Latest / Short Term Rental Problems and Solutions / How to Actually Get a Call Back From a Contractor
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- Jeremiah: It's not all sunshine and five-star reviews. If you've realized being a short-term rental investor isn't glamorous, then you're in the right place. Today I've got something I found very entertaining. A prospective investor who has completely unrealistic expectations of a property manager and rental properties in general. We'll talk about what's realistic and how to approach service providers so that you actually end up getting a good one. We'll get into it because this is the community where we talk about the gross, the awkward, and the operational messes, as well as the real strategies that help you keep going instead of quitting. Anybody can win big in this industry, but you can also ignore education and you can quit. My name is Jeremiah, and I'm an investor with over a decade of experience, and I'm also a property manager with over 140 units under management. I talk about what rental investing looks like from the inside. We have a long email today, so let's get right into it. Hello Galvanized team. I'm evaluating a ski area vacation home for family use plus professionally managed short-term rentals. Could you provide a preliminary, evidence-based rental and full cost estimate before I decide whether to buy? Please model two alternative owner use patterns. A January twenty two to twenty-four and February twenty-sixth to twenty-eighth, twenty twenty seven, four nights total. B February twenty to March 6, 2027. One 14 night stay replacing the weekends. Also note what changes if the stay includes a peak holiday week. For income, please provide monthly lodging revenue and booked night slash ADR assumptions. Identify three genuinely comparable homes and use actual anonymized trailing 12 to 24 month results where possible. Please separate accommodation rent from guest taxes, cleaning, platform charges, and owner blocks. For costs, please itemize your commission and its base, fixed fees, setup, platform fees, owner state cleaning, utilities, insurance, repairs, supplies, snow / lawn, permits, and replacement reserves. Please flag rental restrictions and confirm service coverage for these exact addresses. the property is 87 Cross Country Lane, Village at Camelback, a parking level three bedroom including loft, two and a half bath townhouse currently listed for sale, and then he gives me the listing. Your site lists a twenty-five percent management fee. Please clarify whether this is before or after platform fees, and whether actual expenses are included versus merely coordinated. Email is best. I'm gathering information, not authorizing paid services. Thank you. Daniel. He sent me another one. Cause I didn't respond. Cause I didn't respond to that one. I guess not right away. hello, Galvanized team. A clarification to my earlier request. Convenient ski access appeals to us, but meaningful cash flow after professional management, operating expenses, replacement reserves, and financing is the deciding factor. If eighty seven Cross Country Lane does not fit, I would welcome stronger Camelbacks / Poconos alternatives that you manage. or know are available for purchase. For an initial comparison, I'm looking for $12,000 to $24,000 per year left before income tax using an illustrative annual financing cost of 5% of the purchase price and also checking 7%. For example, at $400,000 that requires $32,000 to $44,000 after operating costs and reserves before financing. At $600,000, $42,000 to $54,000, These are screening assumptions, not a financing commitment or a fixed purchase budget. Please evaluate the four night versus fourteen night winter owner use cases in my earlier email. If you know one to three available properties that can plausibly meet this screen, please send the addresses, prices, and actual trailing 12 to 24 month owner results with guest identities removed. Please distinguish projections from actual results and include any setup costs or restrictions on the new Owner's rental approval. A candid view that this target is not realistic locally also would help. Email is best. Thank you. Daniel. Daniel does not give a phone number because he only wants a response by email. So if you heard what I just read, like this guy is asking for a ton of information. And any busy person is going to look at something like this and say, Do I even have time to scratch the surface here? And if this guy, without buying something, without committing to buying something, without being under contract, without seeing anything in the region, is going to be requiring this much time of me right now. What are the chances that I want to enter into some sort of a partnership with this person? What are the chances that I want to serve them and make their property successful? Big fat goose egg. I it's it's zero. there's not a snowball's chance in hell that I am going to manage property for Daniel. I'd like to see people succeed. I really do, you know, I mean, success is not for everyone. And I can't help everyone. This is not a charity. I'm not running some sort of homeless organization where anybody who's homeless can come in and get assistance. I'd like to see people succeed, but I have only 24 hours in my day. And a good property manager is spending their time marketing your property, analyzing guest interactions, building their skills, preventing fires before they start, putting out fires that have already started. where are they going to find the time to respond to a random email like this without even a phone number, like this person hasn't even come to the Poconos. There's still like way too many like hurdles in the way between them actually looking at property out here as a possibility and them actually closing on the property. They have to see it first. If they don't like it when they see it, they're going to then do what? Well, they're going to not buy. Right. If they like it when they see it and they make an offer, but they don't make a realistic offer, they're never going to get anything under contract. If they get it under contract and they have it inspected and they don't like what they see on the inspection report, they're still not going to buy. If they don't qualify for financing or if they have cash to make this purchase, I don't know. But they actually have to sign on the dotted line. Like there's so many things between where they currently are and actually making money for me as a property manager. I'm not interested in even entertaining the conversation. For my listeners, I'm planning on just recording this podcast and sending it back to him as a link so that he can see my actual response. I promise I'm gonna make some of this worthwhile. And if you just stick for the end, you'll see how I bring this full circle and how this is gonna bring some value to you as the listener. But my goodness. He wants 12 to 24 months of records, and I'm just looking through this email. he wants platform fees. He wants what it costs for snow and lawn and permits and whatever replacement reserves is, the cost of insurance, repairs and supplies, and owner stay cleanings, the cost of setup and platform fees and fixed fees and commissions. my gosh. I don't think I'm even allowed to give all of this information. Now I can make some projections, right? I can make some assumptions. I'm not gonna just look at this listing that he's got, which is by the way, a very average listing. There's nothing unique or special about it. That property is gonna probably make $10,000 a year. There's no way that he's gonna clear 12 to 24. so his income projections are even unrealistic. And the Property that he chose is just like blah. It's so normal and average. I don't even want to like it's not worth the time. It's not worth the effort. it's like a $290,000 property. there's nothing unique, nothing special, nothing helpful, nothing in this world would make me, as a very busy, productive property manager who's an educator in this space, want to entertain. The kind of like conversation that this guy needs to convince him to just start looking in the Poconos. And why, why? Maybe write it in the comments. If you can think of a good reason, you know, put a comment on the YouTube channel. So I just I can't figure it out. I don't know what makes this guy think that he's gonna get a response that convinces him to purchase something in the Poconos, that there's a property manager out there who has enough free time. that they're going to like go through and take all this private information from not one, but three comparable properties with data and spreadsheets for 12 to 24 months, including what it costs for owner stay cleans. All of this information, like what it costs to, shovel snow. Here's the thing: Village at Camelback takes care of that. There's no expense for that. Like this almost seems like some sort of weird generic email just meant to troll people, just to waste my time. I don't know. I'm not responding. I'm not gonna waste any time with it. But man, is this entertaining to me? I read this while driving. my car drives itself, so it's not so dangerous. Anyway, I read this and I'm just cracking up so loudly in my car, thinking that this guy has no clue what he's doing. If he does end up purchasing a property in the Poconos, I have zero anticipation that he's going to be successful. I have every expectation that he's just going to find some property manager that has a dedicated sales team that's just a bunch of VAs using AI over in the Philippines. And they're going to just put all of his questions into AI, get him some sort of fake report. And convince him to sign up because they get a commission and they make money based on onboarding properties. So he's going to start looking and he's going to start working with a real estate agent. He's going to waste their time too. Because he's going to ask these real estate agents to underwrite every single deal before going actually to see these houses in person. He's going to ask, Hey, can you get rental history for me? my gosh, guys, this is the most annoying thing. As Investment Real Estate of the Poconos. I'm the broker of record. I have the most listings. I get these questions all the time. Hey, send me the rental history on this, please. well, I don't have rental history on this. It's not an active short term rental. No response. No email back. Nothing. or another very common one I get is like, hey, I need a rental history on this listing. Well, just because it's an active short-term rental doesn't mean that I've got some sort of report available to you. But they ask for it anyway. No harm in asking. But they're not working with an agent. They're just reaching out to listing agents randomly saying, Hey, get me this document. Well, don't have a document. In this situation, the seller has chosen to keep their rental records private. Like, well, then I'm not interested. Why? Why would you be not interested just because of that? Are you incapable of Underwriting this yourself? Are you like applying for a DSCR loan before you actually come and tour the house in person? Are you working with an agent who already booked a showing for you and they're unwilling to ask for this information? So you come to meet as a listing agent directly. What is actually going on here? Guys, this is how you get on the nerves of a contractor, of a service provider in the Poconos. It's like we're all very busy. We don't have like a dedicated sales team that's just gonna like go through with every single lead and follow through with it as if they're gonna get some multi-million dollar commission by signing you up for this program. You know, like that's not what this is. So What are the right ways to actually get the information that Daniel's looking for? because these are not illegitimate questions, like these are good concerns, but obviously he's going about it the wrong way, right? I think we can all agree that you don't just write a thousand-word essay in the form of a question to a random property manager that you've never met, never spoken to, never built any relationship with. Never given any hope that you're actually going to purchase something or that you're going to use their services. I think we can all agree that that's the wrong method. So, what is the right way to do this? Well, you call them up, or you ask them when they have time that they can actually speak to you for approximately 30 minutes, because you want to have a conversation about their management, about their management style, and about their marketplace. Real estate agents, real estate property managers, they love having conversations like this, but it has to be done on their timeline. See. I know that there's certain days of this week where I'm going to be in the car for at least a half an hour and I can talk to them. I can schedule the call for when I'm going to be in the car. I'm happy to talk about my marketplace, about our management style. I do this all the time. I was on the phone for an hour yesterday with somebody who's looking to purchase property in the Poconos, just randomly talking about, you know, what they're looking for. They were working with an agent who had no clue what they were doing. Just, you know, go figure. Found the agent because they were the first one who called back. On Realtor.com. Anyway, That's what you do is like you find out when they're available to talk to you. Respect their time. don't expect that they're just some like salesperson like in an office somewhere that's got an open calendar with no business going on. Don't just expect that they have time. an email, it doesn't expect that they just have time, but it does expect they can like email you back. And again, there's no phone number here. There's no way for me to actually get in touch with this guy that's convenient. So, you know, what I would end up doing if I wanted his business, which I don't, but if I wanted his business, what I would end up doing is just throwing this into AI, you know, and getting some sort of response that makes him have some sort of hope that this property, this area can do well. So the second thing that you do once you find out like a good time to speak with that agent is to ask, like, hey, tell me about your most successful rental near Camelback. I'm interested in buying something similar and I want to know what made that property successful. Then listen. Listen to that property manager. If they're good, then they know it's because of this amenity, it's because of this approach, it's because of this pricing strategy, it's because of when we launched, it's because of the photos that we took, it's because the order of the photos. They can go through a lot of these things and explain to you the secret sauce, which we'll give out over the phone. Like we'll tell you what makes us unique and special and why our properties are successful. Property managers love talking about this stuff. This is their thing. This is their time to give you. the impression that they know what they're talking about because most of them do. Most of them do. But they're not going to give you that over an email, Daniel. here's the next question is once they tell you about their most successful rental near Camelback, the next step is how does it compare to 87 Cross Country Lane? Now if they're driving at that moment, they might not be able to look that property up. I get it. But if they can look it up, if they can look at photos, they can tell you, well, how it compares is Mine's significantly better because of X, Y, and Z. And I just gave you all these examples of why it was successful. And 87 Cross Country Lane has none of those things. So if you want 87 Cross Country Lane to be successful, you're gonna have to do X, Y, and Z. Copy a model that's already working, or adapt the model and go in a different direction that you also know will work That answers all of your questions. but let's keep going. So next. Say to the property manager here and email them a file. Say, I put these figures together for an income projection on this property that I'm interested in. Does it seem like these figures are realistic? So here you are, respecting the property manager's time, not just anticipating or expecting that they're going to have the time to spend mulling over your deal and underwriting this deal for you, but actually like do it yourself. And share it with them. Say, does this look realistic to you? I'm happy to look at somebody's spreadsheet and say, oh no, you definitely underwrote way too much money for snow because the community takes care of it. You don't have to worry about that. Also, your occupancy rate seems a little bit high over here. You should be a little more realistic. We get a higher ADR. oh your cleaning fee, 100 bucks. Who are you finding to clean for 100 bucks? any decent cleaner out here is $200 minimum. you get that kind of like feedback, but you've got to create the document for them, Not all of them are this like analytical and social person, the next thing I would say is you ask them, all right. So if this was your property, if 87 Cross Country Lane was your property, what would you improve to make it one of those high performers? What would you improve to make the rent that much better for the property? And then you listen. See, that is how you get an email like this answered. It's not by writing the email this way. It's by respecting this service provider's time. It's by expecting them or giving them the opportunity to toot their own horn, right? People love telling their story. People love telling stories. I think people love learning. By stories. I like teaching by example. And in this situation, Daniel, this is completely the wrong approach to actually get answers to the questions that you're looking for. And I want to just call it like somebody with Daniel's personality where he doesn't respect anybody's time. He's not willing to put forth any effort or actual work in researching this stuff. Somebody like him is gonna be a complete failure when it comes to rental investing. He's gonna be a complete failure when it comes to managing his own property. I'm actually kind of wondering now if his expectations for income were kind of realistic. Cause I noticed he didn't say anything about a mortgage. He's just talking about 5% or 7% based on the investment. So if the investment is $400,000, let me whatever. I'm gonna get off of that. Forget if he's being reasonable or not with his income projections. It seemed completely unreasonable the way it was written. Am I right? Let's go back to that for a second. For an inch comparison, I'm looking for $12,000 to $24,000 per year left before income tax using an illustrative annual financing cost of 5% of the purchase price and also checking 7%. It sounds to me like he's going to get financing on this property once he purchases it. And it's either 5% or 7% And it's not clear to me that he's looking at like an actual realistic return. So who's actually going to respond to an email like this? If you email a property manager and you're looking for these kinds of answers and you send an email like this saying, hey, I haven't come to the Poconos ever. I don't know anything about your marketplace. I'm just peppering like 50 different marketplaces with property managers expecting them to just get back to me. Who's actually going to respond to this? Well, I think if a property management organization is so large that they have a dedicated sales team that doesn't have anything to do. Like they've actually got free time. And your lead is one of the stronger ones. Like that is a property manager that's going to respond to this email. And they're going to give, you know, some information, some trailing data, but you're looking at like putting together some sort of long presentation almost. Like you're asking somebody to do homework and they're not getting a grade. You know, they're potentially getting some sort of a commission. And I honestly I have no clue what property management salespeople. Actually make in commissions for writing deals. I know we have an onboarding fee of $1,000. But what portion of that could actually be allocated to a commission if I had a salesperson? I have no idea. Because I haven't really thought about it. But I guess other property managers could go higher. But like the big organizations like Cassago and Vicasa and Evolve, they don't seem to have any onboarding fees. So, like, where's the commission coming from? So I just don't see it happening. the next person who would actually respond to an email like this is a property manager who is so bad at marketing themselves that they only have you to work with. You are the only lead that they've gotten this month. And they're gonna find some free time because they probably also don't have many properties to manage, in which case they don't have three properties to compare. To your town home, unless they're like really, you know, familiar with managing properties over there in Camelback, which by the way, Car Realty manages more properties on that hill than anybody. Their office is also located right there next to Camelback, but they've been a property manager there for the longest time of anyone. And they're not like super high tech. They still give out keys for some of their units. So like you're sending an email. The organization like that that has like 20 or 30 properties just next to Camelback is not going to be emailing you back anyway. So I don't really see you getting a response from anybody, but would you even want a response from a property manager who was so bad at marketing that you are the only lead that they've been able to find? I get, well, in the summertime, it was about five leads per week. In the fall. It slowed down a little bit. I would say like two leads per week. People asking me property management questions to talk about property management. I end up onboarding, three new properties per month for property management for short-term rentals only. And I want to say I'm good at marketing, I wanna say like I'm pretty effective at choosing which properties I want to manage, which properties I don't want to manage. And here we are. I have no time for this. I have no time for this email. I'm not gonna email this guy back with a book report about like, you know, all this data pulling from all these sources, which owner stays should be something that I can keep private. Like my owners don't want me sharing all of their data with other people. Not only that, but like the income production of a property, like not everybody has the same intentions. Not everybody has the same projections what do I mean? I'll give you examples. I've got property owners that I manage property for, and they do not want to be successful in short-term rentals. They just want the property to be occupied twice a month. They're not looking for like lots of reservations. Why? Because it's actually a vacation home for them. They don't want like a million people in there. They want to be able to use it when it's vacant, and that's about once a month. So if I target a 50% occupancy where it's every other weekend is actually booked, they're gonna be really happy. I've got one guy who's using us for management because I'm willing to take that approach. And I'm not just gonna rent out his property at rock bottom prices because it's not booked yet for next weekend. he wants me to take this approach because at the end of the day, it meets his projections and what he's looking to do. So I wouldn't give you something like that as an example. I've got another property that does want to make money, but he keeps standing in the way. He blocks it for the fourth of July, he blocked it for Labor Day, he blocked it for Memorial Day, he blocked it for New Year's, He blocked it for Thanksgiving. Like this guy uses his property for all the high priced weekends, even President's Day. so not everybody is going to be successful, but sometimes it's not because of the manager, it's not because of the property, it's just because of personal use or some other preference. I know some people out there who should be earning like $110,000 a year. But because they don't allow pets, they don't allow renters that are under 25 years old, because they don't allow people to be in the hot tub without being on camera. like a bunch of like just preferences that they've got, they're just failing. I want to say it's failing. They're happy with the performance. They're happy with what they're getting. I've explained to them several times. Like, if we just open up this. And do this, your property's gonna earn twice as much. I don't really believe you. Okay, whatever. I'm restricted, right? If I had full reign on these places, I could make them as successful as I can make them. But they're not my properties. I'm just the manager, so I don't need to have full control. But You know, some properties and some property owners I like and I want to manage for them anyway. Some property owners I don't like and I don't manage for them, or at least I'm not going to be managing for them soon. So, like I think every business grows with your clients, right? you kind of tailor your client base to be a group of clients that you really like serving, and that's where we are as a business. You know, we're in business now. wanna say six years working with short-term rentals, I've been actually working with short term rentals longer than that, but as a business, nevertheless, I'm getting off topic. My point is in our phase of business, I'm not managing every property that wants to be managed. And for Daniel to assume that I'm gonna compare like 87 Cross Country Lane to three other properties, it's just not fair. Like some of those places are not performing very well. And I know it, but it's because of some reason that would be difficult to explain to a Daniel. You know? So what's actually gonna happen? Well, if there's a property manager who actually wants some business, they're gonna put his emails right into AI and they're gonna just have a conversation with AI about some of those examples of properties. And then respectfully decline to give him spreadsheets of private information, but to give him generally this is what a property is doing. That would be displaying an a very high amount of patience, but also a high amount of motivation. And Daniel might end up with a property manager like that. Hopefully, Daniel will end up with a property manager like that. So my recommendation. Well, my recommendation to somebody like Daniel is to check out episode 18, The Infinite Return Strategy. Episode 18 of this Short-Term Rental Problems and Solutions podcast goes over three different examples of properties in the Village at Camelback. And like these houses are so like cookie-cutter. They're so similar. it's an interesting like case study to look at them compared to one another. So to look at them. based on their value, to look at them based on their rental performance and their rental history. it's again, it's very interesting because there's so many and they're so similar. So on episode 18, we talk about 217 Cross Country Lane, which is very similar in many ways to 87, which is the one he's thinking about buying. 217 was much cheaper. It sold for $240,000. And the listing he sent me is listed at like $325. Now they're going into ski season, they have a chance at selling for that number, and some of it's renovated, updated, whatever. So it's a little bit nicer. But here's my point is I looked at what properties we're actually earning. And I actually looked through Air DNA. And we did all of this on the YouTube version of this. You can actually see the videos of all these different properties. I compared it to three other properties over there based on the value, the after-renovated value, the rental income, and the rental income projections, what other properties were earning and what I would project that property as earning if it was fixed up. So he could easily just watch a video that's already available. But Daniel doesn't want to do any research. He doesn't want to spend 45 minutes watching a podcast with the guy that he just emailed. And I don't think he knows I have a podcast, and I'm not going to be putting his email out there in front of all of my audience for entertainment purposes. But you know, beware, right? You send me an email. don't don't disrespect my time. You might end up on here. but that would be my recommendation. if you want to get a ski house, if you want to be like right next to the slopes, and if you need to have some sort of like return on investment for your cash, you know, investment. if you are parking $400,000 of currency in a ski house so that you can use it personally. A couple of times per winter and not really anything more, then like go for it. You know, you're you're definitely gonna make twelve thousand dollars a year. there's a better chance that you'll make 24 or 46. With that property that I sold for $240,000, it was making $42,000 a year gross. Now that was with our previous strategy where we had a high occupancy for that property. Once we put that property up for sale, the occupancy dropped because we were trying to make space for actual showings. Whereas if we just kept operating it at that previous level, we'd make more money, we'd have more nights booked at lower rates, but there would be less availability for somebody to get in for a showing. So we wanted to go from high occupancy back down to like an average amount of occupancy, which is mostly just weekends. So the pricing strategy changed, you know? So that's why like rental history sometimes is misleading. It's like it made 42, but in the six months while it was on the market, it made very few dollars. Like I'm talking probably six thousand dollars total in six months. And that was because the pricing strategy changed significantly. And the property wasn't really anything special. It was just well managed. So that one example is what I would tell Daniel about. And if he invested in that property with $240,000 in cash. He could be potentially making $42,000 per year on that. Is that what he's gonna do? no. but if he did, he would just have to find a manager like us and then actually respect our time and not just assume that we've got nothing to do except respond to his lengthy, intrusive, not respecting privacy kind of emails. You know? So That's what I'm getting at, you know. So anyway, So hopefully you've got from this like a good way to actually approach service providers to the point where they're actually be interested in working with you. Because doing what Daniel did is just gonna get you no responses in most cases. And the responses that you do get, you should probably be worried about them actually telling the truth. So I genuinely enjoy sharing messages like this. And it's why this show is the place where we discuss the challenges as well as the stuff that no one else talks about when they sell the dream of easy passive income. If you're a property manager, an owner operator, a co-host, or just an investor. Email me, info @ galvanizedmanagement.com. Just like Daniel did, I'd love to connect and learn more about your approach. And if you have a question, go ahead and ask it. Your question might be the next one that we break down, and chances are you'll help a lot of other hosts in the process too. We win or we lose together. If this episode helped you, great. I'd appreciate a good rating and a share too, so we can keep it growing organically. Together is how I believe we make this industry better. Until next time, stay steady, keep learning, and keep building something real. This is Short-Term Rental Problems and Solutions.