The Secret to Scroll-Stopping Listings with Tim Grillot

**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 another episode of The Short Term Show.
Today, I have a familiar face, who you have probably seen on the podcast before, in different roles. First, he came on as a client, then he's been on a number of times as an investor and short-term shop agent, and he retired from being an agent, probably two years ago now, one year ago.

**Tim Grillot** (0:56)
A year and a half, yeah.

**Avery Carl** (0:57)
He has now established himself as the top vacation rental photographer in the Smoky Mountains. Today, we have Mr. Tim Grillot. How's it going, Tim?

**Tim Grillot** (1:08)
I'm doing great. Thanks for that. That was quite the intro there.
I love it. We're doing great over here. Have a little ball.

**Avery Carl** (1:17)
Awesome. Well, I mean, I also didn't include former executive in the automotive industry.

**Tim Grillot** (1:23)
Yeah.
We've had quite the journey. It's wild thinking back on it. I was actually thinking about it this morning coming on here that I remember our first meeting with you and I was all excited. I'm like, this is what we want to do and we want to live in a Sprinter van, and we want to do this, we want to do that, and quit our jobs and we've done almost all. We didn't live in a Sprinter van, we lived in an Airstream for almost three years, so it's been quite the journey, and just very grateful for everything that's happened along the way.

**Avery Carl** (1:54)
The Airstream was cool though.

**Tim Grillot** (1:56)
Yeah. No, that was a fun part of our life.
That will be cherished forever. That was a phase that we went through to grow our portfolio, really. I mean, we sold everything when we got to a certain phase and did that for a while, so a lot of fun.

**Avery Carl** (2:12)
Well, let's recap what's in your portfolio right now just to kind of set the stage for you as an investor.

**Tim Grillot** (2:18)
Okay, cool. Yeah. So we have eight short term rentals. We've got six here in the Smokies and two in Gulf Shores, Alabama. And then we have a number of long term rentals in Kentucky and Texas. I don't remember the exact count. Under 30, probably more than 20
Something like that.

**Avery Carl** (2:38)
Okay, so eight short term rentals, like 25-ish long term rentals.

**Tim Grillot** (2:42)
Yeah. Yep.

**Avery Carl** (2:43)
Good deal.
So you're a pretty experienced investor. And then you were an agent at the shop, helped other investors buy short term rentals. So what made you decide to get into the photography side of things?

**Tim Grillot** (2:57)
You know, that's a great question. So, you know, kind of going backwards a little bit. A lot of people probably heard some of this. But so we had normal W2 jobs. I had normal W2 job most of my life. And always had the dream of, you know, my dream was a little different than my wife's dream. But my dream was to retire young and sit on the beach and drink cocktails and have just this passive income coming in and all this stuff. And my dreams have since shifted and reality kind of kicked in and stuff. But honestly, the dream shifted to just doing what we love and having a life where what we love is what we do. And so we don't look at this as like our jobs anymore. And people throw around the retired word and stuff. And yeah, we both quit our jobs and we do this full time now.
So kind of shifting the photography thing, as we grew the portfolios in the real estate, that allowed us to have a little bit of freedom to be able to breathe a little bit. And when we both quit our jobs, we were both a little panicked. We were very, very grateful for the opportunity to join your team. And that was a nice bridge and all that, but it was never really meant to be a forever thing. And as we kind of explored our next steps, we did want to move into something that was more, I'll say just us, we just kind of wanted to have our own little empire and we explored several business opportunities, everything from water heaters to water delivery services and photography and kind of everything in between. Photography is just something, it's been a hobby of mine since I was really, since like seven. My grandpa bought me a camera and a photography book when I was seven years old and it just kind of stuck. So it's always kind of been in the background thing and it just kind of fit in. We had had some, you know, not great experiences with some local photographers here and we ended up doing some of our own pictures. And then in that, my wife kind of learned that she loves like the staging and the things and setting up things and really taking things and making them look their best. And so that's like her skill. And it was just an opportunity, this was an opportunity for us to be able to have an income source that complemented both of our skills and something we both enjoyed. And so we do this together. You know, I'm kind of the face of things. She doesn't love being on camera, but she is a massive part of this. And she does, you know, an equal amount of what I do. She, when we go in these places, she does all the setups and she spends a lot of time shopping and studying trends and all the kind of stuff and just kind of keeping things fresh and whatever. But she does all the setup work ahead of me and then I do the actual photography and editing and stuff. So it's just really been an opportunity to jump into more of what we love. So it's just, and it's, you know, for us it was something that we could do that we weren't completely tied down. So like we can still travel to a degree. I mean, it gets pretty demanding because we're extremely busy now, which we're very grateful for. But you know, if we need to shut it off for a minute and run, you know, our families are kind of spread around the country. So if we need to shut off for a minute and run to, you know, we're going to Texas for graduation in a couple of days, and we're able to do that and no problem. And so it's just been a great segue and we love it. You know, we tell people all the time, you know, we work harder than we ever have. And, you know, going back to my dream of sitting on the beach, I found out real quick, I get really bored really fast and I enjoy working. And I've kind of shifted to like now, I don't ever want to retire. I don't ever want to stop working. I love what we do.