Table of Contents
Podcast Transcription
Dave Dubeau [00:00:09] Welcome to Free Flow Friday, powered by the property Profits Real Estate podcast, I’m Dave Dubeau and I’m very excited to give you an over the shoulder learning experience around raising capital, as well as other tips, tricks and strategies to help you on your real estate investing journey. So let’s start. Let’s discover together. All right. Welcome everybody. This is Dave Dubeau with another one of our zooming and trainings. Our special expert guest today is Mr. Kyle Ford talking about Cottage Rentals 101 and to just prove the fact that he lives what he’s talking about. He zoomed in from the cottage today. So how are you doing today?
Kyle Ford [00:00:48] I’m great, Dave. Thanks for having me on. Well, it’s exciting to talk about cottages.
Dave Dubeau [00:00:51] So yeah, well, I’m really, really excited about this because you guys have got this really, really dialed in. So I can’t wait to see what you’re up to with cottage rentals. The big benefits, you know, this pandemic thing, everybody is freaking out about it. But I think this has done nothing but good things for cottage rentals from what I’ve understood. And we’ll see if you if your crystal ball says it’s going to get going that way.
Kyle Ford [00:01:19] Yeah, it’s been a great year or it’ll be our next year’s forecast and, you know, pre-bookings and stuff. I think the domestic travel is going to be here to stay for a bit and definitely looking at continuing to grow in the space.
Dave Dubeau [00:01:31] Awesome. Very good. Well, I’ll let you take it away, my friend. I’m just going to mute myself and turn off my ugly mug so they can focus on you.
Kyle Ford [00:01:37] Great. I think you’re most great, by the way. Don’t go, Dave, so
Dave Dubeau [00:01:41] I appreciate it.
Dave Dubeau [00:01:42] Thanks. Bye. Awesome.
Kyle Ford [00:01:44] So I have a presentation today, as you can see here, it listed my lovely if you say on your Chelsea, she could be here with us today. She is my co ventura in cottage rental business, so we call cottage rentals one on one. The way I like to do this presentation, tell you a little bit about our self and our story, and our story is a
Dave Dubeau [00:02:01] lot of great, great nuggets
Kyle Ford [00:02:03] on how to build a cottage rental business. So I’ll go to start with a little bit about who we are. We’re real estate investors out of Kitchener originally. We are currently living in Grand Bend, Ontario, which is where both of our cottages are. Our other businesses have moved
Dave Dubeau [00:02:16] basically fully remote, so it’s covered
Kyle Ford [00:02:18] most over the cottage, which I can see my boat and sea views
Dave Dubeau [00:02:22] from my office, so it’s the perfect spot to be.
Kyle Ford [00:02:24] We started investing in 2013. We’ve got all elements of investing, so I’ve been in single family
Dave Dubeau [00:02:30] rentals, triplexes, big building
Kyle Ford [00:02:33] burgers. We flipped pre-construction condos. Most recently, we’re doing so. I do a ton of private lending as well, and most recently were into larger scale land development, the cottage rental, large scale land development. I also am a mortgage broker. I run the call for mortgage team Chelsea, run home staging and design business as well. This is a little outdated as we currently on 11. We actually
Dave Dubeau [00:02:54] own 12 cottages
Kyle Ford [00:02:56] under Shipley Paradise. Kind of. Our focus here is
Dave Dubeau [00:02:59] on clean, as Chelsea would
Kyle Ford [00:03:01] say, and still were the friendly cottages, and we are most recently also expanding into the motel business. So if anyone’s seen the recent motel makeover on Netflix, we have a similar project underway right now, which I’m excited to
Dave Dubeau [00:03:13] share about the future.
Kyle Ford [00:03:14] So just kind of diving in a little bit about the cottage rental business and how we got into it. And, you know, some of the deals that we did, the very first cottage we purchased was back in 2016.
Dave Dubeau [00:03:23] That was prior to Chelsea.
Kyle Ford [00:03:25] In our relationship, I bought this one on my own.
Dave Dubeau [00:03:27] This is a cottage we
Kyle Ford [00:03:28] purchased about two and a half hours north. And when I did this deal, it was predominantly a lifestyle investment. So the goal for me when I did this deal wasn’t massive. Cash flow wasn’t income replacement
Dave Dubeau [00:03:40] wasn’t in those main core investment
Kyle Ford [00:03:43] philosophies that we like to focus on and a lot of our investments.
Dave Dubeau [00:03:46] I just wanted a cottage that
Kyle Ford [00:03:48] the renters paid for when I wasn’t using it, and even if it cost me a couple grand a year at the end, I looked at that as kind of like a vacation budget. So kind of a cool, cool story with this one. Negotiated a 90 percent bender take back mortgage for anybody who doesn’t know what it BTB is, it is when the seller of the property holds the mortgage for you. So there was no credit checks, there was no income verification. We were drinking corona on that lovely dock that you see there when we negotiated this deal in good sound mind, I might add. We negotiated this 90
Dave Dubeau [00:04:21] percent vitb
Kyle Ford [00:04:23] took over this cottage out it for the first year went pretty well. I think it cost me a couple grand am here to own their property, which I would like. I said I was OK with the fall of the year, though. We sort of, you know, we blocked out some weeks, but then we got some good requests for money for those weeks and we decided to rent them out. And before we knew it, this cottage was, you know, it was making money now, but we couldn’t really enjoy it ourselves. So that’s why we made the decision to move to our next property. This is what we call Scoot Shack. You’re going to notice throughout this that we have a lot of cheeky names
Dave Dubeau [00:04:53] for our cottages, scooters, our dog.
Kyle Ford [00:04:55] The branding that we put into the cottage is great for marketing. People love the names. We have part of our repeat business. We have people saying, I see that shack last time I stayed at the place where the time before that. What else do you got? Where else can we stay? They want, they want to experience them all. So this is the second one that we purchase and the same thing with this one. We weren’t really trying to build a cottage business at this point. The challenge was, is we we’re renting out our other cottage so much we couldn’t use it. So we’ve got this one and we said, OK, this is the one. We’re going to use this one most of the time only rented out a little bit. And then we have our cottage. That’s ours. So once again, use of private under to get into this deal, you’re going to see in the cottage business quite specifically around short term rentals. Financing is a very, very difficult. It’s possible. There are definitely
Dave Dubeau [00:05:45] workarounds, but using private
Kyle Ford [00:05:46] money is a great tool that we use to accelerate our growth in this business.
Dave Dubeau [00:05:51] So when we had this one,
Kyle Ford [00:05:53] you’re going to notice this is a bit of a theme as we go here, we are
Dave Dubeau [00:05:57] once again started renting
Kyle Ford [00:05:58] the corridor
Dave Dubeau [00:05:59] too much, couldn’t really enjoy
Kyle Ford [00:06:01] it. Very much started being rented all the time. And that’s what we kind of started having our little bit of our aha moment like, Hey, this cash flow is really good, and I got some long term rentals back Kitchener.
Dave Dubeau [00:06:11] But they are not cash flowing anywhere
Kyle Ford [00:06:14] near what these cottages are.
Dave Dubeau [00:06:16] So an opportunity presented itself.
Kyle Ford [00:06:18] So sorry, I just want to show you some pictures here. This is the of the top was the original, the original, the core of this cottage. As you can see, Chelsea and certified it made it beautiful and great to look at in our experience. We hear people say all the time
Dave Dubeau [00:06:33] they want a rustic cottage
Kyle Ford [00:06:35] experience that is not what our business has found. We found that people want beautiful.
Dave Dubeau [00:06:42] They want granite.
Kyle Ford [00:06:44] They want air conditioning. They want dishwashers. They want all the bells and whistles. They don’t tend to want
Dave Dubeau [00:06:50] what they’ve told us.
Kyle Ford [00:06:51] They want, which is rustic. They want the nice stuff. So there’s a little bit of the before and after.
Dave Dubeau [00:06:56] So you can see here a major kitchen
Kyle Ford [00:06:58] hole in the bottom right here. But some of the rooms that we
Dave Dubeau [00:07:01] just simply painted our flooring
Kyle Ford [00:07:03] and added more beds, you can see it. This one specific room. This sleeps four, they say in this industry, beds and heads. So the more people you can get into a cottage, the
Dave Dubeau [00:07:13] higher the night per
Kyle Ford [00:07:14] rent per night you can get. It obviously increases your cash flow. And also, we have a lot of people that like to combine groups brother, sister, kids, grandma and grandpa or whatever they want to come. That’s how they make it affordable for themselves. And that’s how they. And that’s how we get top dollar for our cottages. So I was there before and after. So this in 2014 is when we purchase our beachfront property, and this is where we started taking the cottage rental business a little bit more seriously. You’re going to see in the next couple of slides some of the things we did. This is another property that we purchased with a vendor take back mortgage. We got it financed over 90 percent loan to value. So it was over a million dollar purchase price and we had the vendor lend us back a million dollars on this. This is a property that we were able to carry for the last several years, and I just before this presentation uploaded our new development that’s going on there. So this started off as just a single family cottage that we rent it off. We’re now putting a luxury
Dave Dubeau [00:08:07] boutique condo building on there. It’s going to be three to four units, depending
Kyle Ford [00:08:11] on what we can get approved.
Dave Dubeau [00:08:13] But this is a luxury boutique type property.
Kyle Ford [00:08:15] Now our attention is actually to live in these condos, not rent them out. But if they were to go on Airbnb or any other short term rental website,
Dave Dubeau [00:08:23] we would be very,
Kyle Ford [00:08:24] very lucrative. These things would rent for five hundred two thousand dollars a night all day long. So going forward from here, this is another interesting strategy and story that I’ll tell you in relation to cottage rentals. This is a property that
Dave Dubeau [00:08:38] was the first unit that
Kyle Ford [00:08:39] I showed you in. Grand Bend were 16 and 17 pine. This property came up and it was 18 broken right at the corner. So I like to say we owned it was the house between Boardwalk and Park Place. So when this property came up full transparency, we were not in a position to buy it. We had their major projects
Dave Dubeau [00:08:57] going on, a lot of other
Kyle Ford [00:08:59] irons in the fire. We are not in
Dave Dubeau [00:09:00] a great position.
Kyle Ford [00:09:01] But the cool thing about this one is there was 10 people that own this cottage, 10 kids around it, and some of them wanted to sell it and some of them did.
Dave Dubeau [00:09:12] What we actually did on this
Kyle Ford [00:09:13] property is we did, and this is a great
Dave Dubeau [00:09:15] tool for you to use when you’re
Kyle Ford [00:09:17] negotiating or buying cottages. It can be an emotional experience for a family to be selling the property. We negotiated a one year close. So we’re going to make the offer today, agreed our price today, put the deposit
Dave Dubeau [00:09:30] down today, but we’re not going
Kyle Ford [00:09:32] to close for a year. And the way we position wasn’t that, hey, we’re not ready to buy it right now. It was. This gives the whole family one last summer. Every kid gets a week at the cottage. Everyone gets a chance to say goodbye to it and then we’ll be close. Closing the following year worked out really well. They went for it right away. They had no idea that had nothing to do with the fact that we weren’t in a position to close on another kind of cool thing that I’ll point out here. If you look in the top right, you can see there’s a bunch of trees over here. That was actually blocking the lake view of this property. So in that? Your time between when we and we own the property across the road, we actually cut down those trees and turn this property from a non-Lakeview property to a Lakeview property. And even after we build our condos, there’s still going to be a Lakeview.
Dave Dubeau [00:10:19] So that was a great
Kyle Ford [00:10:20] way to value. Add to this property by increasing the lake view. So this is a property. We did a full bore on it. We were able to get our full cash out on the refi. We originally closed with a private lender.
Dave Dubeau [00:10:31] This property right
Kyle Ford [00:10:32] now, we purchased for four hundred sixty five four thirty five thousand dollars. And to put it into perspective, it’s renting for about thirty five to four thousand dollars a week. So when we talk about the one percent rule we are generating, well, well above that this is closer to a two percent rule cottage it from there. This is, as I mentioned, this is when we started getting a little bit more serious about it rental space. These are a couple of three other cottages that we bought the previous year. All of these are in the Grand Bend area.
Dave Dubeau [00:10:59] We were buying them. We’re doing flippers
Kyle Ford [00:11:01] on acquiring with private lending, refinancing. To borrow
Dave Dubeau [00:11:04] these two cottages, we were able to increase
Kyle Ford [00:11:07] its value of $200000 in 90 days, which was a pretty cool deal. I’ll show you some before and after. So once again, if you look at the top rate here, we’re not doing a major rehab in some of these. We simply out of the coat of paint, stylish decor,
Dave Dubeau [00:11:22] and these are the things that, you know, really create that Instagram photo experience
Kyle Ford [00:11:28] that people tend
Dave Dubeau [00:11:29] to want really creating a moment.
Kyle Ford [00:11:31] So if you look at below, you can
Dave Dubeau [00:11:32] see here this cottage
Kyle Ford [00:11:34] was mostly clean and. We were able to get a massive lift on this property. Going to the next cottage.
Dave Dubeau [00:11:42] You’ll see here this one. We did more
Kyle Ford [00:11:44] of a full blown rehab. We actually discovered that the previous owners
Dave Dubeau [00:11:48] had lowered the ceiling height by four feet.
Kyle Ford [00:11:51] We got into the project. We were able to see that opened it all up and create this luxury design feel. So we’ll just skip through the years. I know not everyone’s here to see all the pretty photos, but they can be they can be great to look at as well. This is the final one that we bought in 2020. This was kind of a cool deal. This is right. When COVID hit, we were currently sitting with multiple vacant colleges during the first wave of COVID. We were not renting the cottages at all. Everything was shut down. We were honoring the short term rental band, so we shut everything down and a neighbor here actually came to us and said This COVID thing is
Dave Dubeau [00:12:26] going to freak. So we went out to the cottage business.
Kyle Ford [00:12:29] We’re selling it. So we picked this one up for $400000. Put it into perspective, the cottage
Dave Dubeau [00:12:34] was appraised one year
Kyle Ford [00:12:36] later for 850 after our renovations. And as you can see in the bottom left corner, we actually severed a lot of the side of it. We’re going to be building a luxury seven bed for hot bath. So this started off
Dave Dubeau [00:12:49] as, Hey, I want to buy
Kyle Ford [00:12:51] a cottage.
Dave Dubeau [00:12:51] I’m OK with spending a
Kyle Ford [00:12:53] couple of bucks a month. If I had to carry it, I want a vacation to a portfolio of properties and in the larger building and development, so I’ll get into a little bit more of the nuts and bolts here.
Dave Dubeau [00:13:05] This shocks a lot of people
Kyle Ford [00:13:07] are booking way through Airbnb. It is only about 20 percent of our total bookings. So Airbnb is a great tool. It’s one of our core calendars that we use in our business. The actual format and layout of Airbnb is we adopt it. It’s a great way to fill our vacancies, but the bulk of what we do is actually on Facebook. We rent to people who don’t even know if they’re looking for cottages
Dave Dubeau [00:13:32] for a cottage.
Kyle Ford [00:13:33] So Chelsea will post it by its own groups. Facebook Marketplace. Just pictures of our cottage and we get a ton of bookings through that. We have Corgi as well as VRBO, and I believe we’ve tried a little bit of Expedia wasn’t really for us. Bulk of our bookings are private bookings because of the number of cottages we have now. What we do is we do a lot of marketing on Facebook Marketplace, Brian, so we have our own website, Simply Paradise AFRICOM.
Dave Dubeau [00:14:03] Feel free to go there and check it out.
Kyle Ford [00:14:04] We’d love for you guys to give us some feedback if that’s our landing page. So we promote our Facebook go. Check out the website and look at the properties. Look at some of the different locations that we do a lot of cross-sell. From there, we mentioned here naming
Dave Dubeau [00:14:17] the gorgeous branding
Kyle Ford [00:14:18] that’s become very effective for us. We have people who, like I said, they want to come back to the different cottage based on the names. It’s a bit of a funny story. We’re in grand brand. That’s where we live. We’re walking her dog. People hear us. Oh, what do you say? Your dog’s name is Scoot? Oh, that’s the call for saying, right? Yeah, that’s so cool.
Dave Dubeau [00:14:38] It’s cool marketing.
Kyle Ford [00:14:39] It definitely, definitely branding. This is a big one that I want to talk. Maybe spend a little bit more time to camp out on here. Offseason marketing Most people are budgeting way too high vacancy in off
Dave Dubeau [00:14:50] season for
Kyle Ford [00:14:51] their cottages. I’m seeing people say, Well, I’m only going to count on eight months a year because, you know, we’re not going to get any rentals in the winter. We run about a 95
Dave Dubeau [00:15:03] to 98 percent
Kyle Ford [00:15:05] occupancy rate, which is. Almost unheard of. And with that, a lot has to do with is,
Dave Dubeau [00:15:10] first of all, hot tubs, hot tubs of R and I promise
Kyle Ford [00:15:14] you, if you’re getting into the car rental business, you’re going to hate me for telling you to get a hot tub because they are a pain in the butt. There’s a lot of me in this involves, but hot tubs drive our business in the winter rental.
Dave Dubeau [00:15:25] We make a ton of
Kyle Ford [00:15:26] revenue from these hot tubs, and I’ll give you a bit of a break down here. We book our cottages in three booking periods. You can either book
Dave Dubeau [00:15:35] a one week stay from Friday
Kyle Ford [00:15:37] to Friday. You can book a weekend from Friday to Monday, or you can book a
Dave Dubeau [00:15:44] Monday to Friday.
Kyle Ford [00:15:46] So we use it if we break it down to Friday to Sunday and Monday to Friday.
Dave Dubeau [00:15:51] That’s eight booking
Kyle Ford [00:15:53] cycles in a month. On average, you’re going to get eight booking cycles two week times, four weeks, eight booking cycles. If we were to just do in January, $500
Dave Dubeau [00:16:04] per booking cycle, so Monday to
Kyle Ford [00:16:06] Friday for hundred dollars and a Friday and Monday for five hundred dollars, that’s a thousand dollars a week times four weeks US four thousand dollars a month. Times three months in the off season as an additional twelve thousand
Dave Dubeau [00:16:18] dollars in revenue.
Kyle Ford [00:16:19] We are getting a lot more than $500 for those booking
Dave Dubeau [00:16:22] periods the Monday to Friday
Kyle Ford [00:16:25] in January. Yeah, we’re probably getting like six fifty, but that’s better than vacant, right? That’s supporting our off season property maintenance.
Dave Dubeau [00:16:33] So we have to keep
Kyle Ford [00:16:34] we have to maintain the properties anyway, so we might as well have revenue coming through. But on average, we’re getting about six
Dave Dubeau [00:16:39] fifty for a Monday to Friday
Kyle Ford [00:16:41] and about 900 to a thousand for a weekend. We do promotions with local restaurants and businesses to recommend them as
Dave Dubeau [00:16:48] things as something to do
Kyle Ford [00:16:50] at the court. We had the hot tubs, which is the main driver. We do little things like board games. People are looking for different things to do in here. I based out of Ontario.
Dave Dubeau [00:17:00] I mean, you and your
Kyle Ford [00:17:01] spouse can only go to Niagara Falls so many times for the weekend. I mean, it gets old fast. So we have so many people coming here to do, you know, just a couples weekend or a couple of friends from high school or getting together.
Dave Dubeau [00:17:14] And if you have for couples for a weekend in
Kyle Ford [00:17:17] January, for 800 bucks, it’s 200 bucks per couple. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the hotel. This part of our business has been actually dramatically improved from COVID, where we’ve seen a lot more revenue coming through. I’ll use this section to talk a little bit about COVID and some of the challenges that we’ve seen a go of it since COVID. We had
Dave Dubeau [00:17:37] three short term rental
Kyle Ford [00:17:39] lockdowns,
Dave Dubeau [00:17:40] so essentially
Kyle Ford [00:17:42] the government saying that short term rentals is non-essential business. So during the first lockdown, we fully shut down. Obviously, COVID was new. So many unknowns. We didn’t want to be a part of the problem. We fully shut down our business, shut down all rentals, canceled. Everybody did not have anyone when the second lockdown came around, pivoted. So we made the decision that the short term rental ban was 28 days or less, and this was in February. So we decided to rent the
Dave Dubeau [00:18:11] cottages for a month.
Kyle Ford [00:18:13] You can rent it for a month for 30 days and work from home for the next lockdown. It actually works pretty well. We got a handful of bookings at the cottages that were available. People saying, Hey, I’ve been locked in my house for a year
Dave Dubeau [00:18:25] ago for two thousand
Kyle Ford [00:18:26] dollars, three thousand dollars for a month. Sure, we’ll go hang out at the cottage and work from there. We made sure we were respectful to the rules. We asked people to quarantine when they got there, not show up at the local grocery store right away, wait until they were good and healthy and all that stuff once again in the small towns. We want to make sure we’re respectful of our neighbors and the cottage communities who can be a little bit more fearful of people traveling from out of town. So that was the second lockdown. By the time the third lockdown came around, the rules became pretty clear.
Dave Dubeau [00:18:53] You’re only allowed to rent to
Kyle Ford [00:18:55] people who are in need of housing. So we adjusted all of our bookings that every person who came to the cottage had to declare that they were in need of housing.
Dave Dubeau [00:19:04] So we did lose bookings.
Kyle Ford [00:19:06] What I mentioned the 95 to 98 percent occupancy, that’s not including COVID. When we were in those short term rental bands, we were running about 60, maybe 70 percent occupancy. But what we do felt is there was a lot of
Dave Dubeau [00:19:20] people still
Kyle Ford [00:19:21] looking for accommodations, so that was people who were
Dave Dubeau [00:19:26] there. We heard everything
Kyle Ford [00:19:27] under the Moon. Our house is getting renovated, so we booked a cottage. We are finally the other contractors in there are going to be working at the house. We booked the cottage to stay. We’re in need of housing.
Dave Dubeau [00:19:36] We heard some not as good stories.
Kyle Ford [00:19:39] We’re having marital problems. Myself and my kids are going to come stay at the cottage for a couple of weeks.
Dave Dubeau [00:19:44] I suppose that on its face,
Kyle Ford [00:19:46] we’ve heard more positive
Dave Dubeau [00:19:47] stories. People, Hey, listen, we’re
Kyle Ford [00:19:49] working remote
Dave Dubeau [00:19:50] now. We love Grand Bend. We’re going to put
Kyle Ford [00:19:52] this for two weeks.
Dave Dubeau [00:19:53] We’re house shopping. We’re coming up.
Kyle Ford [00:19:55] We’re looking to move to this area.
Dave Dubeau [00:19:57] We’re going to relocate.
Kyle Ford [00:19:58] We’re out shopping. So we actually were quite surprised at how busy we were in the third lockdown when we made ourselves available to be in need of emergency housing.
Kyle Ford [00:20:09] We did have the police called in with some of the neighbors didn’t think we were following the rules. The police, I showed them all of the emails. I showed them some of the stories from the tenants about why they were staying and the police fully deem that we were operating within the rules and did not. We weren’t fined, we were charged and we were advised that we were welcome to proceed under those terms. So definitely, definitely scary times for some short term rental operators. But I encourage you to look at your area, look at what the rules are in your area, what are the guidelines? What does everybody say is allowed? Talk to your counselor, talk to the local police and by all means, follow the rules. The rules exist for a reason. We got to keep everyone safe, but you can still operate a profitable business. So I wanted to add that section in the off season marketing here to some tips and tricks around expensive management. Our businesses are basically all Google. Right now links really well, shares on email. We use a Google Sheet to communicate with our maintenance people at the point right now we have a full time guest experience manager who does all the front end of the business. Chelsea does all the sales and we have two maintenance guys, so the sheets work really well. When we get maintenance requests, then we have the maintenance guys go out. They can this hot tub maintenance confirming things. We’re done on time. So Google Drive works really well for us. We use Excel spreadsheets and for our internal stuff and the Airbnb calendar for our master calendar. This is a great one here. We have brought our cleaning in-house now where we have on staff cleaners as well. Generally, that’s not going to make sense for you until you heard about the five property range. Until then, work in hire with a reputable, cleaner or cleaning companies and pay them well, do not nickel and dime these cleaners, these cleaners, especially if you’re not local to the property. These people can be you’re the holy grail for you through your saviors. They’re able to. We have cleaners that do product runs, so they go pick things up for us. They go get things for us. They help and assist with any issues.
Kyle Ford [00:22:09] So we’ve had people not leaving the property on time, cleaners showing up on time, making sure they’re removed. Just little stuff like that. Higher power and embrace your cleaner, damaged deposits. Make sure you take them. Sometimes we’ve had very few times where we had to, but when you have to, you have to signage and cottages. I call them Chelsea passive aggressive designs, but they’re great. You need to be clear with people you can’t expect. There’s a reason why Tim Hortons still has to put the coffee is hot, right? You have to be clear with people and the science, the science are going to make your management easier if you’re self-managing in the beginning. And I love witnesses. Chelsea part. But she put a professional college check in instructions, the FDA cues. So there’s a bit of an example on the bottom line here that was for our template of hard knocks life. That’s another cottage we own. Knox is our son, so that’s kind of a cheeky, another cheeky name, but these are the professional chucking instructions. Once again, this some things might seem obvious to you, but if you’ve never been there, you don’t necessarily know we have people traveling from abroad who don’t speak English. So when they’re coming to this new country, a new cottage, they don’t necessarily know everything. Now translating these things can be harder but giving them as much information as possible is going to make your life easier from a management perspective. The ethics are absolutely key. I think that pretty much wraps things up, not here for a sales pitch by any means, but purchasing a booking and put it simply paradise. If you have any questions on mortgages, my emails, my emails that. Oh, smokes that car, which was awesome. Thanks, buddy, and my hat off to you and Chelsea for doing such a kickass job with this business model. I mean, you guys deserve all the success that you’re enjoying because you are treating this like a business. Sounds like you kind of stumbled into it in a fun way. Yeah, but you know. Absolutely, absolutely fantastic. I love your cheeky names. I can see why that is so appealing. I can see why so many people want to hop from cottage to cottage within your portfolio instead of finding somebody else. Because A It’s fun. B, You’ve got these Instagram worthy cottages, so your head and shoulders above some of your competition, I’m sure. Yup. And you just seems like you guys are just super professional and very, very well organized. So yeah, that is awesome. And hey, Ben, I want to I just want to tell you, thank you so much for playing out such a clear explanation. I say, OK, well, I’m going to come up with some questions. But he answered all the damn questions. I, that was a big one. I was going to ask is about the housekeeping. So that was really good because I was going, OK, at what point you hire your own crew? When does that make sense? Okay. Five plus cottages. I can see that other things that popped into my head from your presentation, as it really is all about how many people you can get in that cottage. The number of beds, number of heads. You know, me and our family were staying at an Airbnb in Mexico this this December, and that was a big thing, right? Because it’s exactly that. It’s myself, my wife, her son, my adult kids, their partners. So how do we all stuff into, you know, it’s all about how do we all get the same place and have a good time? So yeah, man, that is absolutely fantastic. And I also like the fact that you’re really, really focused on one community like you’ve created your own little monopoly board there, like you say, old, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, all three of the properties there and then the fact that you got the owner financing and yet you’re able to make it a real win for that family because I was thinking when he said there’s 10 kids involved in going, Oh my God. And if someone want to sell, some don’t, then. So that was an estate situation kind of thing. Yeah, my grandma passed away. She had 10 children. The five wanted to sell five 10, but they were out of money. The estate was out of money to pay for it, so it wasn’t really a choice. But when my offer came in with a one year close, everybody gets one last hurrah. Yeah, it was like they did their calculations. They had just enough money for another year that it had sold them, so they have to worry about the market crashing. Everybody gets one more vacation, so it worked out really well.
Dave Dubeau [00:26:43] It did work out really well. Plus you got a little bit of cash up front to know that you’re serious and help cover the costs for the year and all that kind of stuff. That’s right. Oh, really, really smart. So if you don’t mind sharing how much of your focus is on this area? I know your full time mortgage broker as well, but within your portfolio, is this your main thing these days?
Kyle Ford [00:27:04] Candidly, Dave, no, it’s Chelsea is the full time operator of this business now. She and we built the infrastructure. We have the full time guest experience manager. She’s on salary, she runs the front end. We have two cleaners on staff, plus four more independent contractors. We have two maintenance people
Dave Dubeau [00:27:23] on staff, plus two more
Kyle Ford [00:27:24] independent contractors. So I run. I still am involved in the construction and the development side, as well as the financing side. But as the front end operator, no, does Chelsea. I know it’s a pretty major development stuff in the mortgage business right now, which is be where my focus is now.
Dave Dubeau [00:27:41] That makes sense. Well, again, Karl, thank you so much for sharing that. That was super cool, my friend. And yeah, you guys are. You’re looking for a cottage in Nigeria now, you know the guy that can get you hooked up, that’s for sure. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Let’s see. Oh, Suzanne’s watching here on Facebook. No question. Just says thanks very much, David. Karl was very good, Suzanne. Thanks for being part of this. And Karl, thanks for sharing. And we’ll get this up on the podcast. I think a lot of people are going to get some great value from this.
Kyle Ford [00:28:11] Yeah, happy to help Dave. And yeah, anyone looking for a cottage is a great bed area. Happy to help if you have questions, guys.
Dave Dubeau [00:28:18] You know, Chelsea and I are happy to help you.
Kyle Ford [00:28:20] Sure. Quick message We’re never too
Dave Dubeau [00:28:23] busy to take the time to answer. Answer a small
Kyle Ford [00:28:25] question to help get someone started.
Dave Dubeau [00:28:27] Well, that was the other cool thing that I appreciate you sharing is about the marketing, because my initial assumption is it’s probably 90 percent Airbnb, 10 percent everything else. And it’s almost the opposite. You guys are 80 percent other stuff, 20 percent Airbnb, which was surprising,
Kyle Ford [00:28:42] and that’s how we hit our occupancy rate. Yeah. I’ll do a little bit of a humblebrag here, but almost nobody is running 98 percent occupancy at a cottage,
Dave Dubeau [00:28:53] not on a seasonal thing. Yeah, for sure.
Kyle Ford [00:28:56] Nobody’s doing that. And when we post those Monday to Fridays in January for six hundred bucks, you know, we’re not a tech forward environment.
Dave Dubeau [00:29:05] We’re in the COVID environment.
Kyle Ford [00:29:07] We get a lot of couples being like, No, I’m homeschooling my kids right now. We just want to go look at a different color of paint on the wall. Like we don’t we don’t care. We just want to go somewhere else and do something else.
Dave Dubeau [00:29:19] Or, you know,
Kyle Ford [00:29:20] we’ll get construction guys coming up in the area. So like, we’re cool at our podium, we’re going to take the cottage and pocket our podium and what we’re going to hang out and drink beer and hang out in your hot tub at night. Not all of us.
Dave Dubeau [00:29:32] Sure, that’s fine.
Kyle Ford [00:29:33] So it’s but by doing that direct marketing on Facebook that filling things in advance and then our calendars are full on Airbnb, which I think creates a bit of that scarcity
Dave Dubeau [00:29:46] before like, Oh man,
Kyle Ford [00:29:47] this place is put all the time like, look, there’s a small get in now. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. So yeah, it’s a once again that was another thing that you just kind of started
Dave Dubeau [00:29:57] where we were on
Kyle Ford [00:29:58] Airbnb. And, you know, when we started leveling up a little bit of my chill start, like posting on Facebook, we’re going to build these things. And before we knew it, that became our primary, you know, primary source of rental.
Dave Dubeau [00:30:11] That is so cool that Carl. Thank you so much, my friend. I truly I truly, truly appreciate it. Yeah, fantastic.
Kyle Ford [00:30:19] No problem, Dave.
Dave Dubeau [00:30:20] Thanks for having me on. Got a guy who can help with our experiences.
Dave Dubeau [00:30:23] All right. Take care, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Doctors are just like, what problem? Well, hey there. Thanks for tuning into the property Profits podcast if you’d like this episode. That’s great. Please go ahead and subscribe on iTunes. Give us a good review. That’d be awesome. I appreciate that. And if you’re looking to attract investors and raise capital for your deals, that may invite you to get a complimentary copy of my newest book Right Back There. There it is the money partner formula. You’ve got a PDF version, an investor attraction book dot com again investor attraction, book dot com. Take care.