How to Find High-Cash-Flow Vacation Rentals Using “Secret” Airbnb Data

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26:02And listeners of the show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash rookie. Just go to Indeed.com slash rookie right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's Indeed.com slash rookie. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need. All right. So we've talked about what's happening across the market. Now let's bring it down to the property level. John, what are the top mistakes that rookies are making when they are analyzing an Airbnb for purchase? They are overestimating what their property can actually do.

26:41So they're taking a look at the property and they are assuming that they are going to perform at the top of the market, even if their property doesn't have the things that it needs to be at the top. And one of my favorite examples of this is that somebody showed me their property and then they showed me the property that they compared themselves to. And the property they compared themselves to had a giant backyard with a whole bunch of amenities. Their property, the backyard went down like off a hill, like right away. So there was no room in the backyard to add anything. And they're like, yeah, we were comparing to that.

27:12We were trying to like, you know, perform as well as them. And I'm like, well, how? You know what I mean? Like they're selling 10 more things in their backyard when somebody rents out the property where you can't do any of those things. Right. And so then therefore there's no way that's not apples to apples comparison. Right. And so then therefore your property always has to be cheaper because you're selling less things in comparison. Therefore you can never make as much as them. And so I think if everyone, you know, if you're newer to this and you're trying to get this started and you're trying to figure out like how much do I think this Airbnb is going to make being more conservative will save you in the long run.

27:42Look at that property that you want to consider to be comparable to you and say, okay, if it's making a hundred thousand dollars, what if I made 80? What if I made 75? Could I live with this worst case scenario? And if so, then everything else is a cherry on top, right? If you're not losing sleep at night, that's sort of the best way of going about it. So make sure that when you're analyzing a property, it is truly comparable and it's not like significantly better. And then be more conservative with your estimates. And those two things alone will help you avoid buying a bad deal. One thing that I always like to do when I'm looking at comparables is look at the reviews and what are the items that people are calling out in the reviews because those are probably the amenities or the things that's actually driving that revenue up that everybody is appreciating.

28:25So I always try and look at that to see what the expectations are, what people want in a rental. You can take it one step further with copying every single review, throwing it in chat gpt and asking it that question saying why are people booking this place and it'll just spit out the answers for you not to get too technical but you can take it even further and john you probably know this but like um have you have you used applefy before and i'm gonna get like real nerdy here but applefy is like this scraping tool and they've got um uh an airbnb review scraper where you can just drop in a bunch of different airbnb uh links to like different listings and it'll pull all of the reviews for you and you get this massive like excel file um so that, you know, that's me and John probably just being like more nerdy than the normal person.

29:06And then here's me with my pad of paper and my pen. And then here's me with you guys predicting our product lineup. We've got coming to our property pages within AirDNA, the Airbnb review summary that's going to tell you what gets like. Jamie, I'm so glad you're on this podcast. We got one more. We use Appify to check to see if there's been one to three reviews every single month for the past 12 months with a listing. And if we can, so we will pull the data, we'll clean, we'll extra clean it. If you throw that into AirDNA, that would just be lightning in a bottle. Cherry on top. There you go. This has turned into like the, we're just trying to add things to the AirDNA roadmap right now.

29:47But let me, let me, let me ask you guys the next question about analyzing deals, because obviously things have changed since post COVID. So how has your approach to analyzing Airbnb's change from the gold rush to today? And Jamie, we'll start with you. And one thing that changed, and it was tough to talk with people about it during the COVID area because our app didn't do a good job of highlighting it, was that the past 12 months wasn't always predictive of the next few years. Um, and that's where, like, because occupancy levels were at record highs, like taking a realist to like, yes, it says your property is going to generate a 70 % occupancy over the next 12 months.

30:36Like you might want to get a sense of like, okay, how much are occupancies up relative to 2019 to then predict how much they might be coming down over the next few years. because we knew that those levels were not going to maintain that high, that they were going to be coming down. And now sort of juxtapose that to what we're seeing today. Like, I do believe that now, like the next 12 months, for most markets are pretty predictive of the next five years. So I'm much more comfortable today taking and trailing 12 month performance and using that to project forward. But that is something to look at a market, look at its historical performance and are things relatively stable today?

31:23Are they significantly higher or lower than near term history is a great sort of check of whether or not I could use these projections for the next few years as I'm sort of underwriting that investment. And then, John, same question for you. How has your approach changed? Yeah, I think the gold rush era was one of the worst things that ever happened to Airbnbs. The amount of people that like jumped in and jumped on the hype of a market when it was performing well is left a really bad taste in the mouth for a lot of people, right? But the approach that I have taken has changed significantly where I've become extremely conservative because I was operating about 15 Airbnbs in the middle of a city, right?

32:07When COVID hit and all of those bookings disappeared overnight. So that business was just essentially like wiped out with the lockdowns. And so whenever I'm analyzing properties, thinking about properties, I'm always trying to think of worst case scenario, how do we deal with this? So I'm very conservative, but I'm also trying to find a lot of different ways that I can add things to my property that is going to allow it to be way ahead of the competition. And so I take this approach where I'm trying to create a property that if we do hit or sorry, when we do hit a recession and the stock market drops by 20, 30 % and people are scared to travel and all that kind of stuff that my property or the properties I help people with still have the ability to get booked.

32:49And so the strategy is very, very, very conservative. In other words, the logic is if my property has like 10 different things to it, all these amenities, it's really fun. It's one of the best properties in the market. That's what I want because when the recession does happen, all I have to do is lower my prices to the same prices as the, you know, not so exciting Airbnbs and mine will definitely get booked over theirs because when a recession does happen, it doesn't hit everybody equally, right? Certain sectors get hit, but people still travel. It's just less people. And so I want to have one of the Airbnbs that can still get booked during that timeframe, even though I'm not going to make that record high money, I'm going to be able to still at least acquire some bookings.

33:29That's the strategy that I have been using for the past four years when I'm helping anybody determine which properties get set up. It's like, let's build in these protections so that when this time does come, we have those already in place. And that's how I've really changed since COVID. I feel like somebody who went through the 1920s when everything went terrible and now I'm going to just be conservative for the rest of my life and I'm okay with that. I feel like the same thing happened in large multifamily where people went in, you could make tons of money and then now people are getting burned.

34:00But I think in the short-term rental industry and also multifamily, the people that are surviving and really coming out of it are the operators, the people that really put in the time to build their operations, to give those unique experiences, to go above and beyond, have their systems and processes in place, know what asset management is and actually do asset management and bought off of being conservative or how they're going to operate and not just banking on this gold rush and banking on the appreciation that was crazy happening over those couple of years. But I think that's a big difference too, is really understanding how to operate or hiring the right co-host or property management company to operate your property too.

34:45Now, John, is it possible for an Airbnb property to perform well, even if the market that it is in is underperforming? It is. And I typically never like to talk about the markets that we help our clients purchase in just because I don't want to give away those markets, make it harder for them to hit their numbers. Oh, you're gatekeeping on us. I am 100 % gatekeeping. I've helped invest too much money into these markets to hurt those people. But with that being said, there's one market that's so complicated and requires so much capital that I feel okay talking about it. And that's the Scottsdale Phoenix market.

35:19So there, I mean, Phoenix made the headlines for the Airbnb bust, right? Every like after the Superbowl went through there, everybody was talking about how all these properties are not performing. All these properties are not booked out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. and meanwhile we had you know like 20 plus properties in that area that were all like record highs and so what i sort of learned through that process is and jamie kind of touched on this a little bit is saturation is not as straightforward as you know what is the it's not as straightforward as i thought it was okay it's really really really niched down so um as an example in miami there are 18 ,000 or 20 ,000 Airbnbs, somewhere around that number.

36:01But 10 ,000 of them are one bedrooms. And so if you were to ask me, hey, is Miami saturated? I would say, well, are you trying to cater to couples or are you trying to cater to groups of 16 people? Because that vastly changes it. Then the next question then becomes, well, are you trying to cater to groups of guys or groups of girls? Because there's a lot of bachelor pads, but there's not a lot of bachelorette pads. And then the next question is like, well, are you going for like luxury bachelorette groups or you're going for like just like regular whatever type of homes, right? And so what I'm trying to say is that when you're creating an Airbnb, you're creating it for a very specific demographic.

36:34And the question then becomes, is that demographic saturated for that market? And what we found in Scottsdale was that the market that we were targeting or the demographic that we were targeting was not saturated, but the Phoenix market as a whole was more saturated in comparison to other places for a variety of reasons. And so, yes, without a doubt, it's possible for the property within a market to still perform that's underperforming. And, John, I love that take so much. You and I reached out a couple weeks ago, and you shared that same logic with me. And I was like, dude, I've never thought about it that way, but it makes so much sense.

37:08Like saturation is really at the property level, and who are you competing against, not necessarily just what the market is doing. So I love that take. Now, guys, there's really this Airbnb amenities arms race that's happening right now in the industry. How important are amenities for profitability and which amenities have you seen drive maybe the biggest value? Jamie, we'll start with you. Is the answer, it depends. uh uh and so we uh at rdna i've got a huge team of data scientists and researchers and we've been trying to like really understand the answer to this question of i mean take a hot tub plop it into any market around the country i'm what what is that incremental value going to be uh and it it varies dramatically but something i want to call out is like it varies in ways that i think are very logical.

38:05If you think about investing in maybe some of these smaller markets or more rural areas, the homes that you're investing in is you are creating that destination. There's not going to be a lot of demand drivers nearby. People are going because your home is amenitized. And the incremental value of those amenities is double that of what we see in some of the larger markets. So you look at our typical coastal market, you get like a 10 % ADR increase. You look like at a small city rural area, you get a 21 % ADR increase. A similar impact with saunas where it's almost nothing in like a beach market for adding a sauna, it's like a 10 % increase in a more rural market.

38:55So people are willing to pay for those amenities. If there's not going to be a lot of other things to do nearby. And then, I mean, there's some things are the exact opposite in terms of the impact. So we're looking at EV chargers. Like if you're a beach or mountain market, that's within a two or three hour drive of a major Metro, having an EV charger can make a 5 % difference on ADR. And that can be a huge incremental value for a relatively low cost. Yeah, I feel like the amenities discussion is such an important one because people just think that if they just stuff their listing with a bunch of different things that it's going to make the difference.

39:38And that's partially true, right? And, you know, Jimmy, you just alluded to that. But I think there's also maybe an upper limit on the return of those amenities as well. And if you are in an incredibly small market where the ceiling on revenue is$100 ,000, it doesn't matter if you put Disneyland in your backyard, right? It's like the cap is the cap, right? So you've got to be able to gauge what is the return on that investment and not just, you know, can I can actually add it to the property? That goes the same for long-term rentals too, is in your market, you can't go and put granite countertops and expect to get another$200 in rent per month because there's just the cap that people won't pay more than that.

40:21even if you go and add all of these super nice high-end finishes. So it's like the same thing as finding that fine line of, you know, what to add and where to stop, but also like the maintenance and the upkeep of that amenity. Like a hot tub, I don't have any at my properties. I think of like, okay, do you have to have somebody come and drain it every time? Do you have maintenance on it? You know, issues, it's not working, things like that. So I think also kind of thinking about what you want to deal with also. For sure. We stopped buying air hockey tables for that reason. Like they're just like so hard to maintain.

40:57The little fans kept going out. Handymen aren't super knowledgeable of how to, you know, work with those. So we stopped buying air hockey tables for that reason. John, what about you? What's your take on the Airbnb amenities arms race? The question is, are they important? How important are they? Right. The answer is like, without a doubt, they're extraordinarily important in today's Airbnb space. I always like to explain this in a couple different ways. So, you know, if Jamie has an Airbnb with no amenities, he's selling bedrooms, bathrooms, living room, dining room, and a kitchen, right? But then if I have my home, I'm selling all those exact same things.

41:28Every single Airbnb sells those exact same things, right? But if I then am also offering a fire pit, a hot tub, and a pickleball court, I now have these additional things that somebody is buying from me for the three days that they are going to be there. Therefore, that's going to help me be able to sell my property at a higher nightly rate and at a higher occupancy because it's going to be easier for me to get the booking, especially if I lower that nightly rate to match Jamie. It's going to be an obvious choice that they just get more with me, right? I kind of like to explain it like if you take like a regular car and then you take a truck, a truck is almost always more expensive because it has a truck bed.

42:06You can just do more things with a truck, right? And so when you get this Airbnb that just has more amenities, more things to do, more entertainment while on vacation, people are naturally going to book it more easily and at a higher nightly rate. But I'm glad Jamie had to say it. I didn't have to say it. It depends. It depends on so many factors. Is a hot tub important in Michigan? Yes. Is it important in the Keys? Probably not. Logically, you've got to think about what amenity makes the most sense here. and then from there, it's, you know, like you just said, Tony, it's not just about throwing a bunch of amenities at it.

42:41It's thinking who is my demographic and now let's create a space for them. Um, one thing I've seen multiple times and I always just kind of like laugh at it is a bachelorette themed homes with jungle gyms in the backyard, right? So a full out pink home and it's got a jungle gym in the backyard. And I'm like, what are we doing here? You know what I mean? Who are we targeting? And so, you know, it's like create the experience through the amenities, right? And they're super, super, super important. They just give you a leg up. There's, you know, pools are obviously one of the biggest revenue drivers.

43:15The bigger the amenity, the more you can tend to see it. Yeah, sorry. Pools are definitely one of the biggest revenue drivers. Technically, the bigger the amenity, the more you're going to see that pull from the amenity. but they're just really important. I'll say we did not want bachelorette and bachelor parties in our property. So we put the jungle in to purposely deter people from booking our property for that purpose. Or Jamie, you just encouraged everyone to book the bachelor party and bring their kids along. So now you're dealing with both groups. Every mother's dream, bringing your kids to a bachelorette party.

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47:18Curious if you qualify? Just head over to hostfinancial.com and find out. Stop letting outdated lending practices hold you back. That's hostfinancial.com, where your property's potential meets unlimited financing. Okay, so we've talked about markets and properties, but now let's focus on what comes next. How are hosts actually adapting in 2025? So we're going to put you guys on the spot here. John, you get a pass because you mentioned this earlier by saying Scottsdale and Phoenix. So Jamie, this one comes to you. So I'm going to put you on the spot here, Jamie, because everyone's wondering the same question.

47:48If you were to buy an Airbnb today, what market would you go into and why? I won't give the exact answer of where my property is, but I'll just, and I told you guys it was in the North Georgia mountains. And I'm looking for drive-to destinations near major metro areas that are seeing a growing population. Because those are, you think about more people going into that destination and then that they're going to then be taking more vacations. So I want to be in an area that's going to have that strong tailwind to it. And it's not necessarily like you think about a destination, like Broken Bow is a great example right now.

48:28It's in Oklahoma. It's a drive-to from all these major Texas markets like Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, even Austin. They've got all these major tailwinds of all these new people moving into those areas. And now they're starting to vacation. Like it's been one of the fastest growing markets for new short-term rentals for the amount of demand that's coming in. But also you look at the fastest growing MSAs, they've all been in Texas. So it sort of makes sense that this market has been able to support that. So I want to make an investment in an area that's going to have that tailwind and sort of put myself in front of the upcoming demand that's going to eventually be there.

49:13Now, John, I'll throw this one to you. Do you expect the short-term rental landscape to consolidate at all? So you're seeing smaller hosts selling and then the pros that have actually operated starting to scale, will individuals still have an edge getting started? Without a doubt. I think I'm very well positioned to answer this question because I worked for the largest short-term rental investment fund in America as their head of data. For two years, we still work with them. And they even just received another 10 million plus another 90 million that's going to be coming to them to buy another 300 plus properties over the next three to five years.

49:52So this is the largest short-term rental investment fund, right? In a somewhere between a five to seven year period, they will have accumulated about 500 properties. In America right now, there's 2 million Airbnbs. And I think France is like 1.7 million, right? So then you could just kind of keep going. The reality is that there's just, there's too much demand for short-term rentals for, you know, these funds to be able to control and oversee all of these properties. Plus right now they're managing 150. It is unbelievably difficult to maintain those at the quality that they need to be. They actually were recently, AirDNA named them as the most improved property management company in all of America, which is amazing.

50:36But I saw the work that went through to actually get to that point. I know the people, I know how hard they worked. It was insane, right? They pulled data like you wouldn't believe just on reviews to be able to figure out like which cleaners to fire. It was a nuts operation to get to that point, but they did it. But what I've seen is like to operate at that scale is just so unbelievably hard. They cost a look at their stock market or their stock price, right? What's happened with them? Look at evolve. These people, when they try and go bigger and bigger and bigger, it just is so hard to do in that mom and pop care and love.

51:06And that's what Airbnb was built off of. And I don't see that going anywhere. Do I think you can manage 10 and still give that same quality? For sure, right? I've been in that scenario. But to say that the STR landscape is going to consolidate because of these larger funds that are getting involved. Not at all. And I have people reach out to me all the time. Just this week, I had somebody reach out and say, hey, do you want to be my head of data for a fund I'm going to open? And then I go and talk to them like, how many Airbnbs have you bought so far? And they're like, none. I'm like, okay, call me when you've bought 10 and we'll talk, right?

51:37We'll see how we feel about it then. So yeah, just without a doubt, the answer is that it's not going to consolidate. Now, Jamie, are you seeing anything different? Yeah. So we track every host around the world, how many listen to have and how inventory is consolidating or not. And in general, what we see is with the large property managers, they sort of manage about 35 % of inventory. And that's been pretty steady over the past six, seven years. We've seen individual hosts go from managing about 50 % of inventory to managing about 45%. So there's this middle here. And this sort of middle is what I see as really expanding.

52:22And these are like, they're not the large Vacasas, Casagos, Evolves. They're not the small individual hosts like me. There's these small hyper-local, some call them co-hosts that are managing anywhere from six to 20 listings. They're generating amazing review scores. They're outperforming the market in terms of RevPar. They are eating a lot of these large property managers' lunch in the markets that they're operating. And we see that their inventory has grown from about 10 % of the market up to over 15%. So they're growing dramatically. And we've seen their inventory grow at 13 % year over year this year, where both individuals and large property management companies are growing like 2 % or 3%.

53:14So they are absolutely expanding. And we see the large property managers responding in kind. So I'm with Costco and the Casa merging, I'm turning it to a franchise model where they're going to have locally owned and operated Costco franchises. A lot of these private equity rollups that are out there are keeping the local brands. So people don't even know that it's part of this large national company and they're keeping local ownership or local management and control. So they see local is better, especially for short-term rentals. Like hospitality is really hard to scale. And as more and more you keep local, the better.

54:03Jimmy, can I ask you one question on that? Which is, you had mentioned that the very large property management companies like the Vicasas have steadily owned about 35 % of the entire market over the past six years. But yet the smaller property management companies have increased their market share by 5%, meaning that they're really, that 5 % is all from just individual hosts, right? So individual hosts are handing over their properties to smaller property management companies, but yet somehow these VACASAs and larger companies are still in control of the 35%. I would have thought for sure it'd be the exact opposite because we see such low performance from VACASA type companies that you would assume that those really well-managed property management companies that are smaller would be gobbling up their clients left, right, and center.

54:50But that's not the case. Not the case. And we do see a lot of these property management companies growing. I mean, they're raising money, they're growing their funds. We have seen Vacasa give up a lot of their inventory, but for every Vacasa that's out there, there's a new one that's at 100, 150 listings that is growing super fast. And you see great examples of those in our sort of best property management company list. There's some great examples of ones that are scaling and doing it efficiently. I would say this can account for too, that there's been a lot that were single, maybe two units in 2018, 2019 that had enough experience that during this short terminal boom in investing, they greatly expanded their number of units that they owned and managed themselves.

55:40So we did see this emergence of small to middle-sized operators happen as people expanded their portfolio. Gotcha. Just to clarify too, when you guys asked that question, I figured you were talking about the consolidation of investment funds, buying up all the homes. But when it comes to property management companies and those sides, a lot of people are definitely building businesses in that five to 50 management. It's a great business to own and very scalable as well. So no, it was great to get your viewpoint on that because it was very interesting to see like how much they actually own compared to individuals.

56:14Yeah. Guys, you know, I've absolutely loved this discussion and I appreciate the insights that both of you have shared. And I guess in closing, I got one last question for you guys, but I think what we're seeing right now in the short-term rental industry is what we've seen in other industries in, you know, the modern U S economy as well. I'm in my thirties. So I, you know, I was young when the.com crash happened. Uh, I was, uh, alive and very much impacted by the 2008 crash, but it was the same thing, right? Like there was all this hype around this new thing that was coming out. Uh, initial people got really, really great returns.

56:50And then too many people piled in bubble happens, bubble pops. A lot of people get hurt, but the internet's still here, right? Like the, the.com crash didn't kill the internet. Real estate investing is still here. 2008 didn't kill off real estate investing. And I believe that the Airbnb industry has gone through the same thing where a lot of the early folks made incredible returns, drove a lot of hype. A lot of people who had no business maybe getting into the short-term rental industry did it in hopes of chasing or capturing some of that gold. The bubble popped. And now we're seeing it mature and stabilize.

57:24So my last question for you guys is as we look forward, you know, the next five, 10, 30 years in the short-term rental industry, what do you guys see as just like the foundational things that will allow people to remain successful now that we're entering into this new kind of mature phase of the industry? And John, we can start with you. Love that question. Um, I kind of mentioned this already, like the strategy that we go for when it comes to finding these properties and how conservative I am. Um, I'm conservative in the sense of like how I'm estimating what the revenue is going to be, but also what we need to do to outperform our competition.

57:59So with every single property that we are trying to find, we are trying to think, how could we have an advantage over our competition for the next five to 10 years? Now there's a variety of different things that allow for that to happen. As an example, there's a property we're looking at right now in North Georgia, not near you, Jamie, so no worries, but it's in North Georgia and almost nobody has flat land out there, but this has this one little spot where you can throw a pickleball court on it. And I find it so fascinating because like nobody within this like 20 minute drive of this little town has a pickleball court because there's just no flat land.

58:30That's a gigantic advantage that you're going to have forever. Another good example of this is like, take the, the, the Southeast of Florida, which is like, you're essentially your West Palm all the way down to Miami. Almost all of that land is built, right? Like if you look at a map, they've got the water on the one side and then they have that Everglades on the other side, right? There's almost no land in that strip to continue to outbuild and outperform. And so in other words, whatever's built is what it's going to be. And the price is just going to continue to go up like we have seen for ever when it comes to real estate.

59:05And eventually it's going to hit a point where the real estate is going to be so expensive that there's no return that you can get from those properties, right? Now, the way I look at it is that some of those properties and some of those lots have massive backyards and that's their competitive advantage. And if you get them at the right price and put them together properly, eventually the home prices are going to go so high that there's no more cashflow left. But you've locked in a property that can cashflow because of the purchase price and your neighbors can't outperform you because they don't have a large backyard, right?

59:35And if somebody goes and buys this mega mansion, they're not going to be this advantage. And so I'm always looking for those types of opportunities where there's just built in moats around the property for the next five to 10 years. And if you can continue to hold onto that property for five to 10 years, everyone looks like a genius who holds onto real estate that long, right? So that's the objective when it comes to that. I love that approach. And I love what you said about the moat. And I talk about that so often. And there's location, there's size of the property, size of the lot, there's a construction quality, there's a uniqueness of the construction.

1:00:08If I have a tree house, it's like, you know, cantilevered off the side of a mountain and you got to take like a glass escalator to get down to it. Like there's all these different things you can do, but it's like, how can you build that mode? I love that, man. Um, Jimmy, what about you? What's your take? What's the foundational things we should be focusing on to survive and thrive going into the next five, 10, 30 years. Yeah. I'm going to zoom out. Um, you gave me the permission to talk about 30 years from now. Uh, so I'm high level. You see this and greatly expanding middle class globally. So you're going to have a billion people from China and India sort of move from lower income to middle income.

1:00:47And what do you want to do when you're in the middle income? You want to travel. And we're seeing so many more people begin to travel internationally. U.S. is one of those top destinations. For the first world countries, we see people trading things for experiences. that if you look at the share of every dollar spent, more and more people are spending on travel and experiences. And then you think more granular on the competition that's happening between short-term rentals and hotels. Like past 30 years, hotel industry supply has grown at 2%. Last decade, it's grown at half a percent. And right now it's sort of re-accelerating and it's like just below 1%.

1:01:33And so we've seen a way under development of hotels and you see short-term rentals grabbing so much more share of overall travel spend, both in the U.S. and around the world. So if travel is going to be one of these big secular trends that more and more people are going to be spending on travel, more and more people are going to be traveling around the world coming to the U.S. and there's just not going to be enough hotels to accommodate them. Like, that's why I'm buying short-term rentals and why I think that there is going to be a long-term, steady, more and more demand coming into our sector.

1:02:06Jamie, I got to ask one follow-up question to that. And I love the long-term thinking. Airbnb, and John, I want to get your take on this as well, but Airbnb has made a lot of changes recently that have maybe rattled or upset a lot of hosts, right? There's the fee changes coming up here shortly. There was the chargeback thing that they did recently, their changes in their cancellation policies. There's a lot more people now who are talking about building independent of Airbnb. And obviously they are the dominant player in the short-term rental single-family space. But when you think about hotels, think like Hilton doesn't just rely on booking.com and kayak and name the website, right?

1:02:47Like Hilton has the Hilton brand. Marriott has the Marriott brand. Do you guys think that we'll see more single-family short-term rental brands that grow to – obviously maybe not the size of a Hilton, but they grow in the mold of a Hilton or Marriott where they are getting the majority of their reservations, maybe direct. So Jamie, you know, 30 ,000 foot view, 30 years out. Do you, do you see that on the horizon? Yeah, I absolutely. And it's, I'm, I'm at our DNA. We're putting our money where our mouth is. Like if you're watching the video, I'm wearing an uplisting shirt. Uh, we bought uplisting, uh, it's a property management system, um, about a year and a half ago.

1:03:24and why we do it. We saw that trend of like AirBB's dominance in the sector is going to decline a bit. And it's because people, as they build their businesses, they need to be multi-channel. They need to be on Vrbo. They need to be on booking. They need to have a direct booking site. And we wanted to give hosts the tools to be able to do that. And now when you go to AirDNA, you get the option of you can buy a subscription like you've done always, or you can pay an additional 25 months and we're going to throw an uplisting and say you can go multi-channel, you can run your business an automated way.

1:03:59And we see that's long-term where the industry is going to be going. John, what about for you? Can I ask a, I might have a different answer, but can I ask a clarifying question? When you say like the Hilton brand and talking about individual hosts doing this, are you saying like somebody buys, has one Airbnb, let's just say, and they then turn that into its own brand and have a direct booking site specifically for that one Airbnb? be? I think both right at the micro level where it's just like, Hey, I'm one host, I've got a really killer property, I'm going to do my best to like brand this and make it its own thing.

1:04:31Like, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Joshua Tree house, but they're like one of the first brands that I saw on social media, where they had a really beautiful home in Joshua Tree. And their social media was driving the majority of their bookings. But then there's also on the other side where like, there are the funds, there's wander, who are building these brands. And they're not Hilton, but they're the short term, it's a little equivalent of that. So both those at a macro kind of large scale and at a micro individual host? So the macro, I definitely agree with, especially like with the brand you just mentioned, Wander.

1:05:00You see a lot of this where these specific niches are turning into like their own sort of booking site. So like we have one here in Canada called Canada Cottages or something along those lines. And my fiance owns an Airbnb in Canada and she actually gets more bookings from that website than she does from Airbnb. There's just a little, you know, more demand for that. I've seen one for Hocking Hills in Ohio, right? That's that national park out there. So I've seen there's one specifically for that. Wander's like a good example of like that more luxury type style. So I definitely see those ones from mine.

1:05:32There's a couple of Wander's out there. So I'm not sure if we're talking about the same one. There's one that's all about luxury and it's really, really beautiful. But when it comes to like the individual hosts, that's where I'm still not sold. And I've heard a lot of people talking about this and I'm curious to see how it's going to play out over the next five years. Because one of the reasons I loved doing Airbnb in the first place, when I first started doing this back in like 2017 was that Airbnb was the marketing, right? I always knew I wanted to own a business, but I didn't know how to do marketing.

1:05:59And I was like, well, Airbnb took care of that. And so now I can, now I can have that done. And so with these individual booking sites, uh, you have to then learn how to be marketing, right? You then have to learn how to go viral, have that website, create the content on a, on a regular basis and like get people to actually come to your place. And the more unique your place is, the better you'll be able to do that. The better you're at marketing, the better you'd be able to do that. Uh, but there are going to be also tons of homes that are just like, you know, I'm in the right location. I've got the bedrooms that you're looking for.

1:06:24Come stay at my place. You know what I mean? Um, like a property in the middle of Scottsdale doesn't necessarily need to have, uh, its own booking channel because there's so much demand in that area through Airbnb and there's, it's hard to stand out. So I think it depends on the different scenarios and situations in the property type, uh, in the macro versus micro, but you know, I, I don't see any negative in doing it, right. I don't see any downside. Let's like figuring it out, trying to take control of your listing, having, you know, being able to keep more of that revenue that's coming through for putting in that additional work.

1:06:54So I'm all for it. Yeah. One last thing before we close out here is emails. So like everybody says, you build your following on social media, you're building your personal brand, collect emails because Facebook could go away. TikTok, we've already gotten threatened, is going away. Do you think there's some other kind of capture that you should be doing for your short-term rentals, say Airbnb and B goes away or VRBO goes away or something like that, where you have your own collection of emails per se. For sure. I mean, emails are, it comes back to like marketing one-on-one, right? So, um, you know, when I, I, I mean, I've been trying to build up a online following for years now.

1:07:35It's, it's hard. You know what I mean? I almost swore there. It's hard. Right. And, uh, you know, one of the big things that you want to do is, is get those emails and be able to, uh, provide value through those emails and let people know you exist. And that's sort of like the rock of, or your foundation when it comes to marketing. So yeah, couldn't recommend emails enough. But there's a lot to the entire marketing strategy you'd have to do. Not trying to scare anybody, saying like, try it. Like genuinely try it. Try and make it happen if you can. John, you probably just need to dance more to get those followers and those views up.

1:08:06Well, thank you guys so much for joining us today. We really appreciated it. Jamie, where can people reach out to you and find out more information? Yeah. And feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions or find AirDNA at airdna.co. We do a blog where it's free. You can get the latest trends on U.S. short-term rentals and get a sense of where the market's going and have our own podcast, the STR Data Lab, where we update every week on trends across short-term rentals around the world. And John, where can people find you? I recommend just going straight to our website, strsearch.com.

1:08:41Uh, I've got a free Airbnb data course on there. So it's free seven days, learn exactly how to analyze, uh, data and markets and be able to get good at finding a good property. I can't recommend it enough. That's the best place to go. If you really want to find how to reach out to me, if you go there, you'll figure out how to reach out to me. Um, so strsearch.com is a great resource for learning Airbnb data. John and Jamie, thank you so much. I learned so much through this episode. So I really appreciate you both taking the time to enlighten us and to share your knowledge and information with us today.

1:09:13I'm Ashley. He is Tony. And thank you guys so much for listening. We'll see you on the next episode. Hey, rookies. If you're watching this, we want you to apply to be a guest on the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. That's right. Ashley and I are looking for amazing stories just like yours to be a part of our Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Now, look, you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have done thousands of deals. Even if you've done one deal, your story could help inspire the next listener. As a rookie investor, especially if you just got your first deal, it is all fresh in your minds and you are the best person to tell your story, give your experience on how you got it done to help someone else get their first deal.

1:09:50So head over to biggerpockets.com slash guest if you want to be a part of our show. Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash guest. And we'd love to have you on.