In this episode of Booked Solid, Garrett Brown—BiggerPockets Short-Term Rental Expert and founder of Cameron Ranch Glamping—shares how he turned a single house into a land-hacked luxury retreat business. Using a blend of creative hospitality, structured site analysis, and marketing systems built on influencer content, Garrett achieved a remarkable 76% direct booking rate. He walks us through his strategy, mistakes, wins, and advice for hosts aiming to move beyond Airbnb dependency.
Summary and Highlights
Meet Garrett Brown
Garrett is the BiggerPockets Short-Term Rental Expert and the owner of Cameron Ranch Glamping, a viral Texas-based luxury retreat. He helps investors scale unique, profitable vacation rentals using creative design, data‑driven real estate investing, and proven hospitality strategies.
🎥 He also hosts the BiggerStays YouTube series by BiggerPockets, where he educates STR investors on the power of guest-first independence.
🎧 Episode Highlights & Takeaways
| 🎯 Topic | Insight |
|---|---|
| From Flips to Flagships | Garrett shares his transition from fix & flips to building unique stays on strategically chosen land parcels. |
| Land Hacking in Action | Using a primary house for financing + utility access, then expanding with domes and mirror homes on the same parcel. |
| 60‑30‑10 Rule | Garrett’s formula for selecting unique stay land: 60 min from a metro, 30 from an attraction, 10 from a town. |
| 4 S’s + P | The 5 key filters for vetting land: Sight, Sound, Smell, Septic, and Permitting. |
| Content‑First Strategy | Before spending on ads, Garrett invested in high-quality video and leveraged influencer stays and UGC. |
| 76% Direct Bookings | Through social-driven sales funnels using ManyChat, discount codes, and attribution tracking. |
| Direct Booking Mindset | Focus on building a brand, not just a listing. Garrett used platform independence to unlock flexibility, data, and margins. |
| Hospitality Infrastructure | Clean design, customer experience, automation, and multilingual VAs power his operations. |
📚 Garrett’s Book Picks
- Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
- Traction (EOS framework)
- $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
🔗 Connect with Garrett
- Instagram: @GarrettBrownRE
- YouTube: BiggerStays by BiggerPockets
- Email: garrettbrown@biggerpockets.com
🎧 Listen to Garrett’s full episode here to learn how to scale unique vacation rentals with smart systems, creative thinking, and modern marketing.
Then head to CraftedStays.co to start your free trial and take control of your direct bookings with a platform designed for serious hosts.
Transcription
Garrett: Sometimes you have to just jump in the fire and learn some things while you’re going, but I, you need to make sure you have that basis first, that you can withstand that fire. So I looked at properties for eight months before I found the one that I really liked. I didn’t just find a property like, oh, this is it.
Garrett: It needed to be something that when I walked on it, I knew that the things I look for are the site. You need to make sure it has some type of view. It doesn’t need to be on a mountaintop in the middle of. Costa Rica or something, but it’s gotta be nice. Like I personally always look for a water feature.
Garrett: You’ll get a higher rate no matter what, but not always mandatory. But anything I’m buying now is gonna have a water feature or it’s such a good deal that I can put in a water feature like a pond or something. Good.
Gil: Before we bring on my guest, I wanted to talk just a little bit about something that I’ve been hearing a lot from Host. I keep on hearing the same thing. I know my website isn’t converting, but I can’t afford $8,000 on an agency to rebuild it. Here’s the thing, you’re letting all these marketing strategies, you’re driving traffic and you’re putting it all to work.
Gil: But if your site isn’t really built to convert, you’re basically lighting your energy and money on fire. And even if you could afford an agency build, every time you want to test something or make a change, you’re having to pay them again. You can iterate, you can’t test, and you really can improve on things.
Gil: You don’t need a custom $10,000 website to get the conversion rates that really matter. You just need the right platform. That’s why I build craft estates. It’s purpose built for short term rentals and designed from the ground up to help you drive more direct bookings. You can finally turn that traffic into bookings.
Gil: And you can keep on testing and improving. As you learn, you can make changes all on the platform. You don’t need to learn something new. So if you need some help or you wanna get started, go ahead and go to craft estates.co and start your free trial. Now let’s bring on our guests and dive deep into hospitality and marketing.
Gil: Hey folks. Welcome back to the book Solid Show, the podcast where we bring on top operators to discuss marketing, revenue management, and the guest experience to drive towards being booked solid. On today’s show, I have Garrett Brown. You most notably might know him from BiggerPockets. He has the YouTube channel there.
Gil: He’s also a short-term rental operator and specializes on unique stays. I. Thoroughly enjoy this entire conversation, kind of walking through one, his kind of his guest or his hosting an investment journey there, but. What I found interesting is kind of like the time and effort that he spent towards really breaking down what unique stays is and really how to approach it if you’re thinking about buying a plot of land and building on it for unique stays.
Gil: And then on the flip side, we talk about the marketing side of things and how he was able to get to 76% direct bookings in two, three years. I think he mentioned at the very end he got up to. High double digits in just the first year alone. So he’s gonna break down what his direct booking engine looks like, some of the things that he really emphasizes, and we geek out just a little bit about really the marketing tactics kind of be happening behind the scenes, or the technical parts of the marketing and how it’s difficult and some of the things that we’re trying to do to make it easier for folks.
Gil: So again, I thoroughly enjoyed the show, so I can’t wait to bring ’em in. So without further ado, let’s bring ’em in.
Gil: Hey Garrett. Welcome to the show.
Garrett: I’m super excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Gil.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really good to have you on the show. I love the, I love it when we have a good mic on the show, like hearing someone on the other end have a really good mic. It actually makes me very happy.
Garrett: Nice. I, I’m glad I can contribute to the happiness ’cause I, I, I, I would, I feel the same way I have with my audio engineering background, so
Gil: Yeah. Um, for folks that don’t know who you are, do you mind giving a quick introduction on who Garrett is?
Garrett: that is. Absolutely. My name is Garrett Brown. I’m a short term rental investor from Houston, Texas. I work at a company called BiggerPockets. Uh, we teach real estate investing education for over 3 million, uh, real estate investors in, in the United States.
Garrett: I am the short-term rental expert there, and I have a ton of unique and glamping, you know, different type of vacation rentals. That’s like a little bit of my specialty. So a little bit of background on me, but done, done it all in real estate, I feel like.
Gil: Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about, about kind of like your journey there. Um, I find out a lot of folks in the short term rental space. Many of those actually don’t start off with as STR, as the first like asset class. So talk to me about like your journey
Garrett: Yep. So I, I went to school, um, in the University of Houston for hotel and restaurant management with a focus in hotels. So I always had a little bit of a hospitality, you know, I worked in bars and was a waiter and, you know, I had that background, but I started producing music, actually. So I’ve always been really creative.
Garrett: And so I started doing that. But it was, it, you know, I had a lot of fun. I made okay money, but I knew it wasn’t something that was gonna build me long-term wealth. So I was
Garrett: like, starting to figure out like, all right, what’s, what’s my next step? And so I started getting into real estate. Um, I became a real estate agent probably as a lot of people, and I. Did not. I’ve done, I still have my license to this day. I think I’m on year nine, but not a fan of it. ’cause I’m not a sales person. But the thing with real estate and being an agent, I got reached out to by an investor one day and he was like, Hey, like, do you work with investors? I, I didn’t, but I was, you know, I was just like, sure I do.
Garrett: Let’s talk about it. And I started googling. I, I, I came up upon BiggerPockets, started learning the investing side, and I was like, wait, this is actually like where I need to pivot. So I started doing everything as most, you know, and, and, and start out investors do. Like, I tried fix and flips. I tried, um, I got a couple long term rentals and they went okay.
Garrett: I had a lot of failures. Like, I had one really big success with my first fix and flip. And I was like, oh yeah, like, I’m gonna crush. This is like 2016. I’m like, I’m gonna crush it. Like, just keep getting houses and it’s, it’s, you know, ca I’m gonna be a millionaire by the time I blink and my next deal went completely south, I lost about $15,000.
Garrett: Like, pretty much crushed me what I was doing. And I was like, all right. I need to pivot and, and think of something different. And this was, I think about 2018. So I had a, I had a client of mine that was, I was helping him rent out condos in, in Houston. And he was getting to the point now, and this is why I always stress that networking in any, any style of real estate is huge.
Garrett: ’cause you never know where these,
Garrett: these, you know, these opportunities that are gonna arise for you.
Garrett: So he reached out and he was like, Hey, I think I’m ready to sell my three condos. They were smaller, nothing, you know, nothing crazy, just typical clean one bedroom condos in Houston. And he, and he was ready to sell it.
Garrett: And I go, Hey, like, what if I bought them? Because this is when I was like, oh, there’s this thing Airbnb, like I wanna learn about it. And so we struck a deal. I got a really good deal on the three condos. I put ’em up on Airbnb and they. Quickly did pretty well. And I’m like, okay, this, I, maybe I could get some more.
Garrett: But then not much longer after that, that’s when the pandemic hit and, uh, all the big money at that same time was, had just started coming into the space. They were all starting to catch on. So at that point, it was pretty much a race to the bottom and pricing and, you know, I’m just one person. I had no chance against all these other big conglomerates that were starting to form in the short term rental space. So I sold all those during the pandemic. Heard about this glamping unique stay thing, and me having a creative background, I knew, like, I was like, okay, now I can be creative and be, you know, use my hospitality background and also be super profitable. Like, oh, this is where I need to go. I went all in on it. Uh, you know, plot twist, it is definitely not as easy as everybody said, and you’re not gonna be a millionaire by the time, you know, you’re done with your first tent or whatever. But it became like, it is, it, it was definitely the best pivot I ever made though. ’cause I’ve learned a ton. We are super profitable now.
Garrett: Well, lemme correct that We are profitable now as we grow. We keep reinvesting the business, but it’s all become, because I realize the value of unique stays and, and even direct bookings even more. So we’re, we’re starting to expand now. We have two different sites, one in Houston, one in Austin. I also co-host for quite a few different properties.
Garrett: I only, I have 10 properties under management right now. But it’s one of those things where it’s like I’m very selective on the properties I take and they’re, they’ve gotta be able to get the cash flow that I’m actually looking for. Um, and they gotta be unique because I personally think that that’s how you kind of can still. Have, you know, have the, have the profitability that you’re kind of looking for without having to scale to a hundred plus units. So, um, it’s a little background on me as you know, it’s definitely a winding story, but the, the coolest thing about real estate is that, um, there’s so many different avenues that you can, you can kind of, you know, pick and choose what actually works for you in, in your, your passions going forward.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. So help, help me understand, like when you say unique days, like help me imagine that portfolio and you sounds like you have two sites or at least two markets that you’re in. What’s that look like?
Garrett: So, um, in my, I have a thing called when I’m getting into markets, I, I have a thing that I’m looking for called a 60 30 10 rule. And this is how I, I’m in a lake near, near Houston, Texas, so the 60 is, you need to be 60 minutes from a major metro hub. And so I, I live in Houston. My first site I knew I wanted to be near Houston, we’re about 45 minutes away, um, from the downtown metropolitan area. And so the 30 is you need to be 30 minutes away from a national, regional, or, or state attraction or something along those lines. And the area I found is 10 minutes away from the second largest lake in Texas and 10 minutes away from a national forest. And then the 10 of the 60, 30 10 is just 10 minutes from some type of civilization. So once I kind of cornered what market I wanted, that’s when I knew it was time to go in on the unique property. So I have a geodome, I have an Oud mirror house, which, um, I maybe we pop of pictures or you can, you know, see it on my side. It’s one of the most, uh, viral stays that we’ve had. It’s a company from Estonia that I partnered with.
Garrett: I have a, a lighthouse that’s on a lake. Um, it’s like a really unique build there. We just launched some more mirror houses in Austin. We have two there, hoping to have five very soon. And then I have a couple properties that. Um, are more houses traditionally, but we’ve themed them out a little bit the best we could.
Garrett: They would, the, the crazy part is they are our lowest performing properties. They do fine, but compared to the unique stays, it’s, it’s not even close, like the, the revenue that they bring in and the operational side. So we’re about in, and, you know, then I manage quite a few other, uh, smaller houses on the lake and things like that too.
Garrett: So, uh, the unique stays though is definitely by far the bread and butter of my portfolio.
Gil: Yeah. Let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s unpack that just a little bit. Are these properties all on one plot of land or do you have different parcels that you have these in?
Garrett: So the, my, my flagship one is, um, we have our mirror house, our geodome, and what we call our Texas ranch house on one 11 acre parcel. This is, we’re, we’re still constantly adding more, um, sites to it. We’re even getting some designs and, um, permits built up right now for our next two or three we’re gonna put on there. But I, I use something called land hacking to kind of start this little bit of a portfolio. I didn’t coin the term. It, there’s a, uh, a guy named Kai Andrews that’s pretty popular on YouTube that I pretty sure he coined the term, but I use it a lot still. ’cause what this, what this involves is, you know, if somebody’s looking to start something like this, it, you know, it takes a little bit of sacrifice, which anything that is, you know, is worth it will, but. You basically find a house with some land around it, it’s very hard to get a loan for just raw land. Like good luck doing that. You’re probably gonna have to put a ton of capital down. But the benefit of having the house on the land is that you can get a, you, it’s much easier to get a loan or a mortgage for it.
Garrett: I even utilized, I lived in that property for a year and used an owner occupied loan for 5% down. And so instead of using like a traditional 20, 25% down payment for an investment property, I got a better interest rate. I got to save that cash. And that’s how I built my first geodome because you know, you, I built a luxury geodome and they’re, you know, it’s hard to finance those and they’re not cheap.
Garrett: And, you know, I love my geodome, but I, I learned a lot from that process as well. But once I started, you know, I used that cash and then I opened the geodome and then I moved out after the property, you know, and I fixed up the ranch house a little bit, put some amenities into it. Upgraded the flooring and like boosted the equity value on the house as well.
Garrett: At the same time, I moved out of the house after a year, started renting out both units, had already started to form a partnership with the Mirror House company because we had a profitable site as, and we’d put some money into it. And once we got those launched and going, um, the Mirror House company decided to partner with us.
Garrett: They provided us with a mirror house. Um, we give them a revenue percentage back. And it’s a great partnership there because, uh, it, you know, it, we, we both were able to benefit from that because I’m, they just opened a factory in Houston, Texas. And so I was kind of, I’m kinda like their flag flagship site for the United States.
Garrett: So it
Garrett: was kind of just the best of, uh, making the best of my opportunities that were out there. And I did that all on my own, just researching, you know, opportunities. You gotta be creative in this kind of space sometimes too, people get so caught up with, you know, like, oh, I, I can’t figure this out or how to finance this and I get it ’cause it’s tough, but.
Garrett: Sometimes you just have to, you know, take a, take a risk on yourself and also think outside the box of like, what is actually like available out there. So it’s not as cut and dry as people think.
Garrett: Um, but Yeah.
Garrett: that, that’s kinda how I started that property. Eventually I wanna sell it as a, a business, you know, with assets attached to it if, you know, if I want to down the line.
Garrett: But that, that was also a proof of concept for me, that now a lot of these unique stay people that have unique stays are coming to me because of what the infrastructure we’ve built out and the branding that we’re kind of building out in, in our Texas area.
Gil: Yeah, yeah. And what is that brand called?
Garrett: Uh, Cameron Ranch clamping.
Gil: Nice. Nice.
Gil: you mentioned a few things. I, I think kind of circling back just a little bit of like the process there. So if I can kinda like summarize you, Burch, you purchased this plot of land. It had one ranch house on it. You lived outta the ranch house, you bought it as owner occupied. So lower rates.
Gil: You then built out a geodome in that area, and then you partnered up and you did this mirror house there.
Gil: So you’re able to like kind of split this whole land there. And that’s like, you’re able to do it very organically without kind of like over leveraging yourself, it sounds like. I,
Garrett: Yep.
Gil: that’s, that’s, that’s amazing. And I think, like, what, what’s interesting is also is that when you’re buying it as a ranch house, you, you actually have utilities already at the property.
Gil: And I think that that’s, that’s where a lot of folks make mistakes where they’re buying a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, or maybe it’s not that far, but there’s no utilities in the area.
Gil: And when you’re trying to build your other parcels or your other, your other plots of lands there, you don’t actually have running utilities there.
Gil: So it ends up becoming very costly. I think like out of all the folks that I’ve talked to in the past of doing something like this, this is the one thing that they tripped over starting this out
Gil: and this is the thing that they recommend, like. If you’re thinking about it, don’t underestimate what it costs to bring utilities over to the land.
Garrett: That’s a, that’s a great point I wanted to make as well. And you hit it on the head. That’s the other benefit to land hacking, is that all like the electric cost. Like I planned out my site way ahead. I knew how many I kind of wanted. Um, this helped with permitting, but then it’s also helped me set up the site to save money on utilities.
Garrett: So because I had electric right at the front of the property. I put the Geodome kind of in the middle of the land, ran the electric there, cost me about $5,000. Which sounds like a lot ’cause it is. But
Garrett: other quotes, I was gonna say other quotes for people that I’ve heard of bought raw land, they’re getting quotes for a hundred thousand dollars to bring the
Garrett: electric there. You know, like I still had to get a water well, which you’re probably gonna have to do no matter what, but I was able to, I’m able to tap into the water well already at the ranch house for my next property I’m building and I was able to connect the water well to the Geo Dome. The new one I built to the Geo Dome, the mirror house, and another property I’m building.
Garrett: So if you think ahead in the same with our sewer and septic system, if you think ahead you can plan all that out. But the other thing too is that people don’t even think of when they think of utilities is how much road work costs you could buy a plot of land. No, I, I was shocked when I was starting to get some road quotes just to build out, you know, the back of my land. We were, you know, maybe it was 400 yards. We were getting $10,000 quotes for 400 yards. You know, so could you imagine if you’re bringing a stretch of road to, uh, like a, you know, a, a deserted piece of land and it’s, you know, a mile or something, I don’t even want to know what that kind of bill is gonna be.
Garrett: So that’s the benefit of having the house already there. You, and it’s just the whole process becomes easier. Raw land is a beast. And unless you have a big cash reserve or a lot of development experience, that is not something you should jump into. Take, take the route that, that is already gonna give you some, some, you know, some safety nets behind you.
Garrett: So that way if things car, you know, start to go downhill or you just get tired of it, you still have an equitable piece of property With equitable land, like, I, I think of things, you know, being at BiggerPockets, I think of things in the, not only in the the hosting space, but also in the investing space.
Garrett: What do you wanna do 10 years from now with that property? So
Garrett: it ended up working and, and you hit it on the head with that point.
Gil: Yeah. I think one of the things you’re talking about that I think like Brandon talked about in a lot in the past is like, what is your exit path of this? Like, how do you want to exit this portfolio there? Because yes, we may wanna hold it out long term and build the equity out there, but we need to know that like at some point, if we want to exit out of it, it becomes an asset that appreciated in value and that there is a market for someone to actually buy it there.
Gil: So if you actually
Gil: don’t do things right, or if you kind of overemphasize it as an STR, it’s really hard for you to sell it to someone that’s not doing St.
Garrett: a hundred percent. So, yeah, just as long as you’re seeing your vision for where you possibly want to go in 10 years, it can help you really guide this process. ’cause you could, you know, you can go many different ways in this unique stay place. I’ve seen people, you know, build up land and they put 30 domes on one piece of land right by each other and they do well. Mine’s a little more spaced out, a little bit different, but I know what, what the area w you know, could with withstand from a sale in, you know, 10 years. So you really need to understand your market. And if you’re not a hundred percent sure, don’t be afraid to, to, you know, talk to a local real estate agent that works with some investors and investor friendly agent because agents get a bad rap.
Garrett: I didn’t like being an agent, but they’re a valuable piece of, you know, knowledge that that is resource that is out there. And a lot of times it’s, it’s for a lot cheaper than you think, or it’s gonna save you more money in the long run because they save you from doing a bad deal, a bad zone, or, you know, whatever under the sun.
Garrett: So don’t be afraid to work with an agent and tell them exactly what you’re kind of, you know, planning and get the insights from them, from somebody that really is in that area.
Gil: Yeah, you kind of let me down like a string of thoughts in, in my head of like some of the challenges that you went through while doing this, and I think it sounded like you tapped into knowledge rather than trying to learn off of just. Doing it yourself and possibly making mistakes, which is like totally fine.
Gil: Like it’s good to actually do things on your own and learn, but if there are others that have already paved the way and have certain learnings, like doing your due diligence on utilities, like now that’s actually a lot more widespread news there. But in the very beginning, you might not even know to even look for those things.
Gil: So I guess like my question is like what were some of the due diligence things that you did in the very beginning while getting into this and like almost like, it’s kind of hard to think about like in hindsight because like you kind of like, oh, I had all these checkoffs, but like
Gil: actually in reality, like you probably only had like two or three things that you were looking for and you learned a whole bunch of things along the way.
Gil: So like what was your due diligence? What were some of like the big learnings. That you went through. And then third is like, what are some of like the resources that helped you kind of get through that process? And maybe those resources are things that, like you end up networking more over time and finding those right people that you didn’t have in the very beginning.
Gil: Um, so yeah, kind of walk me through kind of that process there.
Garrett: So, you know, I, I hinted at the agent thing because I know how valuable it was because I am an agent, so I got, that’s a benefit to me. Um, you know, because I have a ton of data. I could go see properties at any time. I didn’t have to wait on an agent, which, you know, that’s, that’s kind of like some people’s sticking points.
Garrett: But I, I say all that to, to give the hin you know, the ’cause you’re a hundred percent right, like, sometimes you have to just jump in the fire and learn, learn some things while you’re going. But I, you need to make sure you have that basis first, that you can withstand that fire, you know? So I, I looked at properties for eight months before I found the one that I really liked.
Garrett: Like, I didn’t just find a property like, oh, this is it, like. It needed to be something that when I walked on it, I knew that, you know, the things I look for are, are, you know, the site. Um, you need to make sure it has some type of view. It doesn’t, you don’t need to be on a mountaintop in the middle of Costa Rica or something, but it’s gotta be nice.
Garrett: Like I personally always look for a water feature. Um, uh, you’ll get a higher rate no matter what, but not always mandatory, but anything I’m buying now is gonna have a water feature or it’s such a good deal that I can put in a water feature like a pond or something. Um, and then sight smell. You wanna make sure you’re not near anything weird like a cow pasture.
Garrett: Um, and then, and then sound, you know, like you don’t want to be near, uh, major highway, you know, like you need to be tucked off just a little bit. Or e even, you know, a failure point of mine was I had, you know, I had a lot of land, but I have a neighbor not far away. I didn’t realize. And, you know, uh, I’m trying to think of a nice way to say this.
Garrett: ’cause he, he rescues dogs and he, you know, he’s, he protects them and I appreciate that tremendously. But. He also like leaves all these dogs outside and so they just howl all night. And that was something I, I miss, you know, didn’t think about fully when I was searching for this property. Luckily, you know, we talked to my neighbor, uh, we worked it out a little bit.
Garrett: It got better. Like, you know, he understood some, and I, you know, I, I tried to help him with some things. I actually adopted one of the dogs. Um, so anything I could do to make it work, but that kind of due diligence is, I, I wish I would’ve, you know, when I always, it’s a little tougher at night, but it’s like, I, I always recommend visiting these properties in the morning and the evening to make sure, you know, everything kind of, you know, plays out how it should in those areas. And then as I was, you know, the biggest part that probably everybody struggles with in this kind of unique space is the permitting of things. And my biggest tip, and it’s not anything groundbreaking, but people seem to like be shy from this, is look the county that you’re looking in. Pick up the phone and call the permitting department.
Garrett: There is probably two people that work in that permitting department. It’s probably, you know, rather small and you should call them, you know, look at a couple different counties. This, this is how I figured out my county was gonna be, you know, something to get permitted. As I called the county, there’s two different ones I was looking at.
Garrett: I called both up and I said, Hey, you know, like this is what I’m looking to do. I’m thinking about purchasing some property there that’s in a commercial or an unrestricted zone, which is very key. Nothing residential, no HOAs or anything like that. And then I’m thinking of, I want to do this glamping thing.
Garrett: And I have, I have architectural permit like plans, um, which is highly recommended if you’re doing unique stays, uh, you know, especially something you want commercially permitted. And I told ’em, you know what the situation was, one county goes, oh yeah, no. Like, I don’t think we can do that. Or it was just super negative and the other county was like, Hmm, you know. You could bring it to us and we’ll think about it. And so that alone was like, all right, now I at least have some knowledge that these people are willing to consider it. If somebody’s like, absolutely not, we don’t do that. Like, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. But then the next step I even took was I was starting to talk to contractors, and I started asking all these contractors.
Garrett: I’m like, Hey, which county is easier to permit in? And every single contractor was like, go to this county. It’s way easier to get permits in. And they were right. You know, so lean on your, like your, your local expertise there. Unless you’re from the area. Like I’ve, me leaning on my local contractors in those areas about, you know, where to put houses ’cause of floods.
Garrett: What kind of gravel do you use? What kind of pat like, you know, con concrete foundations, do you use? All that saved me a ton of money and stress because I knew, I don’t know everything. I, I, you know, I flipped some houses and stuff, but I never developed from the ground up. So lean on your local area. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and start a relationship. Like with these type of areas, I send cookies to the permitting department every Christmas, like, because I’ve built a relationship with them like that, you know, so that’s probably a little extra, but I’m trying to keep building and I’m, I was appreciative of how easy and professional the work they were to work with.
Garrett: So that’s major. And then your septic is major too. The two big things are, are your road work, um, making sure you have plans for the county to permit it, and then the septic behind it. If you don’t know anything about septic, I highly recommend you start researching some and talking to like some septic professionals in a market that you’re looking in into, they’re called Register registered Sanitarians. This is gonna be your biggest pushback from the county, um, by far. And, you know, it’s, it’s by, it’s the biggest process that people care about. I’m even building a an A-frame right now, not far away, um, on some water. And the septic is. The thing that’s holding it back for a bunch of reasons. So those are two, you know, with, without giving you sexy answers or anything like that, is you gotta figure out the permitting and you gotta figure out the septic issues upfront.
Garrett: If, if, if it’s doable to put a septic tank, you know, do soil test work with, you know, like do all your due diligence there. Everything else you’ll kind of learn as it goes. Like, uh, I, I, you know, the one thing I did that is, you know, I’ll tap on last is don’t be afraid to hire somebody to do a consult that has done what you want to do. Sometimes, like I was paying, um, a guy, he, his name’s Alex, he’s in George at Blue Ridge Glamping, and I did a few consult calls with him because he built domes and he’d done this and I knew there was, there’s no mastermind for some of these things. You need to learn. Sometimes you just need to ask, you know, get a direct resource and ask them the questions you specifically had.
Garrett: And I’ve done that with a few different mentors of mine now, where it’s like, I’m gonna pay you for your time. I’m coming with a list of questions that I know only you can answer. And I’m, you know, like, let’s do it. And that is gonna be your best, you know, 250 bucks, 300 bucks, whatever you’ll spend, like, instead of making these thousand, thousand dollars mistakes or paying for some huge mastermind and you’re one of a hundred and you, you can’t even get your specific questions, you know, an answered, like, there are some great masterminds out there, but when you’re doing this unique stuff, it’s such a different ball game than just regular plain Jane, short-term rental, real estate investing too.
Garrett: So don’t be afraid to lean on people that have, like you mentioned, like don’t try to reinvent the wheel every time. You can, you know, enhance it or improve it. But a lot of times that wheel is, is kind of going that way because people have figured out what, what’s worked for years. So vacation rentals in unique cabins and things like that have been around for decades.
Garrett: This is not new. So you just need to modernize it, you know, learn from others mistakes and you know, put yourself out there and start to learn, like hosting and all these things like that, that you only really will be able. You only really get good at hosting when you start hosting, and that’s really kind of like the only way I’ve personally seen it besides research and YouTube and things, but real ground roots hosting is how you’re able to expand and learn when it’s time to get a property manager or something along those lines.
Garrett: I, I’m a big self, self-hosting person too, so
Gil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, well, you gave us a ton of information.
Gil: No, no. It’s
Garrett: rattled it off.
Gil: no, it’s all good. It’s all good. But I, I, I like your last point where you mentioned that there’s a difference between. Masterminds and consultants where masterminds are really good for really repeatable things. Things that have been done over and over again, and there’s tried and true processes for these, but there’s also these very uncharted territories and it’s usually in, in entrepreneur space when you’re doing something that’s out of the box, out of the ordinary.
Gil: And those are the areas where you, where you wanna consult. And I a hundred percent agree with you, even as an entrepreneur, a software entrepreneur, I get a lot more value out of like one-on-one conversations with folks that have done it than I do being part of a mastermind or big course with, like you said, like hundreds of people in there.
Gil: Because yes, they can teach me the ropes, but in entrepreneurship there’s not a linear path to go about these things. There’s struggles along the ways and very different ways of approaching things. So actually have a consultant makes a ton of sense on, on things.
Garrett: yeah, you’re gonna save more money than you spend on those one or two hours to, to just come with your questions like then no, there’s no dumb question either. Like I was asking him like, how do I keep bugs outta my tent? You know, like all these things like that, that you’re, you need somebody straight up to tell you that has done it.
Garrett: And you take that feedback, you, you put it up against other data points and you’re able to, to solve your issue with a few different true tried and true, you know, experiences out there for that specific thing. So people kind of shy away from that. But I’ve always been very pro, you know, like. Pay, pay a little bit to learn a lot and save yourself money on the backend,
Gil: Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. Uh, you mentioned four. I heard, I’m calling the four S’s. I don’t know if you, you would agree with that? Sight, smell, sound and septic. Is that that that works for me. I, I would’ve said the three S’s, but I like the septic one on there too. ’cause it’s, it’s probably more important than all three of those, so,
Gil: Uh, yeah, so you have the three Ss and a p, sorry, four Ss and a p. Uh, permitting be the last one. I, I, I actually really like your approach on permitting, where you’re calling two different counties there. And I, I think that actually is not just for unique stays. It happens also in the short term rental industry in our space as well too, because in a lot of these smaller counties, short-term rentals is still being figured out.
Gil: People, at least in the county areas, don’t know what short-term rentals are. They don’t, they don’t know what the impacts of it is. They don’t know how to enforce it really well. And you’ll find counties that are really, oh, this is actually bringing tourism in there. I’m gonna support it. Or it’s on the other side where.
Gil: We have a housing crisis and we don’t really know how to make sure that the market doesn’t become the short-term rental place where people don’t, can’t afford their own homes anymore. And you can take very different stances on these and they’re both valid points. But talking to the local permitting department and maybe even the county in general, will help you understand like, okay, if I want to build something, what it look like, if I wanna operate something, what it would look like as well too.
Garrett: Yes. No, I, I completely, completely agree. And the thing that I think that, you know, you kind of touched on a little bit too, is regulations don’t have to be bad either. Like, everybody hears the word, like, oh, they have regulations there. It’s, it’s terrible. That actually is probably a better thing. Because you know what you’re stepping into.
Garrett: Like, you know, they always can change things and that’s, that’s one reason why I’m so, like, you know, anything can be changed at any time, which is kind of a wild premise, but I’ve gotten commercially permitted for a reason. So it’s gonna be, I’m not a short term rental, technically I’m kind of considered a hotel.
Garrett: That’s how I got my permitting set up. But at the same time, you, you going to these counties and seeing what their stance is on short-term rentals, if they have no regulations, that’s probably a little bit of a red flag because they could, you know, put the, you know, hammer down at any moment. If they at least are like, oh, we do this, you need to register and pay a, you know, a 7% tax or something.
Garrett: Which is kind of the standard thing. That’s actually good because they have talked about this, they’ve understood what they expect. And a lot of these towns, like even when I, you know, using my third 60 30 10 rule, a lot of those towns have probably. Had vacation rentals for years, like, you know, decades.
Garrett: And like even myself, the, the place that I have, my first site, I used to go, you know, as a kid to the lake all the time and we’d rent a cabin and things. So those areas are, you know, they, they actually thrive on the tourism dollars. And some, like you said, every, every county’s a little different. The county and over is a little more, they’re a little more apprehensive about short term rentals because they’re a little more developed and they kind of are like, all right, we, we don’t want to get our housing supply possibly run over.
Garrett: Even that’s a, that’s a whole other discussion itself too. Um, but you, you hit it on the head, like, if a county has regulations already in place and they have that history, you know, of people coming there to already enjoy the surrounding areas, you’re in a good path for like actually being able to stay, um, stay, uh, you know,
Garrett: uh, online. Yeah. You know, for lack of better words. And the main thing is if you’re getting into a neighborhood that has an HOA. You better not be the only short-term rental in the neighborhood. If you’re one of many, you’re gonna probably be good. Strengthen numbers there, you know. But if you’re getting into a neighborhood and it’s an HOA and you’re the only short-term rental or one of two, uh, you might be, you know, going down the wrong path.
Garrett: I, I like to have, if you’re going into a neighborhood, like, you know, lakefront neighborhoods in our area are really popular. Some don’t allow short-term rentals. Some are very short-term rental pro, and they have, you know, half the, half the houses in there are short-term rentals. So just try to lean towards the one that is already like, established that they’re okay with short-term rentals if you’re getting into that.
Garrett: But the best thing is to avoid HOAs at at all costs if you can, which is
Garrett: not as easy all the time. So,
Gil: yeah, yeah. Um, you, you mentioned like, uh, the, the permitting, I a hundred percent agree with you that I think when you are in a place that is reg, like regulated, it’s less likely for them to flip the switch on the other side, it’s, it’s really when you have no regulations. They can go in either direction there.
Gil: They have no foundation to say, we’re gonna change the rules now. And, and some places are, like Tahoe went back and forth, like Lake Tahoe here in California went back and forth, but their industry, their county relies so heavily on tourism now that like, it’s hard for them. And like you mentioned, the tax tax is actually a good thing because it incentivizes the county to want to keep that tax in place.
Gil: Like they don’t want to cut out short-term rentals and lose out on that 7% tax. I’m in Gatlinburg, most of the properties in Gatlinburg are short-term rentals, and if they were to kill short-term rentals, it kills a large portion of the revenues.
Gil: So I, I a hundred percent agree with you on like the tax part of it, the regulation part of it.
Garrett: You gotta find the right market. ’cause they’re, they’re out there. Even like Myrtle Beach not long ago. They’re banning long-term rentals because they’re losing out on tourism dollars from lack of short-term rentals now. So
Garrett: there’s places out. Yeah, I, I report about this type of stuff all day and I was shocked when I heard it too.
Garrett: ’cause you don’t hear stuff like that. But there’s areas now that are starting to see that short-term rentals are actually extremely beneficial to that economy in the area. And they’re probably kind of propping up the economy at times too. So, you know, it’s, it define the right market for your place and that has a history of working with short-term rentals and you’ll most likely be okay ’cause things are starting to ma mature now.
Garrett: Even though people hate that word in the space. It’s, it’s a true thing though. Things are starting to, you’re starting to be able to, to tell like who wants short term rentals there and who really doesn’t and just, you know, don’t try to buck the system ’cause you’re not gonna win that one.
Gil: Yeah. Have you, um, have you been following what, um, rent Responsibility has been doing? I.
Garrett: No.
Gil: So I, I met Dana and David at, at the STR Hospitality Summit just a few weeks back. Um, but they’re part of the organization Rent Responsibility
Gil: and their mission is to really ban the short-term rental industry or even specific markets, folks together to really figure out how do we go to a county and really professionalize short-term rentals and make it in making it feel like short-term rental isn’t this like wild West type of thing, where we actually have an organization of ex hosts or property managers that meets these types of standards.
Gil: This is how we do safety. This is how we do, um, like, like all the different things that you should be doing as like a business operator. We are doing these things, right.
Gil: Um, and showing counties, like, if you want to lean in on this one, like these are the successful counties that have done. Short term rentals,
Gil: and this is how they do regulation.
Gil: Like for instance, Gatlinburg.
Gil: Gatlinburg, for the longest time, actually, at least since 2016, I think was when the fire happened. Gatlinburg requires a annual permit, a fire permit. And so the fire marshal will actually come to your property. They’ll check that to make sure that there’s fire alarms or extinguishers your, uh, fence And railings are at least, or at max four inches apart.
Gil: Like, they’ll check and make sure that the property is safe. And it’s because their county is so reliant on short term rentals that they wanna make sure that like they can support it themselves, that they can back it. Um, but these smaller counties don’t know about how to like, push these regulations out there because what the, what you don’t wanna do is like have these really mature hosts that knows how to do things by the book and really is taking care of the guests.
Gil: And then on the other side, people that just. We’ll put their property up up and they just don’t care, or they just don’t know what to do and just have that, that’s disparity. So really like coming to the county together and saying like, if you want to embrace short-term rentals, we can guide you through that process and these are the things you have to look out for.
Garrett: Very cool. I I, I wish them all,
Garrett: all, all the best with that, that, that, I think that’s definitely the reason hosts, you know, Airbnb hosts or whatever unit term you want to use, that people will, like, you know, talk about online is because of the bad players in the space, which there’s a ton of really good players and a ton of really good guests out there.
Garrett: It’s that small, you know, minority that kind of put a bad name for both sides. And it’s really not the case that I’ve seen in my, you know, six years that I’ve been in it. So I definitely wish ’em the best and, and I, I hope, I hope they definitely, uh, bring it to the light that it should be. I.
Gil: and I, I think like if. I think the nation as a whole, or even just globally, we will start to see a rise in this type of regulation there, and it’s gonna actually fuel more comfort in knowing that short-term rentals is there to last. Like I’m sure it’s like this in Austin, but like in California and specifically San Francisco, to open a restaurant you have to get permits and you have to make sure that you get your liquor license and whatnot.
Gil: You have to have annual food inspections. And it’s to make sure that all these food establishments are really making sure that they’re not poison, like they’re not hurting people.
Garrett: yeah, yeah. Uh, I appreciate it. So there, I, I definitely, um, I see it starting to, you know, mature in a lot of places and I think it’s slowly starting to kind of, you know, put itself out in the sand to like really see exactly what’s gonna happen with some of these bigger areas now that, you know, things are changing.
Garrett: Even Austin has made a ton of changes, but as long as you do things by the book, you know, good operators are aren’t going anywhere.
Gil: Yeah, and I think that that con like, just like ended that contrast against like how Uber and Lyft was attacking the market in like the taxi industry they were using. They were using a lot of lobbying to, to do that. And I think like we’re probably gonna follow more of the restaurant side of the, the town where it’s more about regulations and making that more of a standard.
Gil: And I think that is the way that we’re gonna make su short-term rentals very sustainable.
Garrett: Yeah, I, I agree completely. So I’m, I’m, I’m excited for the future.
Gil: Yeah. Garrett, sorry, I didn’t mean to go down the regulation path. Um.
Garrett: I feel like, I feel like that’s, that’s mandatory in almost every STR talk nowadays, it seems like.
Gil: It is actually, it’s, it’s a lot more common. Um, it’s a lot more common now. Um, but I would love to kind of like switch gears just a little bit and talk about your direct bookings. You hinted to it that you’ve been pretty successful at direct bookings. Um, I’m interested in kind of understanding what does your direct booking engine even look like?
Garrett: Yep. So we do, I, I haven’t looked at the numbers this year, but I know last year I think we did about 76% direct
Garrett: booking somewhere kind of right around there. Um, people always can’t believe that we still do a ton on Airbnb. You know, I think we’re about 20% Airbnb and then that last 5% is between, you know, hip camp, glamping hub, booking.com, you know, all the other ones that are out there, vrbo. Um, but our direct booking strategy is pretty simple. We built a pretty clean to, you know, easy to navigate website. Um, always improvements you can make on the tech side, especially as really cool things come up and you learn about really cool tools out there. But built that, um, built out a social media platform between Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Garrett: And we went all in on that. You know, we were working with influencers. We were, uh, doing a ton of organic content. I have a little bit of a marketing background and I’ve been a content creator for. Years longer than I can know. So I have a little bit of probably a step up on some people, but I don’t, you know, I shoot with my iPhone.
Garrett: I, I, I hire videographers. You know, I, I buy some really good, I, I pay a lot for really good high quality photos, drone footage, vertical video footage. And I use that footage all through the year. And that drives our social media platforms. I think we’re about 75,000, um, followers online, which is pretty decent.
Garrett: There’s other ones that have way more, uh, you know, views and things, but it’s really about how you’re converting those to your direct booking site. And so we use a ton of tactics and, you know, we can get pretty high level on the social media side, but, um, we just funnel them to our website. We have different, you know, MailChimps set up as a, as a newsletter source.
Garrett: Um, we collect emails. We, we have amazing, you know, customer service and hospitality. When I first started, it was just me, but now we’ve been so successful. I have. Um, two virtual assistants under me that work, um, almost all the week. There’s, you know, definitely a couple days they’re off. And I use a ton of automation between my property management software and I use a ton of, you know, I, I don’t use a, a too much AI yet.
Garrett: I’m still, I still like the hands-on approach, but we, we, we use AI as a tool to supplement my virtual assistants too, so like they can bring that guest experience even higher. I even created like a Cameron Ranch clamping, uh, GPT within Chad GPT with my whole brain dump pretty much. And my assistants can go in there and get answers anytime it, you know, from something that I would probably say or, or on all the properties, especially as we expand, you know, it just, they don’t have to go look through.
Garrett: I have all these SOPs. They don’t need to go look through spreadsheets and all this stuff. They can just, you know, get their answer real quick and get back to the guests because I’m very customer, customer experience centric. So, um, and then we’ve just built out word of mouth. It starts out slowly. We didn’t just launch and instantly crush it with direct bookings, you know, it just kind of started, we. We worked with a lot of influencers, paid some influencers, probably more than I would want to, and some of the videos crushed it. Some of the videos flopped. Um, but our biggest one I would say is on Mondays and Tuesdays, you know, a little flexibility here and there. We will, we will give, we will do creator stays for, for an exchange.
Garrett: Like we don’t pay ’em, y’all just come stay, we’ll do the cleaning, make content. We, we require one real TikTok and then three to five story post on Instagram and some of those flopped. But some of those took off, you know, because those creators are probably hungrier and like, as long as I like the content you’re making and I can look at your Instagram and go, yeah, that, that looks pretty high quality.
Garrett: Some of those gotten just as many views, if not more than the paid influencers. And instead of a thousand to $2,000, I was out, you know, 90 bucks for the cleaning. And also like. Have content that I can use to keep promoting. And, you know, and as you build it up, it becomes word of mouth. Like we, even not long ago had somebody pay to stay in one of our properties, she put up a, a real, or she put up a TikTok, it got a million views and she was a paying customer.
Garrett: And we got, she spoke Spanish. And luckily my assistants are bilingual. Um, we got inundated with Spanish calls one day and I’m like, what is going on? Like, why, where, you know, where’s, I need to figure out what the source is. You know, I’m like, as a marketing guy, I’m like, what, what’s the leads coming from?
Garrett: And I realized it was from her video. She even sent me a, you know, she reached out to me and she’s like, Hey, this video is doing great. And she wasn’t a creator or anything. She had like a thousand followers and she just made really cool content, I guess, and had a cool place. And so I invited her back to my other space.
Garrett: She came back a week later and that video got a million views, you know, and it’s like, so I just lean into like, and there’s times where I’ve tried stuff didn’t work, like not long ago. One of my best influencers that has crushed a bunch of videos, I paid her to come out again. The video flopped. It is, you know, like that’s kind of the, but then we put out an organic one the next day and it took off, you know, and it’s like, some of these things you never really know.
Garrett: There’s a, there’s a formula to it and I can get into that, but for the most part, it’s a little bit of just making sure you have good quality, um, video and you’re making way more reels than photos. My biggest pet peeve is when people don’t have their social media, like optimized to get bookings, like making it very easy for people to know where to book, um, using, you know, some automation and things.
Garrett: And then when I go on somebody’s, you know, I Instagram for example, um, and it’s like they have one reel and they have 20 different photo posts. That is not how you’re gonna reach people. I know people, Instagram says photos get reach. They do not get the reach that you’re looking for. They’re gonna go to your followers most likely. How you get to that crowd that’s outside of it is you need high quality Instagram reels. You can get somebody on like fiverr.com to, to edit these reels for you, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Take some video with your, your phone or pay somebody like I mentioned, um, to get some super high quality stuff. Pay someone on Fiverr or upwork.com. Uh, you know, 20 bucks a reel, 50 bucks a reel. Like I pay my girl now, $50, $50 per reel. But she does all the research. She’s, she’s had several videos go viral. Like, and you know, and this is a bargain at going to hire a social media manager for $5,000 a month or something like that.
Garrett: Like, so, you know, that’s kinda like, it’s a brain dump of my social media world there. But I, I, I tell people all the time, like that is by social media is the new online travel agency. People like Airbnb’s not going anywhere. But social media and Google vacation rentals are going to dominate the game in the next few years.
Garrett: And if you’re not paying attention to both of those, you’re gonna fall behind tremendously. Um, Airbnb is not going anywhere, like I said, but these two are definitely going to leap Airbnb profoundly, in my opinion.
Gil: Yeah, you mentioned a. A few things. Uh, there, I’m, I’m trying to like capture some of the frameworks that you’re kind of going through. Like one is like knowing the type of influencer. Do you you wanna work with, do you wanna work with a paid influencer where
Gil: they may have a larger reach there, or do you wanna work with a smaller, more micro influencer that maybe has 10,000 followers and, and they’ll be fine with just comping their stay and you’re just paying for their, their cleaning fees.
Gil: Two, it’s kind of like alongside of that, it’s like really making sure that that influencer resonates with you, which you mentioned like, it’s like, do you really like the content that, that they produce because they’re likely gonna produce the same level of content for yours. So the best barometer for that is just really looking at their work and seeing if that work like influences you to, to act on things.
Gil: Three is really knowing your sources, knowing how to measure different things and knowing where the traffic is coming from. And I wanna talk about this in a bit more depth, but then the last part is like really iterating because you’re constantly trying to figure out like what is gonna work, what is not gonna work?
Gil: And it sounds like there’s some UGC that works really well. There’s some more org organic content that might work really well. But like what you’re trying to do is like fine tune it over time and try to figure out like, oh, can I actually reproduce this? Can I actually do a bit more of this now that I’ve measured and really iterate on things?
Gil: Does that, does that kind of capture kinda like how you think about social media marketing?
Garrett: absolutely. Um, I got one thing I left out and you, you, you asked a great question about is when I’m speaking about these influencers. The best ones by far are obviously travel influencers in your area. You know, like if you’re in, I’m in Texas, I’m not grabbing a travel influencer from Washington state.
Garrett: Like the video could go viral still. And that’s, you know, a whole nother thing too on its own. But the best reach for, you know, for your, you know, best bet is going to be something in your local area. And then the second tier is foodies. Like, people like overlook, foodie, and travel kind of blend together. I feel like, I feel like they’re almost two peas in a pod.
Garrett: So if those, if that’s the kind of content they make and you watch their content and you’re like, this is pretty cool. Like it does, they don’t have to have millions of views or anything like that. If you genuinely watch it and you’re like, this is, I could see them highlighting the property. Well that’s probably a good step.
Garrett: And, and I say that with the, you know, like checking into the genre because. You may see. So I had, like, when I first started, I had this, she’s a, a wrestler. Okay. She’s a massive following. She wanted to come out to the site and I was like, oh, cool. She’s got, you know, 600,000 followers. Like, oh, she’s gonna crush it. She made a post. Like it did absolutely nothing because that audience doesn’t care about a unique rental in Houston. You know, like, yeah. Is it the worst thing ever? I did, no, for sure. But I started to real like, you know, this, this, you know, wrestler had almost a million followers. I can’t remember what she was at, but then I had somebody the next day that is a travel person, like 5,000 followers.
Garrett: He came out, I was like, oh, he is got cool content. I’ll give him a shot. The video blew up. It did like 600,000 because he understood how to really, you know, set up travel content and we track, you know, to, to keep like going into the layers of this. So we get these out and if we work with a certain influencer, we, we will, we can, I’m very big on 10% discount codes.
Garrett: A lot of people kind of shy away on that in the space. I personally think it’s like I’m, I’m a big fan of reciprocity effect where I’m giving them this code. They’re gonna feel like they need to reciprocate to me by making a booking. ’cause I’m giving them a little gift upfront and they feel like they’re winning.
Garrett: People love a deal. They don’t know that I already added 10% to my base price I was gonna use. So I’m still exactly where I need to be, but I give out these 10% codes to influencers to track how well they do. And then each social media platform has its own 10% discount code. So Facebook 10, Insta 10, TikTok 10, uh, newsletter 10.
Garrett: It’s obvious what we’re doing, but that’s been the easiest ’cause it’s very in the, in the sales ad, you know, content world. It’s very hard for attribution of like where they actually came from. Because like, and you know, even at BiggerPockets, we talk about this all the time, is like, we know somebody saw something. They might just go Google it, but they probably found you on Instagram. How would you know that? Besides you can set up some conversions, but you’re never gonna know. Exactly. And that’s where we struggled at first. ’cause my code was just first 10, you know, like first day get 10% off. And then I realized quickly, I was like, I have no idea where these people are coming from.
Garrett: You know, like, I don’t know, like I pour into every content piece. But I quickly started to realize that even though Insta had, our Insta has more followers, our TikTok was actually getting more people to book because we could track it with the code, you know, and that’s a little, you know, it’s not as like super refined data marketing agency, you know, jargon.
Garrett: But that’s how I personally started to feel confident with the codes we were giving out. We also tested, like, you know, we sent out a ton of newsletters. So we have on our site, um, a big banner that pops up like. Hey, do you want 10% off your stay? You know, what’s your email, basically? And so we were able to start capturing emails automatically that way.
Garrett: So now we know how, you know, now we’re able to own that. Another email portion, and I can’t remember what the survey was, but emails still is like one of the most checked things in people’s, you know, daily schedules. A lot of people check their email three or four times a day. And so email’s not dead yet.
Garrett: People think, you know, oh, you gotta text ’em. And all this, like, email is still very popular, um, for almost everybody. So we really tapped into that. And then we also, you know, we’re utilizing now we’re, we’ve gotten further in the paid ads. We’re using Facebook, you know, megapixels and things, and we’re tracking that and retargeting them on, you know, basically following their whole footprint and, uh, you know, testing ads.
Garrett: The really good thing about organic content is if it does well, we put that now into a, a paid meta ad and it performs amazingly because if it performed well organically, it’s probably gonna perform well as an ad. People mess up and they just make an ad up and they’re like, oh, let me try this ad. And it was like, you don’t even know if that’s gonna do well and you’re gonna be spending money.
Garrett: I. For, you know, like you’re burning money, basically find tr put a lot into the organic at first, and then once you start to see what’s working, put that into an ad and it’s gonna be pouring, you know, gasoline on, on, on the fire. And then it’s just gonna make your dollars work even better for you. And yeah, there’s, there’s tons of tricks.
Garrett: I, I implement stuff all the time. We, we use a, a, you know, even to go more high depth, we use something called MiniChat, which a lot of people have probably seen nowadays ’cause it’s becoming pretty prevalent, but it works amazingly. We make people say, you know, comment the word glamping and this is where you see that kind of trend happening.
Garrett: People will comment glamping and then you send them the link and we’ll tell ’em like, oh, we’ll, we’ll give you a, you know, a discount bonus or something. We send them the link, we make ’em, you know, go through the DM process. And once they have it, the, the thing that I’ve found is like all these social media platforms are basically big search engines now.
Garrett: And so we’ve, some of our most successful ones we’ll do is like, you know, comment, couples, retreat, comment, glamping, comment, Airbnb. All these different things we’ve tested, because my personal theory and just from what I’ve seen, once you’re, you know, you’re adding these words into the comments, you’re starting to push that into that certain algorithm.
Garrett: So we dominate the glamping search features on Instagram and on TikTok because we have posts that went viral with a thousand comments saying the word glamping. I don’t know if Instagram is gonna crack down on this anytime soon, but I’m pretty sure they, they have a pretty good relationship, ManyChat and Instagram, so hopefully not, but I, I think that’s kind of like a little cheat code we’ve added.
Garrett: And it also makes my life easier of answering questions of like, Hey, how do I book? It’s like, comment the word. You get the link, you get your code, take care of it. My virtual assistants now can spend time on bigger money making activities than, than answering a couple of random Instagram comments.
Gil: that’s super, super smart there. Um,
Gil: for, for folks that, folks that don’t know, if you don’t have a good way to, to book, what someone has to do is they’ll have to go to your profile, go to the very top where the lengths are, and then I think they have three links. I think they may have expanded it, but there’s only a limited amount of links that you can have on there.
Gil: But what you’re doing instead is, and that, because what you can’t do is you actually, you can, you can’t embed your booking link inside the comments because the comments are not clickable there. So the only way that you can have them click is one click on your profile. Or two, click on your dms.
Gil: And the only way to get them DM is to use a tool like ManyChat where someone is giving you some type of phrase and your system, your ManyChat, is actually responding back with that URL and whatever copy that you want on there.
Gil: And what you’re saying is that like, not only are you making the conversion funnel much smoother towards booking,
Gil: but you’re also using it at a, as a way of like almost doing social media, SEO there, because they’re, they’re competing glamping or whatever phrase you want to rank a bit higher on so that when people are searching for it, you’re coming up there.
Garrett: Yep. I, I kind of, it’s kinda like a dual-edged sword there, and it, it amazes me how many people all the time will comment, you know, like, Hey, how do I book? And the, the amount of people that don’t realize they can go to your link in your bio to click is astonishing to me. But I found that you jumping into their dms with an automatic link, they, there’s like a, you know, like being in a private message.
Garrett: I don’t know if it’s like a, a, a psychology thing or something, but they just feel like, oh, this is more important and, and like, more understandable. And I don’t know, we’ve seen, seen way better conversions in the direct messages than most likely from what, you know, it’s, again, it’s hard to track, like if they came straight from Instagram where they exactly came from.
Garrett: But you, you only can get that code that I talk about in your direct messages. And so I can see like the amount of bookings that come in with that code versus the amount of bookings that are. Just, you know, like a, a standard booking, which we’re working on expanding our conversions. That’s actually like my high level task I’m working on now with a few people of like, getting my Google ads really, really refined. Excuse me. Getting my meta ads really, really refined with my conversion tracking of different levels of, you know, from what page did they visit to, uh, you know, did they book here in confirmation? That’s kind of why when we were talking earlier and you were talking everything you were, you were saying with, you know, crafted stays, I was like, that sounds a lot of like what I’m actually struggling with now.
Garrett: So I think you’ve built out a really cool tool to, to get more of that data.
Gil: Yeah, so, so, so for listeners that don’t quite understand, there’s, there’s actually various ways of doing what we call, like attribution in, in the marketing space. And what attribution really is, is you’re trying to figure out. Someone that converted, someone that did something, where did they come from?
Gil: Where did they hear about us? And the reason why you wanna do that is so you know, which marketing tactic is really working? Is it the influencers that are working? And which specific influencers specifically might be driving it? So you can then do attribution, say, okay, this source is that valuable to me.
Gil: Um, so knowing that, like there’s actually, in our industry, there’s two ways of doing it. Typically, there’s only one way. It’s usually like some ut m source that people put on the URL. And so you’ll notice that like, it’ll be like your, your property management name.com/and then it’ll say like, question mark, UTM source equals whatever.
Gil: And it’s a bunch of garbage information that like most folks don’t even know what to read. And actually, I think Google suppresses a little bit of that, so you can’t really like, see it as easily because a lot of people don’t really understand it. And Google being an advertising company, they wanna promote it like they wanna promote.
Gil: Operators who use it, but not necessarily a consumer to know what that really is. But that code tells Google Analytics really where the sources are coming in from. So for anyone here that’s sending out emails, having links in your Instagram, you should be doing that slash UTM on there. And there’s UTM builders that kind of walk you through it.
Gil: You can use chatt PT to kind of help you with it, but add that trailing link onto your page or any links there. And then Google Analytics is then able to trace where that person came from. So you can do a report on, uh, the first source, like where did someone actually come from there? Um, and kinda like what Garrett’s talking about here is like, it’s actually good to see like where people are coming in.
Gil: It’s even better if you know what the conversion of it is. So you know how much people are actually like converting. So like not only I’ve had 10,000 visitors to the website from these various sources, but then going a, a step deeper and saying. Out of all those re all the, all of those, these are the higher quality ones that actually contributed to a conversion event there.
Gil: And it’s super difficult if anyone is doing a multi like set site where you have a Squarespace site that’s your beautiful landing page, and then you have a PMS website for someone to book, um, and maybe a different checkout page. It’s really hard to really trace that because they’re on different domains in many, in many cases, they have to be on different domains or even different sub-domains.
Gil: And that breaks the linkage there. And that makes it very hard as a marketer to know which one of like that person came from this place with this U TM source tagged in there. And this is the booking. Like it’s really hard for Google Analytics to be able to stitch all that stuff together. So one hack, what you said is use coupon codes and you’ll know from the start and to the end who actually booked.
Gil: And what you’re doing more now is like, okay, now going a level deeper. And using like UTMs conversions, like Facebook, like meta’s, like conversion tracking as well too, to be able to know, like, I spent this ad and it resulted in this type of conversion there. So you can figure out like what actually worked.
Garrett: Yep. I, I’m slowly learning myself. Even I, I, I, you know, I’ve studied this type of stuff for a long time and I still learn new stuff every day. That’s. That’s what’s cool about this and why I feel like I’m been successful and will be continue to be successful. ’cause I realize I, I can learn something new every day that’s gonna, you know, just get 1% better.
Garrett: And like, even today, like I’m still learning things as, as you’re saying stuff like, oh yeah, I need to really, you know, tune in on that or make an adjustment to my operation. Like, yeah, I do have a little bit of a broken link system, like how you navigate my bookings and stuff too. So it’s
Garrett: all, it all super valuable information.
Gil: Yeah. And I think it’s like, right now it’s like really challenging for many folks because A, like you actually have a leg up where you come from a marketing background, so you have a lot of knowledge about. Uh, channels, conversion funnels, tracking, like all these different things, but to many folks, in a lot of, even our listeners, this is very foreign language Yeah. And that’s kind of like why, like, like we, like we stress, like at crafted days, we want to build the tools so that people are successful without necessarily being the technical expertise behind it all. Like, we don’t want you to feel like you have to hire an agency to be able to have a well converting site and then to be able to know where the traffic is coming from and be able to be a good marketer there.
Gil: Like there’s a lot of tactical things that you have to stitch together in the behind the scenes, and it’s very, very difficult. Like Gary, you’ve probably been working on this for a little while now about like how to do tracking, but even the, even like really good marketers with big, like big property counts, they still have a lot of challenges and they really have to bring in like agencies to do it.
Gil: But that makes, to me, that doesn’t make sense. Like if you have the technology piped out correctly, you should be able to track things all the way through.
Garrett: A hundred percent. I think y’all are nailing it on the head with what, what y’all are, you know, solving as a pain point in the industry for even people like myself that are, know a lot of these things and still struggle with it, you know, on all types of facets. So, I’m, I’m, I’m excited to see where, where y’all take it.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m super excited. Like in the very beginning it was like, how do I make it easy to build these sites? But then after a while we learned that like, oh, it’s not just about building the sites. Like how do we make it so that our customers are getting as much value out of it? How do we help them become better marketers to get more direct bookings?
Gil: And yes, you wanna have a well converting website, but there’s a lot of up, like top of funnel things that you have to think about and how do we make it so that some of these folks can do that easier? And that’s kind of why we do this podcast is like, I love talking to other folks that have nailed it in their specific domain to share their thoughts on this, but also like, how do we actually bring that back into the product so that we have a more powerful platform?
Garrett: Nice. Yeah, and I, I, I think y’all definitely built out something really cool. I’m excited to, to experiment with it even more going forward.
Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Be, be happy to help you kind of like revamp your site if you, if you ever need.
Garrett: we’re definitely talk, we’re definitely gonna talk.
Gil: Awesome. Um, Garrett, we usually end the show with three different questions. First one, what’s your favorite book? What’s one book that has changed your life or that you love referring to others?
Garrett: Um, I’d say buy back your, buy back your time by Dan Martel. You got it over there. Nice. Yeah, I love it. Definitely that, that, that put me into perspective. And I can’t think of the author’s name right now, I’m drawing a blank, but Traction is another one that I’ve really just started to implement the Entrepreneur Operating System.
Garrett: So I can’t remember the author right now, but both great books. And then, you know, I love Alex Hormo books too, so I think, but all of those are very high level business books that can teach you a lot in all these things we’ve kind of discussed today,
Gil: Yeah, so for folks Alex or Mo, that’s a hundred, a hundred million dollars leads and offers, I think it is.
Garrett: Yeah. Offers, and I think he’s got a new one came out, or I haven’t even read it yet. But No, I, I love his stuff too.
Garrett: Very high complex stuff. He breaks down in a very understandable way, so it’s very cool to
Gil: Yeah. I, I like how he does it too. And he, and it stretches across like both like B2B, which is business to business, and then also business to consumer as well too. So that’s, that’s really good. I, I actually have two copies of this book, and I have this one, this is just the cover because I always rip off the cover when I read it, when I read a book.
Gil: But this is actually part of the STR book club. So in, in, I don’t know when this is gonna air, but in the month of May, um, I’m part of this like book club where every month we read one book between all of us and like, there’s like 150 members of this. And at the very end of the month we share just our learnings and, and stuff.
Gil: So it’s just, it’s been a great way for me to find and discover new books because like, that’s one thing that I wanna do more of.
Garrett: Nice. Very cool. I’ll have to check it out.
Gil: Yeah. Um, second question. I. And you’re a great person to answer this one. Uh, given that you’ve done a lot of new things in a lot of uncharged territory, what’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?
Gil: I.
Garrett: Um, I would say, you know, we touched on it briefly is, you know, sometimes you have to throw yourself in the fire and, and don’t be afraid to fail. But one of my favorite quotes though, um, that I’ve kind of lived by always is you can’t fail until you quit either. And I say that because a lot of people get started along something and it may not go the way they want, or things start, you know, like things start to press up against them.
Garrett: That was not what they were expecting. But you can’t fail until you quit. That is when you’ve officially failed. Otherwise. I have had so many trials and tribulations in my real estate investing journey and life in general that, that, that’s the one thing that’s, that’s kind of kept me at comfort at times is knowing that there’s always another day to keep going and, and learn from what happened.
Garrett: So that’s probably my last piece of advice I’d give to em.
Gil: That’s really good. And otherwise, like those challenges ends up becoming more learnings than they are failures. And we’ve hear, we’ve heard this over and over again, like that’s how, like you have that growth mindset there. Love A hundred percent.
Gil: Um, on the more tactical side, what’s one piece of advice, tactical advice, that you would give to someone that’s either starting their direct booking engine
Gil: or trying to amplify it?
Garrett: I would a hundred percent get a, get the best high quality video footage you can get, get, and you’re gonna spend a little money on this, and I know it’s gonna be a shell shock. Get this footage and go all in on your organic content for the year. You can recycle that footage. You, that is going to be more valuable than, than, than spending on one influencer, anything like that. Get that footage and if you don’t know how to edit or anything like that. Go to some of those resources I mentioned earlier, Fiverr, Upwork, there’s tons on Instagram, all kinds of things. Even just pulling up the app cap cut and going in and messing with some of their templates. This, this is going to be what you need to really start driving your direct bookings.
Garrett: I would much SEO for your website and your organic social are the two things that I would put a lot into upfront to learn and, and really implement into your business. If you’re serious about going direct bookings, because otherwise you’re gonna, you’re all the other things you can burn money. Like you don’t need to do ads.
Garrett: You don’t need to be spending, you know, $10,000 on influencers. If you don’t have the systems built out that you need, like look, focus on your organic con video content and your SEO for your website, those two things are gonna be invaluable for you.
Gil: I love that. I love that. And I love how you also like talked about, you kind of hinted to like, this is gonna pay off for the year, do this for a year, because it’s, and you mentioned this early in the show, it’s not like you start building out your website and you start doing these things and you post it and next day you get 50% direct bookings.
Gil: Like the 76% that you got right now, I’m sure it took you a couple years to get there.
Garrett: absolutely. Absolutely. So we, each year we just kind of increased, like, I think the second year we hit maybe 65%.
Garrett: Um, and then, and then this last year we hit seven. Even our first year we were 50%. But I have a marketing background. I was already all in on organic social media and SEO, because I know those two things work.
Garrett: So I can, I can promise you, like if you’re spending money or spending your time, those are the two things to really, really understand on the marketing side. So there’s a ton of other things, but have a very strong direct booking website that’s very easy to navigate, um, and then have, have your property or properties highlighted in an extremely presentable way with professional videography. Get that, pay that money and you’ll, you’ll, you’ll thank me years over year. And even like I have footage from a year, year and a half ago. We still use, like, some of it’s not dated, especially if it still represents the property. So that’s where I would spend my money and really, or learn everything you can and dive into it.
Gil: I love that. I love that. And like I, I think even like a few years back we started talking about like high quality photos and how important it’s, it’s now like the bar is like raised up Everybody’s got high quality photos now. So now the next level is the high quality video for sure.
Gil: I love that. Awesome. Good. It was really good to kind of really have you on the show and talk about your journey and how you went from being a fix and flip long-term rental investor all the way to short-term rentals and now in more unique stay and kind of having you break down one, like how you did all your glamping and, and, and all the learnings there and then doing the same with direct bookings.
Gil: It’s just a wealth of knowledge there. So I appreciate you sharing that.
Garrett: I appreciate you having me on. I’m always, always happy to, to talk shop about this. I love, I I can geek out about this for days. So,
Gil: Awesome. Well, Garrett, it was great having you on and I can’t wait to follow your journey and see what’s next for you. Uh, for folks that want to follow you, where can they learn more about you?
Garrett: uh, I host a YouTube channel for BiggerPockets called Bigger Stays. Uh, you can find me there or all over biggerpockets.com. And then my personal Instagram is Garrett Brown re uh, as in real estate, um, on Instagram. And I’m always there too. But yeah, come, come, uh, come over to Bigger Stays at YouTube and I’ll be happy to teach you everything I know for free.
Gil: Awesome, man. Good to have you on the show.
Garrett: Bye. Thank you.