Welcome back to another episode of Into The Airbnb, where we talk with Airbnb hosts about their short-term rental experience. Our guest for today is Blake Carter, founder of the company CRIBS, a full service turnkey company for people who are interested in investing in short-term rentals and Airbnb hosts as well. Join us for today to learn more about his company and how can it help you in your investment process. This episode is sponsored by Airbtics, the only one analytics dashboard for short-term rental investors and managers, where you can find precise Airbnb data such as occupancy rate, revenue, average daily rate and so on. So, without further ado, let's get into it! So can you tell us how did you get started on Airbnb?
Yeah, funny story, actually. So my background is in property management, single Family and multifamily property management. I did that for several years and I was working for a small local property management company and I was handling all their new business and business development, so like when people would call and wanted us to manage for them or anything like that, I would be the one that would kind of handle them and do any onboarding stuff. Anyways, we got a call from a guy who said, "hey, I have these houses that I'm renting out by the room" and basically, I said, that's awesome, we'd be happy to help you, whatever. I went back to the owner and told her about it and she said, "absolutely not, we will not be doing that. That sounds like a giant mess that I don't want to deal with". So I had to go back to that guy and tell him that unfortunately, we won't be able to do that. So long story short, about six weeks later, he calls me directly and he's like, "hey, man, will you please help me with these houses? I don't know how I'm doing". You know, he knew I had experience and basically, he was just like, "will you do this on the side for me?, like away from your company, just kind of like help me out, manage it for me" and I did. I charged him way lower than I should have, but was basically just kind of to get my feet wet. Anyways, he ended up referring me to someone else who was doing room by room as well. That person was purchasing a short-term rental, Airbnb and he had asked me if we did a short-term rental management as well and I just said yes, even though he had never done that. I was like, "sure, yeah, I'll do that" and I literally have him on speaker and I'm googling how much short-term rental management companies charged. I think I told him like 10% or 12%. Anyways, that's how I got my first client, I was just saying yes to an opportunity, and it's grown from there. We now have several properties under management. We're currently building a short-term rental on the coast and Rockport and I'm purchasing another short-term rental as well, but our primary business is helping clients purchase and manage short-term rentals.
That's great. And do you currently own any of the listings you manage?
I currently don't own any of the listings that I manage right now. But like I said, I'm purchasing one about an hour away from where I live and I also am building one in the coast in Texas.
How do you find the short-term rental management business?
It's all been word of mouth. I mean, honestly, we maybe do some social media stuff like people, I make sure that the people that are in my sphere know what I do. I also run a short-term rental meetup in Austin. But primarily, it's just people referring us business.
And is there much competition there in Texas?
I would say there's definitely a good bit of competition. A lot of people especially now are starting to get into short-term rentals management arbitrage. Purchasing short-term rentals is becoming more and more saturated here in Austin. It's a massively growing city and so people are wanting to invest here. One of the only ways that you can cashflow now at this point, though, in Austin is to do short-term rentals. So yeah, it's getting more and more competitive.
I would like to ask you, what aspects of the listings do you manage in your company?
We're full service. So not only are we full service on the management, but my company, our company's name is CRIBS, I run it with my partner and we're actually a full service turnkey solution for people who want to invest in short-term rentals around Austin. So we help people buy properties, I'm an agent, my partner's an agent as well. We help people analyse deals, we help them do all the remodelling and construction. Then we do all the furnishings in the house and then we do management. So it's kind of like a one stop shop full solution for investors that want to invest in short-term rentals in around Austin.
What kind of clients do you usually receive? People who already, for example, run Airbnb and will like a management company or people who are getting started with short-term rentals?
I would say it's a mix. So we have plenty of people who are very experienced investors that we work with. But with the experience that my company has in short term-rentals, we also help out a lot of people that maybe it's their first time doing a short-term rental or it's their first time purchasing property at all. We can kind of help anyone, in any instance, I would say most of our clients are people who are newer to the short-term rental industry.
And does your company works only on Texas right now? Or do you also get clients from other states?
Yeah, we do actually work with other clients and other states. We're pretty open to where we'll be able to work. For the management at least, we can do remote management and we do remote management, we have a couple of properties coming up in Florida as well, as well as one in Tennessee.
If it's not too personal, can you share with us how would be the remote management process for a company like yours?
Yeah, yeah, remote management is pretty simple. So we just handle all the guests communications, we handle any kind of calendar and management. We have to manage the inventory directly with the cleaner and handle any maintenance items, but it's basically just all remote. So like in Austin, we charge a little bit more because we have an on site, like an in-house maintenance team that actually saves our clients money. But when it's remote, we have to find handyman and maintenance people in those cities to be able to handle different projects.
I see! And what can people expect when they hire your company? For example, if they already on Airbnb, can they expect for their occupancy rates to rise? For the Airbnb experience to be in general, better for the clients, for the guests?
Sure, yeah, absolutely, all that. I mean, typically, any of our listings, we do them the right way, every single time, we get professional photos for all of our listings, we do 3D tours for all of our listings, we have high quality materials for all of our guests and for all of our clients. Pretty much all of our listings are going to be at the top of the market as far as like total revenue. So, you know, if you're looking at comps on AirDNA or PriceLabs or Rabbu or whatever you're using, if you're looking at any of my properties, they're typically going to be some of the highest grossing properties. Then also just like a really seamless, tailored experience for clients and guests.
And how do usually your clients receive, how do you say these, like the feedback from their properties? What kind of statistics do you show to them to prove that their listing is currently going well?
We provide monthly statements. So basically, they're able to ask us questions at any time, you know, we can give them input on revenue and expenses at any time,. But every single month when we pay out our clients, we send them a monthly statement that has all their expenses and any kind of maintenance hours being charged. It's all right there and transparent for them.
That's great. And can you share with us what kind of pricing strategy do you use? Does it change according to, for example, the listing or the area of the listing?
Well, typically with a newer listing, we typically start pricing a little bit lower just to get as many initial bookings and reviews as fast as possible. Then once we get super host status on the listing and once we get enough SEO, like people clicking it, and we kind of make its own like a little brand essentially, that's when we really start cranking up prices on our properties. So most of my properties and I would say most properties in general are going to be really booked out on the weekends, which is definitely the experience we have. So here in Austin, we don't have a very seasonal market, it's pretty consistent throughout the year. So we typically have our prices, based on our pricing software's recommended price, we typically go about 50% to 100% higher actually on the weekends, but we will actually drop it about 5% to 15% during the weekdays just to try to fill in as many weekdays as we can. But we're much more focused on revenue versus occupancy. I would say, you know, we don't really mind if we only have 50% occupancy as long as our daily rate is high enough for it to make up for that.
I see! And were there any challenges that you saw during like, all these years in your company? Any big challenges, for example, with the COVID situation?
Yeah. Well, with COVID, we actually didn't get slowed down at all. I would say it went even better for us. People moving to Austin has just increased since COVID, I would say it's probably doubled the amount of people that are moving in Austin. So whenever COVID happened, we saw that, you know, not only were our listings not slowing down, but they were actually getting more and more busy. So I wouldn't say COVID really affected us much. But we've had plenty of times where, you know, whenever you're working in a short-term rental and you're working with these really tight turnover timelines, oftentimes you only have four, maybe five hours to turnover a property and sometimes our guests will really damage stuff and you'll have bad guests. We've literally had to go and replace, you know, mattresses or replace a dresser, a TV and just that small four to five hour timespan. That's probably like the most drama that we've experienced, we're lucky that we haven't really had much of a downturn, we've seen year over year, our rates have just increased, our revenue has just increased.
What can you say would be like the advantage of hiring a property management company like yours, for example?
Well, for us, since we help investors do every single step, I mean, I would say just the the ability for it to be completely turned key. We will literally help people do short-term rentals along every single step of the way, buying, remodelling a property, furnishing it and then management and then full service management within that. It's really all about time. We're price vary fairly, we're not priced any higher than anyone else in our market. We're actually priced lower than most I would say, but we provide a higher and higher level experience. So for most clients, they're not going to want to deal with, you know, someone calling them at midnight, saying that the pool heater isn't working or the AC isn't working or the showers and draining. We're able to handle all that in house and we're able to handle it fast and with efficiency.
That's great! And is there any particular aspect in which the client, your client can expect to be involved with or if they want to involve in any aspect, can they?
Yes, actually, yes, they can. So we don't limit our clients involvement necessarily within reason at least, we are the management company. So it is really important that we have like certain systems and processes that we follow. But we do allow our clients to be co-hosts on the listing and they're able to give us any input on, you know, how they would like things arranged in the property or anything like that.
That's great. So if you'd like to promote your particular company, you can do it now.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So my company's name is CRIBS, it stands for Creative Real Estate Investment Business Solutions. Again, we're a full service turnkey company for people that want to invest in in short-term rentals. Our website is cribsconsulting.com. My Instagram is Blake.Anthony.Carter. My name is Blake Anthony Carter, you can find me on any social media and I'd be happy to give any more info.
Great. That'd be it for today. Thank you for your time, it has been really interesting!
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me!
Thanks for listening to Into The Airbnb. We're looking for hosts and other people in the short-term rental industry to interview. If you have what we need and would like to share your experience in this podcast, please send us an email. All the info is at the end of the description.
