Francis is a former car journalist who realized after five years in the industry that he wasn’t truly passionate about it. He had the opportunity to attend Burning Man in 2017, where he made the decision to make a change in his career. Despite not knowing what exactly he wanted to pursue, he took the leap and began renting out his apartment on Airbnb. From there, he built his business and found a newfound love for entrepreneurship. Today, Francis is proud of his decision to follow his heart and is excited to continue growing his business.
Show Notes:
02:09 – “We were making our rent times 3!” – Host shares his up-and-coming story about having a successful Airbnb side hustle!
04:36 – Introducing our guest – He’s an Airbnb expert!
06:06 – Guest shares his past and how his path led him to enter the Airbnb game!
13:15 – “What if it doesn’t rent?” – Host shares his secret of overcoming this fear!
14:50 – “Within 6 months I had 5 apartments” – Listen to how our guest scaled up his Airbnb business and learn!
17:15 – “Why don’t landlords do it themselves?” – Find out why this benefits the landlord!
20:46 – “I grew to 6 properties in my portfolio until the war started in Kyiv!” – Host shares his Airbnb adventures in ‘Kyiv Ukraine’ before the war started!
24:12 – “It became a full time job” – Avoid these things, so you don’t get stuck like a regular job!
25:13 – You need someone to clean your apartments! – Guest shares his secret and mistakes on cleaning Airbnb apartments!
28:25 – “I catered to bachelor party crowds!” – Host shares his specialty niche in the Airbnb business world!
30:06 – What it takes to manage a cleaning service – Is it worth it?? Find out!
33:00 – The importance of cleaning your apartments – Learn why YOU need to clean up!
34:31 – FAKE reviews! – Host and guest share their secrets on how to get good fake reviews!
38:03 – Go off the beaten path! – Bend the rules by going outside your hometown where certain rules don’t apply!
39:08 – Study the law and find the loopholes! – We dissect the law and how to utilize its power for your business!
46:53 – You can do Airbnb in only 2 ways! – Guest shares his secret loopholes!
53:28 – It’s easy, you don’t have to be a genius! – You just have to be COMPETENT!
55:55 – This lawyer couldn’t believe he found that loophole! – The importance of studying the law and regulations!
57:27 – “It’s just like any other game!” – We compare how learning about Airbnb is the same as any other endeavor you pursue, like: gaming, girls etc.
01:01:44 – “Figure out who your client is!” – Guest teaches an important lesson!
01:04:09 – Interior examples of his Airbnb apartments – Guest teaches you an optional powerful tool: INTERIOR DESIGN!
01:09:33 – Host shares his successful “HORROR” Airbnb in ‘Kyiv Ukraine’ – Learn why people are attracted to this design!
01:16:12 – Star Wars themed Airbnb – Why? Find out how to stand out from the competition!
01:19:03 – Conclusion – Why everyone should at least try this side hustle!
01:22:04 – We answer important viewers questions!
Links:
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Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to helping you build your inner confidence and achieve success!
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Transcript
Robbie Kramer [00:00:00]:
We were making our rent plus two or three X that in the first couple months.
Francis [00:00:04]:
I didn’t know nothing about airbnb.
Robbie Kramer [00:00:06]:
It might not rent it’s like, even if you suck and only rent it out like ten nights a month, you’re still probably gonna cover your costs. Exactly. Well, why don’t the landlords just do it themselves? Because landlords typically have don’t have time. They don’t want it to do that themselves.
Francis [00:00:17]:
Like, I’m subletting them. I’m renting my apartments from the owner and then I’m subletting them to students. And then whenever they have to go back home, I’m subletting the apartments under their name.
Robbie Kramer [00:00:24]:
Hotels pay a lot of money to the government to make sure they’re the only game in town. Figure out the loopholes, because every law has a loophole.
Francis [00:00:31]:
Read the law and it might actually give you a guideline to how to start your business.
Robbie Kramer [00:00:35]:
Oh, my God. It’s like forgetting a condom.
Francis [00:00:38]:
You don’t have to pay the rent anymore.
Robbie Kramer [00:00:41]:
Welcome to the Inner Confidence podcast, where we bring you men’s dating and lifestyle advice that doesn’t suck. I’m your host, Robbie Kramer, a former collegiate golfer turned poker pro turned finance guy who became obsessed with learning about male female attraction and dynamics and passionate about teaching men how to improve and optimize their love life. Tune in each week and we’ll bring you the latest and greatest strategies on how to get more dates, how to build a thriving social circle that brings the best men and women into your life, how to become a better networker, and how to design a lifestyle that makes all your buddies jealous. If you’re new to the show, I recommend you download my First Date Protocol. It’s the best piece of content I have. It’ll help you optimize your first date and subsequent dates. And I like to connect with my listeners personally, so if you want to grab a copy of that, please send me a direct message on Instagram. I’m at Robbie Kramer. Now, let’s dive into this week’s content. SUP, guys. Welcome back to the show. We are changing our usually scheduled programming of dating and relationships and men’s lifestyle to talk about a slightly different topic which is still in the men’s lifestyle sphere, which is creating side income, passive income, a side hustle, or even quitting your job and doing something that you enjoy doing more getting out of the rat race, the grind, the nine to five. And I’ll tell my quick story about doing that and then I’ll introduce our guest. So back in 2013, I was traveling in Europe and I stayed at an Airbnb. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Airbnb, I just saw it as an easy place to book an apartment, had a cool experience, came back to New York, and me and my buddies decided to list our place in New York City on Airbnb. And very quickly, we realized we were making our rent plus two or three X that in the first couple of months. And those are insane like, drug dealer type of returns. We didn’t own the place, but we got permission from our landlord to continue doing that. And so essentially we became short term rental arbitrage Errs so we’d lease places, convince the landlord to let us sublet them on different home sharing sites and then make the difference. And we grew our little portfolio of properties very quickly that way. Ended up making a lot more money than any of us could ever expected and continued doing that in different markets. La. New York, Miami. I was even doing it in Kiev up until just recently before the war broke out. And this side income generated from that actually became enough to support my total income needs. Obviously I continued doing what I’m usually doing dating, coaching and lifestyle, because that’s my passion. But I found it to be an amazing business side hustle way of life. Met so many awesome people through hosting on Airbnb. Actually, some of the guys from our group literally came as guests who stayed in some of my apartments and then found out I was also a dating coach and became members of the group. So I’m always talking about the benefits and the beauty of using real estate to grow your net worth. Just because I love real estate as an investment, because it’s tangible, it’s there, it’s very difficult for someone to steal it. And typically we’ve seen great increases in value over the years and there’s so much you can do with a piece of property aside from just renting it out on a short term vacation rental site. You could host parties there, you can have friends stay over. It’s a space that can be used for many different things. But not to get too into the weeds today we’ve got a very special guest, and that’s Francis. And Francis has also been in the Airbnb game for a really long time. We met back at Burning Man in 2017. I actually had no idea he was in the Airbnb game. I was in the Airbnb game too, but it’s Burning Man. So you don’t talk about anything from the default world, as they say, right? You just party and have fun and connect, which is the best way to meet people. And then we remain friends and a few years later circled back and realized that we were both in these same spheres. And he’s much more involved in the Airbnb game and short term rental game than I am. I’m more of a passive investor at this point, so I was really curious to have him. Come on, we can pick his brain. And he’s an expert when it comes to some creative ideas of using the legislation that’s coming out, because that’s a big barrier to a lot of people that want to get into short term vacation rentals. They’re like, well, what about the laws and what about the regulations? What about my city? What about this? He’s also an expert when it comes to positioning his properties for the most attention and demand on some of these platforms. So, Francis, thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom.
Francis [00:05:51]:
It’s a pleasure. And, yeah, it’s funny because when we met in 2017, I was only starting my business. It was the start of my business in 2017, actually. When we met at Burning Man, I didn’t even know that’s what I was going to do for a living. Really? Yeah. It was a change of career for me. Prior to that, I was a journalist. I was a car journalist. I was doing test drives and car reviews for a newspaper in Montreal called Jeanaldo Moriar, which is literally the Journal of Montreal. And yeah, I was a car journalist. And it was a pretty cool job. I liked it. And then whenever I’m talking about it, all guys are like, Dude, are you serious? I was going to car lunches in Detroit. I went to the Ford Raptor lunch. I went to one of the Viper lunch lunch. I was test driving cars with Jeep, with BMW, with all these companies, but I did that for about five years. I even had radio shows, TV shows, but I didn’t find myself I didn’t recognize myself in my job. I didn’t like it. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I wasn’t passionate about it. And in 2017 at Burningman, actually decided, you know what? I need a change. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. And when I got back home, it was in August, I already had one apartment on Airbnb, and I decided to follow through and then to build my business from there. Amazing.
Robbie Kramer [00:07:27]:
How did you get that first apartment on Airbnb? Like, you had your apartment and you just decided to list it when you heard about it.
Francis [00:07:33]:
So from the beginning, in 2015 or 2016? 2016, I decided to travel. I didn’t know nothing about airbnb at that point. I barely traveled. I was about to be 35, and it was missing in my life. I just had a huge breakup, decided to travel, and then to change hair and just basically see the world. So I started traveling and I went to for three months, I went to Hawaii, Australia, Singapore, Myanmar, Thailand, Bali. So I did all these countries, and I discovered airbnb while I was traveling, and I knew nothing about it. And then at that time, I was like, wow, you know what? This is cool. Maybe I could use one of my rooms in my apartment. Because at that time, I had a roommate and I was like, and we had an extra room, so why not use it on Airbnb and rent the extra room? So that’s how I started it. And I was the one who was taking care of everything, and I was taking care of the guests. I was putting a lot of energy into it. My other roommate was a bit antisocial, so they didn’t really want to mingle with the guests. But I really liked it. I was talking to the guests. It was really nice. So I started enjoying doing it, and I decided that I was going to rent another apartment by myself that I was going to live in and then rent a room. So I started looking through Montreal, where I could rent an apartment. And I was especially looking downtown because I knew it was going to be a good spot to rent to tourists. Right. Whenever you’re traveling somewhere, you want to be close to all the attractions. You want to be close to all the landmarks. So downtown usually is where you’re going to look for an apartment. So I didn’t find anything at that point, but I found an apartment, which I thought would be great to do airbnb with, but it was too small. It only had one bedroom. So for me, even at that time, I didn’t even think about renting the apartment and solely do airbnb with it. So I talked with the owners, and they didn’t want to do airbnb themselves because they had four kids or they had three kids and they had one on the way, and they already had, like, an accounting business. I was like, okay, well, too bad for you guys. And then I left and finally found an apartment almost next to the one where I was living with my roommate with actually moved by on foot. I didn’t even have to use a car. I was that close to my new apartment.
Robbie Kramer [00:10:11]:
You look pretty strong, like you can carry some furniture yourself.
Francis [00:10:14]:
Oh, yeah, baby. Look at the guns. So I started renting an extra room in my apartment. And then I thought about it. I was like, wow. I’m wondering if that apartment is still available. Because here in Montreal and actually in the province of Quebec, we have this weird thing where everybody moves on. The 1 July leases are one year long, and 90% of them are from July to July, the year afterwards. So they’re good for one year. And when you want to move out, usually people move out on the 1 July. It’s Canada Day. It’s Canada Day, and everybody’s on vacations. Everybody has that day to it’s a Labor Day, basically not a Labor Day. How do you call it in English? Yeah, Labor Day. Yeah. Anyway, it’s a national day, and everybody is off. So everybody’s moving out on that on the 1 July. So it was a bit afterwards and I was kind of wondering, maybe that apartment is still available. And I called the owners, and lucky enough, they didn’t rent the apartment. They were still looking for someone to rent it. And it was after the 1 July, so they were kind of, like desperate, right? Yeah, they were desperate. They really wanted to rent it. So I was able to negotiate the rest of the month of July for free and the month of August for free. They allowed me to do airbnb, and there was already a little bit of furniture inside the apartment. It wasn’t well decorated, but everything that was needed was mostly there. So I started doing airbnb mid July. And since I didn’t have a rent to pay, I was really cautious. I was kind of nervous. This is going to work. And then all the financial aspect to it, the responsibilities that I had, and then if I won’t be able to to rent it, then I’ll have to pay, you know, for the rent out of my pocket. I was kind of nervous at first because I was I was I wasn’t really sure it was gonna work, but within two weeks, it was just crazy. The apartment was super well located. I kept renting it. It was always fully booked. So I fully booked the month of August and September. And then when I came back from Burning Man, I started talking about it was on. Maybe I can have another one. Maybe I could have an extra apartment. And then I found another one in the month of October. Same thing. I was super stressed. I was like, okay, well, it’s October. It’s the end of the season in Montreal. Am I going to be able to rent it? Is it going to work? And then surely enough, I was able to book October and November.
Robbie Kramer [00:13:02]:
It’s funny because the thing I see the most and I’ve coached probably close to 75 people through the process of starting a side hustle on airbnb. I have a course about it, right? I’ve gotten all my friends and family in it. And the number one thing is everyone’s so worried that like, oh, what if it doesn’t rent? And I’m like, what other fucking business can you have? A startup cost of rent, plus furniture. Sometimes not even furniture because it comes furnished and like, a security deposit. And make your startup cost back in, like, two or three months, sometimes even less. Show me another fucking business where you can even come close to that and it doesn’t exist unless you’re like, I don’t know. I’m sure it does exist, but show me something that’s not a huge learning curve. It’s not really difficult, right? And people are still so risk averse and scared, like, oh, it might not rent. It’s like, well, even if you suck and only rent it out, like, ten nights a month, you’re still probably going to cover your costs.
Francis [00:14:01]:
Exactly.
Robbie Kramer [00:14:02]:
And obviously, as you get better at it and you learn how to use a platform a bit better, you can make your money back so quickly and you don’t even own the apartment, right? It’s like if something bad happens to it, like, you have renters insurance, you have airbnb insurance, the owner owns it. We had a place burned down in New York City. Literally burned down because the guest left the oven on. Didn’t cost us a dime because airbnb covered the whole thing. But that’s just funny that you bring up. It’s like everyone’s so kind of scared at that at first. But that’s part of the risk. And that’s why it’s so difficult for people to become entrepreneurs, because they don’t want to take that risk. But that’s where the returns are.
Francis [00:14:45]:
Exactly.
Robbie Kramer [00:14:47]:
But anyways, not to interject. So you got that place and then you scaled to like 20 places.
Francis [00:14:54]:
Yeah, within the end of 2017. So I started my business without knowing it on the 1 July, let’s say, around that time. So within five or six months. Six months, actually, I had, at that time five apartments and within the other six months so within a year, I had 25 apartments afterwards.
Robbie Kramer [00:15:24]:
Were you injecting personal capital or were you just taking the profits from what, your current places?
Francis [00:15:30]:
So what I was doing, I was reinjecting some of my money, but I got really lucky because I found owners who were willing to invest money in their home buildings and in their own apartments to renovate them. At that time, it wasn’t as it is right now. Right now it’s super hard to find an apartment in Montreal. There’s a cris, all the rents are going up. It’s really crazy. But at that time, it wasn’t the case. And a lot of owners were looking to rent their apartments because they were empty. And I was able to convince them to invest some money inside of their apartments. I was also managing apartments for owners who already did the entire set up but didn’t have time to manage the bookings and everything. So I had 25 apartments total. And I wasn’t rejecting my money, but I was putting it aside at that time. I was putting it aside.
Robbie Kramer [00:16:32]:
You were partnering with landlords and managing their properties versus renting and subletting or.
Francis [00:16:38]:
It was exactly I was doing a mix. I would say that out of my 25 apartments, I had 21, if I remember correctly. Like 20 or 21. That were my responsibility. That was renting and then subletting. And then I had about like three or four that I was managing. For owners.
Robbie Kramer [00:17:01]:
There’S no money out of pocket and there’s literally almost zero risk besides wasting your time with that second strategy.
Francis [00:17:09]:
Right.
Robbie Kramer [00:17:09]:
So even guys with zero money, you can partner with landlords. And guys always ask, well, why don’t the landlords just do it themselves? Because landlords typically don’t have time. They don’t want to do that themselves. They’re real estate investors. Like, they get a place, they want that place to give them 10% returns, which they’re very happy with. Even 5% returns just beating inflation they’re elated with, and they don’t want to fucking think about it. People are going the owners just going to airbnb. No, they’re not.
Francis [00:17:40]:
And a lot of the owners are baby boomers or people that have no clue how to use airbnb. I had two associates. They had multiple buildings all over Montreal, but they had no clue about airbnb. They had no clue about how to decorate or design the interior of their apartments. They had no zero clue about anything. But they were willing to inject some money in their apartments. And I also find a business model on how to operate with the owners so that I was showing them that I was willing to take some risk and that I was willing to get more money. But as long as the performances were to a certain level, I’m not going to give the entire recipe. But basically, I found, like, a perfect way to approach the owners. And I really found, like, it is still a perfect business model because the owners see that you’re willing to take some risk and anyway, maybe we’ll talk about it some more. Some of the time I don’t want to give the entire recipe. Basically, it was a mixture of me renting out apartments and me managing apartments for owners. That’s basically what I did. And then at one point, I had about 30 apartments on airbnb, and it was a lot to manage.
Robbie Kramer [00:19:17]:
When I created the airbnb course, because I had so many guys in the group would basically be like, I want to do this. Give me advice. And I was like, all right, I’m sick of giving the same advice over and over and over. So I created a course. This was in 2019, and I wanted to kind of put my money where my mouth is. And I’m like, all right, guys, you’re trying to get your first property. I will go through the process with you. I just moved to Kiev and I’m like, I’m going to do exactly what I’m coaching you guys to do. So I found a property there. I convinced the landlord to let me airbnb it. I probably had to view about eight different properties before I found one. That was, like, eight properties that were the sort of property I was looking for. And then I had to have about eight conversations with landlords. I had to get about seven no’s before this guy said yes, right? Just like approaching women, right? It’s like, most of them are going to be a no, but when you get that one, it makes it all worth it. It was so interesting. Once I got that place up and running, i, without even trying, grew to, like, seven other units because guys would come into town and they would, like, stay at my Airbnb. And then they’d come back and they’d be like, I just invested in a place in Kiev. Can you manage it for me? Or people would be like, oh, I know this other guy who’s looking to lease his property. Can’t find tenants. Do you want to take the lease and use it as airbnb. So it’s like once you get going and once you start doing it, those opportunities I found just kind of find you. Obviously, I was still looking for places, so I grew my portfolio to about 16 properties from 2019 until the war started, unfortunately. And that just fucking wiped out the whole thing. Except for one place that I actually owned, the one place that I own. I still have the tennis in there. Thank God they never left. But all the others were rent sublet or I made a deal with the landlord to basically rent it out. It sounds like you were doing a pretty similar model, right?
Francis [00:21:26]:
Yeah, exactly.
Robbie Kramer [00:21:27]:
Okay, so anything else you want to talk about in regards to that? There’s so many different ways you can pitch a landlord on the reasons why it’s their benefit to doing this, which I’m not going to get into, but there’s basically what I’m saying. I’m sure you did it to something different than I did. Right? I know other people who did something different. Different pitch, different this, different that. But it all works, right? You’re just trying to find a partner which is either a landlord or even your own business partner. You’re just trying to find someone that’ll say yes to your pitch and you’re going to get some nose, you’re going to get some rejection. But I find for guys who are in the interconfidence community and they’re already doing that with women, this is way easier.
Francis [00:22:15]:
You’re going to get a lot of no’s. Definitely. And you know what? I think you’re going to get way more no’s from honors than girls. Definitely. I remember doing calls because when I started my business, every Mondays and every Thursdays I would go, we have a platform here. It’s called kiji GG. It’s kind of the equivalent of Craigslist, but way more elaborated. And it’s really useful for rentals. Basically, whenever you have something to rent, you go on Kiji. Usually when I rent apartments, because now I do a lot of monthly rentals, I usually use that platform. So I was calling owners and letting them know, hey, I’m seeing that you have like an empty apartment. We’re in the month of September. It’s harder to find a tenant. I would be ready to rent it. And then I was giving them my pitch and giving them, like you said, the advantages of doing businesses with me. Yeah, I had a lot of no’s, but I had this woman who said yes, and she had a 14 apartment building. Then she gave to me entirely. So that’s when I went from five to 20 in just a heartbeat. And then because I had that building right in front, they were building a brand new condo complex. And I went across the street and spoke with the owners who were there, and those became my business partners. Those are the three apartments that I had. So I had 17 apartments in a radius of 50 meters. So that made it way easier to manage.
Robbie Kramer [00:23:57]:
Amazing. One mistake I made with my business partners was basically spreading from different cities to different cities, and we needed a different city manager and different time zones. And managing the whole thing became a huge headache, which was really kind of like the next step for me, which was once I grew, like when I was doing it in Kiev, once I grew to like three or four Properties. It became a full time job and not a job I wanted, because a lot of those problems were like we got a clogged toilet or someone left their phone charger. Can you get it back to us? Like, annoying things, we lost the key. Right. So I’m curious, how did you scale and how did you sort of automate and remove yourself as much as possible from those annoying parts of the business?
Francis [00:24:41]:
Wow. So that was my mistake. When it became a job, I took the job, and it took me a while before dedicating not dedicating, but delegating. It took me a while before delegating some of the work. And that’s where, basically my biggest mistake, I was able to scale. Because when I started, like you said, I had four or five apartments and it became a full time job, and especially for the cleanings, because at first I was doing the cleanings myself. Most of the time I didn’t have a choice. Right. That’s the thing that people don’t realize, is that, okay, well, you’renting airbnb. You’re like, all right, I’m happy I have a booking, but now you need someone to clean the apartment, but who’s going to do it? And if you’re doing business with a cleaning agency, usually they cost a lot of money and they’re going to do a really shitty job. From my experience, that’s what usually happens. So then you want to hire a maid? Well, she’s going to be available on Tuesdays and maybe on Fridays, because the rest of the week she has her own clients. So you’re kind of like, well, okay, well, this week I have a booking. I have a checkout on Monday and I have a checkout on Thursday, so the girl can be there. So it’s really hard. So I started doing the cleanings myself. And when you have five apartments, well, it can happen one day that you have five checkouts.
Robbie Kramer [00:26:17]:
Right. Five cleanings.
Francis [00:26:19]:
Five cleanings. Like, dude, I mean, I was doing cleanings all the time, and then I had to block dates so that I didn’t have five checkouts on the same day. But by doing that, I was now losing money. Now I’m losing money. So I was thinking about it, I was like, okay, so how can I have a full time maid working with me? How could I do that? So when I was thinking about it, I was evaluating that I would need about ten to twelve apartments of my own to be able to hire someone full time during the weekdays and then maybe hire someone part time during the weekends. At that time, I had five apartments. I didn’t meet that woman again yet for the 20 apartments. I was thinking about how I could do it, and then I realized, well, how about I create my own cleaning agency and I offer my services to other people who have airbnbs and need their apartment cleaned? Because I’m probably not the only one who has that problem and surely enough, put my hat on. Kijiji, the same website was talking about earlier, and then, bang. Within a day, I had four clients and I had 17 apartments to clean with, mine included.
Robbie Kramer [00:27:35]:
Now you have a new business. Exactly.
Francis [00:27:39]:
And let me tell you, the cleaning business was a pain in the ass. But it was a necessity for me to be able to grow my business and to free myself to be able to remove myself from the business. I was still doing cleanings every now and then, and it was hard because some days you forget because I wasn’t using automated websites or automated apps to basically link my Airbnb to my cleaning schedule. So every now and then, I was forgetting.
Robbie Kramer [00:28:17]:
Forgetting cleaning. You lose the booking a lot of the time. People show up to a dirty place and they fucking leave. That’s happened to me a few times on big bookings because my specialty was always getting large places like four, five, six bedrooms. That way I wasn’t competing against hotels as much. Right. Because it’s big parties, groups want to stay together. I really catered, especially in Kiev, to the bachelor party crowd, right. Westerners Europeans and Americans who were coming to party. And then, of course, I had all my infrastructure in place, being in the party world there, where I could get deals with clubs and send them and get a kick back on their bottle service and whatnot. But when you lose a booking because of cleaning, it’s like, oh, my God, it’s like forgetting a condom.
Francis [00:29:08]:
Pretty much. Except you didn’t come, right? Yeah, exactly, man. You didn’t come at all. Exactly, man. That’s exactly it. Fuck. Damn. Yeah.
Robbie Kramer [00:29:21]:
I luckily never did. I think once or twice I had to do a cleaning myself because the maid flaked or something like that. I had a lot of my girlfriends do cleanings last minute, and that was always fun. And I would always make sure to take photos of them, like bending over, cleaning the floors to use as dirt or blackmail material later. But so from that cleaning sort of business that you started, were you ever tempted to just grow and scale that? Because I know another guy in New York City who did that same thing. He was in the airbnb business, and then he was like, well, he did the same thing that you did, basically started cleaning business to service his own places and then. Realized he was making way more without all the hassles, just having this very niche market cleaning business for Airbnb. Dudes, like Gus.
Francis [00:30:08]:
Yeah, I thought about it. I’m still thinking about it nowadays. But dude, it’s a lot of management.
Robbie Kramer [00:30:17]:
You’re managing dumb asses, too, which is tough.
Francis [00:30:21]:
Yeah. I was able to find a really good source of employees, and that was in universities. If there’s an advice I can give to people, if you guys want to do Airbnb, if you want to do short term rental, first of all, I have to understand that you will need a team and you need to invest on that team. So what I was doing is that I went on the website of different universities and I was offering a cleaning job, and I was paying $22 an hour. And to give you an idea, at that time, I think that the minimum wage was like, $10 an hour. And usually girls with experience cleaning apartments would charge $20 per hour. So I was already offering $22 per hour. I was ready to pay extra money, so I made it appealing to the students, I think. I also thought that if I’m hiring, like, an older woman or if I’m hiring someone who doesn’t have a choice and it’s their work for the rest of their life, nine out of ten people are going to do shitty job because they feel obligated to do it. They don’t enjoy doing their job at all. I was lucky enough to find this woman who was also working with me. She was older and she was great, and she really enjoying doing her job. And I was paying her extra. I was paying her $24 per hour. So the reason why is they’re making more money. They’re not looking to go elsewhere, and also if they’re making more money and every now and then I was giving them bonuses. They were doing their job perfectly. And whenever I was asking them or telling them, oh, you forgot to do this the last time, can you make sure that the next time you’re going to do it? They were more than happy to do it because they were well paid and they knew that if you were to go anywhere else, they weren’t going to get as much money. And also, I was a cool boss in the sense that I was telling my students, like, listen, I was your age, I studied just like you at the same university. And if you need to party, if you need to go out with your friends on a Saturday or on a Sunday, and if I’m booking you on that day and you know it in advance, just let me know. And if I’m able, I’ll cover for you or I’ll ask someone else to cover for you. That’s not a problem. And just by being a little bit more free on the schedule, a little bit more strict on the schedule, they appreciated it. And whenever I needed them to come in, they were willing to do it because they knew that it was going both ways. So the reason I’m telling you all of this is that it’s the most important thing on my side, I think, is the cleaningness of the apartment. If your apartments are shitty, they’re not well cleaned and it’s dirty, people are going to give you bad reviews. Let me tell you, if you have a bad review because the apartment is not that well located, yeah, it’s going to affect you. If it’s not that well decorated, who cares if you have beds? It’s comfy enough. It doesn’t matter. But if you have reviews that say that it’s dirty, it’s disgusting, people won’t want to go no matter the price. No matter the price. Just think about it. Would you go to a restaurant where the review says that it’s disgusting, the place is messy and everything, and it’s just like, it’s yuck, and you read the same thing about a hotel or you read the same thing about whatever, you won’t want to go. So why would your clients want to go, come to your place if it’s disgusting, if it’s dirty? So it was my philosophy to pay extra just to get rid of all the assholes of, like, it hasn’t been cleaned properly, or my maid didn’t come in, or she was bailing out last moment. I didn’t have that at first. I did, but I slowly understand the.
Robbie Kramer [00:34:20]:
Power of not having bad cleaning reviews.
Francis [00:34:24]:
Exactly.
Robbie Kramer [00:34:25]:
Not having bad reviews in general. One quick pro tip that I found to be super valuable is whenever I get a new apartment up and running, the first thing you need is reviews. Right?
Francis [00:34:38]:
I know where you’re going.
Robbie Kramer [00:34:40]:
Fake reviews, right?
Francis [00:34:41]:
So.
Robbie Kramer [00:34:41]:
Airbnb polices. This if you’ve ever shared a computer of your friend and they can link your IP address, this won’t work. But let’s say I’d call Sid, who’s on the call, we’ve never shared an IP address, and I’d be like, hey, here’s the link to my place. I’m going to lower the price to, like, $30 for one night, book it, and I’ll just send you back the money minus the 12% or whatever the Airbnb is going to take. I’m going to get a perfect review, and you’re going to get a perfect review on your traveler profile. So before a place even would hit the market, I would already have, like, three perfect reviews, five star. And then you just got to keep it running.
Francis [00:35:22]:
That’s a little trick of the trade.
Robbie Kramer [00:35:24]:
Yeah, nice.
Francis [00:35:26]:
You know what, actually what I did, I created fake Airbnb accounts, and I’m doing the exact same thing, basically going through my friends. I just have, like, fake accounts, though.
Robbie Kramer [00:35:36]:
Because I tried doing that, but linking them all with IDs and stuff like that. I had trouble creating a lot of fake ones. I mean, this was a while ago.
Francis [00:35:46]:
Standards, no problem at all. But recently though, I received a message from Airbnb and they removed these reviews from my booking. Yeah, but that’s funny though, because these reviews, I think that I did them in 2017, 2018, something like that, or even 2019, and it was okay up until maybe like a few months ago. So I guess that they’re maybe using a new booth or they’re using a new program on their websites and they’re able to see where the reviews are.
Robbie Kramer [00:36:21]:
Fake catch bad actors like us.
Francis [00:36:25]:
But the thing is, if it takes that long for them to identify a fake review, I would still just do it because it’s totally worth it.
Robbie Kramer [00:36:34]:
It’s getting those first few bookings and getting your calendar full and having those roll in, and then you get placed higher in the Airbnb ranks and the searches and you’re off to the races. I wanted to shift gears and talk about both over the course of your business and mine. There’s been tons of different rules and regulations and legislation. Airbnb went from nobody knowing about it to it being a household name, right. I remember the first city to start anti Airbnb legislation was Santa Monica, where I had places and really simple why this happens, because guess what? Hotels pay a lot of money to the government to make sure they’re the only game in town. So when Airbnb came out, the hotel lobby was pissed and they spent a gazillion dollars on trying to get Airbnb shut down because obviously, if the market is flooded with cheap options, who’s going to stay in hotels, right? Just like when Uber came out, all the cabbies who had spent $100,000 for their medallion in New York City, now those medallions became almost worthless and they were fucking pissed. Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry horribly, but now you’ve seen and basically once it took Santa Monica a while to figure out all the legislation, but once other cities could just say, okay, we’re just going to do what Santa Monica did, they copied it. And I found that most legislation is pretty similar. And I’m curious to hear your take because I think you’re more of an expert on me. That’s also one of the benefits of doing this somewhere off the beaten path. Like Ukraine, like when I was living in Ukraine, I’m like, there’s no laws here. It’s all the fucking wild, wild west. I can do whatever the hell I want. Most of my places in Kiev were actually like retail office space. I rented a place on the top floor of a building that was all attorneys and other businesses. There’s like an art gallery, a big law firm, a restaurant on the bottom. And I rented the office space and therefore I could have guests and let them party as hard as they wanted because there’s no one there, right? Like they could go till five, six in the morning smashing music because people weren’t showing up to work till like eight or nine. So that was like a humongous unlock. Obviously in the US, there’s zoning laws around, like residential versus commercial space. Probably the same in Canada. But what I found was that you either these legislation, usually they got rid of all the riffraff, like the people who were just like half assing doing airbnb. And that actually made it easier for someone who’s serious about it, who is willing to take the time and figure out the loopholes. Because every law has a loophole. There’s a way around it. You can make even more money if you’re not an idiot and you do that extra research. So I own some places in San Diego. We had to get permits for those, and I had to get everyone in my family to apply for a permit. But we got the permits, right? And then different cities. I had to do a mixture of short term versus long term. Sometimes fiddling with people, not fiddling with people, fiddling with the requirements. Basically. I’d have Airbnb guests come in, and because there is a requirement that it needed to be a 30 day lease, they would show up and be like, hey, by the way, can you just do me a favor? Sign this lease. Your booking is for seven days, but the lease is for 30. So if you wanted to screw me over, you could. Because you have this lease, obviously, I know you’re not going to stay for all 30 days. You’re just going to go home, right? You’ve got your flights back, but.
Francis [00:40:07]:
That.
Robbie Kramer [00:40:07]:
Will cover my liability in case the city comes after me and says, you did short term. I’m like, no, here’s my lease, 30 days.
Francis [00:40:14]:
Exactly.
Robbie Kramer [00:40:16]:
So what was your experience with that? And then I’d love to kind of dive in deeper on any advice you have for people who are unsure about the legislation, how to figure it out, how to operate based on that.
Francis [00:40:32]:
Well, I’ll start with saying that you should always read the legislations, no matter where you are, no matter if you’re in a big city, a small one, because you can take that to your advantage and also will make your life way easier. Because if you’re doing something that you’re not supposed to do, you’ll never be able to leave freely on vacation. You’re always going to be wondering exactly what happens, what’s going to happen if the whole nerd finds out that I’m doing airbnb, kicking me out, honestly, I’ve done it.
Robbie Kramer [00:41:12]:
It’s not worth it.
Francis [00:41:14]:
That’s a lot of stress. You’re already going to have a lot of stress managing your properties and then managing your employees, and then it’s always going to be a lot, and you don’t want to have that extra stress. And let me tell you, when you’re finally going to be able to leave on vacation, you don’t want to have that stress hanging over your head.
Robbie Kramer [00:41:33]:
Don’t want to get that call from the landlord saying, I see you’ve been breaking the lease and illegally subletting the unit. Here’s an eviction notice.
Francis [00:41:40]:
Yeah, exactly. Let me tell you, it’s definitely going to happen when you’re on the beach and having that first drink and you’re.
Robbie Kramer [00:41:46]:
Going to be like Murphy’s Law.
Francis [00:41:50]:
Yeah, definitely, man. Honestly, just do things in illegal way and read the legislation and read it multiple times. Because on my side, what happened is exactly what you said. The hotel lobby in the province of Quebec, I’m here in Montreal, and they were pissed. Like you said, there’s like, we’re losing money. And then real people, because in Montreal, it’s one of the place in the world where you have the most apartments on Airbnb per capita. So it’s crazier than New York, actually. Obviously there are more apartments in New York, but per capita, it’s here in Montreal where we have the most wow. So they wanted to fight that phenomenon and they basically passed a new bill, and it was in 2019 that they were working on it and it was supposed to be applied in May 2020. Obviously COVID happened and me seeing that this was happening and that there was going to be a change in the legislation. At that time, I still had my 25 apartments or 28 or whatever. So I decided to convert all my apartments in January 2020 to monthly rentals until I could find a solution for the new law that was going to be passed. And then COVID happened. So it was the perfect timing for really perfect timing for me. So I didn’t lose any money and I was just renting my apartments on a monthly basis.
Robbie Kramer [00:43:34]:
And you were still using Airbnb as a platform to find those long term tenants?
Francis [00:43:39]:
No, I was using TGG, like the platform. I told you that’s what I was using.
Robbie Kramer [00:43:44]:
Like Craigslist in a lot of America.
Francis [00:43:46]:
Exactly. It’s exactly like Craigslist or Marketplace, actually.
Robbie Kramer [00:43:51]:
You can even use Facebook, there’s so many different VRBO. Of course. FlipKey, right?
Francis [00:43:58]:
Yeah, there’s a bunch. There’s a bunch you can use. So I was using that website to rent my apartments. And also, all my apartments are all close to a huge university here, actually, two huge universities here in Montreal, McGill and Ukam. So I was aiming towards students and I was able to get students, and then I was renting on a monthly basis. Obviously, COVID happened, so it was great. It was the worst time to do Airbnb, especially in 2020. I only started redoing Airbnb, it was in 2021, I think, something like that. And I did it with like, a.
Robbie Kramer [00:44:38]:
Few apartments because COVID fucked me in Ukraine as well. Luckily, I was able to get out of most of my leases because of force majeure. Most leases have a force majeure clause, which is like, if an act of God happens, you are no longer on the hook for that lease. So all the places that I personally was on the hook. I got out of I kept two and I filled one with girls. So that was fun. I made a deal with the landlord. Listen, market rent now has gone from, like, 2200 a month for a four bedroom. Let me just give you, like 400 a month because you’re not going to find another tenant. And he was like, okay. So then I just let my girlfriend stay there and put a bunch of bunk beds in there. We had an amazing little fake model house, which we then used to supplement our lifestyle, which is amazing. But anyways, I digress.
Francis [00:45:32]:
Continue, please. Yeah, well, I wish that would have happened to me, that being able to fill one of my apartments with girls. But I didn’t approach you yet. I wasn’t having your advices in coaching yet. So anyway, maybe in the future. Anyway, that law still had a little bit of work to be done on. And because of COVID the government was like, well, you know what? We’re not going to enforce the law yet. We understand that people will want to make money right now, or we don’t want to force things. So I was able to still do airbnb a little bit, but I knew that eventually the law actually was passed and it was voted, but we didn’t really hear about it. But I knew about it because I was reading on the government website. I read the entire bill. I did all of my homework. My homework. Thank you. Yeah. And then while I was doing my homework, I was trying to find a loophole in it and I was like, okay, so how am I going to beat this? And if you want, I can go into details, basically, of how I beat it.
Robbie Kramer [00:46:45]:
Yeah, if you can go into detail without maybe too excruciating detail.
Francis [00:46:50]:
Yeah, perfect. Just to make it easy and quick. Now, in the province of Quebec, you can only do Airbnb in two ways. You have a commercial license, so you’re a hotel, which is almost impossible to acquire. If you’re not purchasing a hotel with an actual license, forget about it’s. Impossible. Or you can do it with your main residency. So if I have an apartment that I’m renting or that I own, if I’m renting, I need the permission of my owner. If it’s a condo, I need the permission of the owners association or whatever.
Robbie Kramer [00:47:32]:
And by the way, if anyone’s thinking they should nod off and snooze because this doesn’t apply to them, this is almost identical to many, many markets and cities because they don’t come up with their own shit. They just copy a different city.
Francis [00:47:45]:
Exactly. Pay attention. What I did was like, okay, so the only way I can sublet on Airbnb is if it’s my main residency. So obviously, you can only have one main residency. You cannot have 20 apartments where you’re staying in. So I’m like, okay, so how am I going to beat this? Okay, well, there are no laws. I mean, we have different laws, but I was like, there’s no laws that says that I can’t have multiple apartments. There’s only one law that says that I have like, one main residency. So if I have apartments that I’m subletting to people, that becomes their main residency. Okay? So even if it’s a sublet, let’s say that I have an apartment under my name and there’s a student coming from France who’s renting the apartment for an entire year for a one year lease, that becomes his main residency, even though it’s a sublet that he’s subletting from me. So that student usually is going to be renting the apartment from September until May because the two semesters are from September until May. So I rent the apartment from September to September and then the student is like, yeah, but I want to go back to France. I want to enjoy the wine and the beaches, the women and the cheese. I want to go back to France. So I’m like, yeah, I totally understand that, but we have a whole year lease. But what I can do for you is sublet your made residency under your name on airbnb, and I’m going to manage the airbnb for you. And what we’re going to do is I’m going to liberate you from all your obligations. You don’t have to pay the rent anymore. You don’t have any obligations. Like, you don’t have to someone at the door them. But yeah, you don’t have any obligations. If there are damages, basically you’re free of any obligations when he goes back.
Robbie Kramer [00:50:02]:
To France, basically in May.
Francis [00:50:03]:
Exactly, in May. And then I’m renting the apartment under his name for May, June, July, August.
Robbie Kramer [00:50:10]:
But you have him created an account and you’re managing his account.
Francis [00:50:14]:
Yeah, and he also I have him apply for a permit that is delivered by the government. Dude, sorry about that. I’ll be right back.
Robbie Kramer [00:50:24]:
Yeah, I’ll continue because yeah, that’s so genius because it’s such a win win, right? Because that student now has the freedom to go back wherever he wants to do. And I think what Francis said he was doing was even giving that guy like a small cut of the revenue during those months when he wasn’t there. So imagine being a student, you’re going to say yes to that deal every single time because you’re not paying for those three months, you’re actually making some money back. So I was telling them it’s such an amazing win win, because not only is a student not having to pay rent those three months, you were actually giving him a little bit of a cut out of the revenue, right?
Francis [00:51:07]:
Yeah, exactly. I was giving him 5% of the net revenues. So after all the expenses, the cleaning fees or whatever, and then if the government is like, well, you’re using him as basically you’re just using his name as well. Well, not only his name, he’s also making money, but he’s getting rid of all his obligations. So everything that I’m doing is fully legal. And I’m getting permits. I’m actually getting permits. And I have permits from the government. Like, hey, this is fully legal, what I’m doing. Because now Airbnb is asking for the number of the permit. You have to put it on your hat. And if you don’t have it, the government is going to know that you’re doing it on an illegal way.
Robbie Kramer [00:51:51]:
They’ll find you, basically.
Francis [00:51:52]:
They’ll find you. They’ll find you big time.
Robbie Kramer [00:51:56]:
Can be nasty. Like we’re talking to five figures.
Francis [00:51:59]:
Yeah, definitely. And also the part of the government that is taking care of the fees is the financial department. Basically the ones that are doing the taxes. It’s like the IRS, basically of Quebec that is doing it. And the reason they’re doing that is because a lot of people were doing Airbnb without paying their taxes. So that’s the only reason they did the entire thing is to be able to grab that money out of your pocket and make sure that you’re paying your taxes. I’ve always paid my taxes, even when I was doing it illegally, because I didn’t have at that time, in 2018, 1920, was kind of like the law wasn’t really clear about what you could and couldn’t do. So I always pay my taxes and I never got caught by the government. And even though I had multiple apartments because they were seeing that was paying my taxes, they were like, well, we’re not going to stop that guy. He’s sending us money.
Robbie Kramer [00:52:52]:
They just want to get paid. At the end of the day, that’s.
Francis [00:52:55]:
Basically it’s always a question of money, right? And now the way that I’m doing business is that so I’m renting my apartments. I’m renting my apartments from the owner and then I’m subletting them to students. And then whenever they have to go back home, I’m subletting the apartments under their names on Airbnb. So that’s what I’m doing.
Robbie Kramer [00:53:14]:
That’s fucking genius. I love it.
Francis [00:53:16]:
Yeah, no homo.
Robbie Kramer [00:53:22]:
I love creative business ideas. That’s why I loved Airbnb and I got into them. Like, this is so easy. I mean, it’s not easy, right? Like it you have to be a good, like, logical, clear headed, competent individual. You don’t have to be a genius, right? You just have to be competent. And the amount of people out there that are competent is so low. People are fucking retarded. People are fucking incompetent. And even when it comes to dating, most women are like, this guy, he’s incompetent. It’s harder, I guess, than most people realize to be competent. Because you just got to put in that little bit of extra effort and work to understand. Do your homework. Like you said, it’s like a guy going on a date. It’s like, follow the dating protocol, which is like a step by step are you going to know where you’re going ahead of time. You’re going to put in the legwork, do your homework. You’re probably going to have a good result versus if you just wing it, like what everyone else is going to do, well, you’re probably going to end up with a fine on airbnb or with an apartment that you can’t get out of or like stuck in a lease or you get it. Everyone was so afraid of getting an eviction notice. But I understand the laws around being evicted. No landlord actually wants to evict you because they have to pay a shitload in legal fees. So that’s another thing that allowed me to take my business to a much faster level, because at one point, which I don’t recommend, this is back in 2014, we got an investor to put in a million bucks, and he’s like, go crazy. Get as many places as you can. Don’t tell the landlord you’re even doing this. We don’t give a fuck because we know the eviction laws, and we know they really have not a lot they can do. But obviously once city laws came in, now the fines got so hefty that it just wasn’t worth it. But at the end of the day, it’s all about the money. As you were saying.
Francis [00:55:10]:
Exactly. Honestly, that’s why I was saying take time to read the legislations, take time to hire.
Robbie Kramer [00:55:21]:
Like if you have a buddy, most people have, like, a lawyer buddy, right? Like Steve in the group. You guys probably just thought he was a crazy, you know, German literature professor, study, specializing in Jewish German literature, which is like the most niche market. But before that, in his prior life, he was an attorney. So he passed the bar in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania. So anytime I’ve got a legal thing that mofos me, a bunch of stuff for all my free dating coaching I’ve given him over the years, he’s my first cousin. So I’m like, read this thing for me. Figure it out. Right? Free attorney.
Francis [00:55:58]:
It’s a good idea to have someone like you said, like an attorney around you. But funny enough, one of my business associate has 1600 apartments in Montreal. He is a lawyer. He specializes in real estate laws. And when I came up to him with the loophole that I found under the law, it was like, dude, I can’t believe you found that. And even him didn’t think about it. So that’s why I would say, read it, reread it, reread it, reread it, and then something’s going to be pointed out for you. I was thinking about doing it in New York, super strict place. And when I was reading it, it was a while ago, but I was kind of like, oh, maybe I found a loophole there. There were certain types of apartment buildings where it was permitted to do it, and it was like a two store apartment building. And I was now, maybe I found something. I wasn’t really sure. I didn’t investigate it more because I decided not to go ahead with New York. But when you’re reading the law, there’s always something that’s going to point you toward the direction that you could actually use to your advantage. So not only as, okay, I’m doing airbnb now I have to follow the law. No, read the law and it might actually give you a guideline to how to start your business. That’s how powerful the law might be for you because we see it as a curse or we see it as these rules that we have to follow. But that’s the thing. If you take time to understand the rules, you’re going to be a way better player, like you said with the women’s, or if you’re a gamer or if you play board games or whatever. As soon as you understand the rules, you know how to bent it, or you know how to go around and you see the next move coming before your opponent because you understand the rules. Psychic game of chess. So if you don’t understand the rules of chest, well, you’re never going to be able to win a game. So if you don’t understand the legislation of your city, you’ll never be able to exploit it and then fully, fully operate your airbnb business or your short term rental business.
Robbie Kramer [00:58:07]:
Yeah, I mean, I’ll give a golf analogy which always pisses people off because no one likes golfing except for me. But with golf, the rulebook in golf is like the size of multiple hundreds of pages and almost zero. Amateur golfers bother to really learn the rules because it’s like very NIT picky stuff. But one thing that my college golf coach made us do was learn and study the rulebook. Because once you know the rules and the intricacies, there’s all of these ways you can take advantage that you would have never understood. Where you can like, maybe you hit your ball in, like, a terrible shot place where you have no shot, but then you find you’re standing on this tiny piece of man made thing. You can get a free drop. So I think the analogy works here. There’s like the basic understanding of the rules and then if you take it to the advanced level, that’s when you can really have a leg up on the competition.
Francis [00:58:57]:
Exactly. That’s exactly it.
Robbie Kramer [00:59:00]:
So before we open it up to questions, I wanted to briefly talk about the other thing that I think you’re an expert in, which is making your listing stand out amongst the competition. And you and I chatted offline about that. So I’d love for you to share those things. I’ll share my experience with that real quick. My go to was always, like I said, finding the biggest possible places that I could because guess what? It takes the same amount of work to find a five or six bedroom place and. Sign that lease than it does to find a one bedroom place and sign that lease.
Francis [00:59:32]:
Right.
Robbie Kramer [00:59:32]:
There’s one conversation with one owner, but when you have the big your place, you can multipurpose it. You’re not competing against the hotels. Obviously, you’ve got a little bit more risk because the rent is typically higher, but you also have more room for reward because the profits, the margins can be a lot higher too. And the other thing is, most landlords who have bigger places, like if they’ve got a five or six bedroom place, they even have trouble renting that out. So you have a lot more leverage of allowing them to say yes to your creative airbnb venture because it’s very hard for them just to find a normal tenant. It’s easy for a guy renting out a one bedroom apartment to find a normal tenant. But for a guy renting out a five bedroom place, he’s looking for somebody. And landlords, remember, they don’t want turnover. They want someone to stay in that place and rent it forever. Right? And I’ll come to a landlord and be like, listen, if this works out, I’m going to be your tenant literally forever. I’m never leaving. I’m paying the rent on time. I’m cleaning the apartments constantly because we have new people coming in and out. You’ll never hear from me for a maintenance issue. I’m never going to bug you to fix a toilet. I handle all that. So from a landlord’s perspective, they’re like, wow, this is actually a way better deal than I thought. Once you can get them past that initial kind of, like airbnb negative stigma, that happens with a lot of these people. But my point is, it’s like finding a the type of places you want to specialize in and then making those stand out. So what I would do is I’d cater a lot of my listings, the furniture and everything, to bachelor parties, right? I had like a very sort of there’s furniture that women like, and then there’s furniture that guys don’t give a shit about, like big leather couches with, like, built in cup holders. Like, a woman sees that shit, she’s like, I am never sitting there. That’s disgusting. But a guy who’s like, oh, wow, that’s very functional and very nice. We could have a bunch of strippers over and really take advantage of that stripper pole in the living room, right? So I was kind of setting my places up in Ukraine for that distinct sort of market. I’m curious. I know you told me a few different things, like the Star Wars one, but what are you doing creatively to make your listing stand out?
Francis [01:01:47]:
So, first of all, you have to understand who’s your client? I mean, who are you targeting? So I think that’s the main thing that you have to do. I knew that on your side you had really these big penthouses where people were doing parties. So your clientele was totally different of mine because me, funny enough, I was targeting always for apartments with maximum two bedrooms. Why? Because I didn’t want to have to deal with those parties. I didn’t want to have to deal with multiple people in the buildings and then being noisy and then having complaints from the neighbors. So that’s why I always like that one or two bedrooms. And that’s it. Who I was aiming for was families traveling with their kids or couples or friends who are traveling, and they want to have like a little place to explore the city. And so that’s basically what I was aiming for. I would say that 90% of my apartments were only one bedroom apartments because my plan B was to rent apartments on airbnb and then sublet them to students after the summer season. So that’s why I was aiming for one bedroom apartments, because like you said, the more rooms you have, the harder it gets to find tenants to have them. One bedroom apartments are super easy to rent. So then who I was aiming for, I was aiming for clients who were mostly coming from Europe, and a lot of those clients are from France. And when they’re thinking about Canada, they’re thinking about, well, the natives and the canoes and the bears and the maple syrup. So that’s usually hockey. Hockey funny enough, hockey. People that are thinking about that, when they’re thinking about they’re thinking about Montreal. Some of them actually think that they’re going to see mooses and stuff like that. For real. So you’re like, okay, well, I’m going to give them the experience. Maybe I can show the booking as we’re do you want me to share my screen?
Robbie Kramer [01:04:00]:
Yeah, share your screen.
Francis [01:04:01]:
Okay. So I’m going to go to this booking here, and it didn’t look at all the way it looks right now, and I’m actually renting it right now on airbnb. Here we go. So I created kind of a lodge. A lodge basically like a Canadian lodge. So it was empty. The apartment was entirely empty. And as you can see it, I have the maple leaf, the forged iron maple leaf on the wall. And I have the logs and the skis on the wall. And all the frames have a link to a Montreal landmark. So everything that is framed has a link with Montreal. So if you look like that landmark that you see in the frame, it’s called the Calder, and it’s a major landmark here in Montreal. And you have the skis right next to it. So I really want to have the chalet that kind of the lodge. But you’re right in the middle of the city. You’re downtown Montreal. You’re right in the middle of the city. And it took me a lot of time to prepare.
Robbie Kramer [01:05:11]:
That the log next to the chair. Someone looks at this and then they look at like a shitty place decorated with Ikea furniture. They’re going to choose this every day.
Francis [01:05:22]:
Oh, yeah, definitely. Because they’re going to have the experience. Right. It’s different. Like I said, all these here are landmarks from Montreal.
Robbie Kramer [01:05:32]:
And if this looks really hard.
Francis [01:05:35]:
I.
Robbie Kramer [01:05:36]:
Have a girlfriend who’s an interior designer. Right. And you could hire people to do this for not that much money. And this is what they do. They love this.
Francis [01:05:44]:
Yeah, that’s what I did, actually. So I knew I was going to do it, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it. Just so you know, though, that apartment took me maybe I would say 80 hours to do the setup. Took me maybe 15 hours. It wasn’t that long. And I had a paint, a painter coming in. They painted the walls black, so it was pretty easy. That part wasn’t hard. The hard part was for me to find all these little elements of decoration, like the skis. There was one pair of ski available on Kijiji, so I had to go and grab that pair of ski was like 30 minutes drive away from my place. And then the snow shoes that you see on the wall, it was maybe like 20 minutes away from my place. And then the log, I had to go and get there.
Robbie Kramer [01:06:34]:
You put a lot of time, personal time into this.
Francis [01:06:36]:
Yeah, I did, but it was like, okay, well, this week I’m going to do this. So it took me multiple months to acquire all of it, and I knew I was going to do it, but I didn’t know when I was going to do it.
Robbie Kramer [01:06:46]:
But you were probably getting bookings and filling it while you were doing that.
Francis [01:06:50]:
Right, I was still but it didn’t look like that at all. It was like super basic.
Robbie Kramer [01:06:54]:
You can do this over time. You don’t have to get this going before you accept bookings.
Francis [01:07:00]:
Exactly. I knew I was going to do it, but I didn’t know when.
Robbie Kramer [01:07:03]:
Right.
Francis [01:07:04]:
And when I finally got all of my little elements, when I had all the elements that I want to use in my apartment. Like, you see right here, there’s a can of flour, but that can of flower, that particular brand of flour is made in Montreal, and it’s actually if you go back, it’s actually that company here that you see in the frame, it’s called Fat and Five Rows, that’s in Montreal. So I had to search to make sure that I had that can of flour. I put a lot of effort.
Robbie Kramer [01:07:34]:
You went way deep on this.
Francis [01:07:36]:
Yeah, I did. But people are seeing it. Right. So the entire thing cost me, and I hired that’s where I wanted to go. I hired a designer and she came in and she was like, well, you should do a wall, an entire wall with all your frames. You should put decorations, and then you should have mirrors and everything. So she’s the one who gave me the idea and she helped me figure out what I was going to do with my stuff. But I’m the one who actually decided where it was going to go and how I placed it and everything. That’s me. We decided to do that. But like you said, she cost me $350, the best investment I’ve ever did because I didn’t know what I was going to do with all that stuff. I’m not a professional. So I hired her and she helped me install everything in there. Amazing. And then I found this huge bed frame that was made with whole woods and I purchased that as well. And then I did kind of like the main room is the hunting lodge, basically. It’s kind of a little bit more like with the deers and everything. And then I did another room with a little bit more about the Montreal Canadians because it’s a big part of the city, right? So I purchased these hockey gloves and that hockey mask and then it has to do with the Canadians. But it’s not too cheesy because it’s important. You don’t want it to be too cheesy but it’s a little wink to the city, right? Because we’re known for a hockey team. And then if you go to the bathroom a little bit more I went back to the hunting lodge.
Robbie Kramer [01:09:20]:
Just to reiterate for anyone watching. Like you do not have to go into this level of detail if you want to crush it beyond belief and be the only the best game in town. Let me share one example. Place one of my spots in Kiev. You can see it almost looks like a whorehouse. Like the way this is decorated, right? But this appeals directly to big groups of party dudes. And so we had a poker table in there, giant living room, right? All this furniture that’s actually pretty inexpensive because who wants this ugly old Victorian furniture? But we got the big screen projector here. People would pay typically 1000 to 1500 a night on the weekend and it had this massive terrace as well. And this is not a place I own. This is a place that I made a deal with my buddy who owned it. You want to stand out from the competition, basically is what we’re getting at. And you could go all out or you could just go a little bit out and you’re already crushing the average Joe who is incompetent, doesn’t really know how to operate this business with any level of margin or edge. The devil is in the details, they say. So once you kind of get your whether that’s you’re just renting out a spare bedroom to subsidize your rent or you kind of do what you and I did, which is make a side business out of this and turn into a main business, then the sky’s the limit with how creative and cool you can be. And you kind of become like a hotelier. That’s what I called myself. I’m a hotelier because I have all these places. And then one of the biggest benefits as a single guy is if you’re dating multiple women and you’re worried that you’re going to bring a girl back and she’s going to find a piece of hair from another girl, it’s like, yeah, you just take her to another apartment that’s open. And so that was one of the fun ways I used it, definitely.
Francis [01:11:20]:
But like you said, there’s not one right way to do it. There are multiple ways to do it. And the reason I did it was because eventually I want to open, like, a hostel. That’s something that I would like to do. I’ve done a lot of tests, and I wanted to see how far I could take an idea that I had in my head. And that idea of the lounge and the cabin was in my head for multiple years. I really wanted to do it, so I had a lot of fun doing it. But also it brought me a lot of money because that apartment, I invested about $6,000 for the renovations and then purchasing the new furniture and all of that. Sorry I said $6,000, but it’s not true. $4,500 plus Canadian or American? Canadian. Which is almost nothing in American, right?
Robbie Kramer [01:12:19]:
Three grand, right?
Francis [01:12:20]:
Yeah, exactly. So let’s say like three grand US. Plus my monthly expenses. Let’s say that the apartment is costing me maybe $4,500. Okay. So total my month, my base expenses, plus my renovations within three weeks. In the worst month in Montreal to do airbnb, which is November, I was able to cover my base costs and my renovation costs because everybody went crazy for the apartment.
Robbie Kramer [01:12:49]:
Amazing.
Francis [01:12:50]:
Yeah. And then last summer, I made, like, 30K, only with that apartment in three months, which is pretty good. What’s the rent is? The rent is $1,300.
Robbie Kramer [01:13:05]:
Amazing. Because that’s the thing. And people are like, how are the returns so good? It’s like, well, the other options is a $250 a night hotel room, right? And when you do the math, a $1,300 apartment is, what, like $35 a night that it’s costing you, and you’re turning around and renting it out for the way to do the math, I found, is, like, you take the quality of your place and you compare that to a hotel quality. So this place is like the Four Seasons, right? Like, one of the nicest possible hotels you could possibly stay in. And then you take that number, you divide that by two.
Francis [01:13:43]:
Right?
Robbie Kramer [01:13:44]:
So the Four Seasons is 450 a night. You could maybe get 225 for this place. If your place is a shithole and it’s like a Holiday Inn and the Holiday In is charging 125 a night, well, you can probably charge, what, 67, right? And that’s a pretty good way to figure out what you’re likely and then you multiply 20 nights a month. Right. You’re expecting. If you suck, you’re going to get 20 nights a month. If you’re great, you’re going to get 27, 28 some months. You’ll fill the whole thing, especially if you’re doing the longer term, obviously. But that’s kind of like the reverse engineering of the math, and you’ll see that you could make a lot of money depending on how cheap you get that lease and how dope you make it.
Francis [01:14:28]:
Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it’s funny that you were saying 60%, because whenever I was doing my calculations on how am I going to be able to break even, I was always using about 60%. Let’s say I only have a 60% rate booking during the month. And then what I was doing, I was also comparing when I was going on airbnb, I was doing a research for the area where I wanted to start a new apartment, and then I would see what my competitors were charging. And I was also looking, well, okay, right now in the month of May, does he have a lot of space? Does he still have a lot of availabilities? And I was doing that with multiple bookings in my area. And then it gave me an idea. Well, okay, I’m going to be able to charge about 120 with that type of decoration and design. So it was a way also, for me, doing that type of research was a way for me to know how much money I would need to who are my competitors and how much money I would need to invest in my apartments.
Robbie Kramer [01:15:31]:
Exactly. And it’s so easy to do the market research. You just go on airbnb and you look that’s exactly it.
Francis [01:15:38]:
Then. It’s that easy.
Robbie Kramer [01:15:40]:
And most people won’t do that. That’s what I really want to get across. 95% of people will not do that. They’ll just put up the shitty place with shitty pictures, and then after, like, a month, they’ll be go, airbnb doesn’t work for me. And then they quit, which is great because that’s just less competition for you.
Francis [01:15:56]:
Exactly. Maybe before we take the questions, I can show you another project that I’ve made, the Star Wars one?
Robbie Kramer [01:16:05]:
Yeah, sure.
Francis [01:16:06]:
All right.
Robbie Kramer [01:16:07]:
Can you run through it in like five? Because I wanted to yeah, I’ll do it really quickly.
Francis [01:16:11]:
I just want to show you basically something else you can do. So that apartment here, I did a Star Wars thematic, and the reason I did that was just to stand out, because whenever you’re looking for apartments in Montreal, New York, or whatever, it’s always the same thing, right? The lounge with the hike or the Buddha Bar lounge or the New York style lounge. Everything looks the same. So I really wanted to do something different with a thematic that everybody knew and also a thematic that is at the base cheesy. So I wanted to transform it into something that wasn’t cheesy or too cheesy. So that apartment was working really well, downtown Montreal, people were going crazy for it.
Robbie Kramer [01:16:55]:
There’s so many Star Wars fans, too. And this is done in a really tasteful, cool way. It’s not like kitschy crappy like Star Wars for little kids. This is dope.
Francis [01:17:05]:
Yeah, exactly. And I had a lot of fun doing it because in the description, what I was saying is that as Starship Troopers or Star Troopers stormtroopers, we’re fighting rebels comes in the galaxy far, far away. So you can have our pads during the weekend because we’re not there right now. We’re kicking ass somewhere else.
Robbie Kramer [01:17:26]:
Darth Vader’s place.
Francis [01:17:30]:
It was the stormtroopers place because if you look, there are actually frames of the guys at the work and also kind of a couple of stormtroopers right here. So that’s the main bedroom. And then the wallpaper was made out of Star Wars.
Robbie Kramer [01:17:47]:
Oh, wow.
Francis [01:17:48]:
Yeah. The Darth Vader and the stormtrooper.
Robbie Kramer [01:17:51]:
I didn’t notice the wallpaper first.
Francis [01:17:53]:
Yeah. So I just went crazy and I decided to and again, I invested maybe three grands and it took me a month and everything was cleared out.
Robbie Kramer [01:18:04]:
It’s just a wall and a couple of photos, but it makes such a big difference. A pillow. Right. It’s like that one little tiny detail someone’s going to remember that no one’s going to look at this listing and not remember, oh, I can stand the Star Wars place versus the whatever. Nothing.
Francis [01:18:18]:
Exactly.
Robbie Kramer [01:18:18]:
I’m going to choose a Star Wars place.
Francis [01:18:20]:
Right, exactly. Try to do your research, look at your competitors. Who are you competiting against? And by doing your research. Also, if you see that your competitors only have ten bookings in the past, I don’t know, five months, maybe it’s not the right area for you, but if you’re looking at your competition and then, I don’t know, all your competitors have at least 100 reviews, well, you know that it’s the hot spot for the city. Right. And you’ll see who you’re competiting against and you’ll see how much money you need to put in and how much effort you need to put in your apartment, and it’s going to give you a really good indicator. So read the legislation, do your research, and from there, your anxiety level is going to be diminished and it’s just going to be way easier for you to do business. Cool.
Robbie Kramer [01:19:08]:
So, yeah, we covered a lot. We covered everything from getting a sort of business like this off the ground. If you have no money, or if you do have money, there’s so many different options. You can partner with people, you can partner with landlords, you can rent the place, you can buy places and do this if you have money and you just want to do a higher return version of real estate. I’ve gotten a lot of people in this who they have money. They wanted to simply buy a unit and rent it long term to whoever, a family. But I’m like, you could do short term and make much higher returns for not much extra work. Or you could hire me and I’ll partner with you, and you’ll make more that way than doing the traditional long term real estate deal. So that’s what I love about Airbnb, and there’s just a lot of creative ways where you can make more money, have fun doing it, leverage these properties for multi use. When you combine this as a single guy, dude, I can’t even tell you how many times I was able to get in great situations by just, like, a buddy who I wanted to recruit as, like, a wingman. Anytime those guys were, like, coming to visit, I’d be like, dude, don’t get a hotel, stay on my couch, or stay at this apartment where a bunch of models live.
Francis [01:20:28]:
How about that?
Robbie Kramer [01:20:29]:
That guy is forever indebted to you, right? The amount of leverage and ways I’ve utilized having property not only made me money, but created friendships, awesome relationships with men, with women, like, you name it. And you could start just as a simple thing. You just fucking rent out your spare bedroom. Or when you’re traveling, you could rent out your place for three months, right? Like, what if the landlord cash? What about this? What about that? There’s always going to be what ifs. And of course, you want to do it above board, but just to kind of get your feet wet and understand the business. There’s a lot of things you can do to really sort of leverage and hack. This whole rent for most people is like, 30% to 40% of their income. And if you can move that expense into, like, a break even or even a green, you’ve just completely transformed your entire life, right? Anyways, that’s my long pitch for why everyone, I think, should do this stuff, especially single guys. And if you guys are interested in this, anyone watching the podcast or whatever, I’ve got a course that teaches you everything from getting a place to automating and stepping away from the business, firing yourself. Francis, if people want direct access to you, you and I can talk about that at a later time. I think you’d be an amazing specialist when it comes to decorating and making these places stand out with that creative element, because I never got that deep, obviously. And then understanding the legislation as well, that’s a big thing. Anyways, let’s open it up to questions. Looks like Yonik and Charles have a question.
Francis [01:22:09]:
Yes.
Robbie Kramer [01:22:09]:
So soon I will have my old.
Francis [01:22:13]:
Apartment because I want to move to a new apartment, and I’m living in Berlin right now. Berlin is pretty tough legislation around Airbnb, so I’m thinking about just renting it out short term, like one to three.
Robbie Kramer [01:22:28]:
Months or something like that.
Francis [01:22:31]:
Are the returns much lower for these kind of rentals? And is there anything else that I need to pay attention to? Not sure I understand the question. So you’re saying that you’re going to rent your apartment for one, two, or three months. Is that it? Are you going to rent it short term? Yeah. I’m not sure if I want to do Airbnb because it feels like it’s more work. And I’m also not 100% sure yet if it’s easy to do because of the laws around airbnb. Firstly, I guess short term rentals, like one to three months is less work than Airbnb. Well, okay. So if you’re renting for one, two, or three months, obviously yes, it’s going to be way less work because you’re renting to one person. You don’t have to take care of all the cleanings. You don’t have to take care of the check in the checkouts. You don’t have to send messages, because we haven’t talked about that. But when you have 25 apartments on your BNB, you have multiple messages to send to your clients every day for the check, in the checkout for this and that. So there’s a lot of automatizations that I was able to create to respond to your question. Yeah, if you’re doing Airbnb, you’re going to have way more work. But if you only have one apartment, it’s not going to be that much work. And I think that only one apartment is worth it because if you can find a way to do it, you’re going to have way more money. Because let’s say that if I get it correctly, if your apartment costs you let’s take round numbers, okay? If your apartment costs you $1,000 per month and it’s fully furnished right now, and you want to rent it to someone else, that person might pay $1,200. So you’re going to make $200 of profit on three months. So in the end, you’re going to make $600 profit. But let’s say that you rent your apartment on Airbnb, and then you’re renting it, I don’t know, for, let’s say, $50 per month per night, or even, like, more than that. I don’t know where you live in Berlin, but let’s say that you can’t.
Robbie Kramer [01:24:40]:
Find a hotel room for less than $150 a night in Berlin. So you’re going to get at least 75, I think.
Francis [01:24:47]:
Exactly. I mean, let’s say that you’renting it even if you’re getting 75 out of it, okay. You’re going to get close to $2,250. So 2200 or $2,300 of revenue. So instead of doing $200 per month now, of course you have to pay your expenses and everything, but you’re looking maybe at 1000 or $1,500 in your pocket. So, yes, a little bit more work, but it’s going to be more money. Also, it goes with it.
Robbie Kramer [01:25:18]:
If you suck and you do 400 or 500 right. Over three months, that’s substantially more.
Francis [01:25:26]:
Yeah, definitely. And are you still going to be in Berlin during that time? Yeah. Okay. So taking care of one apartment is not that hard. You just need to take care of the cleanings, which you could do yourself. But you’re charging the clients for the cleaning. So that’s extra money in your pocket, that’s something to think about. I don’t know how big your apartment.
Robbie Kramer [01:25:49]:
Is, but yeah, I already have a cleaner.
Francis [01:25:53]:
Good, so you have a cleaner there so that person is taking care of the cleanings. And then it’s just a matter of you of finding a way to automatic to make everything automatic as much as possible. You have a doorknob without a key or you have a lockbox where the clients can take the key from everything that the clients could need. You make it as easy as possible for them. There are plenty of towels, you have a sheet with the instructions of how to do the check in, how to do the checkout, the WiFi codes, where they should go eat, where this? So that they have to ask you as less questions as possible. And you’re going to see with time that people often ask the same questions. Oh, we have a car, where can we park? Well, I’m sending you a link right now with the closest parking space that you can find. Oh, we’re going out tonight and we would like to have suggestions of where we should go eat. Here’s a list of breakfast places, lunch places, diner places you should try that are within a mile radius from your apartment.
Robbie Kramer [01:27:02]:
Here’s a good one, guess what? You get a booking with five cute girls and they’re like, what do we do? Like, oh, guess what, I’m having a party. You’re already the host, the cool guy who’s given them the keys to the apartment, right? You do that, check in yourself, you don’t let them do the lockbox, right? Once you see that profile picture come in and then guess what? They show up to your apartment party. I filled so many parties that way because back in the day you could screen guests on airbnb, you could see their profile before they booked now because a bunch of people were racist and they wouldn’t book to certain ethnicities, they stopped that. But I would very much try to get cute girls to stay in my places. And then I was a night in shining armor with the parties and oh, there’s a nightclub here and there’s this. It’s so easy.
Francis [01:27:50]:
Definitely. Thanks for the information, it was great. Yeah, well, don’t hesitate if you have any other questions. But like I said, it’s definitely more work, but it’s definitely going to be more money too, that’s for sure. And as far as the legislation, take two or 3 hours of your time and take time to read it. And then sometimes there’s probably an office for your city, right, where you can ask questions to a city councilor or something like that. Because there are offices in Montreal where you can go and ask questions about the regulations. So you could go to your city hall or whatever and then you can ask them questions. On how it works. And then maybe they could give you the legislations and maybe they could tell you how you could do it in a legal way. You can ask questions to them and then you’re just going to tell you how you can do it, and then it’s easier for you just to do business that way.
Robbie Kramer [01:28:46]:
I have a funny story. So I had one place that eventually I didn’t tell the landlord that I was doing it, and eventually I was worried that they were going to find out. So I made a listing with none of my furniture and none of my photos of a different place. So what I would do, and I’m not recommending anybody do this, but you could make a listing that’s exactly like yours, but of a different apartment with slightly worse photos. And then when someone makes the booking, you give them a call. You’re like, hey, I’ve been having trouble with my building. Actually, the place you booked is the exact same location. It’s slightly better than the one you saw, and I promise you’ll be very happy with it. And then they would come. And obviously now there’s no trace that I was even airbnb. So my landlord knew I was airbnb for like two years before they could actually get me to stop because I didn’t have a listing. It was a different place. They actually came with a video camera and we’re like recording guests, and eventually they had enough dirt on me where they could victim, but I’m not recommending that. A lot of headaches, but I knew the rules and I knew how to do that. Do as I say, not as I do. All right, other questions or just shares? Like, are you guys getting having some AHA moments or learning anything or expanding your mind on what’s possible creative business things?
Francis [01:30:19]:
Yeah. Hey, guys, Mike Kakaro here. Just appreciate all the info so far, so it’s definitely expanding my brain, that’s for sure. I have not tried any short term rentals that I rent my house that I own long term. So I do year long rental because The HOA has some laws against renting anything lower than six months. So I haven’t thought of any ways around that to do any airbnb outside of just breaking The HOA and doing it until they catch me. I don’t know what the fines are. And it’s like right in a cookie cutter development with families pushing babies everywhere. So it’s pretty obvious if guests are in and out. I don’t know. Any thoughts on that? It’s one question. Yeah, probably no way around it, but any thoughts? So you have a condo or you have a house? It’s a house. There’s just multiple houses, just like it kind of stacked up around the development. Okay. And then it’s a homeowner association and then Derek against airbnb, right? Yeah, it’s like six month minimum rentals. I have to look at the verbiage on that sounds like I’m fucked. Yeah. On my side here in Quebec, I would say that it’s the thing that has the most difficulties to go around with. Because when there’s a law by the HOA that says that you can do airbnb, there’s not really a way to go around it because it’s not a municipal policy or regional or city or even like a provincial or state law. It’s basically a rule that you have to follow with your HOA. So to go around it, it’s kind of hard.
Robbie Kramer [01:32:03]:
HOAs are really tough. They’re like sovereign nations. It’s always these old shitty people with nothing to do that want to sit on an HOA board. To just be like, no, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. That was a big mistake that we made when we got the business up and running is we didn’t closely enough look at HOA stuff and that kind of fucked us in multiple properties because even though we were following the city laws, the HOAs levied us with fines and got to pay them. Otherwise you’re going to jail, basically. So yeah, I agree, that can be tough.
Francis [01:32:38]:
Yeah, HOAs are really tough. And that’s one of the reasons that I had a few apartments in condo complex, but I had to get rid of them shortly after because of the HOA. There’s just no way to really go around them, city laws or regulations. There’s always a way that you can find. But HOAs, I don’t know, it’s kind of tough. It’s really tough.
Robbie Kramer [01:33:05]:
So Mike, you currently just have long term tenants in there. What do you do with now?
Francis [01:33:10]:
Yeah, I just do twelve month rentals. It’s like maybe 2000 more than the mortgage, maybe 5000 more than the mortgage.
Robbie Kramer [01:33:20]:
So you’re cash flowing on it, it.
Francis [01:33:22]:
Sounds yeah, basically not too bad. But nothing like an airbnb, so that’s fine. I figured I was screwed though. Just curious.
Robbie Kramer [01:33:29]:
I mean, one thing you could look at would be potentially selling it and exchanging into another place with more options. But obviously that’s a lot of work.
Francis [01:33:39]:
Right, okay. And then the other one is for looking for legislation. You’re just talking about talking to the city hall basically to figure that out, to read through some of those things. Or I’m assuming different apartment complexes have their own specific things too. Like for instance, the seven where I live downtown, it allows airbnb, but I think it also has time restrictions on that. And I haven’t read these things, I’ve only heard it so I didn’t know. Yeah, I would go through the HOA or your building rules or regulations. That’s what I would go through first. And then I would go to town halls and then just ask them what’s the regulation? How can I do short term rental? Is there a legal way to do short term rentals? And they will tell you right away. And that’s how I figured the Montreal’s regulations, like how they were applied and by whom. And then also we have a provincial regulation, like the law itself, that is applied for the entire province of Quebec. So there are two different things. Now. The provincial law has priority over the municipal, the city law. So where do you live? Which city do you live? Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. So what I would do, I would go to the town hall of Austin and then just ask them, and then after that, ask them if there’s a regulation for the entire state of Texas. Is there a law for the entire state? And they will answer you. They will basically give you the legislation right there, and they can even give you links on their websites to the legislation. And then you’ll be able to see where you can do it and how you can do it. Yeah, okay. Sounds good. Thanks, guys. More than happy to help.
Robbie Kramer [01:35:38]:
Ma’am, any questions? Sid or dialing for AHA’s.
Francis [01:35:47]:
Yeah, I think one big AHA was starting to read the legislation before getting into this, especially because I’m on my visa.
Robbie Kramer [01:35:56]:
I don’t want to get deported.
Francis [01:36:00]:
That’s actually a really good idea, bro. Yeah, no, I want to start doing something in Chicago, so I have a place in Chicago as well, and then I can get some money. And it’s a great city, and it has a bunch of universities as well. So applying your student strategy, it would be applicable there. You know what you could do also, that’s another thing you can do. But I think that Robbie touched it a little bit earlier. But you rent a big apartment with multiple rooms. And let’s say that you get a four bedroom apartment, you take one of the rooms, and then you rent the three other apartments, the three other rooms to two roommates, and then you rent them. You rent the rooms for a year lease or something like that. That’s something you could do. Students sorry. Go on. Francis no, go ahead.
Robbie Kramer [01:36:58]:
This could be something that you could look into, Mike. They might not allow you to rent the whole unit, but you could rent individual private rooms if you have multiple. So one thing we did, one of our properties in La. They changed the law. Like, well, we had the place, and we couldn’t rent the whole thing, but we just started as a five bedroom place, so we just started renting the individual rooms. And obviously the money wasn’t as good, but that still allowed us to make some money off it. And it was fun because we had different roommates coming in, different people. The more social you guys are, the more opportunities are to leverage those extra connections, because you never know. You meet some cool people that way. So there’s always that possibility of just doing the private room listing instead of the whole unit. Yeah, definitely.
Francis [01:37:48]:
Well, then so for my situation, then for the house, and it’s still people coming in and out, but it’s not I guess I don’t see how that’s different.
Robbie Kramer [01:37:58]:
So the HOA probably has a law regulation, like a bylaw I think they’re called, where you can’t rent the entire unit short term, but there’s a pretty good chance they don’t have anything about renting individual rooms because you just be like, these are my friends who are coming to stay here. Right? Because if they did, then how could they stop you from having a different budy coming to stay in the extra room every week? They can’t. Right. And that’s what I found. Mostly it’s very hard for the government or an HOA to stop just room rentals, depending. How big is the HOA? How many units?
Francis [01:38:34]:
That’s a good question. I don’t know. There’s quite a few. It’s probably the whole development. So 50 houses, 60 houses, right, okay.
Robbie Kramer [01:38:42]:
Yeah. I mean, obviously first I would really understand the bylaws of the HOA, find out what the fines are. Right. And then there’s that. Like, are they going to catch you? And if they do catch you, what’s that going to cost? And you can kind of do the math on that risk reward.
Francis [01:38:57]:
Okay. On your side. Like I said, you could always rent a bigger apartment and then rent the rooms. You can rent the rooms and that’s a really good way to make money too, right? I mean, students are a really good source of money. And as you know, first of all, when people are coming from outside the country, they’re already serious. They’re coming here to study. So it’s a good clientele most of the time. I have a lot of students in my apartments and you could rent apartments and instead of subletting them on airbnb, you could sublet your rooms on a monthly or yearly basis. And if you rent an apartment, $2,000. And there’s four bedrooms and you rent them each $800. Well, you’re making 32 per month, so you’re making 1200 clear right there per month. And then it’s not a lot of hassle. Basically, your tenants, once they’re in the apartment on a monthly or yearly basis, you have nothing to do besides taking care of the apartment every now and then. And I was doing that at one point and I was even offering cleaning services, part of the rent. Because that’s one of the things, right? The roommates, there’s always one guy or one girl is not going to take care of the chores and then it’s a penny, ask for everybody else. So I was including a maid coming every two weeks to clean the common areas. People had to take care of your rooms, but the common areas, the bathroom, the floors, whatever, everything was taken care of by the mates, so nobody had to take care of it. Obviously I was telling them that they still had to be somehow clean. We didn’t want it to be a complete peak style, but that’s something you could do. And there’s no regulations that will forbid you to rent rooms on a monthly or yearly basis. There’s nothing that will not allow you to do that.
Robbie Kramer [01:40:55]:
That’s a big selling point too. Like a new potential tenant, right? Like, if I know I have a free maid for the year for the living spaces, that’s a huge selling point.
Francis [01:41:08]:
Yeah. And then for the maid, you can tell them, well, if you want her to clean your clothes or then clean your room, whatever, just check it out with the maid. And the maid is happy because she’s making extra money with those kids. But there’s different ways to do I mean, definitely Airbnb is a really good source of revenue, but doing monthly rental like that, I mean, dude, you can make a lot of money. And that’s why I do monthly rentals now. It’s way less work than Airbnb, but obviously it’s not the same amount of money, but it’s still really good money. And if you build on that, if you have multiple apartments or multiple rooms, let’s say that you have ten or 20 rooms, it’s a living right there. It’s a good living. I think cleaning idea is really good. Like offering that extra feature. I think that would definitely attract a lot more people because it’s easy to find apartments who offer cleaning, especially around college areas. Usually it’s just like they give you the apartment and they just clean it when you leave. So it’s like a dump stack for like one year. If you furnish the rooms properly. Maybe if you want to, I could show you on my screen the apartment that I did. And we did invest money in it, but it wasn’t too bad. But if you take time, let’s say you start with a place. I don’t know if you have a car or if you have a little trolley, but I have a friend in New York that does that. He leaves with his little trolley, and then it just goes around this neighborhood and there’s a bunch of people throwing out stuff. And then he’s picking it. He’s picking the stuff out of the curb, and then he’s using it as design elements for his own apartment. You could definitely do stuff like that for your apartments.
Robbie Kramer [01:42:50]:
There’s a bunch of it’s always shocking to me how often I see usable furniture just sitting on the sidewalk. When I just moved into my current place, there was like two really nice outdoor patio, like couches without the cushions on it in the dumpster room. And I just fucking walked right up to my and got cushions for them.
Francis [01:43:13]:
Honestly, it’s crazy. The amount of stuff that people are trying out is just freaking crazy. So that could be a good source for you of furniture, and then you just start that way. It’s not going to cost you a lot of money. It’s going to take time. But that I don’t know how much time you have, but it’s a good way to do it. And then you just furnish the apartments properly. You make it clean. You could invest in painting the apartment. Honestly, that’s where it’s going to pay the most. If the apartment is kind of a little bit of disgusting, if you redo the painting, it’s going to change the place completely. Definitely. And you just use white. You just don’t go crazy with colors. You just put white and then you put little elements of decoration inside the rooms. A plant with colorful pots and just little elements every now and then where there’s color. But that’s it. You don’t go crazy. And you can make a lot of money just renting rooms. You could definitely do that.
Robbie Kramer [01:44:12]:
I think Dialin’s got a question. Yeah, I guess.
Francis [01:44:15]:
I really like the idea of doing a Glamping set up because I don’t have to deal with the actual landowner and I could probably buy a plot, like a getaway type spot. Do you guys have experience with that?
Robbie Kramer [01:44:28]:
Like the perks and the pitfalls of.
Francis [01:44:30]:
Setting up, I don’t know, like a yurt or RV or what are they called? Silver ones on a plot of land.
Robbie Kramer [01:44:41]:
The Airstream. Yeah. I’ll go first on this one. Francis, my buddy and I invested in property in Joshua Tree. I bought a 30 foot Airstream because I wanted it for Burning Man and then knowing that I’d be able to rent it out on airbnb while I wasn’t at Burning Man for the other 51 weeks out of the year. And just that 30 foot Airstream. Everyone wants to stay in that thing because it’s such a unique and novel experience. We bought the land out in Joshua Tree for basically free. It was so cheap, he bought it. I didn’t buy it, but I was partner on the on the other things. We set up a tent, did the whole Glamping thing. And obviously, like, there’s there’s work involved with that. Of course there’s logistics. We were, at the time, spending time living in there when we were setting up. So you need to find local boots on the ground to do that sort of thing. And obviously a lot of people were thinking that and there’s a lot of anytime there’s a great idea, the market gets kind of flooded. So there are quite a few people who kind of did what we did and set up Glamping stuff out there in the desert. Certainly. Like I said before, it’s all about just being a step above your competition who’s usually not very good. And it’s a lower cost, of course, because you’re dealing with mobile homes or tents or yurts or that sort of thing. So there’s a lot of work in there. But it also has its lifestyle benefits and it’s fun and it’s cool. And obviously you can repurpose. Like if you are going to go to Burning Man, it’s great to not have to spend $8,000 every year on an RV rental. Right. Because I’ve got my Airstream. So that’s been my experience. Francis, what about you?
Francis [01:46:37]:
I never did anything like glamping or like you did, Robbie. I think it’s a really good idea. There’s definitely market for it. I mean, even Airbnb has a section now about out of the box bookings that you could do, like places that are a little bit special, like Lamping or Harvey’s. You can even rent boats on Airbnb. Now. It would be possible for you to rent a boat in the Bahamas. It’s something that I’m actually looking into right now.
Robbie Kramer [01:47:10]:
A lot of people buy shitty boats that are just like parked in a marina and then they turn those they spruce those up. They never leave the port. Right. And people just stay in them. And then it’s a lot cheaper than buying an apartment.
Francis [01:47:22]:
Yeah, definitely. It’s something actually there are two cities now in the province of Quebec who are offering it right now. They have these little ball houses, and you can rent it for the entire you can rent it and then you just stay there. And it’s close to the downtown area of those small little cities. It’s really well organized, so there’s definitely stuff you can do. You can be imaginative and there’s way to make money out of it. And again, it’s just a question of finding a great location and making sure that if you’re not on site, it’s not going to be too far from your place. Because if there’s a problem and you need to ride an hour to get there, it’s going to be a pain in the ass. If you’re on site, great. But if you have to ride over there, all my apartments are like 15 minutes away from my place, tops. And that’s really important because if I need to go there, I don’t want it to go through.
Robbie Kramer [01:48:17]:
Dude, before you were smart and you did it that way, but before I did, I had placed this scattered. What we did when we got new places is we’d move in for a month, we’d set it up, put it on airbnb, and then we’d move out and repeat the process at another place. That’s how we scaled and grew, but we made the mistake. Like when we opened La. We had a place in West Hollywood, and then we got a place in Hollywood, then we got a place in Santa Monica and then Marina del Rey. And when there’s traffic, you know, dialing, that can take an hour to get from West Hollywood to Santa Monica.
Francis [01:48:53]:
Right.
Robbie Kramer [01:48:53]:
And if someone can’t get in the lockboxes and people are retarded, they can’t I keep saying retarded. People are stupid. They can’t figure out a lockbox. Not because it’s too hard, just because they don’t want to take the time. It’s like, oh, I can’t do this. I’m just going to call and annoy somebody. Right. So then you’ve got to make the drive from West Hollywood to Santa Monica to line up the grid on the lockbox and say, here’s your key. Right? Because if you don’t do that, they’re going to cancel and you’re out like $1,500 booking and you have a bad review and a bad review. So another benefit of having like an elock instead of a lockbox, right? There’s these little things that can make a huge difference in your lifestyle and in your reviews, and screwing them up can ruin your entire day. When you got to make that drive and you’ve got like a date or something, you can’t go to the date, you can’t go out with your friends. So there’s like, having the places close to you and removing all possibilities where your time is now lit on fire because there’s like an emergency that you have to address is what makes this business shitty. So if you can take those things off the table, like, your life is great versus having one of the worst jobs ever doing that stuff, definitely.
Francis [01:50:06]:
So I think you have the right mindset in offering something completely different because people want to live experiences, right? I was in Mexico was it last like two years ago, something like that. And I went to Tequila and I met this girl and we went together to Tequila. And we could choose in between having like a regular booking or going glamping on the farm of Jose Cuevo. Dude, we went glamping. It was like no questions asked. We went glamping for sure. So, I mean, if you’re offering something beautiful that is different and attractive to your clientele, well, do it. If you can do it, definitely you’re going to benefit from that, that’s for sure.
Robbie Kramer [01:50:55]:
You can make it instagrammable and people will come and they’ll pay top dollar. I stayed at a place in Romania when I was traveling a few summers ago with Maria, and originally we were going to stay in Bucharest, but we found this Glamping spot, which is like this awesome house with a fire pit and all this land. Even had a little four x four car that came with the listing. So I’m like, dude, I’m going to pay an extra $100 for sure to stay here with my dogs. Maria got a ton of amazing Instagram shots. We took the four x four out and went off roading and the little things like that, that four x four costs them. That thing’s worth like three grand at the most. They don’t give a shit about it.
Francis [01:51:37]:
Right.
Robbie Kramer [01:51:37]:
But that was the difference between getting my booking and not. So like what you’re saying, Francis? These little things that can really add up and bring in the bucks.
Francis [01:51:48]:
Yeah, like another thing, a bottle of wine. You can purchase like a good bottle of wine here in Quebec for like $15. Okay, so you have ten bookings during your month, so that’s $150 that you’re going to put in your expenses anyway. And if you have a place to store them in your unit with the luck. Because obviously if it’s non luck, don’t worry that they’re going to drink them all. But if you leave or it could be bags of chips and bottles of waters or chocolate, something locally made. Like here I was leaving maple syrup candies that were made near Montreal for people in my cabin, in my lodge. So those little extra delicacy, basically, those little extra tots that you’re going to put, they’re going to make a big difference. Definitely. Does that answer your question? Well, I guess so. 100%. Yeah. Thank you. You’re welcome, bro. You’re good. Do we have other questions? Because Robbie, if you allow me, I could show you earlier I was talking to Sid about the apartment that I had that I was renting. Rooms by room.
Robbie Kramer [01:52:56]:
Oh, yeah, go ahead, share your screen. I’ve got a jump in five, but.
Francis [01:53:02]:
Yeah, I’d love to see that you guys see it.
Robbie Kramer [01:53:06]:
All right.
Francis [01:53:06]:
So as you can see, really basic. That was all Ikea. They didn’t go far in the design, but basic beds, like the cheapest bed they had at the Ikea, still looks good. Yeah, I had one wall with color, with the green color and just really basic. Another thing, guys, don’t hesitate in investing in really good pictures. Like hire a professional that’s going to make a difference.
Robbie Kramer [01:53:31]:
Oh, dude. 100%. Having good. Very like the difference. As you can notice in this photo, he’s got all the lights on, the windows open. People want to see bright photos. And most people just take shitty photos and it’s dark and just brightening up your photos will make a huge difference.
Francis [01:53:50]:
Yeah, definitely. And it was the same thing. All my rooms were always the same thing. A little desk, chair, wardrobe, and all the towels. Actually, that room used to be a dining room. We transformed it into a fourth bedroom, obviously. Obviously we invested a lot of money into it. But if you go in the streets and try to find hold furniture just to start with, and then eventually you can go to that level. But it doesn’t have to be all brand new for it to work. Not at all. The most important thing, make sure that you have a great location next to a university. You do have furniture, you do have a cleaning service to offer. And then you just start from there.
Robbie Kramer [01:54:38]:
So it’s great. Very minimal, but looks super clean.
Francis [01:54:42]:
Yeah, redid the entire kitchen. A lot of space. There’s not only one way to do business, there’s multiple ways to do it. But I think that renting rooms, just like renting an entire apartment and then subdiving rooms is a really good way to make money. Definitely.
Robbie Kramer [01:55:07]:
Awesome, dude. Francis this was so fun. I haven’t done a deep dive on airbnb like this in a while. And I love the creativity that you’re putting into it and I love the business. It’s such a fun passion and side hustle or main hustle. It’s been both for me. So really appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom. So generously with us.
Francis [01:55:31]:
Well, I was more than happy to do so. I’m happy to give a little bit back to the community. If you guys have any questions or if you need help, just reach out and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions or to see how I can help you.
Robbie Kramer [01:55:46]:
Awesome. Thanks guys. Who’s ever listening out there, happy Short Term vacation rental. Arbitraging. Peace out. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. If you’re new to the show and digging our content, please leave us a five star review on itunes, Stitcher, YouTube, wherever you listen or watch. But if you’re not really digging it, go ahead. Just don’t leave us any review at all. That’d be great. If you’re feeling a little bit stuck or you just want to optimize and step up your game, we’ve opened up a few spots in our inner confidence community. We’re accepting applications. If you want to join our select group of men and experience a radical power of accountability, cross everything off your sexual bucket list and just become a beast who gets more stuff done. To learn more and apply, go to start interconfidence.com.
