I once wrote a book called Myths Management and Mastery of Vacation Rentals, and the thesis of that book is whether you’re rich, or you want to be, we all need the same thing. A greater return on our time.
Now I’ve helped people with no money, no hope, and no direction find a pathway through real estate investing by becoming a full-time real estate professional and overall recognizing the impact that becoming an entrepreneur can have on your life. Both good or bad, but mostly good if you have the stomach for it. I’m personally psychologically unemployable, so I don’t have any other choice.
Recently, I had a really cool opportunity to meet Dr. Rachel Gainsbrugh, a kindred spirit who has done the very same thing, but for an even more niche community – medical professionals.
These are people with means who still need a leg up. Many of them have over a half million dollars in student debt, they work corporate jobs that come with corporate headaches and Rachael has proven that it doesn’t really matter to the community, we all need help.
I personally found her advice packed with wisdom. Rachael talks about how you don’t necessarily need 200 doors to make an impact on your life. What you really need is one or two properties to make a massive difference for yourself financially.
In fact she did such a great job of it in her own personal business, it landed her on the Netflix show Buy My House. She talks about how to thrive in a crowded market and why multiple streams of income in your life is not just a luxury nowadays, but a necessity.
I hope you enjoyed this chat with Rachael, founder of 75 Gems. It was my joy.
Link to Special Guest:
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For a free trial to the best investment grade Short Term Rental Data tool for locating the best deals out there and to help Investors and Agents achieve mastery in their real estate business:
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Short Term Gems | Dr. Rachel Gainsbrugh
I once wrote a book called Myths, Management, and Mastery of Vacation Rentals. The thesis of that book is whether you’re rich or you want to be, we all need the same thing. A greater return on our time. I’ve helped people with no money, no hope, or no direction find a pathway through real estate investing by becoming a full-time real estate professional and overall recognizing the impact that becoming an entrepreneur can have on your life.
Both good or bad, but mostly good if you have the stomach for it. I’m personally psychologically unemployable, so I don’t have any other choice. Recently, I had a cool opportunity to meet Dr. Rachel Gainsbrugh, a kindred spirit who has done the very same thing but for an even more niche community, medical professionals.
These are people with means who still need a leg up. Many of them have over half a million dollars in student debt. They work corporate jobs. They come with corporate headaches. Rachel has proven that it doesn’t matter, the community all needs help. I found her advice packed with wisdom. Rachel in this podcast talks about how you don’t necessarily need 200 doors to make an impact on your life.
What you need is 1 or 2 properties to make a massive difference for yourself financially. She did such a great job of it in her personal business that it landed her on the Netflix show, Buy My House. She also talks about how to thrive in a crowded market and why multiple streams of income in your life are not just a luxury nowadays, but a necessity. I hope you enjoy this chat with Rachel. It was my joy. I hope you like it.
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Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. It’s like the stars have had to align. It’s like the third Ice Age has happened for us to finally be together talking. I’m so thankful for that. It doesn’t feel like Ice Age, It is hot here in Missouri, summertime. How about you? Where are you? How’s the weather where you’re at, my dear?
It’s toasty. We’re in the Atlanta market. I feel like it could be a similar climate to where you are in Missouri as well.
Regulations In Atlanta
Talk to me about how regulations are hitting you in Atlanta right now. I saw in the news some things were happening there. Tell me about it.
I’m south of Atlanta in a suburban area. It’s pretty good here but those who are in the city proper are going back and forth with regulatory constraints. Short-term rentals, as far as I am aware, are restricted to owner-occupied if you go beyond 1 or 2 properties or something to that extent. There are advocacy bodies right now. One is Amstrad, Rich Monroe. He’s a phenomenal operator who operates in such an ethical and phenomenal way. He is combating some of the unfair regulations. I don’t hate regulations. I like it. I just think some regulations may be unfair and we need to address those.
It’s been a knee-jerk reaction as far as regulations have been. I always like to talk to people about different regulations in their area. In Branson where we’re from, there has been a 400% increase in regulation over the past ten years. It’s happened very fast with moratoriums, big pauses, and a lot of uncertainty. We had a landmark win. The Missouri Supreme Court voted.
Have you ever heard of Lake of the Ozarks? Do you know that TV show, Ozarks? Jason Bateman? The Lake of the Ozarks is two hours north of us here. It’s a real place. I don’t know if all that stuff that happened is real. What had happened in that area was that there was a lodging association that was charging lodging taxes.
The cities were charging lodging taxes, but the way they approached it is they are forcing people to pay those taxes. That was unconstitutional because it didn’t go through due process. Taxation without representation. We’ve all seen it. We’re voters, we’ve been on ballots where we see, “Are you willing to vote for this 2% increase that goes for road improvement, school improvement, or for this and that?” That’s the thing that needs to be happening in short-term rental regulations.
Short Term Gems
A lot of times, it’s not. We see some knee-jerk reactions from some officials. That’s part of the business that as the industry has matured, we’re forced to deal with that, which makes the overall consumer need for that person to have an advocate yourself, a coach, or somebody who knows the business inside and out. Somebody who is an owner-operator as well as an educator. Thank you for doing what you do. Tell us about Short Term Gems and why you started it. Give us a little bit of your history.
A little girl from Haiti, I came to the United States for my background, which my family instilled in me the work ethic. I wish they had filled me an inheritance of monetary value, but I’ve got a work ethic, let me tell you. I grind it out and I love mom and dad. They sacrificed so much for me to be here. As an immigrant, wanted to do the American dream, went on, and got the doctorate. That came with half a million dollars in student loan debt. I built a life that I hated.
Tell me about it.
I was working for 14 hours daily, on my feet, just trying to battle it out. My husband and I at one point had five jobs because the income we were making from our day-to-day was not sufficient to meet our needs. Fast forward, I found Dave Ramsey, I started off doing the dead snowball and started making some good traction. I said, “This is great. We’re starting to see some of the debt come down.”
It was not until I took off my Dave Ramsey hat and put on my bigger pocket hat that I realized, there’s truly a way to build wealth and it doesn’t have to involve 14-hour shifts then punching a clock because that’s all I had known. If you can get some great overtime shifts. The golden ticket is overtime. That was the work ethic that I told you was instilled in me.
Once I was working a 14-hour shift, then I saw a quote from Warren Buffett that said, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” I felt attacked. I was like, “Don’t come for me like that, Warren Buffett.” He was coming for me specifically. I felt as if he was looking at me dead in the eye on this 14-hour shift, having missed out on my kid’s childhood.
They knew the nanny’s name before they knew my name. They called her name before they called my name. I have to tell you, I still have to go through the therapy for that. I asked, “Uncle Warren Buffett, how do we find a way to make money? What is this thing?” I didn’t understand most of the strategies, but in real estate, it’s a house and it’s a property. I get this.
That’s how I realized that I could buy a property that needs some work, add a little bit of value to it, and rent it out on the short-term rental market for a whole lot more than my expenses. That changed the game for me. Back in 2018, that’s how we started. We bought a property for $290,000 right in the neighborhood that we’re very familiar with.
We put in about $10,000 of work, nothing crazy. I couldn’t take on a whole renovation project. Of course, I was working full-time. Overhead was around 2,500 to 3,200 a month. We rented out for $6,000 that first month. The first booking happened at 03:00 AM while we were asleep.
It came true. You were a medical professional at the time, correct?
Yes, a full-time pharmacist.
You needed to build your power team around you because you probably didn’t have the opportunity to take side calls here and there because pharmacies are incredibly busy places. Were you in a hospital pharmacy or a retail pharmacy setting?
I’ve done it all. I’ve done hospital. I’ve done retail. I’ve done heart failure clinics with Kaiser in a variety of settings.
A lot of management experience then for you. That’ll help. Your first investment property then was a short-term rental. Is that correct?
Yes.
Short-Term Rentals
What was it about the short-term rental asset class that gave you the confidence to dive in there first?
I had spent years analyzing our debt. I’m a spreadsheet girl, I have to admit. I’m a spreadsheet jockey. Looking at the debt, looking at what assumptions I can make to pay it off in this timeframe or that timeframe, and creating models, then I applied it to real estate. I said, “If I were to use a multifamily model, what would that monthly cashflow look like and how impactful would it be for my investing strategy and my life?
For multifamily, if you’re going to go direct, you have to start with maybe a million dollars and down the payments. I didn’t have that. I can then syndicate. I can give someone $50,000. I’m passive. They have full control. I hope and pray that I get that money back. That didn’t feel good to me.
I’m a control freak, I told you. That didn’t feel good to me at the moment. Let’s look at the long term. I looked at all the strategies. Everyone is talking about wholesaling. That sounds easy. You start with no money. Yes, but you’re knocking on doors and I didn’t even have the capacity. That didn’t make sense to me either.
I realized that when I was going to Alabama to look at these wholesale deals that someone provided me, the house was gorgeous in the photos. It had three bedrooms and two baths. The sun was gleaming on the side. It had this minty green color. All the things, Jeramie. My husband and I were driving to Alabama from Atlanta and we were dreaming of all the things like, “This house was going to save the world.”
It’s the dreams that we had concocted off of this poor property. We got there and the house was dilapidated. It was falling apart and they said, “You don’t even have to come and visit, just buy it off.” I said, “I got to see it.” There were drippings from the sides of this property. I was standing there and I’m the real estate person. My husband is my chauffeur. He’s driving up there and he’s about to knock on.
That was the paradigm shift for me. I said to myself, “Do you know what? We’re not going to be part of the We Buy Ugly Houses crew.” I had drunk the Kool-Aid, and thought, “No, that’s not for us.” We’re going to be part of the We Buy Pretty Houses and if it needs carpet to be updated, we can do that because we know people. We determined that we’re going to go this route with single-family homes where instead of the $17,000, we’re going to purchase that property outright. We’re going to put that $17,000 towards a down payment on a property. The returns that were the most significant for us were short-term rental returns.
It’s not passive income. Don’t let anyone fool you, if you think it’s passive income, but you can build systems and a team around it to make it as close to passive as possible. That’s why we went the short-term rental route as opposed to all of the other strategies. I had spreadsheet it all and the math was making sense for short-term rentals for me.
Short-term rentals are not passive income. Don't let anyone fool you, but you can build systems and a team around it to make it as close to passive as possible. Share on XI’ve never said it’s easy. I’ve always said it’s the highest-paid part-time job that you’ll ever have. The reason why I ask you that question is because I was looking for confirmation of the illustration of a point that I always make that short-term rental is the gateway drug to real estate investing. Here it is, folks, from an actual pharmacist. It’s true that it is the gateway drug.
I say that term with all respect for people who have suffered from addiction and things like that, but there is a real thing when it comes to real estate investing. It gives you that dopamine hit. It gives you that excitement that a lot of investors get addicted to. It’s a good thing because we have to be addicted to our passions to wake up every day and execute them, regardless of what’s going on in our lives and regardless of what’s going on in regulatory environments or regardless of what’s going on with interest rates.
The things that I’ve learned from those wholesale classes and some of the background from there are alternate strategies. We can use all of those strategies. That’s one of the things that I preached for many years was that the short-term rental asset class is like fix and flips, buy and hold, or wholesale. You can do all of those things within this asset class over here, except you don’t need to know how to do anything except for how to go on vacation.
Less Is More
What you love when you go on vacation, if you can think through what the guests might experience, then you can have a winning asset. It sounds like you’ve done that beautifully. Let’s talk about one of your strategies, which is less is more, how to own fewer vacation homes and maximize your returns because as you began to allude to our audience, time is one of your greatest assets.
That’s one of the messages that I always try to preach, how do we get a greater return on our time? I’ve seen so many people with massive long-term rental portfolios and people saying, “I own 200 doors or I own 400 doors,” like it’s a badge of honor and certainly it is. It takes a lot to be able to build, scale, and manage that. A lot of us don’t want to do that. A lot of us just want a couple of beautiful properties that we can use in our spare time. Talk to me about your philosophies there.
The badge of honor that you mentioned a little bit earlier with the power of owning 100 doors or 200 doors. I get envy just like any other girl. When I hear it, that sounds interesting. I had to think about alignment. What’s in alignment for me? There are two ways to own hundreds of doors. Let’s be fully transparent with everyone.
Most of the people who are telling you that they own 100 doors, 200 doors, or 5,200 doors don’t own it on their own. They own it in a partnership, like a crowdfunding situation. That’s called a syndication or they’re investing in real estate investment trusts. They do own it, I don’t want to discount it, but it’s not as though they own it directly.
What does that mean? It means they’re passive, which is great a lot of times, but they’re sitting around waiting for a paycheck to be cut out to them. A lot of people are going to hate me for saying this, but go around and ask your friends right now who are investing in these passive strategies how they like it and how they’re doing.
All of my friends have had capital calls, meaning, “I know you’ve already invested your $50,000 or $100,000 in this crowdfunding type of situation. Can you go ahead and give us another $200,000? Right now, the loans are being called, the interest rates have drastically changed the monthly payments and it was floating.”
This is a whole different conversation, but it’s something that you wake up in the morning and think, “First of all, I hadn’t received my checks in the last quarter. If you’re receiving it on a quarter basis, I was receiving it monthly. Recently, I’ve been receiving it every quarter and now they’re asking for a capital call. I don’t want to do a capital call, but if I don’t, all is lost because then the deal is lost altogether.”
The reason I’m going down that route is because a lot of members of my community have come to me with those types of situations. It comes from a lack of control. I hate to be a control freak, but I love being a control freak too. I would rather be in control of my own destiny than wait for someone to give me a paycheck. That’s never served me when I wait for someone.
I don’t like to wait. I want to create my own deals. I want to do that kind of thing. It does take some upfront time, but once you get going, once you’re locked into the right community and you have the right support system, it’s very manageable and it’s very doable. You don’t need to be a part of a 5,200-property situation. All you need is 1 or 2 properties that you and your partner, spouse, or teenager can keep your eyes on and pour your heart into it. It’s going to pay you back dividends.
We need a T-shirt that says, “The right property can change your life.” It’s very true. What you’re talking about reminds me of why I got into real estate investing many years ago. It was because a friend of mine was going the salesman route. He wanted $250,000 a year plus commissions. He was working being a salesman for Fortune 500 companies.
I was catching up with my buddy and talking to him, “How is work going?” He would say, “My sales manager came around. We’re a publicly traded company and he asked me what my sales numbers and my projections would be for next year. Taking into account market factors and what I thought I could produce, I turned in a great number of what I thought I could sell.” The sales manager looked at that and said, “We’re going to double that because we need better numbers for the managers so they can go to the shareholder meeting.”
I thought that this is a Fortune 500 company. We see the numbers that are published, but this is peeling back the onion and being right there inside of a meeting. I thought to myself that when we invest in the stock market, mutual funds, or whatever we’ve been trained for by our Baby Boomer parents who tell us exactly what we need to invest in.
I respect and honor my parents the same way that you did. I listened to advice and I put a bunch of money in the stock market and I had no control over it. It goes up, it goes down, and it crashes. It has all of these emotionally inciting events that happen when in fact, in real estate, if you take time to just learn one market and start studying what properties are selling for so that you know.
It takes dozens or hundreds of properties to finally get that market knowledge to be good so that when a property comes across your desk, you can say, “Yes, buy it. Make an offer today.” You need that level of training, that level of confidence, or somebody within your circle like you who can coach you to that level of confidence to help you make a good decision, and ask you a couple of good questions before you pull the trigger on it. If you have that level of knowledge of properties in your market, you can make a massive difference with just 2 or 3 properties right out of the gate.
With our second property, we went ahead and said, “Let’s rent and repeat.” That second property was in the same market. The first one was generating on average $6,000 per month. The second one, we went a little bit bigger and we were hoping for about $7,000 to $8,000 a month. I have the wildest story to share with you.
We got that property. We did a little bit of work on it, carpet and hard-court fluff and buff. Let’s put some lipstick on it and let’s go but my cleaning team, I was transitioning because I wanted to make sure that I had the right cleaning team for that property. I went ahead and placed it on the market for a 30-day stay in, the same suburban area, south of Atlanta, 30 nights minimum, just to indoctrinate a new cleaning team to interview, to figure out who I was going to use for this property.
I went ahead and turned on the dynamic pricing tool for this property, thinking to myself, “My goodness, $8,000 a month would be wonderful.” Dare I even imagine $9,000 a month, that’s astronomical, there’s no way. I turned it on fully expecting that the AI, I would have to train it because it looks at occupancy, it looks at demand.
I would probably have to train it because it’s never as accurate, but I knew in my head I wanted to gauge it around $8,000 or $9,000. Keep that number in mind for a moment. I turned on the dynamic pricing too and it quoted $28,000 for a 30-day stay in suburban Georgia, no amusement parks, nothing in the middle of August. I busted out laughing. I’m getting ready to turn it off. It gets booked.
What?
It gets booked, wild. This was the wildest story. When you say it’s a gateway drug, it’s like, “Give me another hit. Give me another.” The month thereafter, it gets booked for 22K, then 15, then 20. It averages around $22,000. This is a property that I expected to get booked at around $8,000. I was about to train the AI to lower the expectations. I asked myself, “Where else in my life am I playing small? Where else am I dimming my light? Where else am I trying to downplay a situation?”
Seeing that I was counting other people’s pockets, I don’t have $10,000 to rent out a property. Jeramie doesn’t have $10,000 to rent out a property on a random month. Normal humans aren’t renting out a property for $10,000, so there’s no way. Let’s hover around $8,000 and it turns out it’s being booked by insurance policyholder companies. It’s being booked by the filming industry. Corporations are different entities. They’re not normal human beings like you and I.
That’s a whole different ball game. It’s something else that we tapped into that we otherwise wouldn’t have known about if we weren’t in the game. Sometimes it’s a matter of starting, you get in the game and you don’t know what you don’t know. That was incredible. That’s how we ended up on the Netflix TV show, Buy My House. That was the wildest story.
Buy My House
I was going to ask you how you ended up on Buy My House. What you’re talking about is the birth of the midterm rental industry, which isn’t as regulatorily managed because it falls outside of the 30-day or less window. What a cool story. Thank you so much for sharing that. Talk to us about how you made it on the TV show and how all that happened. That’s super exciting.
There’s a company called AirDNA that we use to evaluate our properties all the time. One day they and a casting company reached out and said to us, “The numbers that you’re making on this particular property are out of control. We would love to cast you for a TV show.” I said, “Sure, let’s give it a try.” Not thinking anything.
I come from pharmacy. I don’t have a media background. If you watch the show, I’m super stiff. I’m like, “Hello, my name is Rachel.” It is cringe-worthy. It came from them pulling the data on the back end. They identified that we’re doing something in our market that they hadn’t seen and that’s how it happened.
Thrive In A Crowded Market
That is amazing. What a cool story. Just from exploration and showing up every day, working your business, and finding the fun pathways, I love that. Talk to us now about another philosophy of how we can thrive in a crowded market. As this asset class has gained in popularity, we’re starting to see interest rates rise. We’re starting to see more people enter the marketplace. Not all of them realize they have to be good hosts or good business people. Not everybody realized they had to materially participate. Help us understand how we can thrive in an environment like this.
In everything that I do, I want to cater to my audience of busy, burnt-out medical professional moms with two boys who are working. I’m laser-focused. I’m always trying to find the shortcut. The shortcut for me is finding those one or two properties that could change the trajectory of your life. You don’t need dozens and dozens.
The reason I don’t advocate for you to start with dozens and dozens is the love and the attention that you’re putting into each specific property. The best way to stand out in the crowded market is to take a step back and understand who your ideal guest avatar is. Understand what their needs are. Walk a mile in their shoes and identify their pain points. What are they struggling with?
The best way to stand out in the crowded market is to take a step back and understand who your ideal guest avatar is. Share on XFor me, it’s typically multi-generational families who are traveling with children, who are traveling with pets as well. I love that asset class and I love that avatar because that avatar helps inform my investment strategy. When I tell you that’s my avatar, automatically, it gives me a focus because I’m not looking for that high-rise condo in the city center. It eliminates a lot of the noise.
That avatar is someone that I’m thinking about, “It may be a little noisy in the house. Is there a way we can corner off a gaming area?” or “This property has a bedroom on the main, I’m going to prefer this property over another property where all of the bedrooms are not accessible on the main level.” We’re building one on the beach right now.
If all the properties or all the bedrooms are upstairs, we would want to consider an elevator or something to that effect because granny may have mobility issues. What if there’s a child who has special needs? I want to walk a mile in their shoes and identify what are their biggest needs. What I love about this short-term rental business is your business is out there.
I review every single guest review for a community or a market that I’m going to invest in. I will look for a set of properties that meet my comps and I want to see all the good, the bad, and the ugly. What are they complaining about? What do they love? I’m going to double down on what they love and I’m going to solve for what the problems are. There’s a market in Norfolk, Virginia that one of our members closed and every other guest complained of rat infestation.
Not rats. Come on.
We do this activity, let’s see what people are saying about this market. I say, “Go pop the popcorn and come back to the Zoom call so we can see because the stories are treacherous.” The guests do not pull punches. They will tell you that if they don’t have a good experience. At the end of the day, one of the first things that we do is we need to get pest control. “Let’s find out who are the best pest control teams to make sure that everything is on the up and up for this property.” It was new construction, but I still wanted that assurance. I don’t know why there were so many rats, but there were so many rats on multiple properties and different hosts. It was like Ratatouille.
Mice are one thing, but rats are huge. Those things are like, “Give me a break.”
I know. That scared me but she had a connection with the place because her mom had passed. If you have a connection with this market, you can devise a solution to everything. Let’s solve it. We’re going to up our pest control and rat eradication game.
Rachel Gainsbrugh, the Pied Piper. Fixing communities, out there with the flute. Getting rid of rats. Short Term Gems, a children’s story.
That information is out there if you’re willing to take a moment and take a look. You get to see what people are complaining about in the market. You can stall for that and say, “Here’s how I stand out from the crowd.” There was another community in Crystal Beach and everyone was complaining that the host only left four towels. All of the hosts on the Facebook group said that towels are expensive to watch. We launched, and the first thing we said was, “There are twenty towels here.” That place is booked because everyone was towel-stingy. How many little things like that are out there that you can solve for?
That’s what I mean by, “You only need to know what you want when you go on vacation.” I have to buy salt and pepper, toilet paper, and coffee filters. Every place that I go to is a short-term rental. In some places, I did a video on one place I stayed. I had to fill all of the half cups, one-fourth cup, and tablespoon with ice so I could have ice because there was no ice in the place.
You should at least provide ice. You should at least provide everything that a hotel provides, then maybe a little bit more. That’s my philosophy. That’s such a great illustration of the fragmentation in the industry right now too. If you can build a brand for yourself as you are, people are going to come back to you because they don’t want to search reviews for that.
Multiple Income Streams
Once they find that good solid operator who they know they can count on, they’re going to want to know what else you have, and where else are you located. That’s super smart. Another thing that I wanted to touch on is this idea that you have of growing a wildly successful online and remote business and why multiple streams of income aren’t a luxury, it’s a necessity now. A great opinion. Let’s drill down on that.
I’ve always had trust issues when it comes to my revenue stream or regulatory constraints. Anything that can happen may happen in business. I think it’s important to figure out if this is something that I love and if this is something that I intend on doing for the rest of my days, how do I create a spinoff business offer?
Members of my community have started helping other members who may be constricted on time. That is by co-hosting and supporting them that way as well. That is one business strategy that can spin off because you now have a skillset that is very much needed. Don’t think that you’re just hosting 1 or 2 properties. No, if you’re hosting it at the caliber that Jeramie and I are speaking, you are a rare commodity. You’re very rare in the marketplace.
You can offer insights, consulting, co-hosting, and listing optimization advice. There are a variety of ways that you can create a spinoff business with this particular business strategy because of the skills you have honed in on. I figured that out when I was a part of a women’s mastermind.
Full transparency, I was part of a women’s mastermind. We are looking at each other’s numbers. Women and numbers are traditionally two things that are allergic to each other. In this mastermind, we look at each other’s numbers and we critique each other’s numbers. One thing that was identified and brought up to me, I remember her to this day, she said, “Rach, it looks like your horizontal income is empty, but your vertical income is revving up. What are you doing for your horizontal income?
That was the birth of my desire to create a course where I could help others that could bring in revenue on a day-to-day basis for me. The difference between vertical and horizontal income for this particular mastermind, and some people in your audience may know this, Gobundance, it’s a real estate mastermind. For this particular mastermind, they define horizontal income as the income that comes in without you necessarily having to lift the finger.
Vertical income is the income that comes to you with your labor or your sweat equity. Your W-2, the rentals are active income, although we have a team that I oversee and I’ll have a meeting once a week to make sure everything is on the up and up, but that is still considered my active income. I was being asked the same questions over and over again by my colleagues at the hospital. At the time I was working at a local hospital, “I see you’re doing this rental thing. How are you doing it?” “The first thing you need to do is get pre-approved for a loan and then the next thing you need to do is work with a realtor or a team like Jeramie’s team to help you find a property in your market. Your realtor has to be short-term rental savvy.”
At the time there weren’t any. I say, “Here are the five questions that you need to ask first, and then ask these next five questions if you start to dive with them.” I was answering the same questions over and over again. I said, “Why don’t I create a little video series and sell it for $47 to get them started. It became a hit. That little series, I may sell 3 or 4 of those a day on its own. People were passing it around. I was like, “They’re actually paying me for my intellectual knowledge.”
That is amazing. I think it’s something that we all need to figure out because traditionally, in single-family homes, if you’re not going to expand and expand, it’s not necessarily a huge business model. It is a wealth strategy for sure, by having a business on the side or if you’re going to continue with your W2 long-term on the side, like some of the trauma surgeons that I work with or the emergency room surgeons, they’re lifers. I think it’s better to have 2 or 3 revenue streams for sure.
It’s true. A lot of people want the perfect property or the perfect opportunity, but you just have to get your feet wet in any business. You have to jump in and learn what’s right with the industry or what’s wrong with the industry so that you can find those niche services. For example, I met some people the other day.
They’re both about to quit their jobs because what they did is they found all of these timeshare owners who weren’t able to use their timeshares. They said, “We’ll rent those out for you.” They have a community of people who are looking to rent timeshares. They’ve built a community of people who want to find great timeshares and people who can’t use them. They’re doing great off of this one little community.
That’s separate from the short-term rental industry, but it speaks to the same user or the same traveler. They wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn that one opportunity or that life-changing opportunity was out there until they took action and saw what they loved and what they didn’t love about the industry.
I think you’re right. That’s how our real estate brokerage rose in popularity because I didn’t sell coaching programs. I just sold our services. We said that we’re dedicated to making sure you have all those questions answered and all of those things because we wanted to create raving fans. We wanted people to come back to us because we knew if we treated them right, they would buy another property and that they have friends.
Real estate investors are like truck drivers. They’re a hard group to break into, but once you do, they’re very loyal and very special. You have to treat people right. Another thing is we’ve trained a lot of real estate professionals. I have created a personality test. I’m looking specifically for one personality type because I know I’m not going to be able to train them.
I can’t train money-focused people. For whatever reason, my training doesn’t land with them. We’re looking for the servant leadership people. There are seven different archetypes within it that can begin to serve people. We did that and it worked because we were able to find real estate agents who wanted to first become investor-friendly agents. They don’t have the money to buy real estate themselves, but they want to serve real estate investors.
You can’t be in an environment for that long without wanting to buy your first investment property and they usually do. We create that winning environment for real estate agents. Of course, as you said, you’ve got to create those scaling opportunities, which is why we joined a nationwide brokerage and decided to scale and train those agents all over the country. It is because we figured we could serve investors better by serving the agents who serve them.
That has been the business model that we’ve been using. It’s so nice to hear you validate that with your, “Everybody needs a great agent and you just can’t rely on a guy who doesn’t know the business.” I applaud you guys for being dedicated there. I also applaud you for taking a risk and putting yourself out there because that’s not easy either to put yourself on video and offer your information for sale. It’s not easy. Was it easy to find the marketing to get the stuff out there? Was that a process for you?
Marketing
It was a process. Some members of my community were asking questions. They put something together and I remember, I was listening to a podcast and the expert was saying that you need email addresses. I thought, “Okay.” At first, she said you need an email list. I said, “What’s that? Is that a list?” I have no idea what an email list was. They said, “Green, green, green.” This was in 2021. You need an email list. “What’s that? I don’t know what that is.”
I came from a W2 full-time job and never built lists or databases or anything like that. I know your business rises and falls on the amount of emails you have, which are all potential customers who want to hear what it is that you have to offer. I asked them, “Do you mind giving me your email address?” I had an email about, I want to say 50 to 75 email addresses, just from work colleagues, friends, and friends of friends who were curious about short-term rentals.
When I decided that I was going to put something together, I sent out an email to all of them, saying, “Hi guys, I want to put something together and I want to make sure that it’s what you need. It’s going to be an eight-part video series, 15 to 20 minutes each on how to get started. Here are the first steps.” Before I put it together, I was looking for ten people who were willing to pay that initial investment to get it going because I was still working full-time. I want to make sure that I’m not going to waste my time.
Market research.
Yes, I’m not going to waste my time unless you guys want it because everybody should do this. Put your money where your mouth is.
Can I get your credit card number on that?
That’s when you know if they’re willing. I said, “I want to know by Friday.” I got ten people who signed up and paid. Full disclosure, I told them, “You’re prepaying for something. You’re not going to get anything. You pre-paid and then we start. They paid and I’m so grateful. I know them each. I’m so grateful for Dr. Tim, and Dr. Carol. That was another gateway drug, by the way. They’re willing to pay for my knowledge and pay for my ability to get them results, a game changer for me.
That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing all that. That’s very inspirational to me even because I still haven’t figured out digital marketing yet. It’s an anomaly, but I love the way you’ve approached everything with ambition, drive, and an intellectual approach. I see in you almost a pioneer spirit, somebody who knows that there’s a way, believes you can make the way, and goes after it. It has created success for yourself.
That’s why I wanted to talk with you because I know you’re going to inspire far more people than just me. I appreciate you speaking to my audience because we had spoken on your podcast. I had the good fortune of being on your podcast and I just connected with you. I love the way you operate. I love your servant’s heart. Before we go, is there anything else that you want to share? Maybe a question I haven’t asked or something that you’d to talk about. Anything else?
Get In The Game
What has been resonating with me lately is in 2018, if I had waited for the perfect market conditions, if I had waited for the perfect property, and the perfect interest rates, I would be looking back today and kicking myself. A lot of hesitation right now in the marketplace is, “I’m going to wait for the market to crash to start investing. I’m going to wait for the perfect interest rate. I’m going to wait for the perfect assets. There are no deals.”
I want to challenge that because every single day in my community, we’re seeing deals, and getting in the game is the first step. Get in the game. The interest rates, we don’t love them. We’re not going to even pretend that they’re the greatest. No, you’re not crazy. The interest rates are high. I get it but you have to get in the game. Figure out a way to get in the game. Your future self will thank you.
Figure out a way to get in the game. Your future self will thank you. Share on XGreat advice so much. How do people connect with you if they want to get some of your coaching information?
I do have a free resource. If you go to 75Gems.com, I have a list there for you for the 2024 Top 75 Cities with the highest profitability for short-term and midterm rentals. Grab a hold of that and it’s going to ask you for your email and then you’ll be a part of our ecosystem from there.
That’s great. I encourage you to become a part of Rachel’s ecosystem. We’ll be contacting you for all that so that we can make sure that our audience can connect with you as soon as they are ready.
Thank you, Jeramie. This was too much fun.
It was. Thanks.
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A big thank you for tuning in to the end of our show. I know your time is valuable and I hope you got a few takeaways that are going to help you get a greater return on that time. I know you will. If you did enjoy it, I’d sure appreciate a share or a comment. Feel free to subscribe for instant access to new episodes and offers.
There’s also a ton of free content and ways to learn more and engage more at WorleyRealEstateNetwork.com. Until then, we’ll continue to bring you recipes for success and real stories from real people who like you, are living out your divine purpose. God loves you. No matter what happens, don’t give up.
Important Links:
- Dr. Rachel Gainsbrugh – LinkedIn
- Short Term Gems
- 75Gems.com
- Myths, Management, and Mastery of Vacation Rentals
- Worley Real Estate Network – Youtube
- Worley Consulting
- Worley Real Estate Network
About Dr. Rachel Gainsbrugh
HEY, I’M RACHEL Full-Time Mom, Wife of 18 Years & Short-Term Rental Investor. And I remember the very first time I made my very first dollar without punching in to my shift at the pharmacy. It was from my earliest real-estate investment, and my mind was BLOWN. At that moment, I realized that if I could make 1 dollar doing this… then I could easily make thousands more. I immediately saw the potential this lucrative industry had for job and income replacement. And that’s how I was able to change the game and get the odds in my favor.