Building a Family STR Business from the Ground Up with Luke and Laura Hintermeister

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Welcome to The Short Term Show, the show about short term rentals and long term wealth. With real property owners hosting real properties, who are crushing it in the vacation and short term rental space.
And here's your host, Avery Carl.

**Avery Carl** (0:29)
Hey, y'all, welcome back to The Short Term Show, brought to you by The Short Term Shop. Guys, I want to make sure that I'm mentioning this at the beginning of every show. We are real estate agents and we operate in about 20 markets, and we want to help you buy a short term rental. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about buying a short term rental, give us a call. Just go to our website, theshorttermshop.com, and you can get us really easy there. We want to help you on your real estate investing journey. Now, we are going to hear from Luke and Laura Hintermeister. They are Midwestern investors that bought their first short term rental near Lake Superior sometime in the last year, and we're going to hear about how their journey as new short term rental investors is going. How are you, Laura and Luke?
Great.

**Laura Hintermeister** (1:14)
Great.

**Luke Hintermeister** (1:14)
I'm excited to be here.

**Avery Carl** (1:16)
Well, very happy to have you. So, first off, just tell me a little bit about yourselves, who you were before real estate investing, and how you kind of got into it.

**Laura Hintermeister** (1:26)
Great. Well, we met at UMD. It's University of Minnesota Duluth in college.

**Avery Carl** (1:32)
Sounds cool. It is.

**Laura Hintermeister** (1:34)
Yeah. That's where we fell in love in Duluth. It's a beautiful city, and we lived there for, well, just during that time. We moved around quite a bit. We got married in 2000 We've had four kids.
We've done a lot of early on renovations on homes, probably about eight, eight or nine homes that we've either renovated or built. Yeah.

**Luke Hintermeister** (2:04)
We met in college. I got married right after college. I ended up going to medical school in the same city.
We've had four kids since then, and so she's been someone who homeschooled her kids initially, and then it was the contractor and director of all of our renovations since then.

**Avery Carl** (2:27)
All right. Homeschool.

**Luke Hintermeister** (2:29)
Yeah. Interesting to see.

**Avery Carl** (2:31)
Yeah.

**Laura Hintermeister** (2:33)
Not for everyone.

**Avery Carl** (2:34)
How many kids do you have?

**Laura Hintermeister** (2:35)
Four.

**Luke Hintermeister** (2:36)
Four?

**Avery Carl** (2:36)
Oh my.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:38)
Yeah. Yeah.

**Avery Carl** (2:38)
That's a lot of work.

**Laura Hintermeister** (2:39)
We had about 10 years and thought we were done. Everybody was off to school, and then later on in life, COVID hit and everybody was around again. And it was kind of a crazy time, but it was a good journey.

**Avery Carl** (2:55)
Yeah.

**Laura Hintermeister** (2:56)
Yeah.

**Avery Carl** (2:57)
Love that. So tell me a little bit about how you chose the market that you were going to invest in. Obviously, it's nearby-ish, somewhere you're familiar with.

**Luke Hintermeister** (3:08)
Yeah, absolutely. So in college, obviously in Duluth, that's about an hour and a half from where we have our current place. And so it's a hiking, biking destination, all up and down that hour and a half. And so we spent a lot of time in college and then after college, you know, hiking and biking. So we knew the area really well, just from personal experience.
I think it was, we travel a lot with our kids in snowboarding, they're pursuing that. So we started staying in a lot of Airbnbs and we've always enjoyed design and renovations and sort of started thinking about it probably 2018, 19 And so that's kind of what led us to find our market, just from personal experience.

**Avery Carl** (3:53)
And what's the name of it again?

**Luke Hintermeister** (3:54)
Yeah, so it's on the North Shore of Minnesota, it's between Tofte and Lutsen, two towns up that way.

**Avery Carl** (4:02)
Okay, so is this like a lake house? Is it on the water? Is it out in the woods? Or what type of property is it?

**Luke Hintermeister** (4:08)
Yeah, so there's a primary highway called 61 that goes from Duluth all the way to Canada. And so there's lake homes on one side and then there's basically bluff homes on the other side. So we're on the bluff side with expansive lake views.

**Avery Carl** (4:24)
So what's a bluff home? Is that like on a cliff? I'm picturing being on a cliff.

**Laura Hintermeister** (4:28)
The mountain is the mountain that it's on. It's one of the many beautiful hiking mountains in the area.