In today's episode of Get Paid for Your Pad, we had the pleasure of hosting Nate and Dan, two successful short-term rental hosts, as they shared their valuable insights and strategies for running a profitable Airbnb business. Throughout our conversation, they discussed various topics ranging from pricing strategies to maximizing five-star reviews and even touched on their upcoming venture, a real estate fund.
Nate and Dan emphasized the importance of tiered pricing based on the length of the stay. They found that offering two-night stays for bookings within 10 days, three-night stays for bookings within 25 days, four-night stays for bookings within 40 days, and five-night stays for bookings beyond 60 days helped them optimize their revenue. They also mentioned allowing one-night “orphan” bookings to fill gaps in their calendar, but with increased prices to attract quality guests and avoid potential issues.
When it comes to earning five-star reviews, Nate and Dan shared their proven strategies. They implemented an automated guest messaging system that sends messages at various points during the guest's stay, including a follow-up message the day after their first night. They also leveraged DoorDash and Instacart to fulfill guest requests promptly and efficiently. By actively engaging with their guests, providing exceptional service, and requesting five-star reviews, they managed to maintain a remarkable streak of 117 consecutive five-star reviews, which significantly boosted their rankings on platforms like Airbnb.
Throughout the conversation, Nate and Dan highlighted the importance of educating guests on the Airbnb review system, as many guests are accustomed to the traditional hotel rating system. They explained that a five-star review signifies a good stay, while anything below that indicates a less satisfactory experience. By educating their guests and encouraging open communication, they created a positive guest-host relationship, resulting in satisfied guests and higher ratings.
In terms of advice for aspiring hosts, Nate and Dan emphasized the significance of taking care of guests, actively listening to their needs, and personalizing their interactions. They also stressed the importance of creating efficient systems and processes to save time and address any recurring issues promptly. Additionally, they highlighted the value of building a strong team and fostering a sense of camaraderie among team members, recognizing their contributions, and celebrating successes together.
Towards the end of the episode, Nate and Dan discussed their latest venture—a real estate fund aimed at allowing investors to passively participate in short-term rental properties. They expressed their ambition to scale their business, diversify into different property types, and continue growing their success.
To learn more about Nate and Dan's short-term rental properties in Ohio, visit their website at HomeHopPM.com. If you're interested in investing in their real estate fund or have any inquiries, you can reach out to Nate at nate.clatt@homehoppm.com.
This episode provided valuable insights and practical strategies for hosts looking to elevate their Airbnb business, optimize pricing, earn five-star reviews, and scale their operations. Nate and Dan's success story serves as an inspiration and showcases the potential of the short-term rental industry when approached with dedication, innovation, and a customer-centric mindset.
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Read The Script Here
Jasper Ribbers:
Welcome back to Get Paid for Your Pad. Today I have two guests on the show. We have Nate and Dan. They are the founders of Homehop, a short-term rental management company out of Cleveland, Ohio. And they've both been in our rising star mastermind for a while. I actually met up with Nate a couple days ago on the weekends at dinner here on the beautiful San Diego on the beach, which was a lot of fun. And I'm excited to dive into it. We're going to talk about how… These guys went from flipping to owning to managing and now starting their own short term rental fund. So super interesting journey. Nate, Dan, welcome to the show guys.
Nate:
Yep, thanks
Dan:
Appreciate
Nate:
for having
Dan:
you having
Nate:
us.
Dan:
us on.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, absolutely. So Nate, I want to start with you. Can you give us a quick backstory of what Homehop does and what you guys focus on?
Nate:
Absolutely. So Dan and I got started together in 2020, doing flips. Prior to that, just to kind of give one more backdrop, originally, Michigan State grad, CPA background, so my accounting has always been focused on accounting, finance, always knew I wanted to own and operate a business and know what that path would be. Dan and I combined forces in 2020. We did our first flip and we actually purchased our first home in February right when COVID hit. So great timing. Thankfully that went well. We did a total of 10 flips together, made some money, had some heartaches, got to deal with a lot of contractors, which wasn't our favorite. Ultimately in 2021, we launched our first Airbnb. And during that time, we went from one Airbnb up to nine Airbnbs now owned. Really learned a lot of the systems processes together. And then with that success, we brought on our first client for property management earlier this year. up to now eight clients in scaling. And then now, as you mentioned there, we're looking to create a fund and I'm sure we'll jump into more of that, but that's kind of in a nutshell, kind of our story from owning, flipping to owning to property management to now fund.
Jasper Ribbers:
You guys are moving fast in three years, going from flipping to now owning eight properties you said and managing nine and now you're starting your own fund. That's, yeah, that's you moving fast. Is that how you used to operate when you were in the NFL as well?
Nate:
My roommate managed to make the NFL. I did not quite get there, but definitely learned from having a plan of attack and figuring out how we were gonna strategize in order to get to our goals. And Dan and I both have goals in order to create, again, generational wealth for our family and to be able to kind of afford some of the different aspects we wanna do with our families as we grow. So it's all about kind of setting those goals and how do we execute.
Jasper Ribbers:
Awesome. Love it. Love it. Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about the what we have in Legends X is called the playbook. Basically, you know, a combination of documents where we have all of our systems, our processes and everything. And I believe that in American football, like the coaches also have a playbook, right? For the players, isn't that right?
Nate:
Yeah, we actually had a coach, Coach Trestle, who's Ohio State's old coach. He had his own playbook that they had for the summer for teams and Coach D'Antonio, my head coach at Michigan State, was a defensive coordinator at Ohio State whenever they won their championship in 2001, kind of copied that. So it's pretty cool to see the playbook we would have every summer camp. And it was, a lot of it was really around this goal, this mindset. Again, how do we… ensure that we're preparing for success and a lot of that goes back to that mental toughness, making sure you kind of are able to roll the punches during the hard times and then celebrate during the good times.
Jasper Ribbers:
Right on, right on. Awesome. Dan, I wanna start with you with a question. You shared something in Mastermind today around Chet GPG, which I thought was very interesting. I haven't really had a chance to take a good look at it yet, but you wanna share what you learned. I know you're a big fan of Chet GPG and implementing its power into the short rental business.
Dan:
Yeah, absolutely. So we are very tech focused. Tech has helped us streamline a bunch of things and GPT actually came out. I don't know if it was yesterday or recently, but they have an option now that's called code interpreter, which means you can upload files and it'll also send you files. So perfect example for SDRs is I went into our PMS I pulled all of our reservations from May up until today, which is July 18th. And I had to analyze each property and I came up with the average length of stay, the ADR, average daily rent, and how far in advance those guests booked. And it's really powerful. That was just the first idea I had as far as how can I analyze our data to really implement and set those higher minimum night stays depending on how far the booking's out. That's just one way we use GPT and again that's just something I found out today and I'm excited to learn more about it as we continue to grow.
Jasper Ribbers:
It's pretty crazy how powerful JetDBG is and how quickly it evolves as well, right?
Dan:
Oh
Jasper Ribbers:
I
Dan:
yeah.
Jasper Ribbers:
feel like every week there's a new functionality in that thing.
Dan:
We recently started using it for our listing descriptions too. So what I'll do is I'll copy and paste like the top four to six listings in our market. And I'll tell it, I'll say, act as an SEO expert, identify the keywords that you think are allowing these listings to rank higher. And then what I'll do is I'll ask it to then create our listing description using those keywords. And then the important thing too at the end is telling it to give you any questions that'll help provide a better output, and then it'll ask you questions, and boom, it uses those keywords and creates our descriptions for us too.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, it's amazing. And another student in our group recently used ChatTPG to create new captions for all her photos. And she instantly got a little boom from Airbnb and got like five bookings right away. So it's definitely worth spending like 30 seconds to get ChatTPG to write all that stuff for us now, right?
Nate:
And one of the things that we're actually, again, always kind of looking for the new software that we want to leverage, and we mentioned this a little bit on Saturday when we had dinner together, but we implemented Yada AI about a month ago. And that's been fascinating to see how we can leverage, again, bump gas. So right now we onboard our first VA. Six months ago had a little bit of turbulence. Recently actually hired a newer recent VA that had worked for Airbnb before. She's been on board for a month. Absolutely fantastic. But on the weekends, it's myself, Dan and our director of operations running the show and we were looking for how do we really get this relief, the support. Late at night, I don't want to be looking at my phone. It's been amazing to see the success with Yotta. And then one of the pieces that we're excited about that we're in beta testing with them right now is this ability for them to actually go in and move the pixels around a little bit or to change the description a little bit. So again, it can help to boost the algorithm for Airbnb to say, hey, they are active on their listings and they're creating this, again, algorithmic boost for us. So something
Jasper Ribbers:
Hmm.
Nate:
that we're still kind of testing with, but it's been a good success so far.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, for those who are listening, if you're not aware of Yeda.ai, it's actually an automated messaging software that uses AI to respond to messages. So it's a very smart piece of software. It's pretty cool. I looked into it. I haven't started using it yet because I'm waiting for them to integrate with Hostly so that we can start using them as well. I'm really excited about that. But essentially, what you can do is you can upload a bunch of content and information. And then it will base the answers that it sends to the Airbnb guests or any other guests, it will base it on the information that you provide. Right. So, um, how, how has your experience been with them? Is, is there, are there a lot of questions where you have to kind of intervene or, or sometimes maybe it answers in a way that you don't really want it to answer. Or any, any challenges with that at all? Or.
Dan:
Nate, do you wanna take this one? Or do you want me to take this one?
Nate:
You got it, Dan.
Dan:
Cool. So overall it's been great. There's been a couple of times where it doesn't quite understand what the guest is asking. Most cases it just won't respond if it doesn't know. But there have been a couple of cases where it's not quite what we want, but it's all about just training Yada on each specific listing. So. What we've done, and we do this with our VA, anytime a guest has a question that maybe it doesn't pick up on, we just copy and paste that, add it to the knowledge base for that property, and now it knows. You can also test it. So per listing, when you're under the settings, there's like a little test on the side panel, and you can go in there, ask it whatever question you want, and it'll spit out the answer. But I will say, when we originally turned it on for the first time, We had an issue with a guest where they couldn't get inside and it gave them the directions to the lock box, the lock box combo, what key the door works to and it saved us 15 minutes of going through our nodes, figuring out all that information, the backup combo and it was awesome. So very, very well worth it.
Jasper Ribbers:
Wow.
Nate:
And just to preface that, we do use Smart Locks, but that was more of the backup system in case of. But definitely was a beneficial tool to have in place. And then again, it's all about that training.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah. So I know you guys are pretty tech heavy, very focused on like operational efficiencies in your business. Aside from Yara.ai and ChetGPT, are there any other like cool technologies or software that you guys use in your business?
Dan:
Nate, I'll say the one and then I'll let you cover the rest of them. The one that I absolutely love is, and it's just simple, it's Zapier. So what we do, we use Slack for our cleaners. And so I set up a bot to where it analyzes that cleaning channel and anytime a specific cleaner says this property is cleaned and ready, it automatically creates a zap. It uploads that bill into QuickBooks. And from QuickBooks, I can now see, okay, what's been paid or which cleaner has been paid, which cleaner hasn't been paid. Because once you get to like a certain threshold of properties, at least for us, it starts to get a little hectic. It's just creating a system for anything and everything. So that's helped tremendously. Because I wasn't able to track which cleaners have been paid, which ones haven't, and this is just on autopilot. I check it once a day, go in, pay everyone up, and we're good to go. So that's one of my favorite pieces. I know we have quite a few others, but Nate, I'll let you touch on those.
Nate:
Yeah. And again, for us, it really is how do we put the best process in place? And again, Zapier is a great tool to be able to connect everything. Um, we recently switched from Logify to HostAway and we've… absolutely been blown away with kind of having HostAway in there. Obviously they got the big $175 million raise. You can see the support behind there when it comes to their tech, when it comes to their customer service. So this has been a fantastic transition for us and really giving us visibility that we didn't always have. And especially as we're looking to raise this fund, you really need to have that visibility to provide to investors. And then just some simple ones like I use, We didn't have Slack implemented before, and now we have Slack, so we have all eight of our cleaners on Slack. We have our maintenance men on Slack. My Slack actually just went off as I said that. I'll have to mute that here. But having everybody in one channel to where we're able to have great communication, there was a lot of one-off text messages. There was a lot of, hey, you have this institutional knowledge, I don't. And that really started to put a drain and a burden on our time resources. So simple ones like that and again, another one that's kind of down that path is Asana. So again, now that we have a larger team, making sure that we create tasks on a timely manner. You can integrate Asana with Slack so you can quickly do within Asana. You have a reference back to it. Really, it's been a game changer for organization and structure.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, I love that we are enthusiastic users of Zapier as well. And some of the tools you mentioned, Slack for communication and then Asana for task management. That's a big one as well. We recently switched to ClickUp actually, but Asana is awesome. And yeah, what I love about Zapier is that you can just connect all those different tools, right? Like getting a Slack notification if someone like. completed a task or pretty much like anything, any type of information that you want, like you can use Zapier to set that up. So it's definitely one of my favorite tools as well. And Loom, I love Loom.
Nate:
We,
Dan:
Yes.
Nate:
we, yeah. What,
Dan:
Another…
Nate:
what I was going
Dan:
Go
Nate:
to say,
Dan:
ahead, mate.
Nate:
what, what other, this is more just like a tip or trick and I think at this point, everyone knows price labs. So I don't think that's new to say price labs, but, um, one thing that I've been surprised by and we've taken over a couple, uh, clients from previous property managers. and just talking to potential clients. And everyone always talks about the, you know, let me have all my two night stays or three night stays or one night stays and that's how I'm gonna fill my property. And if anyone's not taking advantage of leveraging the longer far out stays and requiring the five plus nights if you're 60 plus or 90 days away, you know, I Jasper you've, I've probably listened to every single one of your podcasts at this point. It's how I learned all my information. I've heard it once or twice mentioned, but for me it was one of the game changers was really making sure that we're trying to ensure longer stays. That's really how you fill your occupancy and boost your revenues.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, that's a good tip. So let's dig a little deeper into that, actually. So are you guys using one night or two night stays for short-term bookings within a month or so?
Nate:
So we have it's base right now where if it's less than 10 days, we'll do two. If it's less than 25, we'll do three, and then 40, we'll do four, and then 60 plus, we'll do five. So we kind of tier it out. And then we do allow what they call orphan nights within Price Labs. So if there's a booking that checks out on Tuesday and a new booking on Thursday, we will allow one night booking. One thing we found as well though is we want to ensure that we have quality guests. And for us, it's making sure that we actually increase the prices. So if we do have a one day booking and it's that orphan night, we'll usually raise the price by anywhere from 50 to 100% based on whether it's a weekend or a weekday night. Again, it's not worth the headache to take on a one night booking and have someone come in, have a party, trash the place. So we've really found that to be a way to ensure that we get the quality guests we're looking for.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, that makes sense. And then so like 60 days out, you said you have five nights or more. Do you get a lot of those bookings?
Nate:
I would say we have at least most properties every one a month, I would say, on average. So we do get a good amount where it's, there's a five night booked six days in advance for each property, somewhere in that range. Obviously during the summer, you might have two or three in there and during the winter, it might be every other month. So there is some seasonality to it. But we definitely do get our fair share of it. And we've found, you know, I was actually looking at Host Away today and from, for our our 17 properties that we have, we're sitting at 75% occupancy through July 1st or July 31st with a few more days that we'll probably book. And again, I think that's really a tribute to we had a lot of our bookings in advance and we were being cognizant of the market as well. Again, you don't want to brag about occupancies because you're too low priced. So again, trying to kind of find that right balance of we're properly priced, but we're still having the high occupancy.
Jasper Ribbers:
One thing that I noticed is you guys are very focused on getting as many five-star reviews as possible. And I know you guys have some specific strategies on how to maximize those five-star reviews. Can you touch on that?
Dan:
Yeah, so it's funny we're talking about this because in the beginning I was completely against it. So Nate had mentioned that we needed to create some sort of system around guest messaging. And one of the pieces of that system was sending an automatic message to our guests the morning after their first night, just checking in. And initially I was like, no, it's a horrible idea because everyone's going to need anything and everything. and I'm our boots on the ground, so I'm the one running a towel to their place or a light bulb or whatever's missing. So I was initially against it, and ultimately we did implement it and we just figured it out. So what we do is as soon as a guest books with us, they get an automatic message 10 minutes after they book, just saying, hey, thank you for booking with us. A little bit of details on Nate and myself. They get another message. the day prior to their check-in with their code and security system code. They get another message the day of check-in just with some basic details of the property. They get another message the day after their first night, again, just checking in and seeing how everything went. And on that piece too, what we started doing is we started leveraging DoorDash and what's the other one, Instacart. So anytime a guest does need something, it's not me. running 45 minutes one way just to give them a towel. We'll do DoorDash or if it's something a little bit larger or less urgent, we just overnight it via Amazon. So that's been a huge help. And then they get their checkout instructions, of course. And then from there, Nate, I can't remember if it's automatic or if you do it manually, but Nate will send them another bump from his account saying, hey, just wanna ensure. that we met all your expectations, and we talk about the importance of a five-star review, how we're a small two-man team and looking to grow, and then we also open feedback as well. And what we found is a lot of guests, they'll still leave us a five-star, and they'll give us a list of feedback privately. And once we implemented that, Nate, what was our streak? I think it was 117 consecutive five-star reviews, which just… crush the Airbnb algorithm, at least that's what I think it is. But if you look at any of our listings, we're usually in like the top six. So absolute game changer for anybody who's not already using our scheduled messages.
Jasper Ribbers:
You want to elaborate on that, Nate, at all?
Nate:
Yeah, I think one thing that's always a little people are hesitant about is asking for the five star. So there's a little bit of you don't want to be an annoyance to your guests. But throughout our messaging, Dan has three different messages that are auto messages that reference five stars. And we actually give them the definition saying, hey, if you don't give us a five star, that means you had a bad stay. So four star is a bad stay. And then admittedly, all kind of self-select and, you know, 95 percent of our guests have a good stay. I'll send the bump up again and say, hey, following up on Dan's message, I just left you a five star, appreciate if you do the same, appreciate you. And then also offer them a 5% discount if they return for us. And it's kind of funny because during that streak, we actually had a guest that, I can't remember what the exact issue was, but she had a small issue and she was like, hey, I can't in good content give you a five star, do you want me to leave you a four star? And she asked us. And I was like, no, I'd rather you not leave us a four star. I appreciate the feedback so we can grow and get better, but I'd appreciate it if you just left a no review. And again, that goes back to the fact that we did, we intentionally asked them. We do try to develop a relationship with them. So in that intro message, it talks about, you know, I was a football player, talks about it. I'm getting a. Shout out to Beth, I'm getting married to my fiance here in a week and a half. I talk about that in our intro message. Dan talks about his two little daughters and his wife. So we try to make it personal. We do try to have fun with our guests. And I think that really goes a long way where, again, if they can see you're trying and you're gonna actively make an effort to correct anything, that's really what's gonna change the game. And for us
Jasper Ribbers:
Mm-hmm.
Nate:
in 2003, sorry, 2023. Our average effective rating now is sitting at 496 and you know, we have nice properties, but I'm not going to say we have Premier luxury properties. They're very nice, but a lot of that really goes back to creating systems controls and messaging with the guests
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah. And I mean, there's, you know, one thing I think that Airbnb could do a bit better job of is educating our guests on how this reviews system really works. Right. Cause a lot of guests, especially that are new to Airbnb, they're used to the hotel rating system. And, you know, I've, I remember in the beginning when I started hosting, I had a several guests who let me, a four star review who wrote, who then wrote like an imagine an incredible like feedback, right? Like. And so I would ask him, I was like, Hey, just out of curiosity, like, you know, what, what went wrong or was there an issue? And they would be like, no, it was amazing. And I was like, so what did you leave a four star review? And then their mind is like, well, isn't that really good? Like, you know, your apartment was, you know, like really good, but it wasn't like the four seasons. And I'll be like, okay, I get it. Like we really have to educate our guests that it's really like a five star is, it means it was a good stay. A four star means it wasn't good, right? Cause cause a lot of guests just are not aware of that, right?
Nate:
And I'd be curious too, and I don't know, you know, the people we talked to, but, and I don't know if we have an exact stat around this, but asking for that review as well, you really then get that additional feedback, that additional reviews, because one, that way you kind of know, hey, this is how, you know. The name of the game is I want 150, I want 300 reviews and that way people know it's a great. And to that point too, I do think like it'd be nice if it was a 10 star out of five star, but I can't, you know, I'm not changing anytime soon because, you know, a four star versus five star in some people's minds are, you know, just a hair difference.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, sometimes I feel like the just having the five tiers is not ideal. Like, if you look at booking.com or something, it's a number from zero to 10. So booking.com, if you see like 8.6 or 8.8, I mean, that's pretty good. Right? But on Airbnb, if you see a 4.5, that's basically a nine, right? But a 4.5, if you look at 4.5, you're like, okay, well, this house is doing something wrong. So it just doesn't really make sense, this whole system, isn't it?
Nate:
No, it's definitely, especially if people don't travel in Airbnb and that's where again, it's educating your guests. You have to educate, educate whenever you're, I mean whether it's Airbnb or anything else.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, exactly. And there's, there's a bit of a balance, right? We don't want to flat out tell a bribe our guests and tell them like, Hey, you know, give me a five star and I'll give you this or give you that, or specifically asking like, Hey, you know, just leave us a five star review. And the end of the day, like it has to, it has to kind of come from them. And, but definitely like we, we need to provide them education and make sure that they're aware of how the system works, make sure that they're aware, which you guys do a great job at of checking in and. You know, allowing, giving them space to provide your feedback or to let you know that if there's something you miss so that you can fix it. And then what I noticed is like, you know, if there's a, if they're like, there's always like tiny little things, you know, nothing's perfect, I guess. Um, but if you offer that to your guests of like, Hey, let me know if, if anything, if we can do anything to make you stay better, you know, where our goal is to provide a five star experience. If then they don't respond to that. And they, when they, and then when they write the review, they'll think back to that. Right. And if they, if they're going to leave a four star review, they'll probably think like, well, did it, they did ask me and I didn't say anything. So it's a bit harsh then to leave a four star review now because they specifically asked me if there was anything they could do for me and I didn't respond to it. So now, you know, does that make sense?
Nate:
No, 100%, developing that relationship. It's harder to give a bad review to someone that you like or someone that's asking you like, hey, can I help you? Can I assist you? You come off cold or you don't get those responses and people are gonna be less likely to wanna benefit you.
Jasper Ribbers:
What are, so you guys been on a free year journey. I know you guys are absolutely crushing it. I see it in the mastermind, how you guys are constantly looking to improve and what are some advice to people that are listening to this podcast and they wanna either improve their current business or maybe some people that wanna get started. Like what's some advice that you would have?
Dan:
I guess my advice is, I know we just kind of touched on this, but take care of your guests. Actually, listen to your guests. And yeah, we have all of our auto messages set up, but at the same time, we do our best to personalize things as well. So yeah, the auto message goes out, they may respond back, and that's when we add the personal touch. So actually reading what their original message says, learning why they're coming to the area, and just building that rapport with them. And then on top of that is just, my thing is creating systems for anything and everything. Like if you have a problem, even if it's happening like twice a week, think about how much time you're going to save if you just create a system or an operation, like whatever that looks like for that specific problem. And now you have a resolution for the rest of however long you're doing Airbnb. So that's been one of my biggest pieces. And I admittedly wasn't the best. with the organization prior to teaming up with Nate. But being the CPA that he is, it's helped tremendously as far as just staying organized.
Jasper Ribbers:
Awesome,
Nate:
Yeah.
Jasper Ribbers:
man. Great tips. Yeah. What about you, Nate?
Nate:
And I would echo a lot of that for us. It's been a lot of trials and tribulations kind of going where we started to where we're at now. I think one, this is kind of more abstract, just life in general, but being that constant student. So when we started, didn't know anything, even now. When I first started, especially again, I mean this in all seriousness, I was probably listening to two or three of your podcasts a day just to try to take every single bit of knowledge I could from every single podcast. And it was how do I get one or two pieces of information and then how do we implement that into our podcast. So, I'm going to go ahead and start with the podcast. into our business. And I think from there, one of the things that Dan and I have always really strived to do is identify issues, make sure we call them out, write them down, and then how do we attack that issue? So if you kind of put your head in the sand, which can be easy to do sometimes in this business, because it can get hectic, there can be a lot coming at you, you really have to kind of take a step back, breathe, identify that. And then the last piece I'll call out is… And especially if you want to scale a business, and again, it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is, hey, I want to have four or five properties, I kind of want to keep it small, this is what I want to do, then you don't need to do a lot of these different things or you might be able to kind of get away with it. But if you look to grow. How do you scale? And how do you scale comes back to outsourcing. You can't do everything yourself. How do I find something that can do something that's 75, 80% of maybe what I'm doing, but it's saving me a ton of time, and it's gonna allow me to now grow my business faster. And again, if we set up the processes right the first time, it really should be a 90, 95% operational efficiency of what we originally had. So it goes back to setting those processes up. And for us, it looks like, again, it's the software. It's, you know, we, when we first started Dan and his wife were the interior designers for our properties and no offense to Dan, but his wife has got an eye, Dan does not. So trying to watch him dance, trying to manage this, like message guests, putting couches together. Like it just, it was not a good look for him. And we ended up partnering up with a fantastic interior designer. And she recently, Jessica recently joined our team now as our director of operations. And now she's again, she scaled up and now she's helping to now manage other interior designers. So we don't, I mean, wander focus on interior design, but now you manage that process. You're a pro at that. We are not. Find your strengths, scale pro.
Dan:
And the last thing I'll add too is hire slow and fire fast. We've had a couple instances, our team now is fantastic. I think we're up to eight cleaning teams. We have a system process for every single one, but creating, like having a fantastic team has been a game changer. Like the cleaning crews and just seeing everything like come together. again, Slack specifically and having everything in one place and everybody communicating with each other rather than Nate and I initiating everything. That's, that's been really awesome to see as well. Just that kind of team camaraderie.
Nate:
And on that note, one more follow up. I live in San Diego, so I'm not out as often, but I'm pretty excited. And one of the things we do when we get back is we recently bought a property in the winter, got it up and running, and it's our first property with a pool. Fantastic, by the way, to have a property with a pool with the youth in the cards. What we're going to do when I'm home is we're going to, we blocked it off for the week and we're going to have a cookout. We're going to have everyone come over, grill out, let the whole team celebrate together. And that's our cleaners, that's our interior designer, that's our maintenance, that's our general contractors, everybody that's really helped us to grow and given that appreciation because within the day you really are as good as the people you're working with. And we want to be someone that people want to work with. And we also want to again show that support, support and love for the people that are on our team.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, 100%. That's awesome. I love this advice. Before we wrap this up, do you want to tell us a little bit more about the fun that you're starting and why you're
Nate:
Yes.
Jasper Ribbers:
starting it?
Nate:
Yeah. So we so the way that Dan and I originally structured everything was, you know, it's our homes are back in the Midwest. They're back in the Cleveland area. So you're talking anywhere from 200 to 400 thousand dollar homes. So not quite the coast expensive, but still, you know, reasonably priced homes. And we did that through no payables, primarily family and friends. And we were raising money that way. And people wanna have equity in something. They wanna say, hey, I have this, this is my property. They wanna have the appreciation upside. So we started to kind of hit a wall and like, okay, how much can we really raise doing this route? As opposed to looking at creating a fund allowing investors to have this passive investment where they're able to now own real estate, get the benefits of real estate without having to have any of the active participation. And the beauty with short-term rentals, as you know, is the revenues are significantly higher. So it allows for both the limited partners to do very well, as well as the general partners to do very well. So it's one of the more lucrative types of funds you can set up if you can have the track record to really show that successful results. So our goal, honestly, is kind of following a little bit of the model that you guys are setting up right now where, started with Flips, didn't really love the scale aspect of Flips, wasn't for us, went into Airbnbs, love Airbnbs. Property management, that's cash fuel for the fire. the fund, that's how we start to really grow. And this is our first fund that we're looking to raise. And again, for us, it's a $2 million fund. And then I would love to do it one day here in the next couple of years, do what you guys are doing right now and looking to do more of the Boatik hotels and looking to do slightly bigger projects. And who knows without being Cleveland or other areas, but really kind of making a ladder step stool as to how we wanna go and where we wanna be in the future.
Jasper Ribbers:
Awesome and super exciting. So if people are interested in investing with you, where should they go?
Nate:
They can, that's a great question. If they want to reach out to nate.clatt at homehoppm.com, it's a tongue twister. There are some regulations that we have to watch out for. So we're not able to actively give any kind of return advice immediately, but I'd be happy to set up a first call and then we can have a conversation and see if it's something they'd be interested in.
Jasper Ribbers:
Sounds good. Awesome. Any final thoughts before we wrap this up here?
Nate:
I just want to say I appreciate you having me on Jasper. Like I said, this was my bucket list for 2023 to be on my first podcast. Hopefully one of many, and again, it's fitting that the one I've listened to the most and the one I've gained the most value from is the one that I get to do my first one on. So I really appreciate you having us join.
Jasper Ribbers:
Yeah, absolutely
Dan:
For
Jasper Ribbers:
man. And
Dan:
sure.
Jasper Ribbers:
go for it then.
Dan:
And I just wanted to echo that too. Not just for having us on the podcast, but everything in your specific Slack channel. There's a lot of really good people in the group. There's a lot of really great ideas and it's nice to bounce ideas off of other people that are doing high level things as well. So really, really appreciate that as well.
Nate:
Yeah,
Jasper Ribbers:
Awesome.
Nate:
just.
Jasper Ribbers:
Well, I appreciate you guys being in our community and Nate, I'm glad that this was your first ever podcast. I hope this is one of many to come in the future. And then for people who want to potentially stay at your properties in Ohio, do you have a website to direct them to?
Dan:
Yeah, it's HomeHopPM.com.
Jasper Ribbers:
Homehoppm.com.
Dan:
Super, super easy.
Jasper Ribbers:
Keep it easy. That's good. Awesome, guys. Well, I appreciate you guys jumping on here. Definitely some great advice on this podcast. I'm sure listeners will appreciate that as well. And I'll see you guys soon in the MassMind. So.
Dan:
Good
Nate:
perfect.
Dan:
deal. Thanks, Jasper.
Jasper Ribbers:
All right. Take it easy guys. And thanks for the listeners. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Hope you learned a couple of things and we'll be back on Friday. So see you then.
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