
It sounds like this is a career that you found fulfilling and enjoyed. What was it about real estate that made you switch industries?

Garrett :
So I love music, but I dislike the music business. It takes a lot of time. I have to trade in for music and it’s hard to ever get away from that.

Dave:
And

Garrett :
I realized there was other things out there that I could give my upfront time for, but down the line I wouldn’t have to trade my time as much anymore. My mom used to be a real estate agent for a little bit. She ended up being a teacher and is a child therapist now. But she always said one of her regrets was she didn’t stick with real estate and she wished she would’ve went further with and that always stuck with me.

Dave:
Oh really?

Garrett :
And so it just always was in the back of my mind and as I was trying to figure out like, alright, what’s a path that I can, isn’t a full-time job necessarily, but I can balance it with music and being a real estate agent worked perfect for that because you get as much out of it as you put into and the hours had the flexibility I needed to still run the studio and be an agent at the same time and just the amount of things I learned from that really changed my life in the direction that I’m in now.

Dave:
That’s an amazing success story and I think a really probably more common than is talked about ambition for real estate investors. Yeah, it’s great to become financially free, but a lot of us are just looking for ways to supplement other careers. Personally, I know this is insane, but I like being a data analyst. I never wanted to be a full-time real estate investor. I have other professional interests and it sounds like you have the same thing. I find enjoyment out of that. It lets me use a different part of my brain than being a property manager and I enjoy that and I think that’s a super cool and very valid and good goal for any sort of real estate investor to get into. When you first started, you became a realtor it sounds like. What sort of lit the fire under you? Was there one deal or one interaction that made you think this is for you?

Garrett :
They don’t teach you investing side to in real estate agent school, a lot of the things they teach you aren’t necessarily even field applicable. But I’ll never forget, I got an email from an investor, I live in Houston, Texas, and he I guess had just came in from Mexico City I believe, if I remember correctly. And I just got a random email one day. I don’t even know how he found me to this day. He sends me an email and he goes, Hey, do you work with investors? I’m new to there. I’m looking for somebody to help me find deals. I didn’t know anything about the investing side. My brain just started going. I was like, oh, maybe this is a person I can network with and figure something out. I go, yeah, of course. I work with investors. Didn’t know anything about investing side. I think I typed in Google real estate investing and BiggerPockets popped up and I started diving into just all the content I could there and there wasn’t as much content as there is now. Back in, this is like 2017 I believe,

Garrett :
But I dove in. I told the guy, I was like, Hey, can we meet for coffee and just kind of talk about what you’re looking for? And we met for coffee and I never did a deal with this guy. I don’t even remember his full name to this point, but that moment changed my life. We met and he just told me so many things he was looking for and it was a different perspective than I thought before of like, oh real estate is especially in the agent side is oh, they want their house for sale. Okay, I’m going to list it and we’re going to sell it to another residential buyer. Or I work with a buyer who wants to buy a residential house. And that guy having just that simple email sparked a whole different side of real estate that I didn’t even know was something that I would be capable of. And then once I dove into the investing side, it really got me excited because there’s just so many different facets of investing and it’s like you can try stuff and see if you like it. You want to do self storage if you want to do midterm rentals, if you want to do RV parks. I love all the creative sides and I love the ability to just try some things and see what I liked. I tried flipping, didn’t really like it.

Garrett :
I tried some long-term rentals. Personally I have ’em still personally wasn’t for me though, but I landed on short-term rentals and that is my bread and butter now. But it all started with that one guy and me taking a chance and seeing the opportunity and also understanding like, hey, maybe I need to open my horizons a little bit and see what this guy’s talking about with these investors. Juan, if you’re somehow watching this out there, I appreciate that. That cost me me more than you’ll ever know.

Dave:
Isn’t it funny how these random meetings just have these impacts on you and you never know which one it’s going to be. I find that so many times if I meet with an agent or property manager, I get excited about one, maybe it doesn’t turn out, but the ones, the random ones, you just have to do it enough. It just becomes this numbers game where if you meet with enough people and have enough conversations that one of ’em is either going to spark a passion in you or is going to hook you up with your next deal or is going to be your property manager. And there’s no shortcut to it, unfortunately, at least in my experience. You just have to do it and put yourself out there. So good for you for doing that. So after this meeting Garrett, what did you do next now that you had sort fire lit, what was your next step?

Garrett :
I was working with investors. I started doing more on the agent side with them. I saw the opportunity being there, but I also started realizing that the investors were the ones not doing as much of the work. They were doing some of the work, but they were making the profits on the back end that I necessarily wasn’t. And even though I had a lot of the knowledge and skillset sets that was helping them get to these deals, so then that’s when we decided to put our hand in there and decide to flip a couple houses and I found a for sale. I was showing a house to somebody, a different client. We found a for sale by owner in that same neighborhood. They happened to be outside and I drove by, stopped, had a conversation with ’em. I knew the area very well. This is one of the reasons why investing in your local markets, you can outperform a lot of other people. They talk about hot markets and all these things, but sometimes just having general knowledge of your area is going to lead to a deal that a lot of other people don’t even see. And that’s kind of what happened with our first flip. We bought it for about I think $115,000. That’s exactly what they wanted. Even though it was probably worth one 50, just even on just a hotel side of sorts, we put about $45,000 into it. It ended up selling it for about two 50, about three months later.

Dave:
Wow,

Garrett :
That’s

Dave:
Awesome.

Garrett :
It wasn’t a home run, but it was a triple. But that was the first deal that we got going. It really started us out. It was lucky that that one was successful even though we had a couple after that that weren’t as successful. But that first one really did light us a fire under us to keep figuring things out. But even if that one hadn’t been successful, we were learning how to mitigate our risks with the next ones that they weren’t like that we were able to still get our money out of it and move on to the next deal and learn from where we made mistakes.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s just paying your dues. I know we talk about this all the time, but sometimes you take those lumps, hopefully they don’t cost you money, but at some point you have to pay for the lessons. If you think about it, some people pay money for formal training. Other people get in there and do it one way or another you’re paying for it. But I personally think the hands-on experience, hopefully it’s usually less expensive and you learn a whole lot more by actually seeing and doing it. I do want to also just commend you on how political you were on just saying, oh, these people put out lists about hot markets. You could say it, it’s me. I know that I’m the one doing this and causing all of these people to be like, I want to be in the hottest market. But what you said is so true is we put out these lists, it is helpful, but knowing your neighborhood and having a team on the ground is probably going to have a bigger influence on your returns than picking the ideal market or the perfect market. So I agree with you there. Alright, time for a break, but we’ll be back shortly.

Dave:
Thanks for sticking with us. We’re back with Garrett. I think a couple of minutes ago you said you didn’t like flipping. So what happened between a successful first deal and you not liking flipping?

Garrett :
So after that we ran into a couple deals that for different reasons, we locked one in right before the pandemic happened and then the pandemic happened and the hard money lender decided to pull out and we lost some money there and there was just too much volatility I think personally from what I was seeing in it. And it was a lot of work too. That’s one thing about flipping is it took a lot of work. It took a lot of things on my end to scheduling wise and working with different contractors and seeing them walk through the property. It was definitely way more time intensive than I liked. And the deals started to kind of dry up in my area too, especially in Houston where I was in some of the markets, a lot of the big money really started to come into our area and it was really hard to compete with some of them.

Garrett :
And I saw the writing on the wall of, okay, I need to make a shift into something that I personally enjoy a little more. So then I started with my hospitality, my hotel restaurant management background. I knew that maybe short-term rentals may be something I might be interested a little more. I like the creative side. So we bought a few smaller condos. I was working with an investor that was renting ’em out. He was ready. He messaged me one day. He was like, Hey, I want to sell my condos. I’m kind of tired of ’em. This was I think 2019, he was ready to sell ’em and I go, Hey. And they were all three of ’em in the same building. They were $65,000 a piece in a decent area, but nothing fancy at all or anything along those lines. I struck up a deal with him to get all three at 50 a piece and just to get rid of them and he didn’t have to pay any commissions, anything like that.

Garrett :
I built that up through networking over time with him and just being a trusted agent for him for a couple years, he decided to let me have those apartments, our condos. We got into ’em, ran ’em in short-term rentals for a little while. They were performing pretty well. We were probably clearing a thousand to 1500 per month profitability on each unit. And then the pandemic started rolling around and things really went crazy. And then for a while we weren’t sure what we wanted to do with them, but then all the big money really started coming into Houston, especially in these regular one bedroom condos. And at that point it was just a race to the bottom of pricing. And so at that point I personally couldn’t compete anymore and I was doing music more full time. I was really loving that at that moment. I was having a lot of success in that area right then.

Garrett :
And so I was like, okay, I don’t think these are worth the time and now we might not even break even and this isn’t even an appreciating condo necessarily compared to some others. So I started looking to should I buy a triplex in a really high appreciating area of Houston? I was going through all these things and I ended up coming upon glamping, which is luxury camping, but basically it’s just short-term rental cabins in a destination area of a lake or a mountain basically. And I saw that opportunity and I realized that I could use my creative passions I like to use for music, put that into real estate and also use my hotel background to use my agent abilities as well. I kind of used all of the things I had been learning to put ’em into one pie of sorts. And then I built up one of my short-term rental glamping sites. We have four sites over there now and yeah, we crush it. We do about 90% occupancy each month.

Dave:
I love that you found something that you’re so passionate about. It seems like this is important to you in your career. You followed music and something that you were super interested in. And I guess, let me just take a step back. You said you were looking to get into short-term rentals because you have a history or some experience with hospitality. What experience is that?

Garrett :
So I went to school at the University of Houston, the Hilton College, which is where Conrad Hilton actually has been from me started.

Dave:
Let’s guess who funds that college.

Garrett :
Yeah, very easy to guess that one. But yeah, so I went through that program. I waited tables. I was a bartender for years during college and that’s how I was kind of supplementing my music business at the time when I was just building up my clientele. We had to do internships at hotels, I did internships at cooking schools, different things like that. And I didn’t necessarily work in hotel front office or anything like that, but I always knew the hospitality side of restaurants and hotels was something I personally thought I was good at. I thought I was a good server. That was one thing I took pride in was I thought I was actually, I loved making connections with the people coming

Dave:
In Totally.

Garrett :
And at the same time that brought up my revenue as a bartender and a waiter. I used to have people regulars come in all the time and tip me a hundred dollars just to drink a couple drinks and watch a football game, but they like the customer service and the guest experience I brought to them. And that’s one of the things that I kind of carried over into Airbnb and short-term rentals as a whole was that guest experience. A lot of people don’t put the guests first, and I did that. I used to do that with music too. I didn’t care about what the money comes in. The money and all that stuff will come in for me it was providing the best guest service I could or the best product, the best music I can make. And I’ve always believed that everything else will fall in line if you put your customer first basically.

Dave:
No, totally.

Garrett :
And so in that short-term rental space, I do everything I can to make sure the guests are satisfied and it has exploded our referral business, which is the easiest marketing you can get within this and everything going along the lines. So that is usually where I base everything off of and that comes from my hospitality background as a whole.

Dave:
That’s great. I actually was waiting tables when I bought my first property as well, and I think there’s a lot of overlap to being in the service industry and being a property manager, whether you’re doing long-term rentals or short-term rentals, but that attention to how other people are receiving your product and what their experience is. Also dealing with angry people because no matter how good your service is, you work at a restaurant, there are going to be some angry people

Dave:
And if you’re a property manager, you’re going to deal with some upset people at some times. And at least for me, that was a job that really exposed me to that interpersonal relationships and just learning to stay calm when other people are upset. And there’s a lot of overlap with real estate that I think is very helpful for people or at least it was for me. You have this background in hospitality and an interest in it. Tell us about the first deal. You said you sort of found glamping, but where did this deal come from?

Garrett :
So I was searching in a particular area. I like to follow something called the 60 30 10 rule. When I’m looking at short-term rentals, which is it’s 60 minutes from a major city, at least 500,000 residents or more 30 minutes from some type of hopefully a national attraction. But those are kind of priced out now. So maybe a state attraction or a regional attraction that a lot of people are going to visit that area still and then 10 minutes from some type of civilization, gas

Dave:
Station,

Garrett :
Dollar General, something like that. That way you’re just completely out in the middle of nowhere. So

Dave:
Did you make that up by the way? The 60, 30 10?

Garrett :
Yeah,

Dave:
I like that. That’s a good rule of thumb.

Garrett :
Yeah, so that’s just kind of what I generally thought and I did a lot of research. I’m sure that was drawn from other conclusions, but in the end, the one thing I found a lot of people didn’t think, the area I ended up choosing, which is about 45 minutes away from Houston by a lake called Lake Livingston, which is pretty popular. I used to go to it as a kid. That’s how I even knew about it. A lot of people were like, oh, that’s not the Smoky Mountains and that’s not Joshua Tree. You’re never going to be successful there. And even like Air DNA was saying we would make 30,000 a year or something like that. I saw the market had a need and I also know that Houston, Texas is the third or fourth largest city in the country and we’re near Dallas and Austin and all these other areas.

Garrett :
So I knew that if I could use my background in hospitality and marketing and things like that to get this product out there and I make a good product to begin with, getting those people will be easy. We have a surplus of people to choose from. So I started researching houses in the area. We ended up finding a deal. It was in a time when everybody was throwing out crazy cash numbers for houses in Houston, suburban houses, but these type of deals were a little more acreage. They were sitting for a little longer. They wanted 600,000. It had 10 acres. It had a house on it, a pretty nice house, needed a little bit of renovation, but it would do okay as an STR. It wasn’t on the lake, but it was close because on the lake you have a lot of HOA restrictions, which makes it even tougher.

Garrett :
So we got this house, it needed some work, so we knew we’d be able to build up some equity into the house if we built some cabins in the back that weren’t maybe as equitable. So I got into it for 5% down as an owner occupied loan, so I was able to save all that cash instead of putting, I think we bought it for five 50 in the end and was that 120,000 or something along those, if we were putting down 20%, I was able to put 22,000 down or something along those lines. So I had a hundred thousand dollars difference that I had saved up from being an agent. All these things for years that I was able to deploy into building cabins in the back. So we started putting road infrastructure in, we started putting electric septics, all these things like that and that money that I saved from the owner occupied, I lived in that house for a year, learned the market. I was meeting cleaners, I was meeting handymen. I was really ingrained in that market. I was meeting the county commissioners and they all loved my plans and I was going about it every step of the way. So it made the process very, very easy. We ended up building a geodome. We now have a mirror cabin that’s on our property as well. That does amazing that we partnered with another local company that builds these mirror cabins and it all just started taking off because I saved that money on that owner occupied loan.

Dave:
Why did you go all in on one property rather than trying to spread it out and invest in different properties in a similar area?

Garrett :
The thing I’ve found with short-term rentals, especially how I operate with, there’s so many within one site, my property insurance is cheaper. I went and got another property and had four or five properties because for these type of operations, insurance is already expensive, but because I have multiple properties on one parcel, mine is a lot cheaper than if I had four or five different parcels with a tent or a cabin on each one. The insurance rates would be through the roof for this. Then you also add on taxes. The more I build on my own land, I have now the taxes only go up incrementally and I hope my county’s not watching, but they don’t come out and assess these new bills I’m doing. So they’re not really keeping up with, if you buy new property, they’re like, okay, you paid this much. We’re raising the taxes, but they don’t really know how much value I’ve actually put into the property.

Garrett :
So they’re not really raising my taxes at a rate of if I’m buying new properties each place and they’re triggering the appraisal district to go into a review and see how much that property actually costs. And then also just the operations. Mike, I have a one section on my property that houses all my supplies and everything. I have two full-time employees and I have three others that work on the property, different facets, but they’re all, it’s more profitable for me because I don’t have to pay them to drive over to this site and they’re driving over there to do this site. It’s 30 minutes away. And we looked at other properties like do we want to keep expanding right now? But we decided no investing into this property is going to be the cheapest in the long run. And it’s also going to be just operations wise, just the easiest for us because man, building this type of thing up early takes a lot of effort from the person that’s doing it. But once now that I’ve built up those operations and built up this automation, I probably work two or three hours a week in my short-term rentals. I go up there just to check out and we’re going redesign the geodome that we have soon, things that are fun like that. But before I was doing all this legwork, but I built up the team now that I’m pretty hands off in the whole operation and it’s exactly where I wanted to be and I saw the vision two years

Dave:
Ago. That’s great. Well, good for you. It sounds like an awesome deal. I’m curious though, two separate questions. So I’ll start with is it applicable to other people? Do you think this is something that our audience could reasonably copy or is this just like a one sort of a unique situation that you found yourself in and you have the right background for?

Garrett :
I definitely think it is a little unique and I think the one thing, all the gurus online will tell you like, oh, you can set this up and it’ll take no effort and a little money and you’ll pitch a tent and you’re going to make $500 a night and 95% occupancy. And I’m very realistic when I talk about this with people. If you have the time to actually put into this, you can build up something pretty nice and you don’t even need an insane amount of money to start. I saved up a pretty good chunk of change, but you can find some places maybe in your area that this approach could work, but you’re going to have to realize that there’s going to be a lot of time upfront that you’re going to have to spend on

Dave:
It.

Garrett :
I was working full-time during the day, but at night I was doing fixing up stuff at the property on the weekends. I was going up there getting it ready, but that year, year and a half that I put in all that effort, it led me to now be a lot more hands off, build up the team. I barely, all I do is just the marketing and the numbers crunching now of how we can bring more people in,

Garrett :
But that took that year while I really had to dedicate it. But that’s the thing is a lot of people don’t want to do that. And so there’s definitely going to be some times that you’re having to give up. You’re not going to be able to watch football on Sundays. Sometimes you’re going to be out at the property fixing something. Even that happened to me all the time and I used to, my friends would say, oh, come on, let’s go do this or something and let’s come out, let’s go eat somewhere. And I obviously tremendously valued work life balances, but I knew in that moment for that year I had a vision and I had a focus that I really needed to attain and that would make everything easier for the years after that. I’d never have to question if I want to go to a dinner again because I have that freedom now to do it because I’ve built up all that year or two.

Dave:
I love that attitude. I am sort of the same kind of personality where I always joke with my wife that I just love frontloading misery. Everyone has to do stuff they don’t want to do. My personality is like, I’m just going to do it all right now. I’m not going to drip it out and do 10% of it over 10 days. I’m like, I’m going to just not stop for the next two days and I’m going to do everything and then I’m going to relax for eight days. That to me, I do that with everything. But it’s a really good corollary to real estate investing because if you are willing to put up a lot of effort upfront, then you get to reap that benefit for so long. But you have to put in the effort. No, I don’t put in a lot of effort and I get long-term benefit that just doesn’t exist.

Dave:
You have to do one or the other. And it sounds like we share this in common. We got to take a break. But first, a quick note, if you’re enjoying the show we have right now, we want to hear your opinion on it, let me know. Does glamping STR sound like a fun vacation to you? Is this something you would love doing or are you a absolutely not on the outdoorsy types of vacation? Submit your answer in the Spotify or YouTube app poll, wherever you’re watching or listening. Alright, so check that out and we’ll be back after a few quick ads. Thanks for sticking with us. Here’s more with investor Garrett Brown. Do you have any advice for our audience, Garrett, on what type of investor or what type of personality, what type of experience works well with this type of glamping or short-term rental approach that you’re using?

Garrett :
You definitely have to have a go-getter mentality of sorts. If you’re looking for a more hands-off approach or especially something a little bit different, this is not going to be the business for you. It is more than just a real estate buy and hold or anything like that. This is a business within, it’s a mix of real estate and hospitality. And so if you’re not prepared for that and you don’t like building up systems and operations and processes and working within teams, you’re going to have to lead a lot of people under your team and it can be built over time. So if you’re a leader of people and you feel like you can definitely have that in your repertoire, that is a great experience that if you already have what translate well into this type of business at the same time, it’s a great thing for your work-life balance as well too. A lot that gets lost in short-term rentals is I do. I like going up to my properties and staying as I expand and add more. I’m looking for areas that I genuinely would want vacation

Dave:
To. Yeah, I love it.

Garrett :
We can go on to hours about what are the benefits in having short-term rentals between taxes, debt, pay down, all these things that run into it. But one of my favorite things about it is finding areas that I would want to take my girlfriend and my mom to and go vacation and I own the place and when I leave, I have operations and systems in place and that even if it broke even, how amazing would it be to have a place I love to visit that I don’t pay a dollar for?

Dave:
Oh, it’s amazing.

Garrett :
Those are the type of things I envision with my short-term rental portfolio as I keep growing it is I want to be able to add that to my life. I want to have that ability for my mom and girlfriend and all them to reap the benefits from all this effort I put into and myself as it gets grows more and the better I am with building out systems and leading people. The headache that even comes with short-term rentals, it drastically is reduced. Maybe one to 2% of the year have somebody that I’m like, oh gosh, this is a nightmare guest.

Dave:
Most

Garrett :
Of the time the guests are very respectful. They treat the place great. My team runs it fine. I don’t even hear from my team a lot of time, as long as I make sure they get paid and they tell me anything. That’s a big operation thing I need to know. It is smooth sailing most of the time, but that took a year, year and a half to build up that team and confidence in them and from leading ’em. So

Dave:
I totally agree with you. I only have one short-term rental, but I bought it in a place that I love to go and even when I go up there to do maintenance, I’m just so happy. I’m like, oh, I would happily fix a faucet or reassemble furniture or whatever in the mountains and I’m in a place that I love. So it’s great.

Garrett :
A hundred percent.

Dave:
So one of the things that you’ve done really well, Garrett, is documenting your journey and using social media to market your properties. Can you just tell us why did you do that? I feel like not everyone takes that approach.

Garrett :
I saw it in music, how much marketing really, there were so many. Everybody says all the time like, oh, why is this music popular? Why do people like this song? This song’s not any good. But it was always like, one, the song may not be good to you as maybe you’re just not the right audience. But two is the marketing behind that. They figured out the target audience, and that’s the same approach I took with my short-term rentals. We documented the whole process. People think that, oh, you’re just giving them a place and that’s all they’re worried about. But a lot of people have been interested in our journey and why we built it and how we’re a family owned operation and why we did it. We named it after my brother that passed away 15 years ago for mental health reasons. And so that’s one of our biggest things that we push and all these things we documented and brought to the guests to know more about us as a whole and feel more ingrained with our story and feel like part of a community. So we document everything and we get 70 or 80% direct bookings from our social media.

Garrett :
We tell people that number all the time. Like, oh, people say, oh, I get 80 to 90% Airbnbs and maybe five or 10% direct. And they go, how much you make? And I go, we’d probably do 70 or 80% direct booking. I love being able to have the guest at my disposal of I have their network, I have their email, I have all these things that I can market after the fact to keep spreading this awareness of our property, which you don’t really get with Airbnb, which is a great platform. They bring in a ton of people complain about Airbnb sometimes, but it is by far the easiest way for a short-term rental to market themselves. Just be on Airbnb of course, and a ton of great guests come through Airbnb. But me having my own direct booking site that really controls everything coming in, we are able to do so many different things.

Garrett :
Like we’re able to do upsells on our direct booking sites so we can increase. We do, we had one guest not long ago, his stay was a thousand dollars for the weekend. He booked $1,100 in extra packages between balloons, a mobile masseuse. We have breakfast that we leave in there, like a birthday cake we drop off and my team handles all of this and I make 50% profit on every single one of these packages we sell. We can’t really do that through Airbnb. Getting new guests in is hard. If we’ve already captured the guest and we can increase their bookings by 25% with one simple automated email, that’s when the door really opens up to profitability. And that’s when we really saw just having these, we didn’t need to keep adding more structures. We just figured out ways to become more profitable with what we already had. It didn’t really take much. We implemented small things that we knew that it provides a better guest experience and we make money That’s win-win all

Dave:
Around. Awesome. Well, I commend you for that. Yeah, I totally agree. Every B is a great platform, but cutting out a middleman pretty much works in every single industry. That’s nothing wrong with middlemen, but you make a higher profit, you get more, like you said, it’s not like necessarily they’re trying to control a guest, but you have more contact information, remarketing opportunities. It’s great. So it’s such a good way to do it. But I think a lot of people who use social media just post pictures of their photo, but you do a really good job of telling a story. Like you said, you’ve shared a lot about your background and your personal history and it does make people interested in you. And at the end of the day, so much of especially short-term rentals is like a reflection of your personality, the things you like, the things that you care about, the guest experience that you want to create.

Dave:
And you’ve created such a good way of showcasing that. I’m not surprised at all that you have 80% of your coming from bookings because at least for me as a consumer, I would prefer to book that way people who I felt like I know who, whose stories I know, who I feel a personal connection to. So highly recommend that. Before we go, Garrett, I’m curious. I said way, way before I said I have two questions for you about your clamping. We’ve been not focusing on one side of it. The second side is I was curious about scalability because you, you’re growing out this property, what’s next for you? Are you going to continue investing in this property or what are your goals for your portfolio?

Garrett :
So absolutely going to keep reinvesting into this property. Local banks are pretty much beating at our door to work with us on our next expansion for a multitude of different reasons. But that all came with the proof of concept and believing in myself from the beginning, all I needed was one property and I did that with the geodome to prove what I was able to do because at first people weren’t, like I say, necessarily believing in the idea I had, but once I was able to prove that concept, now getting investors is much easier. Getting all the, and ultimately my expertise now, I started small. One thing as we expand, the one point I do want to make for people too is my geodome. We were going to build a thousand square foot geodome. The last minute I decided, I was like, we probably should actually start smaller because even if it’s not going to be as profitable, we’re going to mess up a lot

Dave:
And

Garrett :
We need to learn. There’s no guidebook for some of these things. And I was like, I think we need to, if we start smaller, our mess ups won’t cost as much. If we mess up on flooring or something or whatever the reason is, a thousand square foot is double what it would be for a 400 square foot place. So let’s make these mess ups with a small place that’s going to have less upfront that we could not be profitable on. And then now I’ve learned so much from that, that my next builds are going to be 1500 square feet or 1300 square feet and much bigger, but I have more confidence in myself and everybody I’ve worked with to make that an actual profitable adventure and not make it a money pit.

Dave:
That sounds great, man. I’m excited to see a little bit more of what you’re up to. I’m sure you’ll document the journey. But last thing quickly before we go, you’re also joining BiggerPockets, so what are you going to be doing for the team here?

Garrett :
Yep. I’m super honored to be a part of the BiggerPockets team at the time. I am the resident STR expert. So anything short-term rental related, I’m going to be doing a lot of the content. We have an amazing newsletter we put out each week called Bigger Stays. And if you are a BiggerPockets member, please go in to your notifications and subscribe to the short-term rental newsletter because each week we put out everything that short-term rental hosts are worried about. We talk about regulations, how to make your property more profitable. We interview hosts that are success stories. We dive into even more nuanced and fun stories of how people build unique stays or what are some of the, even last week we did a what are the top college football markets if you’re interested in that, if you’re interested in going to a college football town. So a lot of data crunching. I’m constantly in all types of numbers and we love hearing all about different host success stories out there too.

Dave:
Awesome. Well, welcome to the team. We’re super excited to have you, Garrett. And again, if you’re a short-term rental investor or an aspiring investor, short-term rental, curious, go check out the Bigger Stays newsletter of all sorts of information and expertise from Garrett. Garrett, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. If anyone wants to connect with Garrett, we’ll of course put his BiggerPockets profile, social media handle all of that below. Thanks again Garrett. We’ll see you. I’m sure you’ll be back again soon.

Garrett :
Yep. See you BP Con soon.

Dave:
Awesome. Yeah, I’ll see you there. And thank you all so much for listening. We appreciate you. And if you appreciated this episode, don’t forget to leave us. Review wherever you’re listening for your pockets. I’m Dave Meyer. We’ll see you next time.