Why Orlando STRs Are Not Oversaturated with Christian Walston

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 to another episode of The Short Term Show. I apologize for my voice today. I have the back to school kids coming home with everything and I caught it from them, but we've got a really cool guest today. So we are going to push through it. Christian Walston, how are you doing? We've got he's an investor in Orlando, which I really love that market. Everybody likes to crap on Orlando or Kissimmee.

But to me, and we'll hear more about it from Christian, to me, the oversaturation and the overpriced and things like that, that market was very affected by that in 2021, I would say. Now the tide has gone out on that. A lot of those COVID buyers have already sold out. Prices have come down significantly and income has stabilized. I think that there's a lot of opportunity in the Orlando market just because everybody, you know, they don't even look at anything. They just heard somebody say, oh, it's oversaturated. And so they don't bother with it. But those 54 million tourists a year to Disney World are not going away. And as somebody who goes and stays on Disney property four to five times a year, there's only four resorts that can sleep more than four people in a room.

So anybody who has three kids instead of two or wants their grandparents to come or go with friends, if y'all want to stay together, you're probably going to need a vacation rental. So let's talk about first, well, we're going to talk about Orlando, but let's talk about Christian. Christian, how's it going? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Christian Walston (2:01)

Doing well. Happy to be here, Avery. So name's Christian Walston. My day job, I'm an engineer, I'm working the aerospace field. So that's usually pretty exciting, keeps me busy.

My wife is a teacher, she just went back to school this week, so she's unable to join me, but she does help or a partner in this venture. But yeah, I got into real estate several years ago and just recently got in the short term world.

Avery Carl (2:29)

Awesome. So what got you into real estate initially? Sounds like you got into long term first.

Christian Walston (2:35)

Yeah. So really my dad got me into real estate as a kid. So he's self-employed. He would be a great podcast guest somewhere. He's not in the short term world, but he came from a very poor upbringing. And then he's an entrepreneur. He owned, I think at the most, he had like six long-term rentals. And in high school and middle school, my job was to mow the grass.

So I was around it. And then in college, I would go for my dad to the poor house steps, and be there for auctions and things like that.

So I was really at a young age getting exposed to real estate. And then that's all thanks to my parents.

Avery Carl (3:18)

That's amazing. And I hope my kids will one day say that about us, and not just say, well, my parents, they're boomers or whatever, whatever the equivalent. Millennial will be a slur at that point. And they'll be like, oh, they're millennials. They bought a bunch of real estate. Maybe they'll...

What you just said and say, my parents really exposed me to something helpful and cool that's allowed me to build some wealth. So that's really cool. So your dad kind of exposed you to that and you bought how many long-term rentals?

Christian Walston (3:49)

So at 23, I bought my first long-term rental. I graduated from college. I was an engineer and you're going to think, people listening to this are going to think, this was like 50 years ago, but I'm in my thirties now and I bought a home for $33,000. What? Yeah. Where? So I live on a small coastal community. It's called Crystalfield, Maryland. It used to be the second largest city in Maryland 100 years ago, and it's been in decline ever since then. But it's right on the Tuskegee Bay. But it was just a home nearby, not even a half mile from where I grew up. It had been foreclosed a year or two beforehand. Then Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, whoever owned it, they went in and they fixed it up a little bit, but they tried to sell it. It didn't sell. You can see from the photos there was a sagging floor, and I think that scared a lot of people away. Then finally, they put it up for auction. I put a bid on, it was online.