Long-Term Vision for Short-Term Rentals

**Miles Hobson** (0:12)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast, with me, your host, Miles Hobson, Head of Marketing here at Hospitable. Today, I am speaking with a Seattle host, Christopher John, all about his experience of starting out with short-term rentals, his experience with Hospitable, and how he prepared for the FIFA World Cup coming to Seattle.
As always, if you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. And if you're not already a Hospitable user, you can sign up for a free trial on our website and get started with our new no-subscription cost essentials plan.
Head to hospitable.com to find out more. Okay. Hello, Christopher. Thank you so much for joining us today.

**Christopher John** (0:53)
Hey, Miles. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

**Miles Hobson** (0:56)
No worries. Cool. So Christopher, we're obviously here to hear your story, and we'll look to start at the beginning.
How did you first get into short-term rentals? How did you make that leap into deciding that you were going to get a short-term rental?

**Christopher John** (1:10)
Well, I think all of us have experienced them now for several years and whatnot, the evolution of Airbnb and whatnot. But for our journey, it was a little different. We're real estate agents by trade, and then we do a lot of investing, had the long-term rentals and have done flips in the past. And with long-term rentals, it just seems like unless you're purchasing the property outright and putting a lot of money down or all of it down, the risk of that is just not in your best interest anymore. If you're carrying a mortgage, the rules, regulations, I guess, not with tenants nowadays, it's pretty risky. So we've had some issues in the past, but it's made us decide to look at other things. And staying at Airbnbs and then talking to people about the type of cash flow that it can create was very interesting. So looked at that for, I'd say a couple of years before deciding to do it.
And divested of all of our other investments and decided to pull the trigger and go for it.

**Miles Hobson** (2:29)
Nice, awesome. And yeah, when you went for that first property, maybe talk me through the kind of property that it was. And did you have to do a lot of kind of design or innovation to kind of make it a bit more short-term rentally, or was it kind of already kind of set up for a short-term rental?

**Christopher John** (2:47)
It was a short-term rental. We purchased it from a gentleman who had like, I guess they had some kind of investment group in Taiwan or China, and they had 122 units up and down the west coast of the United States. So it was already operating, which was nice for us to be able to investigate the financials and see what they were doing. But they kind of ran it, and I see this quite frequently from sub-operators, is it's just about jamming beds in a space. So he had, I want to say, in a studio, a 450-foot studio, he had, I want to say, three beds, two-day beds, a queen bed, and there was nothing else. So we purchased that from him. And again, we were looking for some place, because I've talked to other people who own short-term rentals, and their traffic is very seasonal. And we didn't want to do that. We wanted to have a place that actually had the opportunity to be full capacity year-round. So we focused in on the downtown Seattle area, or Seattle in general.
You've got a lot of people that are traveling in for work. You've got, you know, it's an international destination and whatnot. So that's what we did with that. And there's not a lot of places that you can do that in downtown. You've got the city regulations, which are very strict. And then on top of that, you have a lot of HOAs that restrict that. So finding the property took some time. I think we were looking for about a year, little over a year before we found it. And then at the same time, being comfortable with that place and who runs it, making sure that they've got all their financials and things because you're dependent on them being well run. So finding that, and then we kind of just settled on this building, which is one of the last historic brick buildings downtown. It's adjacent to the Amazon campus, the spheres and everything. So we knew people would be coming there because everybody loves Amazon. So we picked that up, and then we decided there are heavy renovation on it, upgrade everything.