How STR Property Managers Are Valued Today: EBITDA, Growth, and What Buyers Really Want

**Jacobie Olin** (0:05)
Welcome to the STR Data Lab.

**Rohit Bezewada** (0:12)
Welcome to today's episode of the STR Data Lab. I am Rohit, the CEO of ADNA, and with me today, I have a very special guest. Welcome Jacobi. Jacobi, for those of you who don't know, is the owner and CEO of M&A Advisory Sharp in the short-term rental ecosystem called C2G Advisors. Jacobi, why don't you introduce yourself and what C2G does?

**Jacobie Olin** (0:34)
Thanks, Rohit.
Yeah, so I'm the managing partner of C2G Advisors. I'm probably a little unique in this industry that I was actually born and raised in this pirate industry back in the late 80s, and I grew up as a kid stripping beds and tipping trashes out for my father actually in the 90s down in the Panhandle of Florida. So I've really been able to see the various iterations and evolutions of the short-term rental industry or vacation rental industry or Airbnb, whatever you want to call it today. And so fast forward many years, I was in the restaurant business most of my 20s and really got to learn some of the, just the grind of owning your own business and the tough parts of the entrepreneurial journey there.
And sold that, and that actually kind of like going through that M&A process myself actually lit a little spark under me and made me pretty excited to try to push that a little bit further. But in 2017, my father actually started this business, C2G Advisors, as like a semi-retirement place for himself. He had been in this industry for 30 plus years and various roles.
And so I came on board in 2017 and learned under him for a year. And then I really decided I saw a need for helping these property managers.
I mean, honestly, at that time actually was the least arbitrage praise was going on with the fundraising in the urban metropolitan's from the Saunders, Alphard, Delmeos, Lirards, you name it, there was a ton of those. So we actually started out just grinding, calling those up, sending engagement agreements to them. There weren't really brokers running around and trying to get these deals with landlords or developers. So I really started doing that in the 20 teams. And then not to go too deep into the story, but as COVID came, a lot of that industry kind of fell apart slowly. Some parts of it quit. And we flipped our service on its head. It really started representing sellers of property management companies within the industry. And I guess fast forward to today, we specialize in sell side M&A advisory. We primarily operate in your traditional vacation markets. They're like beach, sea, mountain, desert, lake markets. And most of that is driven by just supply and demand. Because a lot of the urban players, I mean, I live in Nashville, Tennessee. I've only done two transactions in Nashville out of the hundreds that we've closed. But many of the urban players got started kind of on the backs of Airbnb. And so there's just less larger players in the urban markets. And then also, there's more generally more regulatory concerns there. So most of the most of the buyers in the industry are buying in more of these like traditional markets that one have a lower barrier to entry, less regulations and typically have like a larger TAM there. So yeah, so we represent about 15 to 20 sellers a year. Our average transaction is around 10 million dollars. Since we just work in one industry, we go up and down markets. So like last year, we had one of our largest transactions we've ever done. That was right at like 100 million. And then we also do a hundred thousand dollar transaction and everything in between. So yeah, it's this industry is in my blood and I love everything about it. I love that.

**Rohit Bezewada** (4:37)
I love that introduction and I'm excited to like unpack different aspects of the Southside experience because we have listeners from both sides of the aisle. Jacoby, we have a lot of private equity funds now getting into the space. We have the larger shops, you may like the 250 plus door, VRMs who are part of roll ups and potentially exploring roll ups. And then you have the potential Southside candidates, 50 to 100, 200 doors that are trying to be potential targets for these acquirers.
The first question I'll ask is more to set up the macro. Like if a EMC owner comes to you, is this a good time to sell? What makes it a good time to sell? Do you have any perspective on just general macro grounding that based on everything you see? Yeah, yeah, yeah.