Welcome Back to Unstoppable Real Estate Investing. Today we are getting back into short term rentals and our guest to have this conversation with is Mr. Michael Elefante. Michael was financially free at 27 - Retired from corporate America at 28. Full time real estate investor and content creator! Want to learn how to invest in short term vacation rentals, the fast path to financial freedom? Check out his Airbnb Investor Academy course - a complete guide to becoming an expert short term rental investor! Michael currently owns and operates six short term rentals that brings in over $1M of revenue per year. Michael shares how he is able to charge twice as much as others rentals by providing an experience that renters seek out. He is making money hand over fist with only having 6 properties with the biggest property being a four bedroom rental. Tune in this week and enjoy! Connect with Michael https://www.instagram.com/melefante6/ https://www.tiktok.com/@melefante6 And after that head on over to... https://easysell411.com https://billyalvaro.com https://billyssecrets.com Who knows maybe you will be our next partner? To get some neat (and FREE) Tools | Tips | Tricks to help you in REI!
Welcome Back to Unstoppable Real Estate Investing. Today we are getting back into short term rentals and our guest to have this conversation with is Mr. Michael Elefante.
Michael Elefante is a real estate investor, content creator and entrepreneur. He and his wife became financially free at the age of 27, just one year after investing in short term rentals. Just 2.5 years later, they've scaled to six short term rentals that generate over $80k per month and $40-50k cash flow per month. Michael is an avid online educator and sells a variety of resources to help others jumpstart their journey to financial freedom. He is the founder of Airbnb Investor Academy, which launched in April 2021, and has generated nearly $1M in course and coaching sales in the first 16 months. Once Michael and his wife became financially free, they quit their 9-5 jobs and traveled in a camper van for 12 months, before settling down on Lake Keowee, SC. They are expecting their first baby in October 2022. Michael has participated in numerous podcasts, webinars and in person speaking events over the past two years. He has around 1M followers across Tik Tok, Instagram and YouTube. His niche is short term rentals and finding ways to achieve financial freedom. Michael preaches that anyone, regardless of age or current position in life, can achieve financial freedom in the next 1-2 years.
Michael shares how he is able to charge twice as much as others rentals by providing an experience that renters seek out. He is making money hand over fist with only having 6 properties with the biggest property being a four bedroom rental.
Tune in this week and enjoy!
Connect with Michael
https://www.instagram.com/melefante6/
https://www.tiktok.com/@melefante6
And after that head on over to...
Who knows maybe you will be our next partner?
To get some neat (and FREE) Tools | Tips | Tricks to help you in REI!
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
property, people, short term rentals, airbnb, llc, higher, loans, years, amenities, average daily rate, nashville, cleaners, guests, pay, big, market, bedroom, homeowners insurance, pricing, lenders
SPEAKERS
Billy, Michael
Billy 00:16
Welcome to Unstoppable Real Estate Investing. Well, my name is Billy Alvaro, aka the unstoppable BA former billion dollar mortgage banker gone bankrupt turn professional real estate investor, where each week you'll learn the tools, strategies, systems and secrets myself and other highly successful real estate investing entrepreneurs use to start, grow and scale their businesses creating massive profits and how you can too, and we'll teach you how to put those profits to work. So you no longer have to get ready to finally experience financial freedom and generational wealth now let's get started. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode of unstoppable ra wealth. I'm your host the unstoppable BA Billy Alvaro bringing it now this session with the podcasts are over here loving with today's gonna bring so the last couple of weeks I've been speaking with and interviewing a lot of commercial guys syndicators guys that are growing guys that are doing 5000 units 10,000 units in their portfolio billion dollars under management. We're gonna shift gears now we're gonna get back into short term rentals, which by the way, I have a passion for this. We just picked up another one. And so today I'm gonna be doing Mr. Michael Elefante. Michael, welcome to the show, brother.
Michael 01:34
Billy. Thanks for having me. I'm pretty pumped.
Billy 01:36
Yeah, glad to have you. So let's just start off. Where are you located at
Michael 01:40
currently live in Greenville near Greenville, South Carolina. But I've been all over the map grew up in North Carolina lived in Dallas, Austin Nashville traveled in a campervan for a year once we hit financial freedom, and then wound up here it's my wife got pregnant, so settle down a little bit. She's 30, about 38 and a half weeks pregnant so it could be soon as we get off this podcast.
Billy 02:04
Very cool. So I want to get into the premise of this show, Michael is we teach people how to invest in real estate, start grow and scale eventually, you're in the growth phase. Now you're a young dude, what do you like? 2728 years old.
Michael 02:17
I'll be 30 in December,
Billy 02:19
you got a baby face, bro, you got a baby face? The baby on the way. So now let's get into your backstory five minutes. What did you do? Where do you come from? And like transfer where you where you are today?
Michael 02:33
Yeah, so I was an athlete all the way through college played baseball. And that was my true passion and what I woke up living and breathing every day. So once that came to a screaming halt at the end of college didn't proceed with any professional career, didn't really know what I wanted to do. So I dove into a sales job for a tech company bounced around working up the corporate ladder, you know, just kind of want to do what everyone else did or told me to do, save, invest and just work so I can make more money and live a cool lifestyle very quickly learned that trading time for money sucks and didn't really fascinate me, I wouldn't care if I'm making a million dollars a year if I'm trading 60-80 hours a week, I don't want to. So I wanted to figure out a way to build cash flow and attain financial freedom. Take time back travel with my now wife and family spend more time doing what matters to us. So that's what initially piqued my interest in real estate got dove down the rabbit hole of books, YouTube videos, all sorts of stuff, podcasts, and was getting ready to start like a lot of people do like with a duplex or single family room rental. I just moved to Nashville at the time this is back in 2018 learned about short term rentals because we stayed in a couple Airbnb'sAirbnb there. And I just started to do numbers on what we were paying per night, you know, day of week what they paid for this house or apartment. I'm like if these numbers are right, this is crazy. Like why would I do a single family home when I could get one of these and maybe even become financially free with just two to three units. So that's what initially piqued my interest in short term rentals and Airbnb. And then we finally got our first property at the end of 2019 saw the bookings roll in, kind of figured out what our niche was. Then we liquidate our retirement accounts right when COVID had bought a second property. Fast forward. What is it a year and a half, two and a half years now we have six properties. They do about 80,000 plus a month in revenue and our profit margins are 40 plus percent. So we're cashflow on a pretty healthy amount. Just live in the dream. So it's been a wild ride but
Billy 04:33
six properties you guys in it now like 32 G's a month. Good for you, man.
Michael 04:37
Yeah, 30 to 45 a month typically cashflow
Billy 04:41
insane, right. So let's go let's talk I want to get into the nuts and bolts right. So how did you first off determine what markets you wanted to get into?
Michael 04:50
Yeah, so it's easy, like a lot of most people most people start is where they live and not a lot of people live in a market such as Nashville, Tennessee. It's a great short term. No market great tourism, organic high growth market to for real estate in general. So that was easy for me to invest in the backyard. I also looked at the Smoky Mountains, which was the most visited national park in the country. So I just start where, where our city like the city or population is growing, what vacation rental markets are steady and growing and popular. And that's how we initially started. So that's how we ended up picking Nashville but just a great and we knew who we wanted to rent to, we saw what people are willing to spend for special occasions such as the bachelorette party. So that's when our first property, you know, vision came about, we wanted to bring that experience into the property because we wanted to sell on the experience and not sell on price. And I think that's what's helped us sustain such good growth and average daily rate strength and occupancy rank. occupancy rates being so high is because we're able to sell on the experience and not just a bed to sleep on at night.
Billy 05:51
So talk to me about that because you're the third person over the last six months that I've been interviewing with the Airbnb ease that mentioned the experience portion. So what does that mean to the listeners? That is that mean you're charging a higher amount because you're giving them a full fledge experience with your property?
Michael 06:04
Yep, yeah. And that could that could be anything from amenities selling a view, like if you're going to the mountains or the beach, right, I'm willing to pay more to stay in a certain location within that market because I get the experience of waking up and having coffee on the beach or looking at the clouds rolled through the mountains, right? If you have a hot tub game room, an accent wall, that's a photo that's what we did in Nashville, there's a bunch of murals around the city that Pete that were interactive, people could take photos and I remember driving around on a Saturday morning and I would see 300 people lined up to take one photo people literally come to waste their whole Saturday in my opinion to take that photo but they want that photo op for Instagram whatever they want to post it on show everyone how great of a time they're having I was like what if we could bring that in our living room like our local mural artists tagged named butterfly b&b, you guys can look it up online or on Instagram. And now we have bachelorette parties that are willing to pay like two extra rate of our neighbors because they want that photo up in our living room. So it was like the wildest thing to see come to fruition but ever since then we kind of understood the importance of that especially for special occasion travel, bachelorette bachelor birthday events holidays, family vacations that people go on once a year like they want to go all out and they're willing to spend a little bit more money for that experience so I think that's what initially drove us to to adding in all these different amenities that attract people
Billy 07:23
what what size is the is the the other like an average size property that you guys pick up because the Attract larger groups like that I'm expecting the houses not to be your typical three four bedroom he's probably larger homes I'm taking
Michael 07:35
five out of six of the properties are four bedroom homes. And then one is this one is a two bedroom condo.
Billy 07:40
No shit and what's what square footage of these houses?
Michael 07:44
They range I mean the smallest ones I want to say about 1400 square foot 1200 square foot something like that. Then the rest are probably on average 2500 square feet to 3000 So not crazy big.
Billy 07:58
Not crazy big and how many people do you allow for measuring like eight people you put in the house?
Michael 08:04
Yeah, some cities that we're in right we're in Nashville, Gatlinburg and Fort Lauderdale, Florida does have different rules for occupancy limits like Nashville, for example. A lot of cities are two per bedroom plus four and common spaces or you know, bunk beds. So for our four bedroom properties, most of them sleep 10 to 12 guests and then one of them sleeps 16 In the mountains just because we have a bunch of bunk beds and stuff like that.
Billy 08:25
It's insane. We just picked up one in in the Poconos. Big it's like a 6040 square foot house. So yeah, it's got eight bedrooms, five baths and sick the game room, the TV room. I mean, it's it's insane to pull poolroom backyard firepit so it's going to be one of those experienced places. I dumped all my Airbnb years back I had them in Fort Lauderdale, pompano. Over in upstate in upstate New York Fire Island, Montauk, like all over the place market took off and like you know what I'm exiting, which was a mistake, because the cash flow that I was making with those properties was freaking insane.
Michael 09:03
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. I believe it you're gonna do well in the Poconos. I've done property valuations for people out there, that big properties and a couple of like, the, like the local markets, if you will do extremely well. And if you have a big place with amenities, you're gonna do very well.
Billy 09:18
Yeah, we're gonna crush I think we're gonna be able to get anywhere from 800 to $1,100 a night for that. And depending on season, offseason when they have certain events up there, you know, do you use a specific? Do you guys manage the properties yourself online if you have a company that does it for you.
Michael 09:34
So we've been self managing up until this point. Just leveraging different software to help automate and change pricing and automate the messaging with guests communication with cleaners. We want to create as much of it because it's an active income stream it really is when it comes down to it but you can create a mostly passive income stream with short term rentals with just a few properties. Once you scale beyond five or six, then you're probably gonna want to outsource or let or hire a VA or somebody to handle some of that day to day stuff. But we're about to roll it into my property management company, which we just launched back in June 2022. We're about to 50 properties now and have about seven, six or seven employees and a couple more onboarding in the next month. Yeah, so that'll be good. Well onboard that it'll take my attention off the day to day stuff there. And so we can focus on scaling.
Billy 10:19
So that business for the property management, you're, you're overseeing other people's properties, correct. Okay. Got it. What are the software's that you recommend on the short term rentals to leverage what software is and why? What do they do?
Michael 10:31
Yeah, so pricing wise, I would definitely recommend price labs or wheelhouse, those are the two big ones. They both have great features. I currently use price labs, I might switch over to wheelhouse soon, I'm friendly with the CEO there. And he showed me some awesome new features they're adding. But that's just amazing. It devils in the details, and you can leverage data in there. So it's not just putting your own customizations in but it will intuitively change pricing based on your customizations and then demand in the market every single day based on the day of week. But you can also look at the neighborhood data, for example, on price labs. And I could excuse me use filters and look at future comp sets of what the different percentiles of pricing is for each property in my specific comp set in that let's say a zip code in Nashville, Tennessee, for example. So I can see what other two bedrooms are charging what are the four bedrooms are charging on a chart and I can see am I too high? Am I too low and leaving money on the table. And then for any days that I don't have bookings, I can actually dropped the prices and fill those gaps. I think a lot of people miss a ton of revenue midweek and especially in cities where there's random midweek travel, people just kind of pop through cities. Because they're sticklers on this as my average daily rate, I'm not going below it, you're missing out on 1000s of dollars a month. So that's what we've been able to do and just craft a really good pricing strategy. That also not just helps you make more money, but it helps you appear higher in Airbnb search, because Airbnb looks at a lot of different things in their algorithm, but one of them is impressions and conversion rates. How many people are seeing your property on the first or second page of search? Are they clicking on it? And are they converting to a reservation? Airbnb says, oh, Billy's property makes makes me money, I'm going to promote them higher in search, they have good reviews to their good host. higher in search. Ultimately, that's going to lead to what more clicks more reservations, more money for you in the future and hopefully higher average daily rate, because people are going to see you higher up more reviews. So they're going to associate that with value. And then they're gonna book you at the higher rate later on.
Billy 12:28
Give us give the listeners some some secrets or tips on how to get higher ranking in the algorithm. Is there keyword structure that you can put in like, what do you do if you're a brand new home on Airbnb, the star getting up to the algorithm?
Michael 12:43
Yeah, first and foremost, you can opt in for the new listing discount 100% Do that they'll immediately put you on like the top five of search results for that market, newest and discounted 20% off even if your prices are 20%, higher doesn't matter, they're going to promote you to help you out as a new host. So a lot of people list unless you're in like a dead season in a seasonal market, you're gonna get three to five bookings, like right out of the gate, no problem. That's helpful. And then over time, it's it's you can look up Airbnb search ranking results. And Airbnb actually has a help article that explains all the different things in there. But a couple of the big things for me are pricing, and then cancellation policy not being too strict. And then positive reviews is very helpful over time. And especially from a consumer perspective, if you're looking at two restaurants in a city you've never been in before one has 1000 4.8 average review, and then the other one has 30 and they're four stars, you immediately write that one off, right, and you're gonna go with the one with all the reviews and the higher quantity of quality reviews, no different for Airbnb, sure someone could look at a new property and be like, Oh, they don't have many reviews, it still looks great. But someone who's got 105 star reviews, or maybe a really high rating, that really helps one, it's gonna help you rank higher in search, it builds trust with the guest. And then also the, there's a certain level of criteria, you get super host status once you have super high status that helps rank you a little higher in search, too. But I definitely encourage anyone just Google Airbnbs help article. There's a bunch of things in there that help. And then one other tool you asked about earlier. For software, I use guests for hosts and then my company uses guests for pros. There's a property management software tool that allows you to list on all these different OTAs such as Airbnb for about direct booking, and then manage everything from one central location and automate all your messaging and your communication with your cleaners, your pricing, it's all hooked into that one thing. They have one toggle in there that helps it's called Airbnb search rankings booster you toggle that on, it'll tweak things in your listing daily for you and help you rank higher in search as well. What's the cost of that guest the for guests per host, it's super cheap, I think your first listings like 45 bucks a month, somewhere around there. Then once you get more listings, it's cheaper. I think st for pros, they charge a percentage of your revenue and again, it's kind of a volume thing or they'll bring it down with the more properties that you bring to the table. Have you
Billy 14:57
ever looked at some of these CAPTCHA services that are out there that do the management for you they do the booking for you the ranking for you, like, evolve or something like them. Have you looked at?
Michael 15:08
yeah, sure, I mean, evolves in full blown property management, there are some there are some neat ones bubbling up, like, I remember off the top of my head, one of my friends just sent me a tenant the other day, what they will do, I want to say the pricing and some other specific things for you, maybe it's just the guests communication. So you don't have to handle certain aspects of the management, but they charge you less than a full blown pm would. But that's what our RPM does. Like we're our goal, there's a huge void in the industry, from Legacy property managers that honestly just don't take advantage of new technology. And they don't do a good job of maximizing revenue for homeowners. So our sole focus as a pm is to, of course, have a great experience and make it a hands off for you. But we want to maximize revenue for you. That's the name of the game. So if we can do that, basically, our services paid for just by the increase in revenue we bring in for your property. That's what we want to do for people. So yeah, it's up to you. I think when you first start out, try hosting yourself, unless you just can't with your schedule. It shouldn't take you more than 30 to 45 minutes a week of property. Once you have all the automation tools set up.
Billy 16:11
When you go into a new area, Michael, how do you go about building out all of your service providers that really need to help you facilitate to make sure the property gets turned over? lawn looks good houses clean? Anything and any issues in the inside something breaks? They call somebody? Like are you feeling those calls right now, or they going to somebody else
Michael 16:31
and people, for sure, yeah, cleaners are number one, remember on your team. So interviewing multiple cleaners at the forefront one they have to automate scheduling I had last thing I want to be doing is sending them screenshots or texts on my calendar. So turnover b&b, or resort cleaning are the two that we use, those are great, they get notified when there's a reservation, when there's a cancellation, they know when to show up and when the next group is checking in. So that helps with the scheduling. The next thing is just establishing good communication with them. So I want to know when there's issues, even if there's something that you can remediate yourself, and then offer to pay them extra for basically being an extension of your team tip them, you know, you can pad your cleaning fee a little bit to bake in those tips to your cleaners, because if you pay them more, they're gonna value you as essentially an employer Right? to contract them out. And if they know that, the better job they do, they're gonna get paid more that you're going to be their number one customer, so they're gonna go out of their way to find issues. So if there's anything that's broken or stained, they just send us a photo. And right now, we're still doing claims ourselves. They don't come up a ton, but they do pop up. Pretty simple process, depending what platform the guest book through, you can file a claim. Documentation is key there, because if the guest refuses to pay it, you can bring it up to Airbnb support, and they'll look at the case and many times they'll pay you out most of what you put in as a claim. So that's really important to have the documentation in place.
Billy 17:52
Talk Talk to the listeners about specific type of homeowners insurance, you have these properties. It's not It's Correct,
Michael 18:00
correct. Yeah, you're gonna want something specifically built for a vacation rental. It's different. So like the Cadillac of providers, which I was recommended people's proper insurance. They won't proper. I think they insure through or in conjunction with Lloyds of London technically, but that was like the initial, this is what you want for vacation rental, and they'll cover everything to like bedbugs, but you want a million dollar plus liability insurance policy built baked in there. And then of course, you have all your normal homeowners insurance items as well, but they'll cover loss of rents, right? And you can dictate how much coverage or how little coverage you want, what deductible you want to pay. But having insurances you want to protect yourself for sure. Then as you scale both your wealth and your short term rental business or whatever other real estate you have in your portfolio, you might want to look at a bigger like umbrella. Policy right to cover everything. If if if you were to tap out on one specific policy. Yeah, but proper is the big one. Foremost is another good one. I've done reinsure Pro as a third before, it just depends because some of these will not insurance specific locations. Like if you're in a beach location, that's like Florida Keys. That's a real tough one to get insured.
Billy 19:10
Yeah, the hurricane and the wind is a pain. Yes, yeah. Yeah, I had a house out in Pompano Beach on the intercoastal and my insurance for the year. It was like 15 G's just for the homeowners insurance and the wind. And, and my taxes were like, Why
Michael 19:26
doesn't save X is down there. Or at least
Billy 19:30
it was over 55,000 Just for taxes and insurance on the property before any type of mortgage payments. Oh my gosh, it was insane. Yeah, they got me. I didn't realize what the tax was going to be when it bought it was like a third of what it was. I didn't think to ask because I was so young. What the rate is and when I got my first build was like triple what was being posted. I'm like, this sucks, but it is what it is, you know, right. So this is good man. You're given a lot of really solid information. Next thing I want to I want the listeners to learn from you, when you're buying these properties. Are you buying them in your personal name? Are you buying an LLC? And if you're doing an LLC, are you separating them out or having all of them underneath one and why?
Michael 20:13
Yeah, so most of the properties we bought under our personal name and have since quitclaim the deed over to an LLC structure. The reason being is the cool thing about short term rentals is you can leverage a second home loan minimum downpayment, 10%, or a jumbo loan if you exceed the conventional limit, at 10% down so by leveraging more, your returns likely going to be higher, you have more flexibility on what you can budget for furniture and amenities and things like that, of course, you have the have to have the intent or intention to use that vacation rental for your own personal use in order to do a second home loan, legally, right. But a lot of people take advantage of that I've done one of those before, I highly recommend it. And then we've also done conventional investment loans. Again, they won't let you close in an LLC 99.9 times out of 100. But since we quit our jobs, and I didn't have a full year of business income and tax two years tax returns for the properties, we switched to debt service coverage ratio loans or DSCR loans. These are becoming very popular in the short term rentals. A lot of new lenders are bubbling up or brokers that will look at rental iser on air DNA or projected rents. If you have a property management company that you're using to service the debt each month instead of your own income. So all they care about is your credit score, and then proof of funds to close and then as long as the debt service coverage ratio is typically one to one or one to 1.25 which is not difficult to achieve with the short term,
Billy 21:38
regular rental. I mean, that's what you're getting rentals. Yeah,
Michael 21:41
and a lot of them will look at a long term rental comp first or use the whatever the sales based approach is on the the appraisal report to try and qualify as a DSCR. And if it won't, a lot of them will make the exception and look at the short term rental comps or income. Now some of those lenders have specific requirements because we've been through this before where they might want you to have experience as a either two years as a long term rental owner or one year as a short term rental owner and operator or proof that you're hiring a pm and they could provide projections for you on your behalf. So it's a couple of different nuances with that. And typically they'll want a little more down the rate might be a tiny higher, but if you're tapped down on conventional loans or other types of loans, it's a great great loan to take advantage of typically 30 year fixed interest rate. It's a solid program.
Billy 22:32
What what are some of the lenders that are offering that loan for the short term errs?
Michael 22:36
So a couple specific ones that have popped up Vizio lendings one of them the lender, which I think they're down in Florida, they'll do DSCR loans host financials. Another one that's specific to short term rentals. I've done a bunch of loans with the one brokerage which is David greens team. David greens, the main contributor for bigger pockets at this point in time it hosts the podcast there. So I've worked with their main loan officer, he's been excellent. But they're they're a broker. So they'll go pimp out the loan to a bunch of different lenders to see which one sticks, and then the LSC question we actually do ls F series LLC. A lot of people aren't familiar with that just because I don't know what states technically will recognize it. But instead of doing a different LLC per property or bucketing off multiple properties, in each LLC, we did a series so it's one overarching LLC essentially, and then think about like different sub LLC is within that LLC. So you get similar the same level of protection for my understanding, speaking with my lawyer, but you can have a different ein associated with each of those LLC is in each property, so I can bucket them off, but just have the one LLC fee per year to focus on it, then I can have a different bank account associated with each of those EINs,
Billy 23:48
Smart that you did that. We did that too, for our rentals and for a JV deals and it worked out great because you don't have to go and have the expense of opening up a new brand new LLC. But you get the benefits of having that overall arching protections. That's smart. Yeah. Awesome. Last Last question is when you're going into these new areas, we talked about your vendors, what's your process to like, fill these properties out, right? Like you got to go in and fill a whole house. What do you usually budget? And then is there a specific company that you're going to to get all of your merchandise to fill the property? Yeah, so
Michael 24:21
two routes, obviously, you can furnish yourself or you can use a designer. There's one designer out there that I recommend some summer lead designs, spelled s o m Er So summer lead, but they're amazing. They only do short term rentals. But I usually recommend doing Wayfair Amazon, some poly and bark some of these other stores. But the reason I like Wayfarer and Amazon is just because when you're furnishing a place and it's go time and you're trying to get it done in two weeks or four weeks or whatever it is maybe less. You want to know roughly exactly when that furniture is getting delivered. If there's any issues the ease of returning it and getting a refund on those Wayfair and Amazon are the best customer service no questions asked type policy and usually there's an abundance of of options to pick from so and then budgeting wise, depends on the property, I should probably get more granular on per square foot but usually is like a quick when I'm evaluating a property and putting in my all in costs are usually budget five to $7,500 per number of bedrooms, that includes general common spaces like kitchen, dining, living, and then per additional space like outdoor spaces, game rooms, theater room, stuff like that, I'll budget an additional 2500 per space or 5000 per space, depending how big it is. And that usually gets me roughly to where I end up being
Billy 25:39
at. It's funny you just did those numbers that I was doing in my head and what it's gonna run me for the one that I just bought the Poconos and it's about 6570 grand. Yeah, the bedroom get the outside, we get the downstairs we got. So yeah, it's about the numbers. As a rule of thumb, they kind of like workout on the higher end for us and somebody.
Michael 25:56
Yep, yeah. And for a bigger property where you have a bunch of space for amenities, I would budget on the higher end, you know, to make sure you know, you don't want to be surprised. And the other thing I do is I have like a simple spreadsheet that I plug in basically per room like literally line item even down to like silverware, have everything we need the quantity of each and it will just auto populate the cost per room costs for the whole house adjust for sales tax and all that. So I have the whole house furnished on a spreadsheet before I purchase a single item because I want to make sure I'm not 10 grand over budget or maybe I have five grand of wiggle room. Can I add something else special? And you know, allocate that budget to that additional amenity? I don't know. So that helps me make sure I'm in line and not, you know, up to my ears and it's spending before I before I'm done.
Billy 26:41
Is this a form you created use? Did you swipe this from somebody else?
Michael 26:45
This is a all the forms and investment templates and everything are just things I created along over the years. I love
Billy 26:51
it. Good stuff. I want to flip gears real quick, Mike, I'm looking at your profile, your Tiktok right and say you got like over a million followers on Tiktok.
Michael 27:00
I got almost 900,000 on Tik Tok and like 134 on Instagram.
Billy 27:07
So what was your process? Right? Because content is king? What was your process to build and scale up to this many followers?
Michael 27:15
You know, it's funny, I never thought I'd be a content creator. But I initially started posting on YouTube when I first got started just to like regurgitate a lot of things. I was learning some general things that I knew a lot about. And YouTube is hard. So I started posting on Tik Tok about almost two years ago. And I was using it to funnel people to YouTube. But my mindset was all wrong. I just had to create great short form content and lo and behold now that those are my main channels, right Instagram, Tik Tok, that the biggest thing that helped me was just focusing on one specific topic initially, because there's a lot of people that are interested in the same topics you are, even if it's something like coloring rocks outside, I guarantee you, there's people out there that like to do the same thing. And that sounds crazy. But real estate, obviously, is a huge bucket of people that have interested in. So the thing that helped me the most was just trying out different videos, seeing which one got a lot of views and attention, because the algorithm knows, right, the the attention span, how many seconds they watched the video, did they share that they liked the comment, they save it. And then I would just beat that type of video style into the ground over and over and over again. And some people get sick of it. But tick tock is great, because it'll push it to a new audience every single time. You know, it's on the for you page. It's all new stuff. So I did that. And then I was very transparent with the earnings that we had. I mean, I've done like monthly breakdowns of all of our properties for the past, like two years, of hey, here's how much they brought in, here's how much our expenses were the mortgage was, here's how much money we made or didn't make. And a lot of those videos, you know, they get a lot of traction, because it motivates a lot of people. It also gets some people that are like Screw you, I hate you right now. But hey, they're just pumping the algorithm. So it helps me which is fine. You know, but yeah, so finding like the niche that you want to focus on because ultimately you want people to follow you and engage in your content if you're posting just like lifestyle stuff. It's really hard to grow as a lifestyle influencer. Yeah, people have to follow and want to come back to engage more and more and more on one specific topic, then you can introduce some lifestyle later on because they're like, what else does this guy or girl do? You know? I'm interested now in their life. But yeah, initially, you just got to focus on that one, one key topic, find a video style that works and just continue to do that.
Billy 29:23
This was great man, young guy. Very smart, bright, bright, dude. If people want to follow you online, check you out alone. Where do they go?
Michael 29:30
Just on Instagram. Probably your tick tock is @melefante6. Simple Yeah, simple as that
Billy 29:37
handsome bastard Making Moves. Congratulations on the newborn which is going to be happening probably when we end the podcast. It's been it's been really cool interview and you're you're a solid individual. You go in places you got great energy and you have your shit dialed in. Like, before we got on, you're like, look, I don't want to work 80 hours a week and not have a life. And so you're learning that at such a young age. 30 years old. It's takes a lot of people years to go through miserable times of working 75-80 hours to get all the wealth. And then they realize I just burned 15-20 years of my life where I didn't really enjoy myself. So kudos to you for that, bro. You learn a lot of wisdom.
Michael 30:14
Yeah, appreciate that.
Billy 30:16
You got it, bro. Take care. I'll see you in the next one.
Michael 30:18
All right. Thanks, Billy.