Welcome to Boostly Podcast Episode 549. The Boostly podcast is discussing Bill Faith, an experienced host and thought leader in the short-term rental (STR) industry.
He has 25 years of experience in real estate and runs a website called buildstrwealth.com which shares valuable information on the topic.
Bill is based in Nashville, Tennessee and got started in the STR industry by purchasing a luxury beach property in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
He initially intended to hire a property management company but had a bad experience and instead decided to self-manage his property and leverage his skills in Facebook advertising to increase bookings.
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Timestamps (audio)
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Transcript from the Episode
[00:00:00] Liam: Okay, everyone, welcome to the new episode of the Boostly Podcast. And, uh, this is a podcast of course, which gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the trainings, and most importantly, the confidence to go out there so you can go out and get some more direct bookings. My name's Liam Carlan. I'm lucky enough to be the co-host here on the Boostly podcast, um, in Mark Simpson Stead.
[00:00:19] And today we're going behind the host with a extremely. Successful and one of the thought leaders in the S t R industry. Um, I'm really excited to dive in today. Um, uh, we've got Bill Faith and he is, uh, well he go and check out, uh, his website, which is build s t r wealth.com. It is somewhere where you need to go and have a look at to really truly understand the amount of value that Bill shares.
[00:00:46] But he's got 25 years. Hos, uh, real estate sort of, um, experience. And also in terms of s t r knowledge, there's not many people who will be able to outdo him. So I'm really excited to dive into this. [00:01:00] So welcome along. Bill. Thank you for being here today.
[00:01:02] Bill: Hey, Liam. Thanks for, uh, having me this morning. I'm pretty excited outside of having to get up so early
[00:01:07] Liam: I know. What, what time is it where
[00:01:09] Bill: you are? It's not too bad. It's seven o'.
[00:01:11] Liam: Uh, seven. Well, thank you for joining us this morning, uh, mid-afternoon as we record this in the uk. So we're going out live on Facebook. So if you are watching us live on Facebook, just drop a message where you're watching from. As, uh, I'd love to find out in the comments.
[00:01:25] So, bill, if you could just introduce yourself and your business, where your units are in the world, what kind of model you use
[00:01:31] Bill: as. Yeah. Uh, so I live in Nashville, Tennessee, kind of right in the heart of the Bible Belt here in the United States, and I started with, uh, a, a luxury beach property. Uh, it's, I didn't know I was starting with a luxury beach farm.
[00:01:48] I didn't even know that I was starting into short-term rentals. My wife wanted a beach house. Uh, we were, everybody's heard of Dustin. We were in Dustin, and one of my best friends and a groomsman at my wedding. [00:02:00] We had lunch with him and his wife. He just happened to own over 300 properties at that time, 2015 in Dustin.
[00:02:07] Mm-hmm. . He and I had played professional golf all over the world together, and, uh, we, he's like, how much money do you have? I said, we have $127,000 to buy a beach house. He's all, well, you're not gonna do that here. Go to this place called Gulf Shores, Alabama. Which we'd never, we'd heard of it, but we'd never been.
[00:02:24] And you'll get a much bail, you'll save 30 to 40% cuz she had some restrictions. Right. So just like when we're, it's interesting because a lot of the things that I teach now, proximity, views, uniqueness, we got so lucky. We flew down from Nashville to Gulf Shores. We saw 10 properties in one day. The very first property that we saw was the property that we bought.
[00:02:45] It checked the box for all of those things for us as somebody that wanted a second home at that time. And. We were gonna hire a property management company cause we knew nothing about short-term rentals, even though I was been in the real estate space, commercial building, [00:03:00] uh, you know, doing duplexes long-term, all that stuff.
[00:03:03] It just wasn't the plan to get into short-term rentals. Long story short, property manager sucked like most of them do. I'm total anti property manager. I think anybody that's buying and investing into real estate needs to learn how to self-manage it. We'll probably talk about that later in the podcast.
[00:03:17] It's super easy. You just need, you don't know what you don't know. So we had a bad experience for three to four months with the property manager. Finally, I said, you know what? You're not transparent. I don't know what my guests are really booking. I see all these bad reviews for cleaning. The house is getting, you know, worn down in three to four months.
[00:03:33] Just all the stuff that just irritated me as an owner. I said, there's gotta be a better way. So I fired them. I took it on myself. I'd leveraged my skills in Facebook marketing doing, at that time, probably seven to 9 million of direct marketing ads on Google and LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and all this type of stuff, and I learned really quickly that hospitality's easy.
[00:03:58] You just need somebody [00:04:00] to kind of, if you've never done it before, give you a little nudge down that path, give you a little bit of information, and then you can do that. The hardest part is off platform. And I think that's where I have the biggest advantage. So what I did is I bought property. I, I saved my money.
[00:04:17] So I want everybody, and everybody says, oh my God, bill, if you know who I am, you've got these million dollar plus properties and they're all over the United States, you must be rich. Well, I wasn't when I started this I am today. I am very wealthy today. Built my wealth over the last seven years through real estate.
[00:04:33] I've had other successful companies before. I've done 27 startups, built one to 50 million, two to over 30. So I applied those business practices to scale here. But here's the difference and, and I don't know if it's the same over there. I assume that it is Liam, but on this side of the pond, it's how many units do you have?
[00:04:51] Do you remember this? We were talking about this on Clubhouse, right? When you and I first met with Mark and Mike and TJ and all Sean and all these guys, it's like, How many [00:05:00] units do you have? Well, let's don't let Bill have any time in the room cuz he's only got at the time, like 13 units. We all got 40 and 50.
[00:05:06] Well F you guys, I'm making way more money than you are with much less time. And that's the thing that I learned when I started building my portfolio with intention. Mm-hmm. , I'm gonna say that one more time with intention. So I believe we all need to have a plan, a future plan of what our desired outcome.
[00:05:26] Because everybody that comes to me for coaching or comes to one of my events or whatever, it's like, yeah, hey, what? What's your outcome when you, oh, I wanna have 50 units. I wanna have a hundred units. I wanna get to a thousand units. That's a bullshit outcome, right? There's nothing there. It's not substantial.
[00:05:41] Mm-hmm. , how much money do you wanna make by what date? How much cash flow do you need? How much debt are you willing to, you know, shoulder to be able to achieve that? And how much equity, how much wealth, long-term wealth do you really wanna build? Answer those four or five questions. Now you can start to [00:06:00] formulate a plan.
[00:06:00] So I built out my plan. I knew exactly when I was gonna retire, is what I'm, I'm gonna be 50 here in about four months. Mm-hmm. , I was gonna retire at. Because of my investments into real estate, that plan has fast tracked to where I was ready to retire at the end of last year. So literally about three weeks ago financially.
[00:06:20] But I've still got life events that I have to wait for. I've got kids, right? Mm-hmm. . So I wait for my daughters to get outta high school and those things. But financially, I've hit that because of that intention. So I only invest into larger properties that yield more cash. Some of them now could be slightly less cash on cash.
[00:06:39] Here in the US we talk a lot about cash, on cash return, cash on equity, cash on uh, cash flow. So for me, I believe, I don't even believe this cuz I, I know it for a fact. Mm-hmm. , it takes the same amount of time to market, set up, manage bill out, do [00:07:00] your taxes for a two bedroom. 1100 square foot condo or apartment as it does for me to do a 1.6 million, two acre, 16 person occupancy, six bedroom with massive game room cabin or beach house or whatever it is.
[00:07:17] But that two bedroom might do 75 or $80,000 a year in revenue, whereas I'm, I'm doing $300,000 in revenue. So if I look at 75,000 versus 300. Hmm, same amount of time, roughly to manage that. I'm going with the 300,000 every single day. So I just rolled all of my profits that I was from property number one to get into property number two, and it took me almost two years to get to property.
[00:07:46] Number two, a lot of people think I just started writing checks and growing. It's not, not the case. And then it was another year after that. So it really wasn't until 2018. That I have enough cash to really start to scale pre covid [00:08:00] and then covid, you know, is just an anomaly. I mean, that's just through gasoline on the fire, right?
[00:08:05] So that's kinda how I got in and, and started that journey up to the, up to the Covid era, if you will.
[00:08:10] Liam: Do you know you're a breath of fresh air Bill? Because first of all, anybody who comes on and goes, do you know what? Hospitality is easy. You just need to know your outcome. Is, is, is so important, isn't it?
[00:08:19] Cause most people do this and they go, well, I'm just putting my spare cash somewhere. I don't really know what I'm doing with it. I just, I just need something to do on the side. Right. And especially that moment that we talked about just then on Clubhouse, where it's always stuck with me that it's not the number of units, it's actually the cash flow.
[00:08:35] And I guess what that cash allows you to do with your lifestyle, which is is the aim. It's, it's not, like you say 150 units is, is, is, is a pissing contest , you know, really isn't it, you know, is whereas if you've got a select few units which are doing really well, well then, you know, that's, that's really all you need and it depends on your goal and what your, what your why is.
[00:08:55] Which I guess that's a good question to pose to yourself. What is, what is the desired [00:09:00] outcome of this and, and what is your why?
[00:09:02] Bill: So before I jump into that, I just want people to understand the mindset, right? You're a hundred percent correct on what people think, doctors, attorneys, professionals. I'm just gonna park some money here.
[00:09:10] It's easy. Turn on Airbnb. Turn on vrbo. Oh, that price Laing. That'll do the pricing for me. So I'll plug that in. Um, and I'm good. And a hundred percent that worked from about May of 2020 till about August of last year. Right. Just put it, set it and forget it. A. Not gonna happen. Moving forward, we're going, we're moving back to like 2017, 2018 numbers.
[00:09:36] Mm-hmm. , uh, now, so the mindset is what needs transformation, right? So I've done 27 startups. I can honestly tell you that, like two of them. When we started them, I used one like glow golf business glowing the document miniature golf and shopping malls. It was top golf before top golf, and we actually sold our technology to top golf so they could [00:10:00] do all the tracking and everything.
[00:10:02] That was the only business that we, my partner Reg Booth, and I did really, truly thinking of scale first. Mm-hmm. , now people come in and they buy a short term rental and a lot of us are putting 50. Hundred thousand, sometimes $200,000 plus in cash to invest until I got in. Outside of real estate, I've never invested more than $25,000 to start a company.
[00:10:29] One to 50 million plus two additionals to 30 million plus four over 10 million. I don't even know how many have gotten to 5 million. Most of 'em have gotten to between five to 10 million, less than 25 grand. So the mentality for me is if I'm going to buy everybody, if you're going to buy the coffee shop or the scone shop in the UK on the corner, you're, you're thinking about, oh my God, I gotta make sure this cash flows immediately cuz I'm putting my life savings and my effort into that.
[00:10:58] You're the one baking, you're the one behind the [00:11:00] cash. It's the total EMyth. If you, if you've never read the EMyth, go to Amazon right now, buy the EMyth Revisited by Michael Gerber. So we become the technician mentally when we buy that sandwich shop, that coffee shop, whatever, it's people don't think that way when they invest a hundred grand to buy a half a million dollar property in short-term rentals.
[00:11:20] And it doesn't matter if you're co-hosting and it costs you nothing, or if you're arbitrating or if you're buying, the mentality needs to be the same. Let's get our shit. On number one, and let's get the execution down. Let's build systems. Let's build an s o P. Let's get a track record to prove to ourselves, then let's go put our money into number two.
[00:11:41] Right? And I think Covid really jacked that up because it was so easy. And that's where people are either gonna have to adjust now, or they're gonna get, I don't wanna say get burned. They're gonna learn a tough lesson, you know, financially. So for me, . Um, I mean today the scale component, I actually, because of Clubhouse and those [00:12:00] conversations, I got into co-hosting mm-hmm.
[00:12:03] and I wanted to try it, and I'm like, well, look, I'm, I'm not the guy that doesn't have any money to go and buy, but if you are that guy, co-hosting is the absolute easiest in my opinion, and safest place to get. Real estate as a whole, but also short term rentals cuz you still have control of your outcome as opposed to getting into a syndication or a fund or giving your money to somebody else and or borrowing money and going into debt, or giving up equity in a partnership.
[00:12:32] So I quickly built a 1.9 million co-hosting business in less than 18 months because it was, it's the easiest place to be able to scale and I could take everything that I've learned owning and apply it to co-hosting, right? So now I've got this asset to lead me to the desired outcome for more than one person.
[00:12:55] So I've got Chris who works with me. I don't say for me anymore. He is actually a [00:13:00] partner. And he's one that produces the SDR Wealth conference and my boot camps and does everything for me behind the scenes. Well, the CO I, I can't give him build short term rental wealth when I retire, right? Because that's really the B Build Faith, you know, program.
[00:13:14] So what I can do is I can build this co-hosting business. To replace the income and increase the income that he makes through this business, and then give that to him and create an annuity for myself. It's not just, like I say, here you go, Chris, here's a hundred percent of the business. It's like, here's 5%, then 10%, then 25, then 40, then 50, and create an annuity for myself.
[00:13:36] So I'm about building long-term annuities as opposed to start, build, scale, sell, right? And I've done that, but I prefer to start build scale. And then sell with an annuity coming back on the back end for me. And I did that with my very first business, qua Bikinis in nine, I sold in 1994. I was drop shipping [00:14:00] Brazilian bikinis and swimwear and sarongs, uh, out from a fam, a small family outside of Sao Paulo.
[00:14:06] I met when I was playing the South American PGA Tour down. And you know, I sold to Venus Swimwear nice. And I wanted to take the lump sum. And my cpa, thank God I had a cpa. Cause I was like 22 and a half, 23 years old. He said, bill, take a little bit of cash. So that's taking the $2.8 million. Let's take like the 350,000 and then take the annuity.
[00:14:32] I still get checks today. That was 1994. They're not huge today. They were huge when they. But that's what funded my life. That's what funded me to be able to do everything. And, um, so I believe in, in, and I would've never been able to do that, Liam, if I didn't have somebody that understood that I was too stupid at 23 to make the right decision to give me some of that guidance for that.
[00:14:56] And I grew up with no father. So for that [00:15:00] reason and many other reasons, as a golf professional and having to have a coach to. Being a college golf coach and having so many mentors, I talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. I believe every single one of us needs a coach, specifically in this business.
[00:15:14] If you don't, if you're not an expert in tax, you're not an expert in finance, you're not an expert in evaluating real estate, you're not an expert in banking, you're not an expert in hospitality, you're not an expert in marketing. You have to have all six of those. To thrive in this business long term, and most people might have one, maybe one and a half when they get into.
[00:15:36] And
[00:15:36] Liam: their, their belief, like you say, that comes back around to that mindset, is the mindset is, uh, you know, they, they either believe they can't do it in many cases, or, um, believe they can do it all. And, and both of those are in incorrect, aren't they? So you picked up, there's a lot to unpack there, by the way, bill.
[00:15:50] Wow. For the amount of value, uh, that you just provided and. When it comes down to that mindset, um, I actually watched a documentary with Richard Branson recently, and, and it's amazing to [00:16:00] see all the amazing success, but how close these businesses are, you said about at the start of this shouldering debt, how close they were for, for foreclosure and, and that side of things, but actually the, the gamble paid off for them.
[00:16:12] And, um, you know, by, by getting the right people and, and doing the right things at the time. One of the things which I'd love to ask you, bill, is. Mistakes do you see are the most common mistakes for people listening to this are gonna be likely in the hospitality communities in both the usa, Europe, Britain, even Australia?
[00:16:31] What are the most common mistakes that you could say you see across the board?
[00:16:36] Bill: I think number one is people think that they can just throw a dart at the map. And invest into a property. Mm-hmm. . And when I say that, everybody's in a default. Oh, well, I, I, I arbitrage or I, man, I'm a property manager or I'm a co-host, so I don't have to worry about that bullshit.
[00:16:54] I mean, there's pockets of London, London's a big, a big city, and there's [00:17:00] pockets that are gonna produce one property on the same. Can do completely different returns. Right. And that's what I, people don't understand at the S P R Wealth Conference last year I did a presentation about how you, how you basically just extremely what we call a R v, right?
[00:17:20] It's how do you get more value out of your property? But it's not about renovating and stuff like that. It's about the marketing, the value increase, the decor, the design. But it all starts with the location. And I have a. The exact, the new construction, same house, eight houses down, same street, same location, same builder, same design, same bedroom count, same everything except for the design, the marketing, and the view.
[00:17:47] Right? That house did roughly $190,000 in revenue the previous 12 months prior to the, uh, conference in June last year, I did 257. How is that even [00:18:00] possible? It's possible because that house was with a property management company and the owner did nothing, right? Which is okay if they just want passive income, but I treated my property like a business, and the biggest thing is the location.
[00:18:14] Their house had houses in front of it, between it and the beach. My house had open views of the beach. So you know, we're all looking in. In the Bosley world, you're looking for opportunities to market your property to drive direct bookings, right. It's the same thing in my world. I actually don't care where the bookings come from though, so I just want more bookings and I want to be able to increase my.
[00:18:35] So I've looked at, I paid more money. The only difference for the lot that had open views. Does that make sense? So it's the same thing when you're looking for that flat that's at the end of the road or in the middle road versus the flat that's on the corner that sees, you know, into the, the open area in front of it or the park or whatever that is.
[00:18:52] Or when people are walking by that visibility that they can see your property or they can't really see the property where the signage [00:19:00] is going to. It's these very small details that become super important and it affects the co-host, the manager, and the arbitrage, just like it does me as an investor, because we only have so much bandwidth.
[00:19:13] So it's the same model. Like for my management company, my co-hosting company, I only take on properties that started with properties. I can only do a hundred thousand dollars in revenue or more right now. Then it went to one. I've just bumped that up to 200 because as I max out the, the, the maximum number of units that go into my portfolio, I continue to raise my commission.
[00:19:35] I started at 18%. I'm out 22%. Plus I charge a 2 99 a month retainer because my pot, my refrigerator's getting filled. You can only put so much stuff into the fridge without starting to pull stuff out. I also pull stuff outta that fridge. Right, so I bought 13 properties between June of 2020 and June of 2021.
[00:19:58] I only had a net hold of [00:20:00] three. That means that I sold four. Because I was scaling those up. I had those $400,000 properties that turned into $700,000 properties, and I could use a 10 31 exchange to sell and then buy into a million dollar properties. So there's a lot of strategy that goes into this, but at the end of the day, I think we all need to understand we only have so much bandwidth personally and professionally.
[00:20:28] We need to max out. We need. 10 x every single thing that we can do inside of that bandwidth that we have, you
[00:20:39] Liam: know, you've, the point you're making there is, is ringing so true? Because at the end of the day, You are building the right kind of portfolio, and this is one of the things which I really take from you, bill, which is, is first of all the due diligence and treating it as a business.
[00:20:54] You know, like this isn't, this isn't somewhere that you're just buying to go and stay in and you're running it out on the spare time. [00:21:00] If you're buying a place, you know, as, as an investment, it needs to be treated as as such, but also the. Um, the ability that you've got there to maximize it. Like you say, don't, don't hedge your bets by having four different places.
[00:21:13] Go for the one which is really, that you can really max out the one with the best views. And, and you remind me of, um, one of the properties I've just taken on beautiful big house. Uh, it can sleep a lot of people, you know, it's a mini mansion. But there's no parking. And instantly that is such an important aspect of it, and that'll drop that revenue so, so far down just by not having that one.
[00:21:33] Amen. Which is, is needed for that type of stay. So,
[00:21:37] Bill: and I, Liam, I kind of got off track on your question. I apologize. I think you just kind of jogged my memory. One of the things that I, I think the biggest mistake, cause I didn't answer your question, is what kind of, what you just said. It's the evaluation of the property and people don't understand.
[00:21:51] They, they look at just the property as a stand. The mistake is, is they're not taking mental notes and leveraging how they're gonna [00:22:00] position and market that property, right? That's one thing that I'm looking at is what, what are my statement pieces? What, what do I get? What do I have to do? What's it gonna cost me?
[00:22:09] How am I gonna market this? Because if I don't have. Everybody for the last two and a half to three years has been able to buy an average property in an average location to make money well before Covid and now after Covid it's gonna be what's the marketing? And we, we all, we've all seen how we can absolutely be annihilated by one little algorithm change and it's come back, you know, at least if you're doing the right things.
[00:22:33] I mean, I've taken more bookings in the last six days than I have in the last three months. But what I'll tell you is, is that when you evaluate a property, once again, arbitrage co-hosting property, now it doesn't matter. You've got the four major, you know, investment styles into um, S T R. You have to know how you're gonna market it.
[00:22:55] And that could be something unique interiorly, it could be something unique externally. But if you [00:23:00] don't see something you can market. And then if you see an issue like Liam identified with, Hey, I can have a private that can sleep 10, 12, 16, 20, but I've got limited marketing, you better make sure you can get over that hurdle either before you sign the contract to work with the the owner, or you buy that property on your own.
[00:23:16] Liam: Hundred percent. I, I really love the, uh, the inspiration there, you know, that I'm, I'm certainly, I'm learning a lot here, so I'm sure people listening are, one of the things you mentioned is, is you get more bookings at the moment. And we talked about the, the algorithm obviously change back in May, uh, for Airbnb.
[00:23:30] There's a lot of talk in the communities as we record this January, 2023. There's a lot of talk and there's a term being flown around called Airbnb Bust. Um, I'd love to get your opinion on that. And also, um, What you think the future holds for hospitality in general, in, in the market? What are the opportunities, I guess?
[00:23:49] Bill: So I'm gonna start with those of you that are listening to me for the first time. If you like my style, go listen to t r and filtered. That's my podcast. It's str and filtered.com. You can catch it everywhere that [00:24:00] podcasts are, cause I'm gonna give you about three to four minutes of it. Airbnb bus. The hashtag is bullshit that an influencer started in our industry.
[00:24:07] That's fearmongering. You know, his community and students and people to buy his. You know. Then immediately he starts the hashtag and then he goes in and he, he sells, you know, an algorithm, you know, changing webinar or course or whatever. That's fucked up, Liam, and you can bleep that out. I have a, sorry, I'm just getting passionate.
[00:24:26] You can say what you like on the podcast. Be fucking responsible as influencers. You're an influencer. You have a lot of people that listen to this podcast. Mark is I am that there is no Airbnb. There's an Airbnb bust if you bought in bad locations that are, that were not able to produce in 2018 and 19 pre Covid, cuz they're not gonna be able to produce afterwards if you don't know how to do the things that we've talked about.
[00:24:53] If you just are parking cash, if you can afford to park cash, great, so be it. But if you're one of those guys [00:25:00] you don't like, I'm gonna back. I'll bet 90% of your listeners, maybe 99% have never heard of a company called Stay Alfred. Stay. Alfred was an arbitrage company, a massive scale that had raised like 110 million in 2019 in the US and they went so fast into scaling and growing arbitrage, like thousands of units, but they were out of business by the end of March 20.
[00:25:30] Because they didn't have enough cash. They didn't have runway to be able to sustain, right? So, mm-hmm. , that's why you have to treat this like a business, not millionaire stuff, not driving high-end cars, having a hundred thousand dollars pianos and all the bullshit that attracts Gen Z. To come and buy your stuff on Instagram and YouTube, you need to treat this like a business.
[00:25:54] You need to have at least six months of full carrying cost and operating. Right. [00:26:00] Don't invest if you don't have that money. So when I'm running a perform, I'm under property. I'm under contract right now to buy my first property since April of 2022. I'm gonna close on February 20th. That's gonna be nine months by far the longest period of time.
[00:26:19] I've gone since 2018, buying a property. I mean, she had about 13 in one. Why? Because the economic climate has changed dramatically since Russia invaded Ukraine. Right? Which we're coming up on that one year anniversary here in a few weeks. It's still not stabilized yet. The short term rental space is stabilizing now, but it's not stabilized yet.
[00:26:45] We don't know what that outcome is. So I think that people react and I'm, and I'm, everybody has reaction. We all get. The algorithm update for Airbnb happened on December 4th for most [00:27:00] people. It really started back in late October and November for people that really paid attention to Che's address that he released prior to the algorithm being updated.
[00:27:12] Sure, we all got hit with it. We all saw some things happen, but if you've been making changes in, in doing. Through iterations and tracking and benchmarking, like I use a program called Rank Breeze, and I know we'll get into the text and a little bit that I love, but then I can see what actually works and doesn't work.
[00:27:30] So I'm gonna go back if you're, if you're doing the fundamentals, the right thing. Really, you know how to evaluate property markets all the way down to properties. You're using s t R Insights or you know, one of the data tools out there to help you identify a strong market bedroom count. Then you go in and you learn how to optimize your listings.
[00:27:48] Take professional photos, write copy. We, Liam, we have so many, you know, tools to help us like chat, G p t and jasper.ai for the copywriting. If you're not a copywriter, you know, you have professional photographers. [00:28:00] Don't just use, you know, this thing if you're not a professional photo. All these things to go in and, and boost your listing.
[00:28:06] See what I did there? Boost Lead, boost Lee. I like it. Yeah. Um, I like get your, get your direct booking sales pages or websites, you know, set up. I'm sure Mark and I are gonna debate that in at the SDR wealth conference and our, our marketing workshop. Not a pitch, it's sold out. Just fyi. Um, the, uh, if you can go in.
[00:28:28] And if you can do things the right way, like what the top 10 or 15 percenters are, do and model them, you're gonna be fine. I'm not worried about anything. Have bookings been slow? Yes. Are bookings coming back for like here in the US at least for spring season and summer season? Absolutely. They are. They started later this year where we're gonna lose and why?
[00:28:49] Our, our, our profit's gonna go down year over year. If you look at it as a calendar. Is most of us are really slow. If we're a summer based market [00:29:00] here in like January and February, things are picking up, spring breaks in March. Then we're into the summer season, concert start summer, all that type of stuff.
[00:29:08] I think that's gonna be fine, but it's making up the delta for how slow it's been really from November, December, January, and February. That's one of the reasons that I think, you look at the smart investors and they diversify geographically, right? Mm-hmm. , so you guys. Huge climate changes from the UK to Ireland, to Paris to Spain.
[00:29:29] Right. Kind of just think about in that four country area, that's kind of like the, the Southeast or the myths, a section of the United States. So there's a reason that I'm invested at the beach. On the, on the, the Gulf of Alabama. There's a reason that I'm in the mountains of North Carolina. It's ski season right now.
[00:29:48] There's a reason I'm buying in Montana right now. So I'm diversifying in, in Scottsdale, Arizona, a lake property, you know, close to Nashville. Not everything is confined into one [00:30:00] geographic location, honestly, because of weather patterns drives traffic. Right? And I wanna make sure that I've got cash flow in the winter with peak season.
[00:30:10] So I have two owned properties. Actually my biggest property is owned. I own a smaller property. I paid $500,000 for it. And I have a ski and ski out $2 million chalet that I co. Right, so I've, I've got this revenue coming in to offset the slow season at the beach. So I think that geographical, you know, kind of investment strategy to really how that's gonna impact your cash flow on a 12 month cycle becomes super important if you do a handful of those things.
[00:30:40] And if you listen to the smart investors, they're all doing the exact same thing. This isn't just some secret that I'm sharing with you today, to be honest with. There is no Airbnb bust that is a marketing tactic to sell a product and services.
[00:30:58] Liam: You know, that's, that's refreshing to [00:31:00] hear and I'm sure there's a lot of people just going, yes, bill, do you know?
[00:31:02] I mean, that is, uh, because what you're saying there is, you know, there is always ups and downs, isn't there? There is. Um, you know, the market may start a little bit later, but the key thing is having a good product in a good location and, and, you know, treat it as, as stock at the end of the day, having.
[00:31:19] Benefit of having properties in the different areas and having that cash flow coming in. You know, it's high season, well, this one's low season. Well actually these ones are high season. And then I move into the next one is, is just such a, uh, a genius way of looking at it and, and something which is, is everybody listening should take in under
[00:31:36] advisement.
[00:31:37] I
[00:31:37] Bill: think. I think the other thing, Liam, so everybody's looking for 12 month markets, right? And most year round markets are in urban area. Because of the tourism, the business travel, the combination of all these factors. You know, downtown London would be amazing. One of the best year round markets is where I live in Nashville, Tennessee.
[00:31:55] I don't own a property here. So what happens is those markets are very heavily regulated. [00:32:00] Manhattan, New York, you know, London, and the pockets that they have, national North Carolina, um, you know, Barcelona, Spain, all these heavy, heavily relegate, regulated, uh, markets, none of them are closed. A lot of people say they're closed and you can't get in.
[00:32:16] You can get into every one of those markets that I've mentioned. Mm-hmm. , and when you do get in, it's strong. The question is, is do you have the mindset or the kones. To spend the time and the effort and the work to figure out your way to get in one of those markets. Right now, literally today, like I'm in Montana of all places in the US you would not think that it would have stringent regulation.
[00:32:41] It's tough to get an s t R permit. Um, and like, I've gotta put in a new septic tank and it's gonna take me three months to go through permitting at a local level and a state level, which doesn't happen in most states, but that's the barrier to entry, right? That keeps a lot. People out that don't want to do that work.
[00:32:59] [00:33:00] So I look at investing into heavily regulated markets. One, because they have a history, it's not gonna change dramatically, but two, it keeps the week out. So if you're a strong person that is willing to do the due diligence, jump through those hoops to be able to get into a highly regulated market, it's typically stronger once you get inside of it.
[00:33:19] So that's a strategy that I think people that are willing to do the due diligence should be looking at moving forward. It's a nice
[00:33:25] Liam: way of looking at it. So many people are looking at regulations fearfully, whereas because Airbnb, short-term rental, it is a short, uh, it's a low barrier to entry. People can just put, you know, any property, especially where I am in the uk, there's no regulation at all.
[00:33:40] But actually because of that, the number of listings since last early last year has gone up by over a hundred. So there's a lot of supply. Having regulations actually means for a lot of the people listening will have been involved in, uh, hospitality, short term rental in some way for, for years as opposed to mumps.
[00:33:57] And actually, if you're already in it and there's [00:34:00] regulation coming in, well. You know, that will stop others from, from being your competition at the end of the day. And, and that'll help to, um, make it a little bit harder, which makes the, the supply potentially drop and then then more income for each of the hosts, which are already here, which is cool.
[00:34:14] So we mentioned it earlier on that you, you talked about tech, and we're gonna dive into tech. But before we do, one of the questions which I've got read down here is, what are your thoughts on AI technology and how it's gonna affect the hospitality industry?
[00:34:27] Bill: I think AI is affecting everything, to be honest with you.
[00:34:30] I mean, Um, I've been, I, I've, I, I know Dave Rogan Miller, who is the founder of Otter ai, which then turned into Jarvis, which then, uh, you know, M C U didn't like that a whole lot. . So the Casper ai, um, which is probably still today one of the best copywriting tools, um, available. And I, Chris, and I've been using it since beta.
[00:34:58] We use it for every single [00:35:00] thing that we write, except for my personal emails that go out to my community. Um, just cause I want that to be personal. I don't care if they're spelling errors or whatever. It's, I want my voice to be a hundred percent in that. The interesting thing about AI and how it affects is, you know, Google's already catching up to be able to identify AI written copy, uh, because it leaves some type of a footprint.
[00:35:20] I'm not techy enough. So truly understand that. But as an SEO for 15 years, I would be apprehensive if back in the day, there used to be tools that were like content spinners. You'd write something, a blog, then you'd spin it, spin it, and distribute it everywhere. And that was Black Hat seo. And you know, the, the algorithms for Google, yahoo Duck dot Go, were gonna be, um, you know, smart enough.
[00:35:42] But I think, excuse me, I think ai, um, is like, I'll, I'll be honest with you, I, I, I. Hospitable hosts. You know, I'm writing in the book, uh, right now and you know, mark wrote in it last year. There's a lot of great people writing it, but a lot of [00:36:00] tho those people are not professional writers. Mm-hmm. , and I'm in the Facebook group and we all struggle with writing.
[00:36:05] Right. Well, it would be if you really would just do a brain dump, like, here's a trick, get Otter Day. I Otter ai. It's a free app. You can get up to like 600, 800 words or you can. Just go in and, and voice over what you wanna say in your listing, right? Then take that and copy and paste that into chat G P T, which is a free app, and watch what happens with the copy that pops out.
[00:36:30] So I, I believe that copywriting, Liam, and our, in any industry, is one of the most important skill sets that we need to have. If I took 60 seconds to read, The copywriting from my very first beach house, you would say that's the best copywriting ever because that was somebody that was professionally trained to copyright.
[00:36:49] That was on my, my marketing agency's team at that time. Um, so I'm a huge fan of AI as it exists today, and how we can use that in any [00:37:00] business specifically with the amount of copy that we should be writing, meaning our descriptions in our listings, maxing out every character under every image in our listing.
[00:37:10] For our direct booking sales pages and websites, our posts that are going into Instagram or Facebook for social media or Facebook ads, whatever we're doing, email marketing. Most of you don't do email marketing and you're missing the boat tremendously. Cause that's the number one place to generate revenue.
[00:37:27] Um, you know, outside of like Airbnb, which is Google, that's the search engine. But when you wanna do it on your own, don't waste time doing tos and all this other crap. Focus on writing an e cap, building an email list, and then writing emails. Well, your hurdle. I don't know what to say. I mean literally DM E at Bill Faith 73, that's F A E T H on Instagram, and I'll give you seven topics immediately that you can write about to send to your past guest.
[00:37:52] But you need stayi or you something to be capturing and building your email list. The mental hurdle is, I, I can't write. [00:38:00] Well go spend $99 a month for Jasper AI and let it write it for you. I can type in six to seven, five to six sentences in the Jasper AI. Now because it's learned our. And it'll write me 500 to a thousand words that I could literally would be confident enough to copy and paste an email to pass guests.
[00:38:17] Mm-hmm. . Now I, I probably need to write one or two sentences to drop in a call to action inside of that. Right? Not a problem. Boom. Email's done in 15 minutes as opposed to taking a day to try to write an email. Now, the flip side, you probably know if you follow it, Liam, like I do chat, G P T. I just saw like 10 billion, you know, Microsoft valuation on chat G P T yesterday?
[00:38:44] Mm-hmm. It's like quadrupling or 10 Xing. Its intelligence on a daily basis right now. Mm-hmm. Five weeks ago when nobody knew about chat, G P T, it couldn't write a lot of stuff about our industry. [00:39:00] Mm-hmm. today it can write a book about our industry five weeks. So I think that's exciting for us as marketers and business owners and how we can use it today.
[00:39:11] It do, I don't wanna say it scares me, but it does give me pause, you know, moving into the future of how those tools are gonna be able to be leveraged as they grow and they get smarter. And I think a lot of that's the fear of the unknown, right? You just, you, you don't know. But I mean, when, when you look at.
[00:39:31] Arguably one of the smartest, most successful men on the planet, Elon Musk. He's investing into AI for Twitter, um, extensively. Um, and you look at what's, at least what I personally experienced since the launch of Otter and jasper.ai, and I see what's happening with chat G P T at some point. I don't think we'll write anything.
[00:39:51] It's gonna be like, you know, Wikipedia, you know, information, or you know, basically you have it all at your fingertips. You're gonna just type in a question. And you're gonna get a fully [00:40:00] written answer. The question will be is how good is a company like Google being able to identify that? Because as a marketer, I don't want everybody to have a one click and be able to develop the same quality of content that like Neil Patel or myself or a Danny Sullivan can create on their own.
[00:40:18] Um, because that would level the playing field. That's my concern, you know, moving forward. Um, but right now I think it's a great. You know,
[00:40:26] Liam: there's, I'm, there's so much to unpack there, and thank you again, bill for, for how much value you're sharing because that, that a AI is something which I have used. I, I can't write to save my life, but I can talk, I can talk into an app and as long as I've got a very basic outline, then I can go to town with it.
[00:40:41] And like you say with chat, G P t, I've used it, uh, today, um, for, for one of the listings. It's an amazing tool. You just have to ask the right questions, don't you? You, you have to know who your market is, cuz that's one thing it can't do, is it can't identify, you know, your, your guest avatar. You've gotta give it the right kind of few [00:41:00] sentences or the right hints, but it is just such an amazing thing.
[00:41:02] And like you say, it's learning all the time, which is,
[00:41:04] Bill: is amazing. Oh, the cool thing is like for your li you said for your listings, right? So let's just look at titles, you know, type in a title, type in our normal crappy title for a listing, and give it the character. Into chat G p T, but then copy and paste that into Jasper.
[00:41:19] And that's where the magic happens, right? Like combining those two apps. So you think about if you're setting up a listing today is not a $99 investment worth it for you to nail your copy, uh, in a listing. A hundred percent. The process, in my opinion, is what I just shared with Liam. Do your, do your title and chat, g p t.
[00:41:38] Write the copy for your, you know, whatever it is, 120 characters under every image and chat, g p T. Then paste it into Jasper because you can select the tone and how you want it written, right? Mm-hmm. . And then that's kinda where the magic happens, and you'll end up with tremendous
[00:41:52] Liam: copy. Jasper is, is much more for marketing in general, isn't it?
[00:41:57] Whereas chat is, is a little bit more functional, I [00:42:00] identified. But one thing I'd love to ask and uh, I wanna be respectful of your time, bill, is what is your tech stack? What are the things which you use in your hospitality business and that everybody listening should, should know about?
[00:42:13] Bill: Um, so I mean, my PMs is owner res, I, it's hands down the most robust PMs in the industry, in my opinion.
[00:42:21] Um, I love that it's got direct API access into Facebook, into Google. So I, I, I'm, if you don't use owner res, you truly cannot track your roaz, which is return on ad spend or your roi, return on investment, you're guessing with any other platform that's out there. So that's really the reason I migrated to owner res, but it's so robust.
[00:42:42] Um, you know, I've got QuickBooks API integration. It does everything that every other, you know, p m s does and then, you know, a lot of other things as well. Um, it's challenging. A lot of people stay away from it. They're, if you're one property, I don't recommend owner re I would actually start with hospitable.
[00:42:59] I actually use [00:43:00] hospitable on top of owner roads, uh, because Hospitable has AI built in, uh, to their messaging replies. So they have automatic replies. So I have. Three or four different, you know, WiFi's down or wifi doesn't work, or internet's out kind of keywords that hospitable can track and then send information to the guest automatically.
[00:43:20] If I'm on a plane or I can't get to it immediately tells 'em how to reset the router. And by the way, if that doesn't work then you know, message me back and I'll call the service company. So it saves me time. So I have owner res with hospitable on top just for putting the AI and some auto responding messaging and stuff like.
[00:43:37] Um, getting the, the granularity of the apps, I think is what becomes important. Back to that process real. All the apps I'm gonna share with you, the technology I'm gonna share with you is a, a deal breaker, like from a co-hosting standpoint. Mm-hmm. , or a property management standpoint. If they don't want to use my tech, I'm not gonna use Schlag and Yale and August locks.
[00:43:57] I'm not gonna use Ring and three [00:44:00] other security cameras. So I am a ring camera guy. One of the reasons I love it is I can install it or, you know, a not very educated handyman. Even a cleaner can install. I use the battery powered and I always have a solar panel with it, right? So that way I don't ever have to win.
[00:44:15] I love the interface, um, you know, on phone. So my tech stack has been built. I do 99.9% of my work from this thing. Um, I never wanna sit in front of my iMac, you know, or do any of that type stuff. So it's built with intention, just like my portfolio around how I'm gonna. Owner re hospitable ring cameras, eco B thermostats, um, slagan code locks.
[00:44:39] So those are kind of the core, you know, inside the house. Now I do have add-ons from Ring, uh, that go in, I don't even know what they're called, to monitor the co, the CO2 or whatever in the house that monitors water breaks. So they have the little things to put down, uh, you know, around the water mains and leaks and faucets and stuff like.
[00:44:57] Um, one big one for me is I bought [00:45:00] properties with tools and pool heaters is I use, uh, aqua links. That's the kind of the communication system that's built into your heater, tied into the Penta app. Um, here. Um, what else am I missing from a text? What, what does that do? That,
[00:45:16] Liam: that, that, um, Aqualink
[00:45:18] Bill: so I can make sure that the heater's on, I can schedule the heater.
[00:45:21] So like, as an example, If it's during the winter, everybody pays to, so I charge $50 a day to have the heater. It's super expensive. If I run it for a month in December, it's like 800 bucks. So I charge $50 a day when people stay. So immediately when they book, I just pull out my phone and I, I've taken four bookings since we've been, you know, recording the podcast.
[00:45:41] If somebody wants to pull, eat it, one, I gotta send the payment request to get paid for it through Airbnb or vrbo, but then I just go in and I add it to my calendar. Inside a pen tear and it will automatically turn it on and turn it off at a specific date and time. Control the lights, control the pump, all of that type of stuff to where I don't have to, most [00:46:00] people are, Hey, handyman, go turn on the heater for whatever, and then you have to pay the handyman for that.
[00:46:04] And it's just, and then you think about your time to have to manage that. And the one thing that is critical for me is you. So like just having a calendar sync for even one property between Airbnb and VR R B O and not having automated messaging, you know, is a huge deal. So, I mean, I send out an average of seven to 10 messages to my guests for every stay.
[00:46:28] You gotta remember, my average stay is like 4.5 days. and my average booking lead time is like 61 days. It's a little bit shorter than it used to be cuz people now are booking for the summer, right? If you're in an urban market that's a little bit different, you're probably gonna have shorter booking lead time.
[00:46:45] So adjusting your messaging and being able to control that based on the lead time is very, very important. So like, I'm, I, so I'm a big believer and I don't, I don't want to get, keep me on track here, Liam, but this is something really important I wanna share with every. [00:47:00] You need to understand your cancellation policy, so a lot of, you're probably thinking, bill, well, why would you send out six or seven messages or emails before somebody checks in?
[00:47:09] Because I have a cancellation p I used to be strict, so after 48 hours, they're losing 50% of their deposit. Because of the ranking algorithm. I have a much more flexible policy to where they can cancel up to 30 days for free and up to, I think it's up to 15 or 14 days, and still get 50%. So that means if Liam books with me today for June, there is a four month sales process.
[00:47:33] Liam is not my customer. Let that sink in for a second. I have four months of Liam being a high, highly qualified lead because he is booked, but Liam can go and book another property and cancel me with no penalty up until 30 days. So for me, I'm still in a sales mindset. So I have an email funnel just.
[00:47:55] ClickFunnels, Russell Brunson, all that type of stuff. I do that stuff. It's built in [00:48:00] from the time that Liam books till the time that he gets to the 30 days where I'm adding value, not trying to upsell him into anything. , but just saying things like, Hey, Liam, you know, here's what you need to, uh, to pack if you forget these things.
[00:48:12] By the way, we have these, so we have to earn the right to get into somebody's inbox. We have to earn the right to communicate with them. So no way am I selling anything to Liam, but what I'm letting him know, or a lot of the small things that can make or break Liam's or his wives who's more important than Liam.
[00:48:29] Cuz usually, at least for me, it's mostly females that are booking. Mm-hmm. . But so like the little things of, hey, if you stated other short term rentals and you're worried, you think you have to pick up toilet paper and paper towels, you don't have to do that. We've got your covered night. I'll send him a picture in the laundry room of a case of, you know, toilet paper so they don't have to worry about that starter pack.
[00:48:48] Then the next email. Mom, we got you covered. We got tampons, we got tamp, we got pads, we got makeup removers. We got extra toothbrushes. When your kids forget to pack it, toothpaste. And I take a [00:49:00] picture of the little wicker basket that we have. Everything really nicely organized and send it to 'em in that message, right?
[00:49:05] So I'm nurturing right through that funnel, essentially is the way that I view it, because Liam is not a customer until they're. The cancellation policy. So customize your messaging to be able to deliver during that period of time. And that's what I really love. Hospitable. The most important reason I use hospitable single inbox, a lot of these PMs is when you have multiple properties have, you have to use multiple inboxes.
[00:49:30] And that sucks for efficiency, right? So outside of that, I'm using Facebook Business manager. Um, you know, I run Facebook. Um, active campaign is my email and C R m I was a huge HubSpot guy. Uh, customer number 33, HubSpot Partner Agency at HubSpot. It's overkill for what we do. So most of you can get away with MailChimp for email marketing if you're just starting free account, up to 2000 contacts and one email a month for free.
[00:49:58] And you should be emailing [00:50:00] your past customers and your, your leads because you should be generating leads with Stay five for all the non-book that stay in your property. And everybody that gets a quote, you should have this in your lead funnel as well. Um, so I, I like MailChimp for that. Um, am I forgetting you Chat, G p t jasper.ai.
[00:50:17] I use Otter, uh, for just about every, everything. Um, oh God. And a big one. Touch Stay. Um, I. Uh, touch day and I'm, and I'm using touch day differently, uh, today. So a lot of video going into touch day. A lot of how-to stuff for my guests. But one of the big problems that really frustrates me and my wife is our staging, excuse me, just something as simple as like, your beds, right?
[00:50:42] So our average bed, I counted it when we were in, uh, on vacation or we were work vacation, sorry. Uh, after Christmas, going skiing at one of our. My wife averages like seven pillows per bed. That's a lot of pillows, so you got decorative pillows, you have shams, and most cleaners don't know the difference between a sham and [00:51:00] a regular pillow.
[00:51:00] So the regular pillow ends up in the sham in the wrong spot. So we're using pictures, but also how-to videos to identify. And we even give them a process. We don't know if they use it, but here's how you take everything out. Here's where you put the pillows, here's where you, you, you put the laundry. So we're communicating with our boots on the ground team using touch Stay now as well.
[00:51:20] And most people don't think about using it in that type of an asset because staging gets all wonky. You know, you guys know, you walk into a. And the coffee table's supposed to be here, but it's over there and you know, somebody moves stuff in the kitchen and all that type of stuff. So Lamps.
[00:51:36] Liam: What's that?
[00:51:37] Lamps are the worst one. Lamps go walk out from, from
[00:51:39] Bill: places? Yeah, a hundred percent. I have my, I have a big house in North Carolina. Leave. It's got a guest house. Right. The only problem that I have a guest house on. Furniture moves between the two houses. So like, you know those Infinity game tables that are like a thousand bucks that have like 500 games on it.
[00:51:55] We've got one in our main house and literally mm-hmm when we got there the [00:52:00] day after Christmas, the previous guests had carried it through the snow up the stairs and put it into the guest house for the kids. And I'm like, there's a whole fucking game room, you know, three car garage game room underneath you.
[00:52:12] You didn't need to do that, but you know it. It's crazy. And the cleaners don't know where to put that stuff back because they don't pay close enough attention on the front end. Right? So those are things that we kind of just use that in a different way. I use resort cleaning for all of my cleaning, even though a lot of these PMSs say that they, that they get access to the calendar.
[00:52:33] But one of the big things for me is there's no accept acceptance, decline features inside the PMs, right? So what I love about resort cleaning.com is it costs me nothing. Cost of cleaners like a buck to a buck 50, uh, per clean. But every PMs integrates with resort clean. I have a dashboard for all my properties, and I can see when they accept.
[00:52:56] And when they decline, and I can leave special notes and there's [00:53:00] maintenance records, I can run all of the maintenance and everything through resort cleaning and the cleaners can bill. So instead of them, you know, sending you a text saying, Hey, send me money, I can, they can bill me and I can pay directly through resort cleaning.
[00:53:13] So it checks a lot of boxes, uh, for management and also payment processing and accounting, uh, by using resort.
[00:53:23] Liam: You know, thank you Bill, for, for sharing. I mean, that is one amazing tech stack, but also I feel like, uh, I feel like we've been given a lesson on, on, you know, sort of some of the things that you need to do for, uh, that sales process. You've mentioned before somebody actually stays. I've never thought of it like that, you know, that many hosts, including myself, I'm probably quite guilty of.
[00:53:44] I've got all made messages and they're just set up to, uh, you know, to, to fire out. But, The journey's different, isn't it for everyone. And so making sure that you're hitting their fears about the reasons why they might cancel is just so important. You know, like, and, and just making sure they feel valued [00:54:00] at the end of the day, which is, is amazing.
[00:54:01] So. I want to, as we reach the end of these, just ask two very quick questions. The first one, bill, is you've, you've provided so much value. Where can we come and find out more information? Where can we follow, where can, uh, you know, where can people go and learn some of the stuff you're talking about? Um,
[00:54:16] Bill: I mean, build short-term rental builds.
[00:54:19] Str r wealth.com is the website. The most valuable asset that I have is my Facebook group. It's, uh, build Short-Term Rental Wealth, uh, Facebook group. We have 25,000 people in there, and it's not like the other Facebook groups. It's, there's no bitch. There's no complaining. We do our best to keep all the, you know, the, um, telegram and the four x and, you know, the crypto spammers out of there.
[00:54:41] Uh, I know I own the group, but it's the best Facebook group in our industry. It's so packed with value. My su I, I have, I've built the s t r super team. They're in there adding value like less. Yes. Every Tuesday, Ryan Bacon and I are doing tax. Tuesdays live broadcast q and a. Just answering questions as we get prepared.
[00:54:58] Tax season, [00:55:00] um, on Bill Faith, that's f ae t h 73 on Instagram, every other platform, Twitter, um, you know, TikTok, whatever. It's just B Faith, uh, with an E instead of an I. And, uh, and also, you know, the build s t r Wealth on YouTube, but I would say the Facebook group is the most value because of the amount of free education that has dropped into that group.
[00:55:22] Um, if you like short doses of content and you like the way that I deliver, Some do, some don't. You know, you gotta find your, your, your person, your tribe to follow. Um, St. R and filtered is, uh, one of my two podcasts, and that is the Unbridled Truth about short-term rentals. I dropped a couple of, you know, truth bombs a few minutes ago here.
[00:55:43] Um, it's 10 minutes. I mean, some of them go a little bit longer. Um, it's not your typical vendor interview type of stuff, you know, that we're doing. Um, it's, I try to keep it at 10 minutes or. Um, I just did one really important one that's coming up, uh, probably next week, and it got to like 15 to 16 [00:56:00] minutes.
[00:56:00] And then those of you that struggle for like evaluating properties and, uh, the investing side and the data side. Kenny Bedwell, the founder of s t r Insights, hands down, in my opinion, the, the best data analysis tool, uh, in our industry. And I have s t RNomics, uh, podcast. We host both of these with real slickers at the hospitality network.
[00:56:20] Love. . Um, we drop s str r n filtered on Tuesday, so that came out yesterday. Uh, and then we drop s str RNomics every Thursday and you can give [email protected], s str filter.com or anywhere, uh, that you listen to podcasts. We're on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, all of them.
[00:56:37] Liam: Nice, nice. And finally then, bill, uh, what is the mantra or saying that you kind of live by, or one that really resonates with.
[00:56:48] Oh, that's
[00:56:49] Bill: a, that's a tough one. Um, I, I think that I, I wanna navigate, I don't really have one. I'd, I'd say it's more of a, of a mentality of two, [00:57:00] many times subconsciously I'll pick the more challenging path to go down as opposed to the easier path. And so actually I, and, and it ki you know, I do have one, it's, I want to be different.
[00:57:11] When people are going down the easy path, I go down the hard. When people are, are making investments in Gulf Shores where we bring, my wife and I have been investing there forever. We're out. I'm not investing there anymore. So one of the things that I look at is you gotta be different in how you host different than how you stage different in how you design different in the properties that you buy different and everything.
[00:57:30] Because by the time you're getting information on social media and you're following people, it's too late. It's like the stock market. If you watch CNBC and you're investing in what Ron and Sauna tells you to invest this morning at 9:00 AM that that ship's already. Right. So carve out your own path and when when you see the herd going this way, you need to go the opposite direction.
[00:57:49] That's kind of my mantra.
[00:57:52] Liam: I love that. I love that. And Bill, this is, this has been amazing. There's been so much value. I'm sure that people watch it on the Facebook Live. I mean, if you are watching [00:58:00] on the Facebook Live, please drop a thank you to Bill for, for sharing this information. Go and check out his Facebook group.
[00:58:05] Go and check out the, uh, the webpage as well. That will be in the show notes if you're listening on the, on the podcast. And so, yeah, thank you very much Bill for, for spending your time with us today. And, and thank you too. If you're listening in on the Boley podcast, I know there's a lot of places you can put your attention.
[00:58:19] I really thank you for putting it with us and, uh, hope you've enjoyed the interview here with Bill and Bill once again. Thanks very much. And is there any, thank you. Have
[00:58:27] Bill: an awesome time. I really appreciate it. Thank
[00:58:29] Liam: you. Thank you buddy. And, uh, yeah, we'll, uh, we'll see you in the next one. I look forward to the, the, you've got a few conferences coming up this year, haven't you?
[00:58:35] So we look forward to seeing you there, . Awesome. Thank you Li. See you later. Bye for now. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee
[00:58:44] Bill: podcast. Bruce Lee led Bruce Lee cuz it's so hard on the tea. Is loose leaf picking up those rhymes? Don't write it, just do it loosely.
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