How I Built a 13-Property Airbnb Empire in 1 Year | Brandon Meyer DSH #1088

100k you're passive, right?

Yep, which is great for most people.

That could be life-changing.

Life-changing.

Yeah, that's cool.

And with Trump in office now, I'm assuming the real estate market's going to be better, right?

I hope so.

I mean, crypto's already feeling it.

God damn.

Yeah.

Yeah, we see it.

We saw the boost there kicking up.

It's like 20K jumped up.

Yeah, it's at Bitcoin's up 10% to the...

10%.

It's at almost $90,000 as we go.

All right, guys, we got Brandon here today.

We're going to talk Airbnb, real estate, and we'll see what else we talk about.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah.

How's the Airbnb stuff doing?

It's good.

My portfolio is good.

There's a lot of fear in the market with the Airbnb bust, but if you do Airbnb right, I found it to be very lucrative.

So that bust, did it wipe out a lot of sellers?

It's an oversaturated market right now.

You have a lot of people jumping in the game and they are

just throwing furniture in.

They're not spending enough money to invest in a good home and advertise it well

so they'll do they'll buy a lot of stuff off facebook marketplace they'll do um ikea furniture just really cheap but with our properties i found that you you put in enough capital and market it well uh and this this is like accent walls you know doing wallpaper paint uh just making it a scroll stopping design it it kills it it does It it does really well.

So

yeah,

we do really good.

Yeah, because you got to separate yourself from everyone else.

Exactly.

Yeah.

There's a lot of competition out there and you need to stand out.

And a lot of it too is Airbnb is an interest-based algorithm.

So if we try to optimize for that, we're setting up the listings and we're picking certain photos.

You can add a little bit of mystery.

get people as they're scrolling through Airbnb to want to know more, see more of your photos, click into it, play with the listing, and Airbnb, the algorithm picks that up.

And

you get impressions, you get clicks and conversions, and that helps boost your ranking, put you on first page search on Airbnb.

Nice.

When did the algorithm start getting incorporated?

The interest-based algorithm?

Yeah.

I'm not sure of the year.

I think it's always been based on interest-based algorithm.

to kind of gauge people's interest in wanting to go stay at a place.

And the more a listing gets played with, the more it appears on top of search.

Airbnb wants to list the best listings first.

They want people when they're coming to their platform to see that.

I mean, you can imagine if you were going there and you just saw a bunch of dumpy houses, you probably wouldn't book anything.

So in this case, they're putting some of the best inventory first and they mix it in.

I mean, if part of the algorithm, if you have a new listing, they push you to the top for 30 days.

And that's something with my portfolio.

You know, we do property management as well for other people.

We take advantage of that 30-day window.

That's when the algorithm is going to be kind of gauging the success of the listing.

The first 30 days.

Yeah, it's crucial.

And that's not to say that, you know, down the line, you can't make some changes and bring it back.

That's totally fine.

But those 30 days are crucial for really driving up those bookings.

That's good to know for people just getting started.

Absolutely.

So maybe they should lower their price the first 30 days?

No.

So that's a misconception.

So I don't tend to do that.

So with us, I want to, because you get that 30-day boost, you're likely to get more bookings to come in.

So we keep our prices competitive.

We use a dynamic pricing software, something like Price Labs.

And

we use Price Labs to.

Sorry, I lost my train of thought there.

No, I didn't even know there was a software that.

So it changes the prices of the listing for you?

Yeah, it changes the price of the listing.

So dynamic pricing is how it competitively prices amongst the competitors.

So it takes into consideration things like events coming to town, similar to airline tickets and hotels, and makes you competitive in the market.

For example, we have properties in Pittsburgh.

Taylor Swift came to town in Pittsburgh and everything was like sold out.

All the prices went up that weekend.

If you don't have dynamic pricing software, I mean, that does it automatically, right?

Using software.

A lot of people do it manually.

They just kind of set the same price for the same night and they're missing out on the chance of maximizing their revenue on Airbnb.

That's good to know, man.

Cause yeah, they probably get booked right away and they could have made an extra couple hundred bucks, right?

Absolutely.

Wow.

I did not know there was AI doing that with flights, too.

Yeah.

I mean, they're,

it makes sense in the hotel industry.

I mean, concert tickets, right?

We're all trying to buy concert tickets and you have a bunch of bots that come in and they buy stuff up and back the price up.

As you get closer to an event, like in.

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Tickets don't get bought, prices are going to drop to try to sell those tickets.

And that's kind of the same thing with Airbnb inventory.

As you get closer to something, if it doesn't sell, you want to drop the price.

And you got to be careful with that too with Airbnb, though, because you can also invite parties in.

So what we tend to do with our pricing strategy is try to get it booked in advance.

There are certain zones or tiers.

And if we can get booked in advance, the more bookings we can secure, we can actually raise prices as those dates come closer.

And that's a good party prevention prevention tool, which parties are

unfortunately

a thing with Airbnb.

And a lot of hosts, you know, people come in, trash the home.

And you've seen Airbnb in the news for shootings and parties and stuff.

Yeah, in Philly.

It's a bad rap.

Yeah, in Philly, exactly.

How common is parties?

Like, has that happened to you?

Yeah,

quite a bit.

I love the honesty.

Yeah.

So we implement noise detection hardware in the houses.

It just measures the decimal levels in the home.

Smart.

So we, I set like a thresholds around maybe 80 dB.

If it goes over that threshold, I get a notification maybe around 8 p.m.

that that happens.

Then we have security cameras, one at the front door, one at the back door, don't have any inside, right?

Just monitoring the outside of the building.

So we get those notifications.

I check the cameras and you can always tell a lot by you read a listing, you know, I'll check to see who checked in.

I'll see what the registered guest count is.

They'll put down like, hey, I got two guests that are coming to stay.

And then all of a sudden you look at the front doorbell camera and there's like six, seven people, you know, piling in the front door.

So at that point, they're breaking our house rules.

They're breaking Airbnb policy where you're only allowed to have registered guests at the home.

That's, that's actually one misconception a lot of people think is that you have to register for every single person

at the home.

I didn't know that.

Yep.

And you,

yeah, you have to have those registered.

And if not, you're in violation of Airbnb policy.

And at that point, the host can kick you out if they want because you're breaking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I never knew that because I've definitely stayed and not.

Is that a newer thing where you have to register all the guests?

As far as I know, it's been around.

I think it's a liability thing, right?

You don't want like all these people coming to your house that aren't registered.

And

so Airbnb, you know, wants to keep track of everybody that's coming.

And so no lawsuits and things like that.

Right.

Yeah.

That makes total sense.

So what happened when you found out there was a party at one of your spots?

I mean, we've had a few.

Having that system in place, we're able to stop things before they get out of control.

Got it.

When that happens, get that notification to the phone, check the camera, see that there's some funny business, try to reach out to the guest.

If they don't respond, which a lot of times they don't, music is really loud,

depending on where they are.

If they're in the backyard, some of the cameras that I have actually have a two-way talk feature, or they're really fun, they have a siren.

we've we've had a property in florida where they're blasting music well we have this really cool siren that just blasts and they all get freaked out they're like they're looking up at the camera and then they turn the music down.

I'm like, hey, I need to speak to so-and-so, whoever's the host, talk to them on the phone, say, hey, like you guys, you know, can't be partying.

Got to get everybody out.

It really depends.

If they're being respectful, if they're being friendly, if they're, you know, hey, we're so sorry, we didn't know, like all these people are going to leave, we'll monitor the situation.

But of course, if we can't.

get a hold of them through the camera or from the phone we'll send a boots on the ground person over and i i manage multiple properties in multiple states so we have teams of people where I'll just reach out to a boots on the ground.

They'll go knock on the door.

Hey, guys, like you can't be partying.

You're breaking house rules.

We're going to have to ask you to leave.

Wow, you've had to do that?

All the time.

Damn.

Yeah.

I got some interesting stories on my social media for some of the crazy things that have happened.

I think I saw one of your viral videos, right?

Yep.

Yep.

So up there, we have

the one that went viral that was really huge was the scammer video.

So that one, we've been hit a few times by a couple of scammers that they book the reservation with a fake credit card and then they come to the property and

stay obviously free.

And then we get a charge back later on down the corner.

Oh, like a stolen card?

Stolen card.

Yeah.

So this is off Airbnb.

Let me just say Airbnb has a great fraud detection.

We haven't had any issues with fraud.

These are more for like direct bookings through our website.

So the Airbnb platform is does their due diligence with really checking that out.

Or if they don't and there's a problem, Airbnb still pays you as a host.

So that's really nice.

So in this case with that viral video, we had a couple of scammers that came.

They tried to, I caught it ahead of time.

Luckily, I had the person that had the stolen credit card, they saw that our company name was on the credit card bill.

They reached out to us, say, hey, this wasn't me.

I didn't book this.

We think it's fake.

And so I was like, perfect.

And these people had hit us before.

They come into the home, they just completely trash it and then they leave.

And then we have to pay for it, right?

We're missing out on the revenue.

And then we get the charge back from the credit card companies so

these uh we we caught it ahead of time and i was like it's perfect opportunity i want to you know catch them in the act uh we have that doorbell camera so when they they came to check in just caught them on the doorbell camera uh just just play with them really and try try to get them to one of the things that like because i called the police ahead of time i wanted to obviously get them arrested uh you know come in and pulling the scam multiple times and in the same city uh we obviously don't want that to continue to happen so uh when they came one of the things that the officer recommended was if you try to get them to admit that they're the person that booked the home then they can be held accountable uh unfortunately they're more they've done this multiple times they know not to admit that they're the person on the reservation so you know when i asked hey uh are you

the name that they used was montana so like are you montana uh there was two people the girl almost admitted it which at that point we could potentially call the police and then have them try to pursue something but there was a gentleman that she was with and he cut her off, didn't allow her to speak.

And he was obviously a skilled and probably the leader in the whole scam, but he basically said, oh, Montana's down the road.

She's not here yet.

She'll be here in about 10, 15 minutes.

He ended up actually like, I didn't allow him in the house.

He went around the back, tried to break in the window.

We caught him on camera.

It's on the social media there.

And they just ended up leaving.

Funny enough, though, I actually got a couple messages recently with people that knew who they were.

Really?

Yeah.

It was like, that's my cousin.

I don't want to say his name, but he's like, that's my cousin, so-and-so.

He's a, you know, he's a real bad guy, just, just not a good person.

If you, if you want to pursue anything, like, here's his name.

His own family ratted them out.

Yeah.

Wow.

So obviously he's not doing something right.

Right.

Yeah.

Your own family's telling on you.

Damn.

So it was the same guy that scammed you before, though.

How'd you know that?

It wasn't the same guy.

I think it was the same girl.

So we had a follow-up video on there where it was like six months prior.

This girl shows up in a ski mask and she looks like she had a similar body type to the girl that had showed up in the recent viral video.

And she showed up in a ski mask.

She got out of the taxi in a ski mask, went in the house.

Every time she left the house, she had a ski mask on.

So she, yeah, she knew what she was doing.

And yeah, there was no guy with her at that point in time.

But

yeah, she just looked very similar.

We can't for sure say it was her, but it seems like the same people kind of know and they just keep hitting.

I doubt it's multiple people knowing how to go about doing that in that area.

That's crazy.

And that's in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh.

Damn.

Is that where most of your stuff is?

Yeah, the largest part of our portfolio is in Pittsburgh.

Why'd you choose that spot specifically?

Pittsburgh was a great opportunity for a couple of reasons when I got into Airbnb a few years back.

So it's a B-size upcoming city.

And at the time, I didn't, so I live in Denver and it was very expensive to try to start an Airbnb in Denver.

I had family in Pittsburgh.

So I wanted to,

you know, get into a place where there was less competition.

And at the time, it's gotten more competitive now.

But at the time, you know, people were, and this is something, if you want to find a profitable Airbnb in a profitable Airbnb market, you can look around at your competition.

That's where we start, right?

We want to take comps.

We want to look to see what we're going to be competing with.

How much money do we need to invest in the the home to be competitive in that market?

And in this case, the people in Pittsburgh, the hosts in Pittsburgh, didn't invest a lot into the properties.

Like we were talking about before, they had put in some Ikea furniture, some kind of hand-me-downs.

The walls were empty and they took photos with their iPhone.

And

here, you know, I know that if I'm going to come in, I'm going to put more investment to beat them out.

I'm going to take professional listing photos using professional photography.

I'm going to list it very well and we can be really competitive in that market so uh when we came in we and still to this day we've done really well uh we've invested in quality listings and quality photos and you know market ourselves well and and that type of market so yeah sometimes it's not best to take the cheap route right exactly like buy the cheapest things not with airbnb i wouldn't recommend it just because it's oversaturated that was something you could potentially do maybe 2017 or earlier uh because there wasn't a whole lot of inventory in the market yeah uh but now it's it takes that extra level absolutely How capital intensive is it now?

Because I'm assuming every year it gets harder and harder, right?

Yeah.

So

it's not too bad.

I mean, single family homes.

So I'm in single family homes.

A lot of people do apartments and I'd like single family homes.

I think they're more profitable.

I think you can be competitive, more competitive with single family homes because let's say if you get a larger bedroom count, which Airbnb right now is pushing for larger bedroom counts, like just their properties, they want to push larger inventory.

How long?

That's a good question.

I don't know.

I would imagine because you're going to get bigger homes, like hosting bigger groups.

Airbnb, what makes Airbnb competitive is the fact that against hotels is that they can host larger groups, larger parties.

You're going to get more property.

And there's just this common misconception with pricing is that we've had a few guests that come in and they're like, your prices are crazy.

I'm going to go stay at a hotel.

And it's like, say, dude, you paid $300 for like two nights.

for a single family home.

That's like a five-bedroom, single-family home.

And you could, you know, I mean, hotel costs costs like $300 a night.

Yeah.

Right.

So why would you not go with the home?

So there's that misconception with price.

And yeah, we with the five-bedroom homes, you can be more competitive because you can compete with everything below it.

Right.

So you have a five-bedroom, four, three, two, one.

You can compete with apartments and beat them out.

Yeah, in a group setting, it's hard to compete on price

when you compare to hotels.

Absolutely.

Yeah, there's very few cities where I think the Airbnbs are actually more than the hotels.

Vegas is hard to beat just because they make their money off gambling.

So the hotels are super cheap here, but I feel like in in most places airbnb is probably cheaper yeah you know are you seeing that yeah yeah um i mean we're with using the dynamic pricing software uh we're competitive with hotel pricing uh because they take that neighborhood data into consideration so our our homes are you know priced competitively with that and then other hosts that makes sense wow um

yeah i guess

I guess there's a lot that goes into it, right?

It's not like you could just start up and make money right away.

You need the right mentorship and leadership.

So, yeah,

let's real quick talk about the price thing because you had mentioned that, how much capital does it take to get into it?

So, I didn't have a ton of capital when I got started.

I didn't have a huge like savings account to just go and dump in.

And I actually, through YouTube and learning about real estate podcasts, just learned about OPM, which stands for other people's money.

It's how the wealthy get wealthier, right?

Is you go out and you borrow money to start your business.

In this case, it was Airbnb.

So I went and I opened a LLC, I opened a business, I got a business loan, and that funded my start to my Airbnb.

And for a single family home at the time, I think when we started, it was a three-bedroom home and we put in about $25,000, I think it was what, and that was like with,

so I do rental arbitrage is where you convince a landlord to Airbnb their property.

So it doesn't, we're not talking about going and buying out a house and have a crazy down payment.

It's a low cost of entry to get into a home.

I approached a couple of landlords.

I got their permission to Airbnb the property.

We put it in the lease and I put that $25,000.

A part of that was some of the rent and deposits.

And then the rest was furniture.

And then when we launched, $1,000 bookings rolling in, covered the rent and making profit each month.

Wow.

Yeah.

So not that much.

Not that much.

That's interesting because usually when you think of Airbnb, you got to put down all the money for the house and everything.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And in today's market with the high real estate prices, it really makes it hard for anybody to get into Airbnb.

So when I started, I mean, I did all of this working a W-2 job full-time, and I was able to scale a portfolio of 10 properties in less than a year.

Damn.

So you've got 10 properties right now?

I have 13.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

In just a year.

Yeah.

That's impressive.

Yep.

13 in one year.

See, if you can maintain that, you're going to be well off.

Yeah.

It's, you know, doing rental arbitrage, each unit, it's, it's probably, you know, couple thousand bucks.

It depends on the, the, the area where you're investing, but um, it easily took over my W-2 job income and provided me an opportunity for reaching financial freedom.

And that's ultimately, you know, what I'm seeking to do.

There's a lot of cash that comes in and you really like, you'll be rich, but you won't be wealthy.

And that's one of the advantages when you're buying a home first renting.

So I take that cash and then I invest into long-term real estate or, you know, starting new businesses or, or, you know, going that route, try to grow that portfolio.

What was your W-2 job?

Software engineer.

Oh, sounds fun.

Yeah.

It was brutal.

Uh, it's, uh, so I worked for uh Lockheed Martin and

I just hated it, man.

Just commuting to work, sitting in a cube.

I worked in the classified space.

So I work in a skiff,

no windows,

just my body hurting.

Yikes.

And, you know, you just, all this time, man, you just sit there and, you know, people,

there's so much more that, that you can be doing to, to maximize your time.

And then you're just waiting for work.

And so there's a lot of side conversation and stuff like that.

I just, I wanted to

utilize that time to grow my knowledge and grow my skills.

And I didn't feel like I could really do that with the W-2 job.

So I ended up getting an unclassed job remote.

And that's really where I started kind of transitioning over, uh, reached a turning point and just, I flew out of state, flew to Pittsburgh and just, let's, let's do this.

Let's go.

Yeah.

Sounds like you're a lot happier now.

Absolutely.

A lot more fulfilled, right?

More fulfilled, more freedom,

like working towards that goal of financial freedom.

And it's really crazy, man.

So I've like, I've seen a bunch of people on podcasts, on your podcast, for example.

I just saw somebody the other day, he had scaled a huge portfolio of properties, like over 200 properties.

And that's amazing, man, when people can do that.

I mean, just the fact that we did, you know, 10 to 13 in less than a year there

was special to me.

But

I think it goes to show you that even if you're working at WTU, you're working full-time, you can still go out and do this.

You can still acquire these properties and you can go and reach financial freedom.

Yeah, I think your story is so like relatable.

It's so realistic, right?

Yeah.

I'm not a God.

I didn't like go secure 200 properties in a couple of years.

And

that's another level of doing it.

But

anybody can go out and they can make passive income, extra few thousand dollars a month doing this.

Yeah, if you could get five to 10, you know, that's probably 50 to 100K a year of passive, right?

Yep.

Which is great for most people.

That could be life-changing.

Life-changing.

Yeah, that's cool.

And with Trump in office now, I'm assuming the real estate market's going to be better, right?

I hope so.

I mean, crypto is already feeling it.

God damn.

Yeah.

Yeah, we see it.

We saw the boost there kicking up.

It was like 20K.

It jumped up.

Yeah.

Bitcoin's up 10% to the 10%.

It's at almost $90,000 as we're filming this.

That's amazing.

So it's going to hit 100K.

I remember when I know we talked before, like people thought you were crazy if you said Bitcoin would hit 100K.

Absolutely.

When you were mining in 17.

Yeah, you know, people look down on it.

And I'm fine with that because I know the potential of crypto and I'm buying into it.

I'm diversifying my portfolio.

I don't even look at it, man.

I'm just going to buy and hold and just invest that money in it like it's digital gold.

What do you buy?

Just one coin or spread it out?

I've spread it out over the years.

I bought multiple, but right now I'm just investing in Bitcoin.

I look at that as like the digital real estate.

And I've heard that.

that term used in the past.

So I'm just going to continue to invest into that right now.

I love it.

I think Michael Saylor might go down as one of the greatest investors of all time.

Yeah, man.

If this pans out and it hits 400K, like you said.

Yep.

Yeah.

He's been in the game a long time.

I remember him 2017.

I mean, he went all in.

Everybody thought he was crazy.

Obviously, he lost a lot of money, but that's what happens with Bitcoin.

Well, he didn't sell, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he didn't technically lose.

Yeah.

But so, I mean, I mean, in terms of, you know, that's one thing with investing is so many people.

Like, I just, how I got here was I wrote, I took a taxi from the hotel.

I talked to the taxi driver driver, and he's like, he's focusing on the ups and downs of crypto.

And the same thing with the stock market, but you got to think long-term.

What's the long-term potential of this?

And a lot of people don't think about that.

So long term, so like short-term, I think a lot of people looked at Michael and they're like, yeah, he lost a bunch of money, but it's like he hung on to it.

Long term, the guy's going to be super wealthy.

Even last year, he was buying the whole way down.

People like, this guy is an idiot.

Like,

he was buying Bitcoin at like 20, 30, 40K, 50K.

And now it's, yeah, look at him.

He knows what he's doing.

He does.

I think

it's hard to go wrong with Bitcoin.

And I like Ethereum too, but some people don't like that one.

But I think if you stick with the top couple, you're good.

I think so too.

Yeah.

They're more proven use cases with smart contracts, for example, with Ethereum.

Like when I learned what smart contracts were and how they could be applied, like actual use cases, that really turned me more onto crypto.

So

the fact that like in real estate, for example,

you can

use those smart contracts to get somebody to sign and it it basically like passes back and forth to one another so waiting for the other party and it's all handled through technology yep uh that to me is amazing and none of it can be tampered with right yeah i thought it was going to change the real estate game it hasn't seemed embraced it fully yet but i bought my house without meeting the seller so that's the first step right amazing yeah so that's the first step and i feel like smart contracts is the next step where you'll be able to buy just online online right yep that could be crazy everything's moving over to this digital world and the i really believe in this ai revolution that's coming up.

I think it's going to be the next industrial revolution with AI.

It's going to take off and you know we might see some market pain coming up.

There's a lot of bad predictions about the market and you know financially and obviously real estate prices are crazy, inflation, everything like that.

And we're overdue for an adjustment.

And there could be a lot of pain, but what could pull us out of that pain potentially or maybe not even make it as painful is an AI revolution, right?

This technology that takes off and a lot of people people are making money and things can continue.

But yeah.

I've been hearing that we're due for a section for years now.

I'm just waiting on them.

You're ready, right?

You got some cash on the sidelines?

I got cash, but yeah, I've been hearing that for six years straight.

I know, right?

Crazy.

It's all the fear, yeah.

I feel like it's supposed to happen every X amount of years and we're overdue.

So

I don't know what's going on, but I don't think it can continue.

Something's got to give.

It seems like they're artificially keeping it up, right?

I think so.

I think with the election and even if something bad was to happen, I wouldn't blame Trump.

I wouldn't, you know, look at like politics and blame that.

It's been, you know, a long time where we've needed an adjustment.

And

it's honestly, it's a good thing.

It's a healthy thing for that to happen with the market.

So it's, it's needed.

It's the next move.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope it comes like not in a negative way, but I just feel like that's the opportunity where you can really run it up.

Yep.

I've never experienced that as an adult because the only recession I've been in, I was a kid, I didn't have any capital to play with.

Yeah.

I uh i i kind of watch what big money is doing i think we've seen warren buffett uh he sold a lot of stuff he's got a lot of cash on the sidelines he's been dumping yeah yeah i see him every week dumping stock yep i i heard about that uh

you know about 2016 2017 where i really started getting my financial bearings on how these guys are moving their money around and making a lot of money and you know just like the quote goes with warren buffett it's uh sell when people are greedy buy when people are fearful yep that opportunity for real wealth and growing and making a lot of money is coming up.

So have that cash ready and whatever, whatever, you know, look at what you're going to invest in.

Is it going to be stocks?

Like, do your research now, just be ready, have that money on the sideline and be ready to go.

Yeah, you need the right connections to the right people to listen to.

Absolutely.

Whether it's stocks, crypto, real estate.

Surround yourself with the right people.

You're the average of who you hang out with the most.

Absolutely.

You got a good network out there in Pittsburgh?

I just got a good network overall.

I feel like I'm in a couple masterminds.

Which ones?

I'm in a Airbnb group called Roadbuilt.

And that's really nice.

We focus a lot.

It's Airbnb in general, but it's creative financing.

And if you're familiar with creative financing, I love creative financing, Pace Morby stuff.

Pace Morby, yeah.

Yeah, it's super smart.

If you can do it right, there's a lot of opportunity right now with the high real estate prices to capitalize on that.

Yep.

I like seller financing too.

Seller financing.

I was trying to do that from my house, but the guy wanted cash.

So you tried to talk him into it.

Yeah.

Yeah, but I started with sub or sub two.

That didn't work.

That's hard to pull off.

It is.

There's got to be a lot of pain.

And that's when Pacemorby talks about it's got to be a lot of motivation.

So with your house that you bought, was it the guy owned it 100% equity?

Yeah.

He owned 100%.

So I was trying to do sub two.

He didn't want to do that.

Then I tried to do seller, but then all my money's in crypto, actually.

So it didn't work out.

So in order for sub two, there has to be a balance on the mortgage still.

So he would have mortgage payments.

But if he owned it 100%, then he would be doing, you'd be doing seller financing.

He would

have that interest rate.

You would just negotiate the terms on that.

That's probably why he didn't.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

There's a lot of people, though, that are in that position where they just own, they own the homes and you could potentially, as you're trying to do with seller financing, just have them act as the bank.

With sub two, though, there's got to be pain.

There's got to be a reason.

Like a late payment or something.

Yeah.

Are there caught up on arrears?

Just late, late mortgage payments.

They just, they want out.

And a of times uh the you know there's people that own the houses outright it's harder to convince them to say hey you know take take a risk and and loan the property to me but yeah if you watch pace's stuff man i mean he's he's a smooth talker man he's a beast i get his ads every day and i just study the ads on it so usually i skip the ads on youtube but no i study his stuff yeah yeah him and jamil both of them yeah jamil i've seen his stuff too jamil's great yeah they got a show too um i had a guy dude have you heard of real estate deeds tax deeds no dude he goes to auction, buys these deeds.

It's crazy.

Yeah,

I've been interested in auctions.

I haven't gotten into it, but

you have to have cash from my understanding.

You need a good amount of cash.

A good amount of cash.

Yeah.

Yeah, because you're taking on the liability.

Yeah.

But if they miss a payment on their mortgage, it goes to auction.

Isn't that crazy?

It is, yeah.

And hey, I mean, if pain happens in the market coming up, we might see more of those situations.

Oh, you will.

Good opportunities for people.

You can sell houses for 5, 10, 20K.

Really?

Isn't that nuts?

Dude, that's crazy.

I mean, even though it's not like the full equity, it's still crazy.

Yep.

You're getting a huge discount.

Yeah.

There's all sorts of ways to make money in real estate.

Section 8, I see those ads.

Yep.

You got to be creative with it.

You know, going out and finding deals and, or if you're doing rental arbitrage and you're trying to convince a landlord to Airbnb with a property, these are all creative ways to try to make money in real estate.

You don't have to have this huge down payment to go in and do anything.

You just got to find the right.

the right knowledge, education, maybe mentors and groups and get support.

Absolutely.

I did see one funny thing on your Instagram.

Did one of your cleaners run away?

Airbnb cleaners?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So we had a cleaner that got freaked out and she went into the home to clean.

It was her and two other cleaners.

And she went to the back room, like the laundry room.

She went to open the door and she said that there was something behind the door.

So

uh she leaned in a little harder.

She pushed a little harder and she heard somebody like basically say like

really really freaky, right?

And so she screamed.

She freaked out.

I got it on camera.

Oh my gosh.

They ran out of the house screaming

and they called me.

They're like, hey, we quit.

We're not coming back to clean for you.

I'm like, what?

I was like, we had a guest coming to check in that day.

I was like, hang on a second.

It's like, we'll get the police out there.

We'll figure out what's going on.

I wasn't sure who it was.

I know we had an AC tech that was supposed to be working on the AC.

I wasn't sure if he was just playing a joke or what the deal was.

So we ended up

calling the police, but before they showed up, the cleaner's husband came back and this dude's a big guy.

Yeah.

He's like ready to confront whoever was behind the door.

I don't blame him, man.

He's like, who scared my wife?

She was spooked.

Yeah.

So he went in before the police were there.

And he, of course, what the police came and what they found was when they opened the door.

it was a metal chair.

No, she she just got freaked out.

She she heard like a growling kind of with the metal chair just scraping across the floor.

Ah, yeah,

they had a good sense of humor about it.

You know, I um I felt bad.

It happens, but uh, yeah, it made for an interesting story.

That is super funny.

Have you had any squatters or people try to stay there randomly?

No, thank God.

Um,

they're uh, we keep our listings under 30 days.

So for a lot of legality purposes, if they're more than 30 days, they get tenant rights.

Um, so we try to mitigate that ahead of time.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

So if you rent out a house to someone for over 30 days, they get rights.

Yeah, you got to look at the laws depending on where you are, but yeah, over 30 days, it switched to tenant rights.

Otherwise, it's like considered a short-term rental because you have the short-term rentals over 30, it's like mid-term rentals, and then you have long-term rentals for long-term tenants.

Got it.

So tenant rights, they can start requesting repairs and everything, right?

Yep.

Yep.

And you got to comply.

Yeah.

And there's some horror stories out there for sure about that.

You know, tenants, obviously squatting and stuff, but we keep our stay short.

We're most profitable with a short-term stay.

So shorter, shorter, the better for you.

Yeah.

It's more of an exit strategy.

Like if that's something that's like, oh man, I want to get an Airbnb.

It's too scary.

Like, you know, lose money.

Well, there's always an exit out of these things.

You know, if you rent the property from the landlord and you're like, how can I get out of this if short-term doesn't work?

switch to midterm.

In Pittsburgh,

there's a lot of hospitals there.

I think it's like over 38 hospitals.

Traveling nurses are a thing.

So you can rent out to traveling nurses coming around and staying at the home as a midterm rental.

That could be profitable or it could could get you through difficult times and then switch back to short term.

Or worst case scenario, you switch to long term, you rent it out to a long-term tenant, maybe you make some cash flow on that, or another strategy, you just sell the furniture or you move it to another listing.

So just being creative, once again, kind of going back.

So it kind of, that was one thing that I had to go through before I got started was that you have all these kind of fears and excuses why you shouldn't get in.

I did my research and I was like, yeah, like, you know, if it doesn't work out, it's like I got these options I can turn to and, you know, it'll work either way.

Love it.

Brandon, where can people find you, man, and learn from you?

My website is strscience.com.

I actually have a mentorship and coaching program for Airbnb Arbitrage and basically doing everything that we talked about here.

Also, you can check out my YouTube channels at str science and a lot of my other handles, Instagram at str science.

Awesome.

Well, links below.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Appreciate it.

Yep.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Check out the links.

Peace.