176. How this CEO Manages 200+ International Listings While Living in South America - Interview with Tim Hubbard

0:00Natalie Palmer:Hello, welcome, and thanks for checking in today to No Vacancy, the podcast. I'm your host, Natalie Palmer. I'm an Airbnb ambassador and 17-time superhost, and I've hosted over 1 ,000 reservations. I'm a stay-at-home mom of two and manage my eight listings remotely. My mission is to help new and experienced vacation rental hosts turn their listings into fully booked, profitable properties that can be managed from anywhere so you too can have no vacancies. If that sounds good to you, let's get right into the show.

0:51Natalie Palmer:Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of No Vacancy, the podcast. I'm your host, Natalie Palmer. Today, I'm really excited to have on Tim Hubbard. He is the CEO and founder of Coorsley Virtual Management, and he's also the host of the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. Tim and I are going to talk today about how he built a virtual management company. You now live in Brazil, and you guys manage over 225 properties, most of which are in the US, but I think you said you're across eight different countries, and you kind of started to build your business while being in Colombia. You're in Brazil now.

1:26Natalie Palmer:And I just want to get through. I have so many questions for you, Tim. First of all, how you achieved some sort of financial freedom before moving abroad and then continued building your businesses virtually. Talking to us about virtual management, we all know how important a boots on the ground team is. So I'd love to know how you're pulling that off successfully. So I'll turn it to you to kind of intro yourself and then we'll dive in. Yeah. Awesome, Natalie. Thanks for having me on. Excited to chat today. Okay. Well, the real quick background, I guess I've been investing in real estate for over 15 years, but I've always traveled a lot.

2:00So I've stayed in lots of short-term rentals and along my investment journey, I realized that short-term rentals could make a lot more money than my long-term rentals.

2:10Natalie Palmer:I'd love to know when did that transition happen? Because if you've been investing, I'm doing quick math here, 15 years, you started around 2010 and Airbnb was like a little baby at that time. So were you several years into investing before STRs caught on or did you see Airbnb like very early in your journey and the potential it had? Yeah, good question. So I started investing in long-term rentals in 2010. Your math is correct. And then in 2015, I switched my first property into a short-term rental. So I guess a few years after Airbnb had started, but also a couple of years after I had already been using Airbnb as a guest, you know, traveling to a lot of different places.

2:53Yeah. And actually there was like one specific moment that I remember where the light bulb went off. I was in Tennessee looking for some investment properties. I'm from California originally. And I had been out all day with realtors, you know, looking at these turnkey single family homes, you know, to put a long-term tenant in and, you know, be passive. We know nothing's really passive, right? But I was, I was staying in a short-term rental while I was doing my research there in the city. And I remember looking up the sales price for the home because it was like a brand new home. And I knew what I was paying because I was the guest.

3:30And when I ran the numbers, it was like, my gosh, this property could make like four or five times more than these other properties that I'm looking at. And I was already familiar with Airbnb and I already had some properties that I thought would make a good fit. So I switched them over in Sacramento. That's the first place I got started. Still have some properties there today. And then from there, it was just focusing on properties that I thought would be a good fit for short-term rentals. And that brought me to several states and eventually outside of the US.

4:04Natalie Palmer:Okay. Okay. So originally you didn't even buy short-term rentals intentionally, you just started converting some of your LTRs and then sort of switched your investment strategy to focus on what would make for a good STR? Exactly. Yeah. I tested it. I had a fourplex in Sacramento and I tested it with, actually, I was thinking of living in downtown Sacramento, like in the Midtown area. I was in a suburb at the time. And so I was renovating this property and I was like, you know what, I'm just going to furnish this and put it up on Airbnb. And if it works, then maybe I'll run it as a short-term rental.

4:42If not, I'm just going to move into it because I want to live like in that, you know, cool hip area. And I put it up and yeah, here we are over 10 years later, I still run that property today and it still stays really well booked and just expanded from there.

4:57Natalie Palmer:Okay. That's awesome. All right. So then you started investing more intentionally into STRs and then talk about the move to Columbia. I feel like a lot of people would be really scared to be that far away from their properties, especially with STR having way more hands-on of a touch needed than LTRs. So how did you pull the trigger to move to an entirely different hemisphere and continue operating everything you had? Yeah, good question. So I started those short-term rentals in Sacramento. And then I ended up buying an eight unit apartment building in Tennessee. And that was with the sole goal of converting it completely into short term rentals.

5:41And so I moved to Tennessee. And I spent almost a year like just fully renovating this old historic building, and turned it all into short term rentals. It was a lot of stress, probably why a lot of my hair is gray now, but it definitely paid off. And that property ended up earning like, it sounds crazy, but like eight times more than it was as a long-term rental. It was all short-term rentals. And so that really gave me a lot of financial freedom to continue traveling and to hire help and things like that. But I was managing my properties in Sacramento while I was in Tennessee. And so I was already, you know, what is that?

6:21Thousands of miles away or 1 ,500 miles away. And so the difference between managing a property that's, you know, 10 or 100 or 1 ,000 miles away is no different than managing properties from 3 ,000 miles away. So after that first property got really dialed in in Tennessee with those eight units, I was still investing and doing things. But I had been traveling to Columbia just because I really liked it. and with things set up, I just decided to make it more permanent and ended up getting a place there. And so, yeah, now I've lived outside the U.S. for the most part for like, I guess, eight or nine years.

6:59Natalie Palmer:Okay. Okay. So once you're in Columbia now, is that when you had the idea to start building Corsley, which is your virtual management company, or for a while were you just living there and kind of living off the investments that you personally had? Yeah, the virtual management came later. And so I started a podcast about six years ago, short term rental riches. And it was talking about just their quick actionable episodes about my portfolio and things that I was doing and things I thought would help other hosts. And a lot of people just reached out on the podcast and said, Hey, can you help me with my property?

7:34Can you help me with my property? And, you know, they were coming from kind of all over the place. And as my team was growing and my portfolio was growing, we got to the point where it was like, yeah, we can bring on other people's properties. We'll manage them the exact same way that we're managing mine. And so, yeah, it's been a little over three years now since we started Coarsely. And it's been a lot of fun. We're in like over 40 cities now and been partnering up with a lot of other hosts out there. So it's been a pretty natural progression.

8:07Natalie Palmer:Okay, so I agree with you when you said like there's no difference between managing something, you know, a few miles away versus a hundred versus a thousand. I actually often tell people I think managing something further away is easier because it forces you to like detach yourself and not be the person that's running over and, you know, resupplying trash bags or whatever it is. Like you have to get your systems in place. but to do that across 40 cities eight different countries that is like a whole new beast like I manage all my properties remotely but they're in one area and so I have like the same cleaner same handyman so how are you guys finding all these boots on the ground teams and then having to manage all of those teams to effectively manage the properties yeah great question so we partner with our hosts, which means that our owners are investors.

9:02And that part, we do not actually hire their on the ground team. So what we realized over the last decade is that short-term rentals are completely inefficient. You can have the exact same properties right next door to each other, same amenities, same everything, and they can make completely different amounts of money. One can literally make twice as much as the other one. And a lot of that difference comes from the way it's operated. Of course, there's a lot of housekeeping and maintenance, but there's also this whole big other part of making sure that your property's listed on all the different platforms, that the technology side's set up, that you're doing your revenue management correctly.

9:44And so that's the part we've really specialized that is standardizing all those backend operations. Actually, our name Coorsley comes from this idea of us being this core operating center on the backend of all of our partners' properties, where we're connecting all the programs, you know, we're handling all the guest communication, creating a really good guest experience, handling the revenue management, but then also coordinating with our partners' team on the ground. And so the same way that we're managing my properties, you know, I built up my team, I had some housekeepers I'd worked with for a really long time, some maintenance people, which also requires a whole lot of coordination.

10:25And even if you have a really good maintenance person, you have a really good housekeeper, there's still quite a bit that goes into organizing things and confirming things and making sure properties are getting cleaned properly. And so those are all things that we really perfected being virtual. And now we handle all that part for our partners. So we have a discounted management fee given that we are partnering, but it's worked really well. And we see really good results with everyone we've partnered up one.

10:55Natalie Palmer:So the partnership. Okay. So hold on, walk me through. If I was an owner that wanted to hire you guys, I would have to come to the table with my own cleaner and handyman already. And then you guys just sort of start working with them or like, what do you, sorry, I just like want to get clear on like, what do you mean by like partnership and how does the communication there work? Yeah. So that's exactly right. Basically when we get started, you know, we have a lot of people that are just getting started for the first time. So they don't have a listing created. We can handle everything virtually.

11:26So we won't be the ones like furnishing the property or taking photos. But once we have all that information, we'll make sure that the property is advertised on all the platforms, you know, booking.com and Airbnb and BRBO, plugged into all our software. So, you know, we use the industry leading software tools. We're not trying to recreate software tools, although we do have a lot of developers on our team, which is another exciting topic. So we basically handle all the setup and everything on the back end, all the guest communication. And then we get connected with our partners on the ground team.

12:02And then we essentially handle everything from there. The only time our partners are involved is if there's some sort of question that we don't have the answer to. And so sometimes like in the beginning, those questions can come up and we simply save the answers and then we don't need to ask them again. And so it just kind of gets easier and easier. And again, it's the same way we're doing it with my properties. As I was growing my team, all of our teams virtual. So we're all over the place from Africa to South Africa to South America, Europe, Philippines. We've got a lot of great members. And as long as we have all the details about a property or we have access to those details, if we don't have the answer right away, then we can manage properties, just like we were managing mine with really good reviews and generally beating the market, you know, based off all of our data.

12:57And yeah, hopefully that clears it up a little bit.

13:02Natalie Palmer:It does. What's the onboarding process like? Like you said, as long as we have all the information about the property. So is that something that the owner needs to go like fill out for you guys? Because I do co-hosting and I have my whole spreadsheet and I go to every property and I'm Like, where is the circuit breaker? Like, where do we reset the router and everything? And I'm taking all those notes. So is that just something you're having owners fill out for you so you guys can answer questions? So really important piece, yeah. And we've built our own portal, which is cool. So I mentioned there we have our own developers on our team.

13:39And this is one of the things that we're working on, making it as easy as possible for our partners to join us. So if someone joining us already has an Airbnb listing, for example, we can plug that into our portal and we pull all their information off so they don't have to repeat information that's already been created. But then we have all these other questions that we know are going to come up, you know, like, do you offer early check-ins? Yeah. If you offer early check-ins, you know, when do you want to offer them or do you want to charge for them and how early can it be, you know? So some of these real specific questions we'll ask up front.

14:16I mean, we don't ask every single question like, you know, how deep is the lake? You know, guests ask everything, right? But we do ask the most important stuff that, you know, that covers the majority of everything we need to get started. And then those other little questions that come up, we simply ask our partners, we get the answers and we fill it in. So yeah, we're building up. We've got an onboarding hub right now that we think makes it really easy, but it is a process. And we work with property managers too, Natalie, which has been really exciting. That's our latest venture because a lot of property managers getting started, there's just a lot to do.

14:59And depending on your portfolio size, you're not at a point where it makes sense to go out and hire a full-time revenue manager and hire maybe five full-time receptionists so you don't have gaps or you're not hiring one receptionist, asking them to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. So we're trying to fill that gap and we're completely white labeled. So we're on the backend. So the property managers we work with, we're handling everything on the backend, but it's still under their name. And I know that onboarding is one of the things that's really helped them, where before they're like, oh yeah like we would forget to ask this or you know we'd have to uh you know sit down with our owners for a really long time and and so all the tools that we create on the back end our partners

15:47Natalie Palmer:can use as well that's really interesting my audience specifically i know there's a lot of people listening who are i would say my core audience is like in the boutique space of like co-hosting or property management like a lot of them just own and operate their own but I would say most of my listeners are probably co-hosting between five to 10 properties and keeping it like a small boutique operation. And that's a very awkward size where you can't necessarily justify around the clock VAs to get a full-time revenue manager might be difficult at that price point, but you're squeezed. You can't do it all yourself.

16:26Natalie Palmer:So that's really interesting that you guys offer that. I didn't know that. So yeah, what does that process look like a little bit if if we'll just use me as an example so I co-host 10 properties in Big Bear California and if I wanted to just like have you guys take over messaging or revenue management but it's still under my name what would that like handoff look like yeah so we we onboard you onto our software you of course have full access to it so you can see all your reservations everything like that. You know, we charge between five and 10 % depends on the portfolio size. And so of course, if you own the properties, you know, what I found is that with my own portfolio, because this, you know, I'll start with my own portfolio is that to really hire a team, you're going to spend more than that depending on what size portfolio you're at.

17:19So, you know, we're trying to make it makes sense for everyone, you know, and for our property managers that, you know, maybe they're charging 15, 20, 25%, totally up to them. You know, they handle their owner relationships the same way that they've always done it. We just handle everything on the backend. And so it's a little different for our, you know, we call them like our retail partners that maybe have like a vacation rental and we handle everything for them. We collect all the revenue and do everything like that like a traditional property manager. But for our property managers, we don't want to disrupt their business.

17:54You know what I mean? They have a certain way that's set up with their owners. And so they continue to receive all their payments just like they would normally. And some of our partners will talk about us, you know, so they'll go to their owners and say, Hey, you know, we're working with a team over 30 people full time. We use all the software. We've got our revenue managers and that helps them get new owners, helps them grow their master companies. And then others will just simply not mention us, but they see their results improve and they are also more confident to add more properties because they know that it's not going to overload them.

18:36You know what I mean? A lot of properties are seasonal too, which is really hard when you're a small portfolio, because if you've got people full time and you know you're in the low season it's like kind of hard to keep them on or keep them on full time and so you're constantly kind of in these swings whereas you know working with us or with Gorsley you know we take that part away.

19:00Natalie Palmer:Yeah no that's literally me my market is so seasonal we're in peak season right now it's Christmas New Year's time when we're recording this and slopes are open but like shoulder seasons hit and it's hard to like give my va's enough to do like it's like okay do i let them go for the next like three or four months like i still don't want to be on the hook for answering messages for 10 listings but you know and then hope that like they're ready to come back because i don't want to have to train somebody new so like trying to give them just enough work in that time so yeah i can see that this is like a super valuable option that you guys, you've basically done all of that and training the VAs and everything.

19:39Natalie Palmer:And then it can just plug right into the system that the co-host or property manager has already created. That's right. Yeah. So what are kind of some of your guys' like growth goals, I guess, does it make more sense for you guys to work with the individual owner or work with these property managers and co-hosts? our main focus is work with property managers and co-hosts you know because as they grow and as we help them grow we also grow uh you know a lot of our individual owners also end up adding more properties or you know they tell their friends which is all great uh and we love we love both sides of it but you know our our main focus is working with property managers yeah yeah yeah Yeah, because I imagine with individual owners, you can kind of like get them, like tell them this is how we do things and like this is what's going to be the most successful.

20:36But with the property managers, is it ever tough like adapting to what they have?

20:42Natalie Palmer:Like do they have their whole own systems or like smart lock brand they're using or their contracts or something that's like harder to integrate you guys into? too? There's definitely some integration, you know, but I think what we found is that like, we've managed way more guests than our property management partners have. And so we have a lot more experience. And so we kind of look at ourselves like a consultants to, you know, my partner, Justin's got a ton of experience in consulting for really large businesses. He did that for a long time, but he's also been in real estate, you know, built a hotel.

21:20We both have a lot of the real estate background. And so, you know, when we bring on a property manager, we're looking at everything, you know, we're looking at, you know, all their financials, of course, but also their, their business. And, and just, you know, one example from one of our recent property managers, they were in that place, you know, where they were like, they actually told us they were thinking about shutting their business down before they joined us. It's a husband and wife team. They've got two little girls. They're doing all these things together. They'd acquired another property management company, you know, with like 18 or so units.

21:53So they grew really quickly and they're like, we just are doing too much. And, uh, and so now we've taken that away. They've, they've taken a vacation for the first time in like three years. And they've also gone back to their, to their owners and changed their management agreement to charge them a little bit more in 2026. And they've already released this to all of them. And, you know, their owners are staying on board. So they're more confident with everything. They have more, they have more freedom, flexibility. And they have more time to actually focus on the business, you know, to identify the things that are really going to help them grow their revenue.

22:32Of course, all this is based off having really good guest experiences, right? Because if we don't have good reviews, then you don't get visibility and no one finds the properties and the whole thing doesn't work. And that's sort of why we're set up like we are, because we realized that early on, you have to have a good on-the-ground team to make this all work. And so we take all the backing off and allow our property managers basically focus on the on-the-ground part.

23:01Natalie Palmer:And then, I mean, I've met so many co-hosts and PMs that get in the position where they're almost like forced to choose. do they keep growing the business and doing more marketing or do they just operate what they currently have? Like there becomes a point where you sort of have to pick and it's really hard to do both. So yeah, hiring on something like this, you can focus more on like growth and sales on your end and know that like messages are being answered, pricing done, listings are getting updated. Yeah, that's a great service. And yeah, I think a lot of times like property managers get like competitive a little bit.

23:38Natalie Palmer:They'll hear of another property management company like you guys and be like, oh, I don't want it to take my business, but it can work hand in hand with what they've already built and what they're doing. Yeah, totally. And yeah, we stay on the back end, you know, so it's not like there's no Coorsley website you can go to and see all of our properties. It would be the property manager's website that you go to. Of course, we're answering the phone, you know we're sending all the messages but it it's at the end of the day underneath our partners names I'd love to ask if you're open to talking about any of this you mentioned that you use a lot of the like popular platforms and tech in the industry but you guys also have your own software developers what are you guys working on I don't need you to like reveal anything proprietary but since you're in this every day I'm so curious like what are the gaps that you're noticing in the market and what is your team developing to make the job easier.