11 Nov Ep. 59 Short Term Vacation Rentals with Alex Zemianek of JZ Vacation Rentals

TRANSCRIPTION

Live from the rooftop of the Hermann London Real Estate Group in beautiful downtown Maplewood is the St. Louis Realtor podcast with your host Adam Kruse welcome welcome everybody to the St. Louis Realtor podcast live from the rooftop of the Hermann London real estate group in beautiful downtown maple Missouri I’m your host Adam Kruse broke her owner for Hermann London here with my fabulous co-host Shannon St. Pierre Realtor extraordinaire hello hello and thanks for being here and we are super excited today because this much-anticipated always requested podcasts all about short term Vacation Rentals Airbnb and we have Mr. Airbnb himself Alex zimmi Anik from Jay Z Vacation Rentals here today live in the studio well thank you so much for having me I love that introduction to I don’t know about Mr. Airbnb but I’m glad to be here thank you guys so much absolutely we really appreciate you coming in today and we’ve got a lot of questions you know our company does I guess what you would probably call long-term rentals and we deal with a lot of investors and stuff like that and people are always asking us about Airbnb yeah consistently asking about Air B&B and management how do people take handle that piece of it so we are super excited to talk to you today yeah well I appreciate it and it’s it’s it’s kind of funny how Airbnb has done a phenomenal job at really taking course on the industry because most people will look at it as an Airbnb industry and it’s kind of like uber really taking of you know a head start over lyft in the sharing industry but Kleenex a verb just like I’m gonna over home or I’m gonna do bur out and just like I’m gonna Airbnb my home now so say yeah but a lot of stuff to talk about absolutely tell me just to kind of start off as if people don’t know but what is Airbnb in general what is like a short-term vacation rental yeah so Airbnb is what’s known as a channel so a marketing channel so it’s it’s considered in the industry as an OTA or an online travel agency okay Airbnb actually started out as air bed-and-breakfast uh-huh and so the CEO started out by two blowup mattresses and cooking breakfast for people and then it became a thirty-five billion dollar company as it is today okay so by the way think of a bed-and-breakfast it’s like you go to Hermann Missouri and the kind of the older couple that like you say you got the they cook you breakfast in the morning and the house is all creaky and stuff like that it’s taken a new term though yeah it absolutely has it started out with the private room sharing and there’s still a little bit of that going on but the markets really taken a turn to be a lot more of the niche for groups entire home the privacy and so it’s absolutely evolved over over the years but Airbnb I think we’re some of the confusion lies with with the industry is that it’s really a massive short-term rental industry known as the home sharing industry home sharing home sharing suit started out if we just go back to 2016 it was a hundred billion dollar industry and then it jumped up to now what is almost a hundred and ninety five billion dollars in just three years it’s so it’s that it’s a lot bigger than what a lot of people think it’s in a hundred and ninety three countries and there are several countries they don’t have hotels so this is this is all you can do as a short-term rental stay and then Airbnb in 2008 really just took it for a different turn and they have really as you as you can tell have excelled in the industry and they’re one of the top websites to list your home on but most of the confusion is that they’re the only site so you can do well by listing your home on just Airbnb but you’re definitely sacrificing your income or your revenue by not putting it on 100 plus sites so and it’s basically like turning your house into a hotel and you’re saying that the people used to rent out just a room in their house and we have like some random person like up in your oh yes not like your son goes away to college and you just like ran away rent his room out for the night kind of thing yeah then that still goes on yeah there’s still some of the stuff most of the stories I would say that end up on the bad press or from the private shared room so we we tried that you could tell that the CEO of Airbnb actually took a different turn going towards Airbnb plus to really focus more on a higher caliber of a unit and it has to go through a certain standard so they realized real quickly they had to rebrand and get away from some of that stigma of just being a private private room stay okay interesting and you said it’s all over the world and when I’ve barely used Airbnb in the United States but I’ve liked it a Europe trip and we stayed in Airbnb okay we would not know where we’re gonna stay that night and then we would just pull up Airbnb and go up there’s a place nearby and stay there how was your experience it was great that’s good you know it really worked that’s good it was a good experience so I mean we talked about Airbnb as like but there are 100 plus sites as you say is there one this indicates to them all or do you have to go site by site by site by site to list your property if you’re going to do short term yeah it’s a great question so when we started we started out on Airbnb and then we we found out that you can list on multiple sites and so we went to and in the beginning six years ago I was listing on Airbnb and then home away and then the verbo channel the largest Channel really in the world is is now owned by Expedia of course they started out in the hotels natural yeah right and so VRBO Homeaway Expedia there’s about 20 sites that that are all give you one package if you list on that home away or VRBO Channel and so what we did is we found a way to connect the calendars in the very beginning it was manual so guess what a book then you got to remember to put it on the other calendar and there was a time on the other side and if you don’t then you get a double booking and is not fun so we learned very quickly there’s got to be another way and so we started looking at software companies and we interviewed what’s there called project management software property management software PMS systems and so we found Keigo is a software that we use and what that means is that makes us a channel manager to where we can manage up to a hundred websites or channels into one place so then you have one booking system one chat system one calendar sanity yes sanity back for sure so let’s back up for a second because you keep saying we so you are JZ Vacation Rentals right yes okay so calm and in there yeah so tell us a little bit about who JZ Vacation Rentals is yeah so JZ is is really a brand and I lost my dad when I was 20 and so I went through a pretty rough time in my childhood I thought I could take on the world at 18 got in trouble my dad gave me some tough love and unfortunately unfortunately a lot of good things have happened but lost my dad when I was 20 so my dad’s name was Kevin Joseph’s imme anak so JZ my first company was actually KJZ which was an investment company and so JZ properties was my developmental company and I would say just all things construction so we’ve we JC properties is going on about a decade and then JZ Vacation Rentals came about about six years ago my wife moved in with me we’re staying in a four family unit and in the loop so right behind the loop in the Delmar area we got news of my son who’s now just turned five Congrats thank you appreciate that and my wife had an extra set of furniture and we were currently renovating a home in the hill and we loved the trendy Delmar Loop but it didn’t really seem right to bring our newborn son home there and so we picked the hill to take her furniture and our newborn home – and then I had an extra set of furniture I didn’t know what to do with it I tried to rent it furnished and then a couple months go by nobody bid on it and so I talked to a friend of mine from Miami he’s like dude why don’t you throw it on Airbnb I’m like what is it Airbnb what do you mean any time like this is St. Louis there’s no beach here like why would why would people travel here I get that in Miami and he’s like dude I’m getting 250 bucks at night for a one-bedroom loft on wash yeah back when washing I was a little bit better area than it is now but I thought what the heck let’s try it out my wife and I went to Walmart and went and tried to stock up on everything we possibly could at the store to make it a hotel we booked within 48 hours and immediately we’re on a path to double the income of the other units in the building Wow so right so I do hear that a lot from investors that I work with is they’ve turned a lot of their rentals in to Airbnb –zz because they’ve made more doing Airbnb than they do their long-term leases but then the question always kind of comes up isn’t it twice as much work I mean you have all turnover and every time we have a turnover for at least because we do property management as well I mean there’s a whole process so I can you know you’re thinking of trying to do that every other night it’s an overwhelming and I guess that’s where alex is okay I’ll do it for you well right so and that’s kind of been that sticking point sometimes talking to investors and I think you and I have talked about this and I know I’ve talked to our property manager and it’s been a you know how do you get past that hurdle of turning this over who cleans it like how do you very good question for the next one who might be coming in in a couple hours so are we saying I was saying Alex tell us about your services yeah how do you well to take a step back it started as me and and so yeah I know I never whelming it was I was actually looking for a management company when I hit the 3:00 mark the average host country 3 properties property when you hit 3 properties that when it starts to to get real so you you got to start figuring out laundry and in all of that whole system yeah you were absolutely running a business so I think you know one two three is not as bad and honestly we educate hosts all the time to do it on their own some hosts love to do it they love to meet guests and make those relationships and the the thing that we had to quickly solve is how do we make it systematic and without yes investing a lot of time without me going headfirst then it’s either you don’t do it at all or you have to really put a lot of time to get there and the software helps the team helps when I employee number one is now our housekeeping director her name is Kim and she started out cleaning our places and now she has an entire cleaning team she has an app that helps with the cleaning team so everything is very systematic I do not I do not miss traditional rentals because I’ve been a landlord longer than I’ve ran a professional vacation rental industry and there’s no evictions you’ve got great people people are coming in and out and here’s the best part for hosts and investors is you have a cleaning team in there or a maintenance crew and inspector in there almost every two to three days oh yeah so imagine that’s a super interesting statement like that was because for us we live in investment mmm-hmm you know worlds of buying properties for rentals that’s right long-term rent yes so to say that it’s so much better this is kind of like a light bulb and just you know that light bulb literally just we’re not going oh my gosh you guys I still have a few long-term rentals that I manage for it I won’t name them on here but it is it is it’s a whole different animal sometimes in the the the type of people that you’re attracting in the short term rental industry is going to be a lot too demographic his family’s groups it’s it’s I said that it really wasn’t so bad and guest support because people are vacationing you know so most the time they’re very happy to deal with and talk to so the level of 10 and guess that you have is great so if an investor is managing or I’m sorry a host has one or two or three properties maybe you’re saying they’re doing it on their own but then they want to get bigger they want to go to four or five or six so enter you and you guys will handle the booking yeah what is your process process what do you do yes so so we do we literally do everything so there’s there anything and everything we can do from start to finish we got a pretty we have an amazing team we have over 20 people that support us and so what I’ll give you just a recent case study that we did one of our hosts she’s amazing her name’s Lauren she was she was managing for herself she was managing her property and she was about to get married to her husband out in Scottsdale Arizona and she was literally flying back still as a travel nurse and cleaning her place and still trying to turn it because she loved the income and she didn’t want to just sell the place or give it up and so she reached out to us originally just to alleviate her time and then what we what we learned very quickly she was doing about 18,000 a year only on Airbnb we took her property and brought her up to 58,000 is the most recent tracking that we looked at in a year’s time able to more often because she was she didn’t have to come back to clean herself yes oh so that the one the the first thing that people assume with with property management is so much on the traditional side and that’s what I used to – so in the traditional side of rental management there’s not as much management tasks you know you get somebody in there I would say the hardest part is finding somebody finding good people it’s kind of like interviewing employees you’re interviewing tenants you get a good tenant in there the leasing the showing that’s the most difficult part the maintaining is not that difficult this is a full-blown business for people so the the difference is when you’re giving up your traditional rental you’re also sacrificing some income so most people are just weighing time versus income in this industry and what we’ve done is created a we’ve created a way in a solution we can literally take the keys from Lauren do every single thing for her and quadruple her income so that was too good to be true so we didn’t we don’t even really market it that much we actually have grown mostly organically in word-of-mouth so you say take the keys from her does that mean you’re you’re probably not going to Walmart anymore but you’re like going hey okay we’re gonna get the forks and the dads and all that kind of stuff do you actually set up if I give you an empty apartment and said have at it yeah so we have a we have a design team that’s ran by my wife we have products and services soon to be actually on our site where the guest guest or host or anyone can purchase all of our products and all the vendors that we work with we had to create a way to have quality control and simplicity so I noticed you did have brand standards yes listed on your website so what is that yeah so there’s two different types of management there is there’s what’s known as co-hosting then that’s what you’re gonna see about 90% of the time throughout the country co-hosting is is more profile management you can add anybody as a co-host within Airbnb or give them your credentials tinnie at the other sites but there’s no real growth for that and there’s no real consistency for that the reason why we almost went that direction and most managers do go that direction is because it’s easy and it was co-hosting me co-hosting just basically means that if I want to add Adam as a co-host to my profile then you’re accepting all the inquiries reservations you’re communicating with a guest you’re managing my property but you’re not necessarily marketing it or growing the revenue of the property okay so I’m handling the behind-the-scenes stuff right the co-host company is handling to behind this yeah co-host basically means you’re gonna take my time away uh-huh and then professional marketing and management we’re way more of the branding to go back to that my wife and I just a very quick story we’re looking at Marco Island and we that we’re trying to take a family vacation we looked at a hundred hundred and fifty properties and granted we were about a month or two months away as kind of a last-minute decision but we could not find one property that even felt comfortable to take our young kids to and we realized very quickly that wow this is a gap in the industry there are not many cities or places where there’s branding and consistency the hotels have solved that if you go to Four Seasons or chase or the Trump in different cities you know what you you’re gonna get but the difference in the short term rental industry is that you can provide a level of consistency for guests but you don’t have to have uniformity so you could still have like your antler theme and our Colorado Springs home we have antlers on some of the cabinets and then you have your modern and your city and you have desert you have all these different themes but every bed has a duvet they all have I always tell the teakettle story because literally every single thing in our home came from a story a review multiple fours out of fives and we basically just created a hundred and fifty point checklist off of listening to our guests of what each rental will have and as your standard that’s right that’s right I guess you were getting calls from people they’re like where’s the iron iron that’s right we want it we want a guest to show up and feel like they’re at home and that’s really the niche of this industry if my wife and I travel I tell people all the time I still enjoy a hotel we just went out to a vacation rental conference and in New Orleans and they did not have room service at the Hyatt and I was like what this is like your last card right is the room service I love room service right and you know there’s one style it sounds like well I don’t I just I don’t travel that much so when I get to I like to do you you your company JZ only manages in St. Louis is that right or it sounds like you maybe have you own properties in other places so we we started in St. Louis were based out of St. Louis but we are now in Colorado Springs we’re also a Kentucky lake and then we have one property that we are co-hosting and bringing on in California okay and then we have a whole territory that we’re looking at in Scottsdale so you can kind of your company is kind of expanding into other cities they’re starting as a co-host ER and then you start building staff there and stuff I guess yeah what we do is we look for the person so we look for whether that’s somebody with real estate experience or somebody that would be a great manager they’re an on what’s known as an on-site manager so they’re the boots on the ground uh-huh basically the person that could check on the property they can run housekeeping they’re mainly doing housekeeping and maintenance and overseeing it for example our onsite manager now in Colorado Springs is now the owner of the two properties because she was retired she’s awesome she was looking for something to do or kids are now going to kindergarten and she manages the properties mostly from a nap we trained her we certified her and we look for that person that individual and then we build the territory around them and then back here at you know corporate you can do all of the kind of marketing and accounting and that’s right booking and all that kind of that’s really what separates us the most is the marketing so we we don’t wait for a channel or Airbnb or verbo or home way to bring in the listing JZ is now surpassing home Wacom so last month for example we brought in seven direct bookings mean meaning they saw social media ad they saw Google ad they saw YouTube they saw something or just a loyal guests coming back they may have stayed with us in a different City and now they’re coming here whatever the cause we track all of that and so we were at 7:00 last month now we’re at 15 interjecting 20 to 25 next month so we’re continuing to grow the direct bookings and it’s part of the reason why we’re able to provide more revenue direct meaning they go direct to your website don’t have to pay Airbnb your verb that’s right so once a guest books directly with with a property management company like like ours that have their own booking engine and own booking system then they realize it’s a hundred dollars two hundred less and they’ll never go back the experience is different it’s cheaper and we might have the Airbnb will charge a service fee so they’re gonna be just like a hotels.com that’s delivering you to the hotel okay so Airbnb is gonna charge the guest and the host a service fee so people probably at least now maybe they book with book your properties through Airbnb the first time because they don’t they don’t trust random websites or whatever right they don’t know yeah and they have a great experience and then the next time they’re like we’ll just go right to JZ yeah yep absolutely and they they’re gay Millennials are getting really smart in the very beginning before we had the brand presence we had to work really hard to to really put that out there organically like I didn’t really mark it at all for the first four five years we wanted to focus more on just taking care of the guests and providing a good experience then trying to brag about it so we we put more emphasis on that and then eventually we started to market and put more investment into the site and our brand awareness and now Millennials will go on they’ll see Airbnb they’ll see a bunch of listings and this is really helpful for all of our hosts and they’ll see JZ Vacation Rentals at the end of all the listings and then they go to Google and they’re like what does JZ vacation levels they’ll pull it up they’ll call in to our call center or talk to our guest support like why is it cheaper like oh well you can book direct and so they’re starting to do that on their own that’s interesting yeah and people are starting to figure it out as the industry has really really grown since we started okay so I own a property actually I do have a duplex with one unit vacant right now right I’m a potential customer I call into your office what are you gonna tell me how you charge and how does all this kind of can you kind of do that first phone call that you get with yep a host a potential host that calls in absolutely first I’d want to ask you where it’s at so is it in Maplewood what city is this one’s in South City okay near on Watson okay so if it’s in south city you’re in the city I always tell everybody the first thing is the area and path of least resistance Maplewood that doesn’t necessarily accept the Airbnb or short term model so South City is okay okay how’s the area feel if you were driving from the airport and you’re heading to your your duplex how does it feel I think it feels good I would say I feel I was gonna say it feels like South City but I guess there’s a lot of different feelings around there this one’s in Lindenwood Park okay so the only problem with this building is it is right on Watson but I think it feels good that makes me wonder are most of the people coming from out of town or is it like someone’s gonna go to the Cardinals game and they live in Wildwood and they wouldn’t rent one or something you got all the above yeah so we’ll run our reports we’ll export the guest data and we’ll look at zip codes we want to see where the demographics are coming from I’ve had I’ve had a couple call me that was in a panic and they looked on Airbnb they looked on all the sites it’s last minute they were walking into an inspection on a home that they were supposed to purchase the contractor dropped the ball and so they had to back out last minute now they have nowhere to stay and luckily we had a home that was coming up for a broker that we were about to manage we didn’t have it live yet but they called in and a frantic and I answered the call talked to him in this couple years back and we were able to put them in a home for 30 days while they’re trying to find their next home so you get a lot of that you get I was talking to somebody the other night that said that they just built a home and they stayed in like five different Airbnb ease while they’re building their home so it could be it could be what’s known as a staycation we still do that my wife and I need a break every now and then from our five and three year old once once your why yeah I know weird right what’s your next step when you’re talking to a potential host he said the main things we want to know is your goals so are you looking at just what you see so you have a vacant unit is that one of the to the duplexes tell me about that unit is it how many bedrooms two bed one bath okay the living room little like porch on the back it’s on the first floor there’s probably five steps going up to it and it’s in good condition okay but it’s empty you know we there’s no beds there’s no Forks there’s no nothing like that what’s up which is okay do you and were you renting it traditionally because why is it vacant now the tenant just moved out I just did a little bit of updating to it and we’re marketing it right now I’m we actually have someone that’s applied for it but for the purpose of the conversation you know I could still turn I can still turn it down what do you what do you typically get for traditional rent they’re 750 750 okay so on a two-bedroom in that area so we have a system that normally if this was a real real call I would pull it out so we we leverage software known as err DNA and we also have our own software in six years of analytics so what we could do is project out what you can make typically on a two-bedroom you’re gonna be I would say about double what you’re getting on the traditional style the way that I’ve been able to break it down just easily without like throwing a bunch of analytics which we can do in a spreadsheet a two bedroom three bedroom four bedroom they’re all going to be kind of on a multiplier so two bedroom you’re typically going to double what your traditional rental would do three bedroom three times four bedroom four times three and up is really the Golden Nugget doesn’t mean you can’t do well with a two bedroom you’ll still beat what you’re doing traditionally and especially in South City you say that I’ll beat it and you’re saying double is that my take home will be double I mean that’s after I pay all the expenses and the cleaning fees and pay you guys and all that stuff or yeah so what we would do is we would project it out for you and we can tell you exactly we give you a couple options so we’ll tell you exactly what you’re gonna make if you wanted to do a fixed rent model we have two different pricing structures one some investors this has become a lot more common now we have a lot of investors or could just be your average homeowner that they just want to know exactly what they’re gonna make and don’t want to take the risk of the ups and downs and occupancy and so what we’ve done because we have six years of data and analytics we can literally project out a fixed rent and we have a lease that we provide and the beauty of that is that lenders now are actually underwriting it as a long-term rental because there’s a 12-month lease you’re so what you’re doing is you’re saying an actual lease with say in this scenario you would sign a lease with Adam to lease that apartment yeah for the next year and then you would just walk in and be like I’m not gonna actually rent this I’m subleasing so in in essence of that lease now its subleasing though right that’s correct so it’s all drawn up that way you and I have that agreement you know it’s exactly what you’re gonna make on every month we even put an occupancy calculator to it so for example January February is typically 30% occupied it can go up to 70 80 90 % in July so we have that fluctuation built in so let’s say 1500 was the number I would need to look in research but let’s just say for this scenario $1500 is the number you put 1,500 dollars over the 12 months that will that’s what we’d be writing a lease for you where do I sign haha excited by the double my rent is that how many do how many leases do you have in your name we’ve as as we’ve really had a lot of collaborations with a lot of Realtors and I was more collaborating with the Realtors before and brokers because I was selling homes we’ve been rehabbing building and remodeling for over a decade and then now it’s more we slowed that down but we still have properties we’re down to one we have one commercial building in Central West End right now but we had eight that we owned gutted fully renovated fully furnished already successful and so we had investors start to come to us and ask if they can just buy it as a turnkey and that’s really what got us into that model because we could we can make it so simple and say one here’s the priced two here’s exactly what your ROI is here’s your cap rate we’re gonna cover the maintenance since we did all the work we’re gonna cover the damage up to 750 dollars and an investor they love it I mean it’s it was almost too good to be true so again we had to just let that organically kind of happen and grow and now we’re we’ve sold almost all eight and so that’s where the fixed came about for for for some of the more savvy investors or people that are a little bit more introduced to this industry then we do a profit share so we charge twenty-five percent on the rent and the co-hosting model it’s anywhere from 10% of the rental revenue of the unit to 20% traditionally in the industry and the professional management model where you’re putting someone you’re paying for a software you’re paying the credit card swipes there’s a lot more overhead built in it’s anywhere from 25% to 50% throughout the industry so in Miami some some of the management companies are charging 50% of what the profit comes in the hosts and investors don’t care because it could be 50 percent of 300 grand I mean it could be something very large so what we did is fall on the on the on the lower end of that scale want to want it to be competitive and so if you go back to the example with Lauren we took her from 18,000 up to 58,000 crazy and we take a quarter of the quadrupled revenue right so it’s still all day long it’s worth it for an investor and we’ve now even put it to where we will guarantee that we can replace our fee or we’re free so we could take if you have that Airbnb let’s say you were already doing it on your own we would analyze the data that you’re doing and if we can’t replace our revenue uptick then we’re free love it but then that can’t mean that you’re taking on every property we can’t take on every property that’s it has to have your standard yet in order for you to be able to provide that kind of guarantee yep okay and that’s that’s an it and that was that’s been a big challenge honestly because it almost came off like too arrogant in the very beginning we had to like quickly revisit like hold on these are our standards these are gassed and we like changed the name from brand standard list to guest standards and because it almost comes off too arrogant like these aren’t the dike I didn’t pick a teakettle I actually got three fours because I didn’t know that that would be something we would get a bad review on and so it’s that’s then right now there’s a whole thing about the triple sheet method even the chase hotel and all real nice hotels that I would I love staying at they do what’s called the triple sheet you have sheet insert sheet it’s 60 more seconds to put a duvet on there but they want to cut that 60 seconds across the the entire Airbnb or Home Sharing industry every but I cannot tell you how many times have heard this at a conference it’s called the smell test and literally if you see a massive comforter comforter and I’m not saying everybody every host does this but more than than not right we’ll just do the smell test cuz you can’t wash those things so we are like we’re not going in that direction we’re gonna do a duvet for nice pillows nice sheets and an insert every time so then every piece that you touch in that bed it’s clean and you’d be shocked how often that does not happen yeah so okay so now you have so some of the methods if someone calls in their options are you can you would actually just leased the place that’s one option then there’s a standard rate what is your standard rate if you Air B and B it just without is there just a standard yeah we can do we have customizable packages okay you used to in the beginning because we had to really like put a we kind of had to have it very universal as I was growing my team getting the corporate office but now we have we have a warehouse we have a supply room we have business wayfarer amazon we have all these affiliates and vendors we travel to all the conferences so we can work directly with these vendors we can chop down the prices so literally will furnish we just weren’t we furnished a 5-bedroom 5-bath room former bed-and-breakfast in two weeks it cost the host about 25,000 ish I believe was the the invoice but that was to put everything in there every single thing that a guest would need that whole list all the furnishing TVs home automation and this this host is making up to six seven thousand dollars a month on this place that’s in so large so he’ll be in the six figures very quickly so it was definitely worth the investment right when you break it down like that yeah yeah I’ve kind of been speechless over here for a few minutes I’m like man what I need to start I mean so is profit sharing different than your fee or is that like basically what you call is this profit sharing can help them grow yes so the so the twenty five percent basically covers honestly we net about five percent on that maybe in some scenarios ten percent but you take care of the cleaners everything get some of the expenses that guests actually pay the cleaning fee so we take the cleaning fee and then we hand it to the cleaners the guests pay the taxes so we take the taxes we remit it to all the cities which is which can be an expensive thing in itself if you’re not on Airbnb if you’re on other channels they don’t collect the taxes so most hosts are just aren’t aware that they’re supposed to remit it or pay an accountant to do it but we do all of that hmm so yeah we every single part of the process so what we’re doing is we’re paying the host their rent revenue and they’re getting 75% of the rent revenue we’re taking 25% of the rent revenue and they’re very hands-off they’re not even complete they’re not even answering the phone no they don’t that’s the only thing they do is get a newsletter a check Lauren I actually haven’t heard from her in like six months and when I just told a case study she’s amazing I’d love to talk to her more but she she’s cool with just mailbox money you know we have some hosting that mailbox some hosts that call us a box money hey I got you what’s the deal about this you mentioned the taxes is there something going on with the city trying to change their rule you want to get into that at all oh yeah and we’re dancing that’s been a lot more of my city and you know especially with this last round of tax um yeah property taxes yeah so um I currently lead two nonprofits there’s JZ gives back which is our internal nonprofit which is kind of centered around education teaching anything and everything as a passion of mine then also STL STR org which is really it’s about five hundred hosts here in St. Louis that are part of our Facebook group will do monthly events and will really really get together to try to solve self regulation and what’s what I’ve learned from a lot of just amazing lobbyists or managers or city officials in other cities what I’ve been doing is trying to take a lot of their ideas and implement them here in St. Louis so I’ve met with the aldermen for the last couple years I’ve been at the City Hall more times than I can count I was just there speaking with Michael dolphin that had assessor that what it would happen recently is they reassessed they sent out 235 letters to reassess property taxes from residential to commercial so that means that they took him up from believe it as 19% to 32% mm-hmm which is a massive increase for these owners some of these owners are the reason why I got so passionate about that nonprofit so these owners are disabled veterans then they’re literally living off of this money and so for us to go after and double and triple their taxes like they’re running a hotel it’s not a hotel it’s it’s completely different it’s still a home it’s still a residential space so what we’ve done when every time I meet with the aldermen we really try to talk a lot about statistics and we have we have a meeting right now I have a GoFundMe set up because we’re we’re hiring a lobbyist and we’re hiring a former judge that I’ve met with multiple times and they’re gonna help set up a meeting at one of our Vacation Rentals so I’m gonna meet with all the aldermen at once to try to again just one goal to accomplish one goal which is for the city to work with our association that I lead and amongst a lot of just great diversity of hosts there all managers professionals or just a diverse group of good people and our old goal is just to solve that problem of ongoing legislations because right now it’s taxes and they made a ton of mistakes there’s a hundred and ninety of those properties where Airbnb and then there’s like 40 something that were not and so the reason I got in the door of the city halls I made a quick video put it at the city hall that use some of our marketing techniques and I professionally called out Michael Dauphin and showing him all the mistakes I’m like look I can hit one button and tell you everything you want to know because we pay for it so we know all the analytics that can tell you where every property is the taxes all kinds of stuff and they spent three months trying to figure out these 235 homes right so they actually just went to the short-term rental sites like Airbnb and just tried to they looked at tried to Zone in on the address and just that and to me I feel like that was extraordinary discrimination because if you do it to one you need to do it all it’s all but so now Airbnb or other individuals are like I’m I could putting a picture of the front of my house yes plus now I’m paying a tax for the whole year on my house so some of the did they appeal them did any appeal and were any successful yes my neighbor’s is an Airbnb guy and he’s like he was very lost and I was just like it just seemed very yes DL STR org well here’s a couple things so an attorney and the attorney was like what are you gonna do well we have attorney so if any bullets it is past the deadline I believe on the appeals but we did this year yes for this year no there’s so there are 50 appeals and anybody that needs help with this they can absolutely reach out to us I on YouTube on JZ gives back our YouTube channel I have a whole playlist just for STL SDR and it’s got my recorded conversations with the Board of Equalization when we were doing the appeals I wanted people to know they they put me first Michaels like let’s get this guy out of the way so the very first appeal scheduled and I recorded it and then I immediately posted it for all the other hosts that come prepared and they unfortunately did not overturn it the Board of Equalization did not overturn the appeal so what happens now is multiple lawsuits did you go to the state that’s that’s the next step is the state appeal so yes I’m an appeal the unfortunate sight is that there’s there’s a hundred and ninety and there’s only fifty that appealed so dude that’s what my goal is is really to continue to rally hosts or investors or homeowners to stand up for power in numbers yeah yeah and we’re really our whole goal is just to empower the city with education because I’ve done it in other cities I’ve been a part of it in kelowna West I’ve been asked to speak at other legislation events and it’s really it’s really been exciting to watch the difference and what happens is it always starts out how it is here in Maplewood where you’re against the short-term rental concept and only wanting private shared rooms and then they eventually accept the short-term rental concept but then have like all these little things to solve so what we tell the city is like it’s you’re proposing a bill two months ago now it’s taxes there’s gonna be ten more other things to discuss let us help we we have all the resources to help so we could be having a meeting quarterly maybe as an association with the city and then we could be solving these things before it becomes a problem we could save them tax dollars in three months it takes me three minutes to run would took them three months and a lot of driving around and peaking and when I don’t know what happened but yeah I just heard a little bit from the Assessor and it’s not know there’s a lot of privacy invasion to have to go through that so yeah so I like that so STL STR is I guess St. Louis short term rental that com yep and then we have JZ gives back org and I have a whole page on there that talks about the events and kind of keeps up with any press releases or anything that we do good well I really hope that you can kind of get through to the city and they find another Avenue I hope so too like right there I mean I understand that they they want their mutton some money – and cut in all this and I don’t disagree with that but I think that there is a right way and a wrong way to approach it I agree and if you look at just some of the numbers taxation alone in Missouri in 2016 this this industry brought in nine million dollars in taxes for for lodging tax sales tax tourism tax then then it went up to last year forty eight million dollars so from nine million in Missouri in Missouri to forty eight million right so think about this there’s eighteen hundred and thirty five properties I looked this morning because I’m constantly trying to keep up on air DNA and there was nineteen hundred so some people already fell off because of this this this announcement but for there’s eighteen hundred and thirty five properties right now so if they just get rid of a certain amount of those hosts think about the massive amount of tax dollars that are being lost so that’s what’s happening in a lot of cities and we’re not the first ones to do this I mean this has been going on for many years and so all I’m trying to offer the city is let me empower your decisions a little bit better by educating you before you make them right and they I mean this is true across any of these newer industries that are popping up like an Uber in the lift they’ve had the battle against the the cab driver yeah is there like a hotel political action yeah there’s definitely hotel lobbyists and what’s what’s what’s funny and I and this may be a rumor may be true I don’t know but when there was less proposed bill at the City Hall and that was there was a whole agenda of things that they were trying to regulate and we all were there and and representing the industry but from what I was told that was Expedia lobbyists backing that which is kind of interesting because Expedia now owns the whole home waiver bow and one of the largest vacation rental sectors in the world so I don’t know if that was to play off the hotel backing or what but most definitely there’s always going to be the cab company lobbyist maneuver came here hotel lobby is now the short-term rentals well we only have a couple more minutes but one I want to ask one question that I get and I know it’s not like exactly in line with our conversation here but one of the things that I’ve heard people say is but won’t they steal my stuff they won’t steal your stuff if you don’t leave it out no like renting out your personal home or if you’re just stalking a house with stuff yeah how do you how do you I make sure they don’t take like one of my five forks okay so well one we can brand those Forks so they can take them you know kind of like the Trump slippers you can take them home and it’s got Trump on it but we do we do a damage waiver so we charge every gas 2535 $50 and we actually backed the host up to $750 we’re very unique not many companies do that they lean on Airbnb your home away and there’s a big big gap in that deposit system so if you have a $500 deposit for example then Airbnb will ask you to confront the guests first and if you can’t resolve it with the guests that broke something staying something or did something in your place then they’ll step in and give you your deposit or whatever so what that basically means is go get a bad review so we had to solve that and do a damage waiver now people are people are great most people do not steal your stuff now yes you have kids or you have things that happen and people will call us and they’ll say they broke a bowl and what that told us is we needed Carell they don’t break you know like thank you for calling us and being honest like don’t even worry about it we got you and then you have yeah I’ve had some like on one hand that have been bad and we got a couple bachelor party or bachelorette parties that slip through because they said wedding and you know would they do that we do not we match your party is only not bachelor yeah yeah it’s the best that’s where I came in a very quick funny story I’m walking into the corporate office I look in my Sales Leader his name is Carson I look in his office and I see this massive blow-up doll sitting in his office and I just started dying and that was the humor of my housekeeping director who found it after a bachelorette party and she thought it’d be great because the guests support leader did not catch the Bachelorette keywords or whatever so she decided to throw up dolls all throughout his office I thought that was you know we had an Airbnb on my street where I live now and we they have bachelorette parties all the time I think they’re hysterical I love them yeah and I can’t say I’ve ever been interrupted late night or anything other than you know but they’re always so funny they’re out there gaggling and they have their little stashes on their wine that’s the problem yeah off the carpet you do kind of like just a little inventory after everything we do we have a whole other level of protection to like we have noise aware it’s a great product I know the owner really well he runs a non-profit rent responsibly and noise Aware’s is called like the smoke detector for noise and you go on our YouTube you’ll see like two minute clips of us introducing that but it’s nice because let’s say this is an actual alarm nope it won’t go off as an alarm but what it does do is track privacy noise so you can set the decibel range in a home and let’s say that off by myself let’s say she has a bachelorette party going on and she didn’t tell us and so then you’re the host it would actually alert you and her as the guests so it’s self regulating and it says hey you’re like you know I haven’t notified them it will alert you by text or you know whatever you signed up for originally and we can personalize the message we can make it funny we can do whatever we want but the average time that it’s result is 15 minutes and people are starting to understand in the home and they know that we so so with Soulard property Mardi Gras is coming up we meet it like we just finished these two gorgeous homes like get noise aware out there get cameras on the front in the back so I’m like nervous and anxious all night because it would be alerting me and I’m like oh no check the cameras and wouldn’t see a party I’m like ok ok so it’s there’s ways to monitor the property to make sure that people aren’t just going gangbusters like you hear in some of the horse well do you have cameras but on the outside on the outside yeah so yeah you definitely can’t have him on the outside he rented a condo down at the lake for a bachelor party now so it was like we’re sleeping mat o’clock you know but the homeowner I guess directly texted the person from my group that had rented it because we had the air conditioning to low she wasn’t happy about that I’m like you’re gonna complain about a couple degrees like like you said earlier like there’s a bad review for you yeah yeah don’t tell us what comfort our temperature we’re comfortable at you know you got to pick your battles yeah I feel like if you’re like 55 degrees or something maybe that’s a little excessive or 95 degrees but now yeah that’s probably not something you need to confront I just thought it was interesting that she was tracking it and I’m I was thinking so this just cost you like maybe 10 extra dollars right yeah anything else you want to say before we wrap it up this has been one of the most interesting but definitely longest podcast okay but I love it oh I’m going to run out of here and look up noise aware is that what it is yeah well go to JZ gives back YouTube so on my youtube and yeah the sites that we have is https://jzvacationrentals.com/ is basically that’s our platform and booking engine we like to provide education so that’s really what JZ gives back is okay so you’ll see that on YouTube we make a ton of Airbnb hosting tip videos we interviewed Vacation Rentals because I was on there and I went I saw the nonprofit but I’m assuming I can click find easily all the other links yeah absolutely can you type if you click on in the YouTube icon it’s going to take okay so we have a JZ vacation runs YouTube and also a JZ gives back YouTube so okay and are they but they’re separate videos separate videos JZ vacation rental videos is more like homes and tours and tours kind of cool homes we even have a home that we built on there that my wife and I and our family are in the video and we’ve we’ve done some REI so we’ll put some of that stuff on there too so yeah okay do you want people to call or would you rather they just went to https://jzvacationrentals.com/ but they’re welcome to call in either way we have Mpho at JZ vacation or else calm they can also call in our numbers on the site which is three one four four four nine six five six five and are any of our team is happy to help and I have on the side actually have a calendar embedded I’ll meet with anyone give anyone an hour of my time just two young entrepreneurs young Realtors young real estate whatever whoever it is and sometimes it’s outside of this industry for motivation I’ve been through a lot of crap so I’m always willing to give it back love it yeah thanks for giving us an hour every time today and all of that thanks so much for having this yeah this was fun thank you guys all right thanks for everybody for listening and take care