00:00:00

okay welcome back everyone Michael here with Str wealth Academy and in this video what we want to do and I want to have a personal conversation with you is how do you build wealth with short-term rentals in 2025 and Beyond you know there's been a lot of talk in our industry that you know the opportunities dried up it's saturated you know there's no more money to be made and quite honestly there is nothing further from the truth to be honest coming into 2025

00:00:26

I am more excited about our industry now than I ever have been because of the massive shift that we're seeing happen in the space right now the strategies that worked a few years ago are no longer going to be relevant in today's age so what we need to do is we need to retool we need to have the right plan and we need to know exactly what direction we're going with this so that we can capitalize and set ourselves up for a very successful 2025 and bring

00:00:52

ourselves to a desirable Place financially now that being said in this video I'm going to categorize this into three distinct stages depending on where you are because there's either one of two people that are watching this video right now you're either someone that hasn't got started in the short-term rental industry and you just need to know exactly what you need to do in order to start Building Wealth or you're someone that's already an operator your

00:01:15

knee deep in it just like ourselves and you just need to know what to do in order to get to the next level okay now if you haven't watched s channel before uh my wife and I we have built a near 70 unit portfolio in the short rental industry and collectively we've generated just over $13 million doing this and become multi-millionaires in the process so in this video I'm going to show you in three distinct stages what you need to do in each of these

00:01:45

stages in order to be Building Wealth and creating Financial Independence okay so the first stage is what we like to call the grind okay now this is going to be speaking more to that person that's just getting started maybe you're building this business on the side while while you still have a full-time job and the most challenging portion of the grind is really trying to get traction with this while you're juggling all of the other responsibilities that you have

00:02:11

on your plate you might have a full-time job you might have a family that you're looking after you might have competing priorities or other you know claims on your time and the thing is at the end of the day you know I'm a firm believer that time management is kind of a thing because really what it boils down to is priority management if you make it a priority to get a business on the side going while you're still working you are going to find the time

00:02:38

to do it regardless of what you have going on and we know this from experience because my wife and I uh we used to work full-time when we first got our business started I used to work in finance I was a currency Trader I worked anywhere from 50 to 60 sometimes 70 80 hour weeks depending what was going on so there were some days literally I would get up at like 5:00 in the morning get to the tra trading desk by you know 6:30 7:00 stay there until 5ish on some

00:03:05

days and then cat and I would literally go to a house and work till like 1 or 2:00 in the morning setting it up and then go and repeat the whole thing the next day now I'm not saying it was easy it was actually really really challenging but we did it okay so the biggest challenge you're going to have is trying to get traction while you have everything going on but the main thing is when you're in the grind it's really helpful to recognize that if you're in

00:03:27

that stage because then you know what's going to be required and the number one biggest opportunity you have in this stage is just simply building momentum and getting traction okay because what you need to focus on when you're getting this business going is finding the right kinds of properties that have the highest profit potential possible because then that will limit the amount of units that you actually need to have in order to be able to replace your

00:03:53

income okay because probably the biggest inhibiting Factor you have currently of trying to get out of the rat race or trying to actually build wealth with this if you're spending over 40 hours a week at a job you know I always like to say to our students that some people are so busy they literally don't have time to make money okay and I know that was a position we found ourselves in a few years ago like we were barely getting by we were just you we were kind of stuck

00:04:20

in this paycheck to paycheck cycle but that was where our time was going we were spending time on things that weren't bringing us a large enough financial return and and we were just kind of spinning our wheels so the key thing is when you're in the grind you want to start getting units going on the side so if you're someone that's just getting started in this industry the two fastest ways to start building an income in short-term rentals is actually

00:04:44

learning how to control properties and not necessarily starting to own properties right off the bat we talk about that a lot in this channel so the two strategies are either rental Arbitrage or our short-term rental partnership strategy where you can get into units for literally no money down now if you're curious about those we have links to lots of other videos on the channel that you can go and check that out but for the purposes of this

00:05:06

video uh we're going to stay focused just on the realm of Building Wealth and how you do that in the various stages okay so the main thing here what you want to focus on is you simply want to be adding units to your portfolio on a consistent basis so if you're just getting going if you average a unit one per month that was our goal when we first started or one every other month or one a quarter in time depending on the kind of units

00:05:31

you're taking on you want to be finding units that have potential to make you at least ,000 to $2,000 a month in net profit at like the bare minimum because if you do that so say for example you're doing 1,000 bucks a month to be conservative well if you need to make $10,000 in order to leave your job well if you're averaging a unit every month well then that means you're going to get to your goal in just a little under a year if you're doing a unit every other

00:05:56

month well then it's going to take you probably 18 months to maybe 2 years in order to reach that outcome okay so the biggest thing here is to Simply acquire units through either Arbitrage or through short-term rental Partnerships because when you're in the grind your number one goal is to replace your income so that you get your time back from your job so once you get out of the grind which if you're putting a real focus on this that should take you

00:06:22

anywhere from about 12 months to upwards of 24 months so anywhere from 1 to 2 years you're then going to enter what we call the grow grow okay and the key thing is in the growth you have already got to the place where you now have replaced your income from your job okay so that means you freed up your time so imagine how fast you can grow your business now by having 40 hours a week back that's exactly what happened with Katrina and myself I still remember like

00:06:48

it was yesterday when I put in my resignation with my job they were so shocked they had no idea it was coming but it was honestly like when I left that lunch I had with my boss one of my co-workers I honestly felt like we came off like Financial life support it was a very liberating feeling and it's been almost 5 years to this day that I haven't had really employment other than what we're doing for ourselves so now as it relates to the growth the key thing

00:07:14

you need to focus on here and this is going to be speaking more to likely the operator that's already running this business is you need to establish systems processes and really get your team built out because ultimately when you free up your time from your job your next stage is you need to free up your time within the business so that you can focus on the highest leverage activities which is actually going to drive your business's growth okay so specifically

00:07:39

in this industry there's really only like two to three things that make growth happen so the first thing is how many properties are you actually running second thing is what are you actually able to charge and how high is your occupancy and like what's your average daily rate versus your occupancy and then the third thing is how how often are you adding new units to the portfolio or are you getting all the opportunity that you possibly can out of

00:08:06

the portfolio that you already have okay because that's honestly a really quick well not a quick but a really simple way to increase your income with your units is actually just instead of focusing on getting more units to Simply make the units you have even better by doing design upgrades amenity upgrades you know so on and so forth Okay cool so once you go through and you start installing systems processes and you start getting your team built out now if

00:08:31

you need help with that too by the way if that sounds kind of like esoteric we'll make other videos on the channel that'll speak to that specifically but the key thing is when you're in stage two of the growth we first got our time back in the grind with our job by or with building our short-term rental business by building up our income the next thing you need to focus on again is getting your time back from the business itself so that you can continue to grow

00:08:55

your portfolio to grow your income which at this stage now if you have enough free cash flow coming through you do also want to start thinking about acquiring properties of your own that you actually own so that way you can start building long-term wealth and actually having control of the asset not just through a contract but through actual ownership okay that's what happened with Katrina and myself we built up our management business to the

00:09:21

point where it was bringing in so much monthly cash flow we could then start taking the gains from the income that was coming in to actually start acquiring units and really building up our net worth and wealth over time we did this a lot in 2021 where we actually bought four vacation rental properties in a market in one single year and that portfolio has done exceptionally well and that was actually the Catalyst that helped us become multi-millionaires in

00:09:47

the first place okay now that's the biggest thing for that stage now let's move to stage three which is what I like to call the gold okay so at this point you now have a business that is growing you have systems you have a team that is taking a lot of the day-to-day pressures off of your plate so that's freed you up on simply adding more properties you're now at the stage where you continue to have more cash coming in more cash coming in you're starting to acquire

00:10:14

more properties that you actually own the really key thing here that I see a lot of people getting stuck on is what I call lifestyle creep this is a big problem that a lot of people have because what ends up happening is that as their income increases their expenses also increase in lock step and they just end up falling into another version of the hamster wheel that they were trying to escape from in the first place okay so the main opportunity here is that as

00:10:40

the money's coming in you need to put some buffers in place so that you are able to invest as much of that cash flow that's coming in as possible by building up that ownership portfolio because ultimately that is what's going to build long-term wealth and freedom for you okay because in the stage of the gold you now have a huge opportunity where if you've really built out your team you have your systems and processes and that business is growing you can then

00:11:06

consider unloading your management or your rental Arbitrage portfolio have a huge windfall and then simply have a few key core properties at this stage that now that you have all the skills of actually operating a short-term rental business you could literally be completely financially set for the rest of your life have maybe five to maybe seven or 10 properties that you own and you can literally just live any kind of lifestyle you want so that's largely the

00:11:34

plan that Katrina and I have been following over the last you know 6 and 1/2 years that we've been in this industry so I hope that gave you some context I hope that that gave you some perspective so again just to kind of recap what we talked about in this video we talked about the three stages of growth in terms of where you might be at in this industry so we talked about the grind what you needed to do there which is to buy back your time by replacing

00:11:59

your income with this business we talked about the growth where you want to really focus on buying back your time from the business that you're building so you can focus on the highest leverage activities and then start acquiring properties of your own and then in the gold what we really want to focus on is continuing to build up that ownership portfolio and then turn that into long-term wealth and ultimately lifestyle Freedom so hope you found this

00:12:22

video helpful if you have any questions or comments go ahead leave them in the comment box below if you enjoyed this and you want to be notified the next time we release new content go ahead and hit the Subscribe button and the notification Bell and you will be made aware anytime we post new videos on this channel anyways hope you enjoyed this guys again if this was helpful leave a comment below and we'll see you in the next video take care