All Things Short-Term Rentals With Bailey Kramer

Casey Brown  0:00  
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Hey there, and welcome to today's episode of cash flow Pro, your daily real estate investing podcast and YouTube channel. I am here today with Bailey Kramer. And we are going to discuss all things short term rental, we're going to discuss low money, no money strategies. And of course, we all know that these are things that we we long for people long for these strategies, because most people don't have a lot of savings, but they want to make money. And the thing that kind of separates, that is the time that it takes to gather the money it takes to get started. So we're hoping to get some strategies from Bailey, we're hoping to talk short term rentals with Bailey we're hoping to share any types of scenarios or ideas that maybe you can latch on to and figure out where you need to go. So Bailey, welcome.

Unknown Speaker  1:07  
Thank you, Casey, appreciate you having me on. And, yes, we will cover all those things.

Casey Brown  1:12  
Absolutely. Man, we're tickled you're here. And we're glad to kind of get this thing on the roll and figure out because we don't have a lot of short term rental guests on here. It's it just simply because it's I think it's kind of a topic that that I think a lot of people get into or or start discussing. And then I think there's some questions around the scalability of it, which I know you have some answers to as far as like crossing state lines or owning a malt or owning a short term rental. That's that's away from that's in a different state or away from you where you can't necessarily like check on it. So tell us a little bit about yourself, what got you kind of started in real estate or how you got started? And then what kind of led you to where you are now.

Unknown Speaker  1:58  
Yeah, absolutely. So I got started in real estate. The short story of course, we don't have all day here. But short story, I was a sophomore in college. And I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, it's just always been on blood, but didn't know a single thing about real estate. No one my family had real estate. I didn't even know really what it was besides the house I lived in and read Rich Dad Poor Dad learned about the single real estate investing and buying assets and just the whole Rich Dad Poor Dad philosophy that everyone seems to start with.

Casey Brown  2:29  
Yeah, and I had $1 for every time it was mentioned on here.

Unknown Speaker  2:36  
So basically, and just to say one quick thing before that, too, is in college, I had a goal. I just released a video on it literally yesterday, but I made a video making a promise to myself that I would start a business in college that I could basically run afterwards and not be stuck in a W two for forever. Sure. At all. So for me, it was it was like freshman year and part of sophomore year it was like I was constantly searching for like, I was like on YouTube like side hustles to start and like you know, I went down that whole like rabbit hole I'm sure everyone knows who I'm talking about and has may have been there before. But found out about real estate, found bigger pockets just started learning learning learning everything I possibly could then started networking, networking, networking, just trying to meet people in the space and figure out you know, what people are actually doing, how people actually making money, what strategies are they using? And then I decided to go the multifamily route first actually kind of hooked into gurus honestly, who just basically said You know, I make $1,000 per $100 per door and I own 2000 doors. Yep, I didn't come to realize six months later that they only owe own you know, a smaller percentage of it and that's to say that I'm not making great money and not to say that multifamily is not an excellent strategy to go it's actually something that I want to get more into I just back to my goal of you know, how can I become How can I get an income stream that won't retire me by the time I'm finished college but that I can continue to work on and while they support me and I just didn't see it through multifamily after a couple months made the transition to single family bought my first fix and flip so partner with somebody bought my first fix and flip came with $2,000 out of my pocket for that first long shoot. Yeah. And then we can you know the story kind of unfolded story with that with that one there. Yeah, yeah.

Casey Brown  4:38  
And so the single family is that when you kind of When did when did the short term rental stuff kind of cuz obviously, the short term rental stuff I feel like was a was a branch off of the malt or the the single family because of trying to maximize the profitability of one unit. Again, that's that's a lot of time. But people give up single families because they're like, Well, you got separate everything for each unit rather than everything under one roof.

Unknown Speaker  5:11  
Right? Yeah. So for me and short term rentals, I stumbled upon it as an accident. So what happened was to get those first six, so you get the first four properties that I bought, two of them were fixing flips. Two of them were just long term rentals. We did all our creative financing and creative strategies to get the deals. And that's how that's one like big like, how to start with literally no money. $2,000 is like partnering with people using creative strategy. So we're doing direct to seller calling and texting. We were doing seller financing subject to, we did a cash deal raising capital. Yep. So we're doing all that stuff. Then just through cold calling and texting, we found this property. And we said, Okay, we have a super motivated seller on our hands. How can we make this deal work? We said, Okay, could this be a fix and flip, we're like, it probably could be. And looking back, it would been a great fix and flip. But we're like, this is way too big of a project. like way too much risk in our head for our first report, this will be our third fixing flip. We're just like, we're not we're not taking this over as then we're like, could be a long term rental with this. We're like we could but it's not going to be a Grand Slam deal. And then we said, well, what if we made this a short term rental? Because it's right on the lake? It's a huge house has like some really cool features to a huge backyard. And we said what if we made this short term rental? We so we looked up just Airbnb in the area. Literally not our next door neighbor, or it wasn't our neighbor at the time. The person we're literally right next door, ran an Airbnb. So what we did is, we went on it we said, Okay, we didn't know any of the tools and tell you that we just went on Airbnb, and saw how much this guy was charging for the summer, which was coming up in like a month or two. Yeah. And he was urging about $1,300 per night.

Casey Brown  7:03  
The Big House, dad, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  7:07  
But we like okay, if you charging $1,300 A night, our house just from looking at both of them. Our house is bigger, it's on a better lot has a bigger as it's just better in every home more people is better in every single way possible. So we're like, okay, if our house is better, how would this number look if we just charged $1,000 per night? So that was just like how we did in the beginning. Like if we're gonna start $1,000 per night, and we just estimate their occupancy, how to do ran the numbers, and we're like, Okay, this is, this is a good deal. This is gonna, this is gonna be this makes sense. This can be a solid

Casey Brown  7:41  
deal. Sure. This is

Unknown Speaker  7:42  
how you make it work. That yeah, and that's how we that's how we went about that first one. So yeah,

Casey Brown  7:50  
man, that's, that's, I mean, $1,300. And I mean, that that's, that's something that's just because you always see, you know, I look on Airbnb, too. And that's, that's kind of the way we've traveled Europe and stuff is strictly pretty much through Airbnb. I mean, some of them are places that you know, other people own. And they're they, they just fate, you can tell they own 10 or 15 of them, and they just, they have the same cleaning crews and stuff like that. But, but, and you always see those big dollar per night things on there. And I'm always clickbait it on him just so that I can be like, you know, I mean, I'm talking and I'm even talking like, some of them are like $13,000 a night. I mean, it just when you get into some of the castles and stuff in Europe that you could rent for a night or two night, I mean, anyway, but so $1,300 a night, I mean that that something like that even for just the the 90 day or 100 100 Day summer period, that can tote a pretty big note or that can that can generate a lot of revenue over and above what the expenses would be. I mean, depending on the cost of the house, obviously. But my gosh,

Unknown Speaker  8:59  
you're right. And then what happened was, so we bought the house for 779,000. We put in, we've had $100,000 downpayment, this is a seller finance deal. 3% interest, we had about $80,000 for rehab, and we can we started we just listed on Airbnb before we even in the middle of the rehab, just so we can get to just start getting some bookings, because it was a summer month and we're like, every day it's not booked. We're losing $1,000. So we just put on there. And we did pretty good for the first like July and August we made like, around $25,000 Each month, and then September we did like 15 which is like that we don't count that as good. Sure. Then what we realized in September, is we already got a booking for next summer. Yeah. And throughout July, we started to raise our prices a little bit to like 1300 and then 1500. So then we're like alright, 1500 is our number. We're not going below that. And then We get a booking like 10 months in advance. We're like, No, we can't, we can't. We're not gonna get booked up this far in advance. That means our price is too low. So we're like, Alright, let's do $1,600 tonight. We're good enough

Unknown Speaker  10:21  
have any people, you know, we want to top dollar. So then now our price is $2,000 Tonight,

Casey Brown  10:27  
man and is it pretty? staying pretty full?

Unknown Speaker  10:31  
Yeah, July and August are that those are the months that we got a lot of the early bookings on. To Apple we keep on getting more and more bookings. Yeah, it's gonna be a good summer.

Casey Brown  10:41  
Man, that's awesome. They that's, that's that's a that's a win win. I mean, because you're looking at if you put 100,007 79 But 100,000 down, then you put 80 back into it. So. So really, you're out? Like, let's say 750 grand, basically, in seller finance, money? What's the payment on that?

Unknown Speaker  11:06  
roughly five $6,000 per month.

Casey Brown  11:09  
All right. So, yeah, I mean, so you're talking about $72,000 for the year, and you could just dang near Miami obwohl. Obviously, you make that and 36 nights for two grand a night. So I mean, so So basically, you rent this thing out for one month, and it pays for the use of it for the whole year. Everything else is tax. So a little bit of tax, a little bit of insurance, but but at three premium, that's an unbelievable, and sometimes you know, when when sellers have higher end properties like that, doing a seller finance could potentially benefit them for taxes, it could benefit them for, I mean, a lot of different ways it could benefit them, and they don't have to take all the money once then they've got a steady stream of income without having to manage it. And so, but man, I'll lie, that's a killer

Unknown Speaker  11:52  
deal, dude. That's awesome. And everything else

Casey Brown  11:57  
is kind of cream on top. So all right, so the low money, no money strategies that you talk about? Or that that you that you teach or show people? Obviously, this seller financing kind of deal or something along those lines? Is that part of that? And we can talk a little bit dig into that a little bit?

Unknown Speaker  12:16  
Yeah, so there's really two things. There's two ways to get started with no with no to very low money. Okay, both on the buying side. And then also on the what I what I do now mainly is CO hosting. So coach in AK managing Airbnbs excellent way to, like start bit like getting involved with Airbnb and build a an income stream started with no money. And then seller financing more buying property with no money. And they each have their pros and cons. They each have their their difficulties. But yeah, happy to talk about either both or?

Casey Brown  12:54  
Yeah, I mean, fill us in. I mean, the either strategy, because the again, this is this is what's holding a lot of people back is the is the initial money. And some people you know, and I don't want to say, you know, people, like let's say somebody has $5,000 saved up what's what's their best course of action?

Unknown Speaker  13:15  
Yeah, for sure. So if so I always ask, like, what's like the purpose of the investment? Is it for you looking more long term? Are you looking for more cashflow up front, and you don't, you know, so I'll walk you through seller financing. Both of these could work, whether you have $5,000, or $500. For seller financing. For those of you don't even know what that means, because I didn't know what it meant, before I got started, is, instead of getting the see, the simplest way to explain is instead of getting a mortgage from a bank, you get a mortgage from the actual owner of that house who's going to be the seller. So how that looks in a practical way. And this works most clean when they don't, when they when they own the property free and clear. And they already paid off their mortgage. There's other ways to get around it. But it gets a little bit more complicated. Just so for easy, easy sakes. Let's just say I approach a homeowner who owns his house, they him or her have owned the house for maybe 25 years, or maybe they've only for 10 years, five years, and they just paid cash for it or paid it off early. Sure. And I say to them, Hey, I want to buy your house or they say okay, you can buy it for $500,000 Yep. $500,000 like I was looking more like your head you're thinking like I was looking I was thinking more like the 450 range maybe or something like that. Yep. Well, with seller financing. The best part is you guys negotiate the terms. So like right now, interest rates might be in the five percents. But seller financing, you negotiate the interest rate yourself,

Casey Brown  14:44  
because again, to the seller could be if they're going to take that half million dollars, so they're gonna go put it in a in an IRA or something that's gonna gain them one or one and a half or 2%. They may be happy to say hey, yeah, we'll hold the note on this and take 4% which is good for you. For them, everybody's happy. Right?

Unknown Speaker  15:02  
Exactly. And especially in today's market, like people are just like I want top down, I want I want my highest price. So it's like, yeah, price is just one piece of the equation. It's like, Would I buy what I bought this house for $2 million? Well, if the interest rates point 000 1%, that absolutely like yeah, that's obviously an extreme example. But interest rate, and price is just one piece of it. Interest rate is actually the factor that moves the that actually has the biggest impact on the deal itself. Sure. So essentially, just like a bank, except the pre approval part, you don't need to get pre approved, it's more like a relationship type transaction, they don't run your credit score, any of that stuff. You obviously have your attorneys and your title company, and you do it just like you would with a bank only differences. You don't you you negotiate your own terms, and nothing is through a bank, there's no pre approval. So for me, like I had, I didn't have money, I didn't have a good credit score. It didn't matter at all.

Casey Brown  16:05  
You just go to and say, Hey, I've got 10,000 I did that the building we're sitting in, I just called some I called Lady one day I could have when got the money. But I called her and she said yes, she said, I really don't want it all at once. And this was her completely her terms. She said, I really don't want it all at once. Would you just let me hold the money? Yeah, how quick can I get, you know, how quick can we make this happen, and her cousin was an attorney and you know, 10 grand down and I'm in sliding into home base. And it was just a win win situation. So not, it's unreal, man. And then And again, some people and even a lot of sellers don't know, or understand that they have the ability to do this. And, you know, I've always oftentimes I've said, like, everybody's always you have some people that are out there, just to cut the middleman out. They're just they're like, you know, they're gonna go find that they can go buy this. And they're like, I can just get around that guy might save a little bit of money. Well, if you want to talk, nobody, but nobody recognizes the money when they're handing it to the bank $100 $150 a month at a time. You know what I'm saying? And that, but the bank is the middleman that's paying repaying the middleman, you're just paying them a little bit less at a time, over a longer period

Unknown Speaker  17:20  
of time. Exactly. Exactly.

Casey Brown  17:24  
Yeah, man. That's awesome. Do them and what other deals have you done? I mean, obviously, you're in short term, short term vacation rentals. And I mean, how many are you? Do you have quite a few of those. Do you just have that one? What's what's going on there?

Unknown Speaker  17:38  
Yeah. So basically, what happened was I bought to Airbnb is, again, using these creative financing strategies. And let me just be clear, like, these aren't easy to find, by any means to find

Casey Brown  17:50  
one out of every 1000 2000 Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  17:53  
whatever. Yeah. So like, Yeah, I mean, depends on how you're doing it. But those were our numbers. So again, this is not an easy thing. It's not, it's definitely not a get rich, quick app. Just to be clear, and so what happened was, I had these two Airbnbs, I had the two long term rentals. And I had, I did the to fix and flips. And what happened is, I started posting about the air be the first Airbnb, and all of a sudden, people kept hitting me up to manage their Airbnbs. Now, I was like, okay, like, that's fine. And then I realized, like, it took me all this work. And all of this, like, everything, you know, took took a lot of time to buy property, especially using credit financing. Yeah, but then the people were coming to me, why don't you just manage their property? And I was getting 20% of the gross revenue, like day one with no expenses. No cost to me and literally no risk to me. Yeah, I was like, okay, like, sure I'll, I can manage it. Because I've already I already started to build the systems for my, my properties. I was like, Yeah, I'll add you in and easy. And then that started growing, growing, growing. So about 17 properties. Now. It's only been like 10 months, since I started with that. Yeah. And now it's just right now building out that as a business so I can do more work on it than work in it. So I hired two people to help work in it while I work on it. But again, co hosting is like, all you really need as an LLC, which cost like 250 bucks. Yep. And besides that, there's, there's no other costs.

Casey Brown  19:28  
So talk walk us through just a little bit of so how many different markets do you do you co host in? Yep.

Unknown Speaker  19:37  
So I'm in four different markets if 1234 different markets

Casey Brown  19:42  
across what geographical areas?

Unknown Speaker  19:45  
So I'm in North Carolina. Okay, so Pinehurst, North Carolina for my golfers be specific. Okay. I'm in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Casey Brown  19:53  
Okay, right up the road. What was that? Right up the road for me? I'm in just south Evans. Do

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
so Okay, cool. I have a bunch in Northern Illinois, like, an hour north of Chicago. Whoa. And that's the one in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which is always out of Wisconsin.

Casey Brown  20:13  
And so obviously, that presents challenges, especially if you just have one. But what's the main challenge that you run across? I mean, automatically, my mind goes to cleaning. Or, you know, being the main challenge, but is that, is that true? Does that hold true for you? Is that the main like, hurdle? No deal?

Unknown Speaker  20:35  
No, honestly, not really, at all. It's just a matter of finding good, like my cleaners that I found, and it builds relationship that I use, like, I trust them with a lot of like, like they were, we have a good relationship, to say the least, like, so as far as I get it cleaned and stuff like that. That's not a problem at all. The biggest challenge there's not like, nothing about it. Any of this is like, hard stuff. Yeah, a lot of little things that you just need to like do.

Casey Brown  21:16  
But you have to get all those little things, it seems like in the right order, and make sure everything kind of runs systematically,

Unknown Speaker  21:22  
I would say that's probably the hardest part is just getting everything in place. Once everything's in place, like building the machine is the hardest part. Yeah, once the machine is built, the machines built

Casey Brown  21:37  
is very similar to this podcast, when I finally like, I would spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours trying to define different things and get everything in place. And matter of fact, I was sitting here about an hour ago, and I was like, I was almost twiddling my thumbs. And like, I mean, I need to be doing something right. And it just hit me. I'm like, Wow, all right, this thing is really running, it's really finally getting in a decent stream or getting into a good routine. And so it's, I guess, it's much the same kind of deal.

Unknown Speaker  22:08  
Yeah, I think that's with everything to like, starting out, especially when you don't have any systems or processes, or really knowledge or experience. It's always tough in the beginning. But once you like, for me, our big systems guy. So like, and also when I set up that first property, I was I actually lived not too far away from it. Because my parents lived here, I was in Florida for school. Sure, came back home for the summer was near the property. Got it ready or so I thought got it ready. But I, like the guests kept meeting me. And I was like, I'm moving to Florida and like literally two months. So if I don't figure this out now, like there was no option like I had

Casey Brown  22:47  
a lot harder to figure out. Right? So then I'm like, I'm just gonna figure out now

Unknown Speaker  22:51  
and figure out how I can just do this so that when I'm in Florida, it will be easy. So then I just designed everything to make sure it can be done remotely, like the properties in Indiana, for example, I've never been to those properties before. Like, I never, like I said, I've furnished the property completely is completely, you know, empty. I ordered the furniture, hire someone to assemble it, you know, got everything ready, just like I do. But just figuring out how to do it remotely. So I don't have to be in these different

Casey Brown  23:20  
places. Sure. Sure. Yeah. And it makes, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. It's it just and then you create that you create another stream. Each one is as many as a miniature stream of income. And then it's built on the same system and you just duplicate and duplicate and duplicate. Now, one of the things that we've talked about a little bit on this show, and again, our Airbnb folks are typically kind of few and far between because we're mostly syndicators syndicate syndicating different, bigger real estate deals, and then capital raisers and so on. But the the arbitrage the rental arbitrage thing was something that really, you know, I see all the gurus on Instagram and Facebook are not in touch on Facebook with Instagram and Tiktok or wherever they talk about. I'm going to show you how to get into short term rentals with no money and just this isn't this. And while that seems like a very logical way to do it, they're just some things that seem like maybe that's not the way to do too, I guess I don't know. What's your thoughts?

Unknown Speaker  24:27  
This is my thought on my thoughts on rental arbitrage. It is the worst strategy. Like in all, honestly, probably the worst strategy in all of real estate. I've learned about a lot of different strategies from wholesaling and fixing and flipping. As far as, like the most risky strategy. Yeah. To me, it is rental arbitrage. I was talking to someone this morning. And for those of you don't know what rental arbitrage is, basically what you do is you rent a house or an apartment or a condo you rent a property from somebody else. let's just say for $2,000 a month, and you have to furnish the property. So you know, upfront you spend 10 plus $1,000 To furnish the place. And then you sign a two to three year lease with this owner, this property owner. So you say, I'm gonna give you $2,000 per month for the next two to three years, you spend all this money up front the first place, and then you go ahead and put that property on Airbnb, and you keep the profit between what you make on Airbnb, and what you have to pay to the, to the owner, like expenses and repairs and utilities that's kind of negotiated. But it is such a terrible strategy. Because number one, like when I when I look at co hosting the arbitrage side by side coasting, like I get 20% on most of my properties, 20% of the gross revenue, and there's literally no risk like I don't pay the mortgage, I don't pay anything out of pocket. And like there's a property I just I just signed on. We have a guest literally come in, we had a guest already there. But we have another guest house we're bringing $150,000 in revenue, it has a pool 5000 square feet. Awesome house,

Casey Brown  26:07  
it's you're getting 30 grand a year for.

Unknown Speaker  26:09  
Exactly. So I'm gonna get like your system, two grand per month, right? Or a little bit more than two grand per month. Yeah. For just just managing it. I have, I have literally no risk at all, if the regulations change in that market. For whatever reason. I all the worst thing that happens to me is I lose that income stream, which obviously that stinks. But if I arbitrage that property, yeah, so that's, that's the coast model, I went arbitrage. I go to that owner, say, I will give you $6,000 Or, you know, $7,000 per month for your property. So you have a guaranteed like, I think it's $90,000. And then I'm going to rent this property on Airbnb. And I'm gonna keep whatever's left, which means that 90,000 And that 150,000. And you might be thinking, Oh, well, that's $60,000. Well, the numbers risk goes into having a $7,000 overhead on a property that you don't even own And don't even get any benefits to owning that besides the cashflow. So what I say to people, is if you're looking for strictly cashflow, go the cohosting route. If you're looking if you're like OPI like arbitrage. If you're the amount of work arbitrage takes, and the amount of time it takes and coasting takes time as well, but with arbitrage into those people either go coasting, or go seller financing, because a lot of the time people who do arbitrage like go out and have a lot of money. I don't have a lot of credit, I don't have a lot of this, I don't have a lot of that. Well, if you're gonna put in all the work for arbitrage put in the work for owning and seller financing, and you'll actually own the property to have a risk have a lot more upside than just the rents that are the Sure, sure.

Casey Brown  27:57  
And then, you know, then there's also the, you know, what if they destroyed somebody else's property, and then you've got to re put money back into something that you don't know. And I mean, there's a lot of different in again, there's a lot of different strategy there. And maybe somebody has a strategy that works really well with that particular model. But alright, so listen, we're running up on our time, and we've got a I've got a couple of questions that we ask every guest there's no right or wrong answer. It's whatever. Whatever you tell us. That's what it is. But what is the best book that you have recently read or currently reading? best book

Unknown Speaker  28:33  
I've recently read is 100 million dollar offers by Alex pharmazie. Unbelievable. Basically, make an offer so good that people feel stupid to say no to

Casey Brown  28:44  
say no to it. That's right. That's right there Russell Brunson always say that. They're saying no, something's wrong with your offer. I mean, that's the one place to go. Right. So what is a dream vacation that you've either taken or hoped to take?

Unknown Speaker  28:57  
dream vacation? I've done a fair amount of traveling. So far. I love traveling. I mean, vacation. I probably somewhere in Asia. I haven't been to Asia. So really? Yeah. I've been to Europe a lot, but not Asia.

Casey Brown  29:14  
Yep, same here. Same here. I just I've always thought my wife always tells me she said you're gonna be like a sports star in Japan. Because I'm just I won't fit in any of the rooms or anything like that. So yeah. Good deal, man. That's awesome. All right. So if the if the listeners heard something about maybe your short term strategy or short term rental strategy or your no money, low money, no money down strategies are want to just reach out to you just to just to see what you got going on or, or potentially partner with you or maybe they want maybe they have some Airbnbs they want to talk to you about coast and how can somebody reach out and get in touch with you?

Unknown Speaker  29:47  
That's way to get in contact with me is Instagram, very active on Instagram. You know, send me a message. I have a lot of free resources in my bio on Instagram as well. For those who are interested in the Costain and the Airbnb stuff. I'm also on Tik Tok more for entertainment purposes. Do you want to watch me there? I think I have fun with it. Let's see. Yeah, those are the two main ways.

Casey Brown  30:12  
Cool deal, man. Well, listen by the thank you for being on the show today. I know that you brought some value to people that are listening that maybe they're even considering this business model, and maybe you push them on to, to go ahead and pursue it in one direction or another. So thank you for being on the show.

Unknown Speaker  30:27  
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, Casey. Absolutely, man.

Casey Brown  30:29  
I'll hope everybody has a wonderful rest of the day. And again, thank you. Bye

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