[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to the Short Term Show. The show about short term rentals and long term wealth, with real property owners hosting real properties who are crushing it in the vacation and short term rental space.
And here's your host, Avery Carle.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hey, all. Welcome back to another episode of the Short Term Show. We are just cruising through 2025. We are getting to the end.
And, you know, it hadn't been that bad. Everybody at the end of the year always is like talking about how terrible the year was and goodbye to 2025. But, you know, I've never felt like that in a year. You either you win or you learn. It's never, it's never a bad year. But anyway, today I've got a very cool guest. I know I say that every time you guys like to tell me in the comments when I repeat myself. So I'm going to work on doing that. But anyway, he is very cool. His name is Jake Cohen and he does a lot of things in the short term rental space. But he is very well versed in revenue management, which a lot of y' all have a hard time with. So we've got Jake here. He's gonna talk about some of that stuff. We're gonna hear his story, and I am really excited to talk to him today. How's it going, Jake?
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Going great.
Happy to be here.
I've been following Avery. Gosh, it's probably been like four or five years, and I've actually done two transactions through her company. So kind of fun to, you know, come full circle and now be a guest on the podcast that I listened to five years ago as I was figuring things out.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much for listening. And actually, one of those transactions is what gave me the idea to ask you to come on the podcast. Because I saw your rental history and I was like, damn, this is really good. And it was a nice house. Super nice house. But a lot, a lot of people go the other direction with that where they've got a super nice house that should be doing a lot better.
And so that one was a joy to market because it had such good rental history. So how did you.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Let's.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: First, I got a lot of questions about how you're so good at that. But first, let's talk about how you got into short term rentals a little bit more about you.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: Sure, sure. Yeah. I can give you some quick background. So I grew up in Lake Tahoe, California, one of the most beautiful places in the world. If you've never been there, never have. It's. It's definitely worth the visit.
Absolutely gorgeous lake. And, you know, all the things you would want to do. Skiing, hiking, biking, you know, anything outdoors basically is great. There's.
It's become a very, very big tourist market. It's getting pretty busy now, so I don't get back that much, but my folks started a bed and breakfast when I was 10 years old, and so I lived on site at a bed and breakfast. So I always tell people that hospitality literally runs through my veins because every day I woke up and went downstairs to go eat breakfast with all the guests, you know, help serve a couple plates. In the afternoons, we were serving wine appetizers by the lake.
So people. People have this connotation of like, oh, I'm. I'm good at hospitality. I'm like, I don't even think about hospitality. It is absolutely the only thing when there are other people around. It's always being courteous and, you know, all of that stuff. So, anyways, I got my first taste of hospitality starting at 10, and then went to school at UC San Diego, majored in economics, minored in theater.
Why those were the right combination at the time, I'm not 100% sure, but.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Well rounded, I guess. Yeah, Yeah.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: I mean, the funny thing now is I look back and I'm like, man, that has really shaped my life. Like, now I have to be personable, you know, be a theater presence to get my points across on revenue management, which is not necessarily the most interesting thing that most people want to do, but you also need the economics. You need to make the numbers work.
So after that, my parents had bought a second bed and breakfast down in Palm Springs, California, and their plan was to go back and forth. They had a manager. Manager left after a couple of months. I had just graduated college and they said, hey, Jake, why don't you go run this place?
I said, okay, I'll do it for a year or two. You know, this is a retirement community. I don't want to be there forever.
And really, really enjoyed my experience there professionally. I was elected to a whole bunch of, like, hospitality boards. I was president of the Small Hotels of Palm Springs organization.
Actually won California Hotel and Lodging Association Manager of the Year award. So professionally, it was an amazing experience for me. But I was also, like, 22 to 27 years old. I was there for five years, and I started to realize I am never going to, like, find my wife in this environment. You know, it was a tennis, tennis and golf community, that kind of thing. Beautiful place, love going back to visit. But it wasn't where I wanted to live.
So I moved to Denver. And at the same time my folks were getting a divorce.
And my mom basically just said, I don't want to work anymore. They now had these two, two, two small, you know, bed and breakfast, hotel properties.
And she said, I don't want to work anymore. And my dad said, well, I can't give you very much money. I haven't sold the properties. You know, she took a bad deal basically financially, and I realized I needed to help my mom financially. So we decided to pair up and do some real estate investing together.
We got into long term rentals. This was like 2012, so bigger pockets was kind of like just kicking off in Denver. And I had moved to Denver and I was like, man, I'm going to follow the Bigger Pockets. I'm going to have a thousand doors and it's going to be amazing. And we bought a townhouse. Then we bought a four Plex. We did big renovations, you know, got them rented. And after a few years we were kind of like, this sucks. It's like long term rentals are not sexy. They're not fun. You know, people are leaving junk cars in our parking lots and, you know, painting on our walls. I don't know, just weird stuff.
So we said, let's pivot out of this. Let's get back to something that we know better. And we bought our first short term rental in 2016 in Steamboat Springs.
And it was an up down duplex. We again spent way too much money on a renovation.
And I was interviewing property managers and I was saying, hey, what, you know, what do you think I can earn on this place? And they all thought, oh, maybe $50,000. And I was like doing a $200,000 renovation on the property. And I'm like, there's no way I can only earn 50,000 on this.
Like, if that's the case, I'm totally screwed, basically. So I said, well, I'm not going to believe these guys. I'm going to do it myself. And I kicked it off and I got into revenue management right from the start. And I had been doing revenue management on a smaller scale with the hotels.
I saw the big hotels around us in Palm Springs having a different price every single night. And me and my dad said, let's figure this out. Let's. Let's do our own dynamic pricing. And we signed up for like very complicated programs that were built for like Hyatt and Hilton and Marriott. And we were trying to apply it to our 10 room bed and breakfast Properties.
But we saw a huge gain in revenue when we did it. And I said, okay, I'm going to get into the pricing right away. And I had tons of success. We did 85,000 in our first year on that up down duplex. We crushed all of the numbers that everyone said we could do. And from then on that was like my number one thing was pricing appropriately.
And I didn't realize I was doing anything different until about five years later. I was a firefighter at the time. I was very, very busy. I had two kids under three and all of a sudden I decided I need to get out of the fire department.
I can't run both lives. You know, I was running a real estate life and I was running my firefighting life and we decided to pivot and go full time into real estate. And I kind of just fell into the revenue management, honestly. I did a presentation for five friends who were all really into short term rentals and they had been doing it for many years. And I assumed when I showed them what I was doing with pricing, they were going to be like, oh yeah, we're doing the same thing. You know, we're doing lots of research, we're applying all these customizations, we have seasons, we have all this stuff. And everyone turned around after I had done this little 30 minute presentation. They're like, nope, we don't do any of that stuff. And I was like, really? None of you? So I took over one of my friends portfolios for, for three months. I took over five of her properties, five different cities I had no experience in and she had her best three months ever. And from then on I was like, okay, this is something I gotta double down on. And now step by step, bnb has over 400 listings that we manage.
I have a course where I teach people how to do revenue management.
So I apologize. That was a very long winded explanation of how I got into this, but lots of context.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: No, that was actually really great. Super great. And, and honestly, Sandeep, if you're listening. So Sandeep Nanda was last week's episode and I asked him one question and he went and it was, everything he said was super informative and like really interesting and cool. How he got into it. One question, hour and a half.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: If you know Sandeep, I love, I love Sandeep. Yeah, he's, he actually works, works with us on our revenue management.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: So yes, of great guests. So yes, it's always. I, I love guests who have a lot to say because it makes my job easier When y' all have so much great information for our listeners. So I appreciate that.
This episode of the Short term show is brought to you by the short term shop. 30 year fixed mortgages, tax benefits and long distance management training made easy are just a few of the perks of owning a short term rental. The Short term shop can help you buy and learn how to manage your property from anywhere in the world. Just go to the shorttermshop.com and click get connected again. That's the shorttermshop.com and we are brokered by exp. See y' all over there.
So, yeah, you grew up in a bed and breakfast. That's. That's cool.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was a very interesting childhood. You know, there were some rules, like if my friends came over, like, don't do the crazy stuff on our lawn, like go next door to the beach next door. So we lived on the lake, so it was incredible. Like, my folks were. It was the ultimate house hack. They were like, how do we get to live on the lake in Lake Tahoe? And at the time, you know, it was really expensive to buy a property on the lake. And they said, well, if we buy this property, we can take the, you know, the front three bedrooms that look out on the lake and we'll sell the rest of them to other people. And I was like, looking back now, going through kind of that, like, bigger pockets time and hearing everyone talk about their house hack, I'm like, damn, my parents were doing that way before anyone else was talking about this stuff. So cheers to them. Yeah.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: The heyday of bigger pockets really was something.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, phenomenal. I'm. I still follow biggerpockets. Scott Trench is still like one of my favorite people.
I went to the same gym as him for a while and like, he sat down with me and my wife and he was like 10 years younger than us, but somehow he still had more, like, experience and knowledge than we had on life and, you know, I don't know. Good stuff.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Scott's great and. Okay. Anyway, off off topic, so let's talk about revenue management.
So I'm going to ask you.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: The, the question that when. When we have clients who are like, struggling and they come to us and they're like, I'm not getting booked.
It is 99.9999% of the time because they are overpriced. Not across the board, but overpriced on the weird days and the weird slow times.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: And they do not want to hear. They, they will not Hear it. You need to lower your price. Because when, when we say you need to lower your price just on these certain weird days, not asking you to lower your price on 4th of July, then you will get booked, but they get really hung up on this, the idea of their break even number, and they forget that it's an average. So you will book well above that, but sometimes you're going to have to book below that. But they get so fixated on this break even number that I have to, I have to get 500 a night or I won't break even. And I'm like, but what if you get 499 instead of 0?
Are you willing to sacrifice that? So since you do this for a living, I'd love to hear your take on that question.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Oh man, I 100% agree with you. And I think what, what people get really stuck on is the per night cost. You know, the per night price that they're putting out there and they're not thinking about the bigger picture. So I always like to give an example and I say, you know, let's use your numbers of $500 a night and we'll say, okay, you get 500 a night every night on the weekends, right? And most people are pretty good at booking the weekends. That's like your, your go to time. So let's say, okay, you get eight nights booked at 500 a night, okay, and that's $8,000. No, sorry, $4,000. That's $4,000. I got to get my calculator out. Yeah, that's $4,000. And, and people are like, okay, yeah, I made $4,000. And I go, okay, but you have five days a week that are going empty every week, right? So we've booked 28 for, for easy math. I always just like simplify the, the numbers here. And I say like, okay, how about, let's consider you have 20 days left in the month. Okay, what if we dropped our price down to $200 a night? And that seems incredibly low for most people who are renting for $500 a night on the weekend, but I say, let's drop our price down to $200 a night. And obviously this is all averages in real life. Everything's variable and there's different numbers. But I say, okay, 200 times 20 nights. If we could get every single night rented, that's another $4,000. You just doubled your revenue.
And when you start to explain it in like now you can double your revenue, then people start to get excited about it and they stop thinking about the individual night cost, and they start to think about the overall revenue. And the reality is we all need to be thinking about that overall revenue number. We don't need to be thinking about how much am I renting for on an individual night.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Have you ever read that book the Gap in the Gain, or have you heard of it?
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: So people want to. They live in the gap. They're looking at the number that they think they need to get, and they're lit. They're stuck on how much less they're getting than that instead of focusing on how much more they'll be getting than zero if they just drop their price and look at it. So would you say.
Would you say that revenue management is largely like a mindset then?
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Revenue management is a mindset. And it's one of our biggest struggles when we have clients come on board with us is explaining to them, you know, some people, we have a spreadsheet they fill out when they come on board with us, and we say, what is the minimum that you will take for this property? And then we start to get into it, and we say, okay, well, that's like 50th percentile line in your market.
Are you sure that's the lowest you. You will go? And we have to explain to them that if that's where we set our minimum, probably half of the days, we're not even in competition. Like, people are not even going to consider your property because it's just priced too high. There's so many properties that are going to be priced lower that you're not even going to come up in the search.
So I feel like it's one of those things that we have to explain very carefully to people and make sure that they understand that, you know, that net gain, like the overall revenue is more important than that individual price per night.
And, yeah, I think it's definitely a mental game, especially for people new in the industry, to get over that hump of saying, oh, I can't believe I'm going to rent this place for $200 a night. It's a $500 a night property.
But, you know, once you get over that hump and you see that nothing bad happened to your property, and a lot of times what we actually do with people is we say, look, if you're uncomfortable with this because you're worried you're going to rent one night at 200 a night, I understand that that's kind of, like, scary to think about that.
So I say, let's do something crazy. And let's set like a three night minimum so that you know you're going to get $600 for that reservation instead of just one night at $200. And once we get past that hump and they're like, oh, okay, these people are normal people. They're treating my house well, everything's good.
Then we can start to pare back our restriction and say, you know, okay, let's go to two night minimum, let's go to a one night minimum, whatever, to get ourselves booked. Does that make sense?
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: You are.
Everything you're saying is just so, like, great. Just it, it just clicks in my brain so well. And it's, it's something that I guess I, I'm like, it's a cathart. What's the word? Catharsis of like some PTSD that I have with trying to help people. And they're like, but no, my break even. I'm losing money at 200 a night. But you're not because it's more than zero.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: And you're just saying what I want to shout from the rooftops. And I love it. Thank you. I love when people come on my show and agree with me.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Well, it sounds like we're on the same page, so I'm happy to come on and agree with you whenever you like.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Yes.
Okay. So we've talked about the biggest mistakes that people make. So if there's something that you want people to remember about, let's say like the top two to three things, most important things about revenue management and doing it effectively, what would you tell them?
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Yeah, my biggest rule of thumb is to keep things simple first.
So don't build in a whole bunch of restrictions and rules into your pricing program until there's a problem that you have to correct. So unfortunately, where we are in life is a lot of us get into whatever we're interested in by like watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts. And I absolutely love YouTube videos. I absolutely love podcasts. However, we have to build in some context when we hear things on these, these programs. So, you know, you hear something on a program that they say for a beach market, you should be doing a seven night minimum, Saturday to Saturday check in, check out.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: That kills me. Kills me. Yes. We get a lot of that around here in Destin.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Right. And, and so like people launch their property, they have zero reviews, they have no history, and they're like, well, I'm starting off with a seven night minimum, Saturday to Saturday check in. I'm like, I Promise you this is the quickest way to fail. You know, no one is going to book your property for seven nights. When you have no reviews, no history, no anything. They don't trust you yet. You've got to build that first. So I always tell people, first thing you know, that first time when you launch your new property, try and go in with a one night minimum.
Try and go in with as few restrictions as possible and keep your prices low. As soon as you get a couple bookings, start bringing your price up, start adding the restrictions that you want to put into place. But don't do that from day one. Make sure you start with the simplicity. And this is what I always tell people. If you have a problem, then find a way to fix it. So you know, for example, if you notice during the summer, your busiest season in your beach market, you are constantly having people check out on Saturday morning and then you're not booking Saturday night, then you can put in a no checkout rule on Saturday to solve that problem. But don't put it into place until you have that problem. Like get yourself successful, then realize you have a problem, then deal with it.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Yeah, love that.
Another one that I want to piggyback on on that is the three night minimum. Like they, it's not a seven night minimum, that's really, you know, cutting, cutting you off at the legs, but the three night minimum. Especially for smaller properties in the off season, guys, weekends are two nights. So if you've got a small property in the off season, a three night minimum is not helping you. And I think that's such a small night minimum. I think so many people don't think about that weekend thing. They're like, why am I not getting booked? My minimum night stay is not that high.
You know, you gotta keep it to where people can book your weekends.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: And I think, you know, especially with where we are in the market, with coming out of the other side of COVID I know I was in this before COVID and you were in this before COVID but a lot of people weren't in this before COVID and they're still thinking that people are going to book those three or four nights on the weekends, even during the off season. And the reality is people can't take an extra day or two off anymore.
So I think that's been a big shift as well, where our seasonality is really reverting back to norms. So people are traveling during the summer, they're traveling at spring break, they're traveling during the holidays, but there's not nearly as much business midweek and off season. And there's been this huge reversion to that. And man, it's, it's so hard to explain that to people who weren't in it before.
COVID But that's just normal. Like, that's not abnormal. It's normal. And so I'm a big fan. Anytime you have a high season, feel free to put, you know, the three night minimum on the weekends, for example. But realize probably like three months is high season and the other nine months of the year is probably not high season.
And those you should have less restrictions. And the lower the restrictions, the more Airbnb shows you in the search and that allows you to get booked. So a lot of people talk about you have to be on page one, right?
Well, the best way to get to page one is removing as many restrictions as possible. Airbnb wants you available as many nights as possible for people to book.
And I think the other, the other tip I'll give is there's a huge range between what you can charge midweek off season and, you know, Christmas week, high season, whatever it is, that is your highest week. So I'll give you an example of, of one of my properties and this is the one that Avery worked with me on to sell.
It was a, a 10 bedroom property in Gulf Shores, Alabama. It was not tier one, it was like tier four. Technically, you know, nice property, but we would rent it for about $500 a night during the off season for 10 bedrooms, $500 a night. But we got $5,000 a night during peak times. High seat, you know, our highest day of the year was around $5,000 a night at that property. So most people, when you give them like, oh, your property is going to rent for an average of $200 a night, they think, well, I'm going to go down to 150 and I'm going to go up to 250.
That's not nearly a big enough range. You need to go like down to 75 and up to 500. You know, that's an appropriate range for that, that type of a property. And I think you only get that if you use dynamic pricing software because otherwise you just don't realize you can push it that far.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I personally didn't know you could push it that far. That's like 10x so. Right. I don't do math. I didn't catch your bad.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: And you know, I can come on.
[00:25:17] Speaker B: The show and do bad math because I'm not gonna.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: These are obviously generalizations don't go just automatically put a 10x on your property. You need to do market research. You need to understand what is realistic for for your properties. I always like to put the disclaimer that I am a revenue manager but I am not your revenue manager. So you need to consult with your revenue manager before you put these into place.
Right.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:25:45] Speaker C: The Short Term Shop is hiring.
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[email protected] so this has been.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: I, I have loved this episode. Thank you for coming on. You're super easy to talk to and give a lot of great information. So thank you so much for that.
Before we move on to the last three questions of the show, is there anything about revenue management or your story that you feel like our listeners should hear or like, is there anything you want to share? Screen. We talked about that. If you want to do that, we can.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I was just gonna do like a, a cool new hack.
You know, just show one, one thing that, that came out recently that I thought was really cool on Price Labs. So yeah, I think that would be cool to do.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah, show us. So guys, if you're listening on a podcast platform, just scoot on over to our YouTube channel. It's YouTube slash the short Term Shop and find Jake's episode and check out this cool thing he's going to show us.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: All right. You should be seeing all of Steamboat with KPIs at the top.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
So this is a market dashboard. Those of you that have not run a market dashboard before, this is the best 10 bucks a month that you can spend on your short term rental. It gives you all the market information that you could want about your area, your property, the properties around you, everything. So if you haven't done this, go on Price Labs. Click Market Research. Click Market Dashboards. It's like three questions. It'll take you five minutes to set this up. Super, super valuable. So this is for all of Steamboat. I, I'm based in Steamboat, so this is the one that I have pulled up right now.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: But you still have, you still have one in Steamboat.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm actually renovating it right now. It's a, it was a seven bedroom triplex and I'm renovating it into a six bedroom, mostly single family home style set up. I just realized there was so much more demand for the bigger property than there were for the individual small properties. Because I'm, I'm like one of ten now as opposed to one of a thousand, you know, in the other categories that, that I was in. Okay. So I'm super stoked. I'm. I'm using a designer. I'm like, I'm doing everything the way I should have done it from the beginning but didn't do. So I'm stoked on it.
All right, so what I wanted to show you guys is a really cool section that they've added here. This is called length of stay and booking window patterns.
They added something on here where you can now select by month.
And this is so cool to me because now I can dig in on a particular season and what I want to learn about that particular season. So in Steamboat, our high season is December through March. So I'm going to click out everything else.
I'll give you a quick example of what this looks like.
And then down at the bottom here, it always defaults to booked nights. Go to booked nights by length of stay and booking window and you click apply.
Okay, this first section here says recent bookings. Ignore that.
Go down to the, the second part here where it says stay months. Okay. This breaks down your booked nights by length by booking window on this graph. And then this one is booked nights by length of stay.
So we can see how long are people booking stays for in this particular market. Now I'm looking at all of Steamboat right now. So this works really well when you dig into like a particular bedroom count. For example, like what does a four bedroom actually rent for during high season?
And what you can see is, oh, like half of the reservations are seven nights. You know, that's incredible. So what it gives you is the ability to say at, you know, we, we see. You can see here that there's kind of a drop off in number of bookings inside of two weeks.
So I don't want to prioritize getting my bookings within these last two weeks. I want to prioritize them further out because that's when people want to book in this market.
Same thing here. You can see that there's kind of a, you know, if we called this a bell curve, you would say that the, the top of the bell is at four Days.
So I don't want to go into this market and take a two night booking six months out because there's potential for me to get a four or five plus night booking in this market.
So I feel like this is one of those really, really cool things that you can now break down.
You know, what does it look like at two to four months out? What are people actually booking? And one of the things that's really cool is you can like subtract out all of the, you know, things further out than that. Okay, what is actually happening? Two to four months plus out, what are people booking? And you know, again, you can see now it's the vast majority are booking five night stays.
So I just love this.
It's one of those cool things that they just released.
The other thing that I really like to do is pair this with this graph up above. A lot of people don't realize that you can actually slide this graph and you can look at whatever period of time that you want. So if we look at last winter, which is our high season, this gives you a very similar breakdown. So you can see the 29 plus day stays, the 15 to 28 day stays, the 7 to 14, the 5 to 6, the 3 to 4. And what the amazing thing is when you start to dig into these graphs is you realize there is hardly anyone booking one and two day stays. I don't want to focus on one and two day stays in this market and you know, let someone book that super far out and then lose my ability to get a longer stay.
[00:32:26] Speaker B: This is very there then with your minimum, minimum night stay.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Well, yeah, this is an all. Again, this is kind of like all bedroom counts. But yeah, if I was looking at a graph like this, even if I had a one bedroom property, I would probably have a three, a three night minimum, you know, more than probably a month out.
And I'd probably have like a four night minimum, more than three months out because I know that there's demand for.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: That and you don't want to clog up your calendar and with a bunch of two night stays and block the three plus night people from being able to book when you know there's demand there.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And I'm, I'll be the first person to open up my calendar and say give me a one night or a two night stay as we get close in. You know, I'll take those all day once we get close in. But what you'll realize is if you take those longer stays further out, it puts you in, in the Driver's seat where now I only have like two days to fill between my bigger reservations.
Instead of being in a situation of now, you have like 20 different check in checkouts throughout the month. It makes it really hard and your cleaners are overwhelmed during high season.
During low season, take the one night stays. They're happy to clean every single day during low season, but you want to kind of stretch it out a little more so that they can have more units during the high season. Helps them be more successful.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: This is a very helpful chart. See, I would have seen this and not applied it this way. So I'm really glad you pointed this out.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's important to understand that like this is high season. If I go to low season, it's going to look totally different than this, you know, so this is, this is my low season. So you can now see that there's a much more normal distribution of kind of all the different lengths of stay.
So don't take this as like you always are able to book a long period of time. But during high season in a lot of our markets we can get those longer stays if we're priced appropriately. So one more quick tip for you while we're looking at this. If you are trying to get two or three times what you booked for last year, you are out of your mind. Those days are over. You know, shoot for like six months plus out. Shoot for like 20, 30, 40% higher than what you got last year. And then as you get into your normal booking window, be right at where you booked last year and you know, be happy if you're hitting the same numbers you did last year or maybe a little bit up. We're, we're just not in a market anymore where you can push your numbers two times higher than what you got last year.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: I think that's really sound advice because I think that, I think that we are, we have stabilized. So I think the big run up is over and I think the big tide going out is also over. I think we're through that.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: In my opinion. I'm no economist obviously, but I think that's really good advice. Like, I think we're, we're done riding the wave back out and we are a stabilized asset class officially and that feels good. A little more predictability in your investing, I think.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: I know, I, I love it too because we've been, we've been really guessing in revenue management for the past two or three years because there has been no stability. And I think now 25 going into 26 I feel pretty confident using 25 as a benchmark now for 26 and you know, shooting for 5% growth or something like that I think seems okay now instead of the past year. It was like, just try and hold steady where you were and you feel pretty good about yourself.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, awesome. Very wonderful show. Thank you for coming on. So now we're to the last three questions of the show that we ask every guest. First question, what advice would you give 20 year old Jake if you knew then would you know now?
[00:36:24] Speaker A: This is, this is so funny because I, I drink tea in the morning after, after I drink my coffee. Okay, yeah, this is gonna make sense. This is gonna make sense. So I drink e after I drink my coffee.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: What kind of tea?
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Good earth tea. Good earth tea. There we go. Okay, the hilarious, the hilarious thing is they have little like sayings on the back. You guys probably can't read that, so I'll read it to you. They have little sea sayings on the back and it says, do it now. The future is promised to no one. So if I could give my 20 year old self advice, it would be do it now because the future is promised to no one. And I think when I was 20 I was really worried about like setting myself up for the perfect future, but I was thinking so much about, oh, I got to meet the perfect person to spend my life with and oh, I can't screw up this investment. And the truth is as soon as I bought my first Property at like 23 or 24, I think it was like, I didn't do it perfect, but it was great and I started to learn something and in the long run it turned into like $30,000 of profit at the end of it. And I think just dive in. Whatever you're interested in, do it, get, get on it.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Great advice.
And what advice would you give? So we're coming up on the end of 2025 for reference. For listeners, what advice would you give a new investor in short term rental who's looking to get started today?
[00:38:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I did everything DIY when I started. I was the property manager, I was the construction manager, I was the head communicator, the social media guy, all the things. And what I realize now after almost 10 years in this is I wasn't very good especially at certain things like design and photography and things like that. I really should have hired someone else to do those things. And now I am hiring people to do all of those things and realize that, you know, time is money.
I, I think, you know, One of the big underrated things is like, hiring someone to set up your property, for example.
You know, you spend two months flying back and forth. I was just at a mastermind meeting with. With one of my buddies, Chris, and we were talking through, like, how much extra time and effort does it take for him to go set up the property, hire handyman, you know, get all the stuff set up versus hiring a service, you know, like. Like Kim Fitzpatrick or something like that. And she comes out, and in a week, you are up and running. So this reno that I'm doing on my property in Steamboat, I, you know, I hired Paige Hayes to do the design. I'm hiring Kim to come out and do the setup. I'm hiring, you know, Andrew to come out and do photograph, like, all of the things that I've heard all along that I've never done myself, and I'm like, God, it is so amazing to have someone actually do this the right way for me instead of me backpedaling and screwing up the whole time.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Yep, that's a good, good group of folks you got there. And, yeah, I think we all kind of have to DIY at first, and some of us are better at it than. I can't do design. Like, I.
I get shoved on panels at conferences because I am gender profiled to talk about design, and I'm like, y', all, I don't know. I don't. I hire somebody else to do this. So. Yeah, and spend so much money.
[00:40:02] Speaker A: Right. I think the, you know, the bigger advice is, like, if you don't know how to do something either, you know, find someone who will teach you how to do it or find someone that will. That will do it for you.
And, you know, this is all aspects of your business, and it doesn't have to be all at once. I agree with you. Like, when you first start out, you've got 50k in the bank and, you know, you're. You don't have the money necessarily to hire someone to do everything.
And I think there's a lot that you can learn by actually trying to do everything yourself in the beginning.
But just realize that once you get past that initial push, let's. Let's learn how to do this the right way.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: Totally agree. And last question. What's your favorite book that's impacted your mindset?
[00:40:44] Speaker A: Oh, man.
Two. Two. That really, like, come off the page for me.
I had a big shift from who, not how, again, same. Same exact thing we were just talking about where I was thinking I had to do everything myself. If I was going to get it done the right way.
I now have a team of 10 at Step by Step BNB, our revenue management company. And it is so freeing and amazing to know that I can. Like, my mom had surgery on Thursday last week, and I was just like, hey, guys, like, I can't be around for a few days. I need you guys to take care of things. And amazing when you put your trust into people and you trust their abilities and you allow them to do the great things that they can do.
The second one for me is profit first.
Profit first, not so much the actual implementation. I know a lot of people debate this about, oh, I don't really want to have five accounts for every single property and, you know, all that. I don't care about the actual implementation of it, but just the mindset of pay yourself something when you start a business.
I'd started like five businesses, paid myself nothing for the first number of years of each of those businesses.
And I can only imagine that it would have been so much more successful if I was getting something out of the business as opposed to just scraping by trying to, you know, work another job or whatever I was trying to do at the time.
And so I love the mindset of just like, pay yourself something so that you are rewarded for all the hard work that you've done.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: Great recommendations.
And last, Jake, where can our followers or followers, listeners, subscribers, whatever. Too much social media. Where can everybody find you, follow you, all that fun stuff?
[00:42:35] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Easiest way to get in touch with me or my team. If you need help with revenue management or you want coaching on revenue management is our website, stepbystepbnb.com.
we do have a really cool group Facebook page where we talk about revenue management. There's no fee to be part of it. It's just a free page.
It's @PriceYourSTR.
So, you know, just type in Price your STR on Facebook and that will get you there. We do have social media pages at stepbystepbnb on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, so check us out on those.
I love doing videos. I love coaching. If you want me to come speak to your group, be happy to do that. Just reach out to me. Probably. Facebook is the easiest way to get in touch.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on your wealth of knowledge today. And guys, we'll see you next week.
