The Lake Michigan STR Strategy That Changed Everything with Jeremy Udovich

**SPEAKER_2** (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 another episode of The Short Term Show. Today, we have Jeremy Udovich. He is the owner of Sheboygan Vacation Rentals. We don't get a lot of midwesterner guests on here, so very excited to interview him today. Welcome, Jeremy.

**Jeremy Udovich** (0:45)
Thank you. Maybe we shouldn't tell anybody about the Midwest.

**Avery Carl** (0:49)
Ah, the Midwest. I'm married to a midwesterner, and I, nine out of 10 recommend. There's some things, but mostly a good experience.

**Jeremy Udovich** (0:59)
It's a great spot.

**Avery Carl** (1:01)
Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background before you got into short-term rentals.

**Jeremy Udovich** (1:07)
Yeah. So graduated from college to be a golf bro. I was a golf professional for about 10 years running golf facilities, courses, teaching golf lessons, and then kind of on a whim jumped to join a buddy in the software world. So we sold software services for about 10 years, and about five years ago, we bought our first short-term rental.
I guess it was December of 21, and this was a partnership with my sister and brother-in-law, and then my wife and I, and we acquired one in 21, opened that in 22, took on our second one in 22, started managing one in 23, and now we have 22 properties in our portfolio. We own six of those all in Sheboygan County, and then we have one property in Manitowoc County on Lake Michigan, just to the north.

**Avery Carl** (2:06)
Okay. What made you choose Sheboygan?

**Jeremy Udovich** (2:12)
Well, I lived here growing up, and then we moved back here. My wife is a brain cancer survivor of about eight years. When that was all happening, we wanted to get close to home to where my parents were, so we moved back to Sheboygan. And we didn't know that this was going to be the best spot to have a short-term rental. We just had a desire to have one, and we bought one in 2021, and it just went so much better than we could have imagined.
So we went for number two, and it still worked, and we just kept on going.

**Avery Carl** (2:47)
All right. So for people who are listening, what do people do in Sheboygan? Do they come to go to the lake? Is this more of a suburban market where people might just be coming through for other reasons? So what's in Sheboygan?

**Jeremy Udovich** (3:02)
I'm going to let all the secrets out here. So we are on Lake Michigan.
I don't know exactly how many miles it is, but it's a lot. And Sheboygan is actually known as the Malibu of the Midwest. We have some of the nicest beaches anywhere in the country.
People do surf here, believe it or not. So that is the number one traffic driver, for sure. But we also have the second most traveled to State Park, which is on some sand dunes that borders Lake Michigan. We also have a world renowned racetrack, which brings in nearly a million people a year. And we have a world class golf resort that literally brings in people from all over the world. We've hosted numerous major championships. We've had a Ryder Cup here. And there's actually five golf courses in this little county that are all in the top 100 in the US. So even though we only have 120,000 people that live here, there are a lot of people that travel here.

**Avery Carl** (4:00)
Oh, I didn't know. I'm looking up pictures in the background.
I tend to not go north of, you know, I don't go places where it gets cold.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:10)
It's cold.

**Avery Carl** (4:11)
I have not, I'm not familiar, but I'm looking at pictures in the background while you're talking and it is really cool.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:17)
Yeah.

**Avery Carl** (4:18)
Awesome. So let's talk back to you, back to you off of Sheboygan. So you, you had a real job in quotes. If you're listening on Apple podcast or on, on Spotify, I'm doing quotes. You had a quote real job. So what made you go, I'm going to buy a short term rental.

**Jeremy Udovich** (4:37)
Well, I had a real job. It was a great real job that paid really, really well for a midwesterner in this little county of Sheboygan. And we just had extra money available. My sister and brother-in-law did as well. He is from a Lake community in Northern Wisconsin that is very tourist driven. So this idea of having a lake house was interesting to us.