hello and thank you um I'm super super excited to be here I wanted to start by telling you guys something that's happened to me uh yesterday so yesterday I signed a lease with a tenant for our next midterm rental and I don't have possession of that rental until June 1st I have not bought the first piece of furniture for that rental I have not stepped into that property but I have a tenant secured until mid July and she's already told me that she will probably extend until September and that's the power of midterm rentals and that's why I'm here to share everything that I think is key to being successful within this space with you guys um I for today I want to go over the things that I think are the most tangible my favorite thing when I go to any type of conference um seminar anything is when I leave with a list of action items right we're all motivated or we wouldn't be here we all know the power of real estate but I want to try to give you guys data signals I want to give you action steps I want to give you things that you can really take and apply to either existing midterm rental business or the one that you want to have so we're going to go through a lot I'm going to try to get through it all um we might have time for Q&A maybe not but here we go okay first things first what are midterm rentals I know most of you in here know this but just so we're all in the same field midterm rentals 30-day minimum stay um this is a hard and fast rule on furnished finder we do not allow any properties that you're looking to rent it for less than 30 days um the reasons for this are once you get to that 30 days the regulatory rules are very very different tax rules are typically very different it's a hard hard line okay nothing under 30 days if you're under 30 days you're not a midterm okay fully furnished now we'll talk about this a little bit later but fully furnished for a midterm is very different than fully furnished from a short term but just know that you are offering this property as something that these Travelers and tenants can come in and they're going to live there okay there's a variety of tenant pools in a variety of property sizes there's been this myth for a really long time that midterm rentals only work if you're targeting traveling nurses and you have small properties now that works okay there's plenty of demand for studios and one beds we have a handful in our portfolio but it doesn't end there traveling nurses brought a lot of light onto midterm rentals um but there's so so many needs you've got digital Nomads you've got relocating families you got insurance claims you have snowbirds um we actually had a tenant who rented one of our properties because she had a family member on hospice and she wanted to be there for six weeks okay the the use cases for midterm rentals are so diverse and if you get stuck in the mindset that it's only for medical professionals you're missing out on so much opportunity so that's just something that I want you to remember as we go through all of this is it's not just nurses and medical professionals okay so now we're going to get into some meat the very first question I always get asked is how do I know if this Market's good for midterm how do I know if this property is good for midterm what do I how do where do I start how do I know because if you come from the short-term world you're used to having all this data and we get really really pretty spread sheets and we have great resources and websites we've got price Labs we've got air DNA and they're amazing and can have so much data midterm is a little bit different we have data but we don't have as much okay so we are going to use the same strategies we're actually going to use tenant demographics and not mographic if you're curious but um we will use Market data and 10ed demographics and we're going to look at supply and demand so it's the same base but we've got to just the knob on how we're looking at this for midterms all right here's where we're going to get real mey tenant and Market data these are all the factors that I look at and I recommend looking at when you are looking at either a new a specific property to see if it'll work as a midterm or a market okay everything on here from I know it's small sorry use the little zoom on your phones sorry for that text um everything is basic as is the population growing or is it shrinking what's the crime rate like um all the way down to what's the average age of a property there um what's the % of ownership and some of these might not feel as instinctive you're like why does this really matter but they matter because we're going to say how do they apply to this to our Target tenant and this is the key key step that so many people Miss I see a lot of people that go through and they show me they say I have all this data and I see that it's growing the population's growing there's job growth there's salary growth um everything looks great on paper but I'm like okay great and what does that mean for your tenant type and they're like what do you mean so what I mean is like I said there's a there's a diverse audience of midterm tenants right who is your property appropriate for because you're not going to put a relocating family in a in a studio and you're not going to put a single traveling nurse in a four-bed house so if you have a market that has aging homes and a high percentage of ownership you're looking really good for insurance placements okay but if you're looking at a rural community and there maybe isn't any big hospitals there's no medical centers there's no job there's no evolving companies that are bringing in outside contractors you're probably not going to look as good if you're looking for traveling medical professionals or if you're looking for corporate Travelers which is a huge growing Market is the corporate Travelers okay so you've got to take that data and you have to apply it if you don't apply it you have a lot of data but there's no meaning behind it okay then we're going to go into supply and demand research supply and demand research is a little bit different with midterm you're going to have your data you also need to get a little bit Sherlock Holmes a little bit sneaky and try to figure out on the flip side how do you interpret all this all right this is where furnish finder comes in really really really handy um anytime we're evaluating a new market a new property this is the tab on my browser that never gets closed that you know Google keeps asking like it has a little timer on it like begging you to close that Tab and I'm not gonna close it because I like it so the QR code's up there it's also very easy to find furnish finder.com stats you can navigate to it through um the menu bar but I did a little case study here because my brain works better with examples than just talking so I picked the most random City I could think of which is LC Texas my husband was working on a project for his job one day on loic and I was like well let's see what leic looks like I know nothing about this city if you do you already have a leg up on me so I ran leik Texas through the furnish finder stats page and I see that there's 26,000 map searches and housing requests annually so in a period of the last 12 Rolling months 26,000 map searches or people who have submitted a housing request saying I am going there and I need housing please help me the flip side 77,000 people who have viewed the map or viewed a property listing page Within so a large a less serious inquiry if you will but still marking demand for that City if you scroll down a little bit further same page on Furnish finder I'm going to see that there's 191 rentals available in leic now if you look right now you're going to see there's probably more because this is from like November Don't Judge Me Okay 153 of those are whole units I personally don't do room rentals I think they're amazing I just haven't ventured into them yet so for me 1503 of those are applicable I'm like okay looks pretty good the other thing that I like to look at is that pie chart that pie chart is split up by price point it's no good to me if the if on paper the property that I'm going to get and use as a midterm rental doesn't pencil out to the numbers I need to get for rent right at that point it's mood so I'm looking here and over a third of them again I know this is like super tiny font I'm so sorry um over a third of them are more than $2,500 a month so I'm like okay great people traveling to leic on a midterm basis have a fairly decent budget so the key things to take away in this is you are making some inferences right it's not hard data to hard data all the time you've got to kind of match up and see what it means but you're also knowing that the stats that we're putting on Furnish finder they don't include what we call Direct booking requests which is let's say you have a property listed and I send you what we call a direct booking requesting I want to book with you or if I pick up the phone and call or if I email or if I send you a message these are only from housing requests which is when a traveler puts out kind of a blanket request saying I need housing please help so this is not even all inclusive there's guaranteed even more people searching for that um and you need to assess your pricing to see where it fits in like I said this is no good if the numbers don't hash out all right now it's time for us to get Sherlock holmesy this is when I explain this to people that are thinking about getting a new M rental or entering a new market where a little light bulb goes off and I'll be really interested to see if any of you guys have done this because I think it's so so powerful and it's kind of one of those things that's right in front of our face but we don't think to do so on Furnish finder search the map as a user I know it sounds very obvious but go in and search it so I'm going to search leic Texas and first I'm going to look at the map and I'm going to look at where are those hotspots and I'm going to use that to see what is in those hotpots are there hospitals are there areas where maybe there's a huge new building being built where they're bringing in contractors are there large companies that are bringing in uh like leadership for six weeks what's happening in those hot spots and I might have to dig in to really figure that out but what is happening there and also I'm going to scroll down I'm going see what are the properties that I would need to charge to make this pencil out what are those properties charging do I fit in with the mix because some of these people might have bought their property when it was a 2% interest rate okay so I want to compare and I want to say am I going to be kind of apples to apples here is there a good opportunity for me or what I would need to charge is it just I'm not even going to be in the ballpark of competition um I also want to look at the availability on furnished finder and traditionally within midterm rentals it's direct bookings okay we'll talk about why that is in a little bit but we capture booking data by people updating their calendar availability okay so if you have a listing and you have listing and you have listing in lck and they all say that they're not available until August I'm going to assume that you have a tenant there now can I guarantee that's true no you might be doing repairs you might be living there because it's a house hack and you might have a tenant but if you take a really big pool and you're looking at the whole map you can take away some generalizations and you can say okay if I have this type of property I charge this much money most of those properties are not available that's a great sign right that shows that your demand is far outweighing your supply so that is a great a great way to use the map another thing you can do that is different in midterm rentals is you can use that map as a networking opportunity Find a landlord on there that has a property similar to what you would like to have and you're going to be able to see their phone number you're GNA be able to see their email we don't care if you want to call them right other platforms it's like you can't send your phone number because it's like then you'll get put in jail we're like you could totally have each other's phone numbers it's great um connect with them as midterm rental landlords we need on average four tenants a year so it's not the scaming kind of attitude as within short-term rentals and rightfully so with with short-terms you've got you got to get a lot of guests in there right so I'm going to be grabbing at every little fish that I can with midterms I need on average four so if I can't place a tenant I want to know someone great I can send them to knowing that when they are full they're going to reciprocate it so it's actually this networking and connecting everybody knows it helps each other okay so that's your first step like all their information is right there call them hey how's it going how's your occupancy how what have you learn about the market like what do you wish you knew before and it's definitely going to be outside of most people's comfort zone but you could learn a whole lot by just having those conversations okay who here still uses Facebook Facebook is really for your parents to post pictures of their Garden right I know like my mother-in-law she just she really like every day she's like I have to get on Facebook and comment on people's stuff she thinks people will like hate her if she doesn't I'm like okay it's all right it's okay but Facebook for us is a search engine okay there are so many groups on Facebook Facebook is a search engent we have a group on Facebook with last I counted 140,000 people that's going to be a mix of tenants and travelers you know what that is it's a search engine you don't have to get on there and be heavily involved every day because I know none of us are itching to go on Facebook every day but what I do know is if I can find groups and I can search I can see how many Medical Travelers are coming to the area if I find a local neighborhood group I can see what what kind of projects are going on like how is how is the pipeline going are they bringing in extra workers recruiters also post like crazy on Facebook so right here again I know it's minus school I'm so sorry but there's recruiters asking for travelers to Leck for a gross pay of $2,800 a week that tells me they need staff in Leck and they're going to pay for it and they're having trouble finding it if they have trouble finding it they're going to have to pay them a premium okay so Facebook is your tool because you it's literally a search engine like I I just can't say it enough even when you get your property you're looking for a handyman Facebook it's like the Yellow Pages of today so great okay last thing I always do is I list it even before I close on a property I list it and I don't list it to get a tenant in fact I'm going to put the availability way far out because I don't even know if I'm going to close on this deal but I'm going to list MLS if I got it from the MLS and I'm going to put I'm going to put those into canva and I'm going to put a big b that says Furnishing is coming soon and I'm just going to get the listing up because then what I get to see is these leads now on Furnish finder you're going to get tenant connections two ways you're going to have leads coming in through people that put out that kind of blanket housing requesting I need housing please connect me with the landlord that's what shows up here okay I won't get into how those all work because it's a little more detailed but you're going to see those leads come in the other way is like I said people will text people will call people will message you directly you're not going to see those because your availability date is way far out right but what you're going to see is how many people are coming how many of these people would I be able to match with the real insight here that people don't realize is you can look at where they were if they put it that if they're a corporate traveler or maybe they say hey I'm coming down to work at the Air Force Base for six months you could say hm let me dig into that let me connect or let's say this you know HP is in the area um and they're hiring they're opening a new Division and they're hiring leadership to come down for six months you see a corporate traveler and in their housing request you see they work for HP you go hm let me see more about what HP is doing so you get these really really insightful they're like little nuggets that start you going down the trail where you can find out on all this good information all right so the key Point here midterm rentals have less data but they still have data the key is you have to take that data and you have to apply it to to what are you trying to do who are you trying to accommodate who are you trying to house um when I was in the on the main in the main stage a few minutes ago I heard that they going back to fundamentals right Minter rentals are fundamentals it's you're you're not giving someone a place to stay you're giving them a place to live it's true hospitality and you are giving them a home right so you're going back to basics and you're thinking I might not have all these beautiful spreadsheets but I do have some really really good nuggets of data that I can go off of and you've got to get comfortable making a decision without being able to say oh I have all the data in the world there's no way this can fail right you got to try it you got to try it the nice thing with midterm rentals is there's a lot of different ways you can pivot um and you can also shift it into a short term or you can shift it into a long term right it's very easily maneuverable you can even change what tenant type you're going after um but you really learn the most about a midterm rental when you just get in there and try it because you're going to learn so many of those things about the market and the tenants that you just can't learn anywhere else all right so now you have the market you have the property what do I do with it how do I furnish this thing that's different than a short-term rental um this is always somewhat of an intimidating question to people who are new to midterm because it is it's just different enough that from short-term that you got to put some thought behind it right um and the key thing is that like I said people are not visiting there they're not staying they're living you are giving them a home they're not going to say can I come visit or stay at your property they're going to say can I come live can I live there for three months and you're say yeah okay so when you're Furnishing and finishing a midterm rental I want you to pretend like you are a very very thoughtful minimalist because these people come with stuff they have a suitcase they might have a few suitcases if they are um an insurance placement or housing relocation they might come with a lot of stuff A lot of times they come with phto right he's going to need a place to go um so you're going to think again about your target tenant if you're targeting medical professionals you want to get thoughtful and give them blackout curtains you want to give them a really good mattress right you want to give them full size appliances and they want to washer and dryer they need to be taken care of okay okay security and lighting is very very important um they want to know that I'm going to be there for three plus months I want to feel really really really secure about living here and if they have a pet which a lot of them do they want to feel that their pet is also very welcome and that it's a homey environment for them okay you don't need board games you don't need fancy Decor you need storage you need to be pet friendly you need a washer and dryer you need to think about Park working these people are living there um the most attractive and highest Roi I've ever gotten on an amenity is a desk and a chair and it was a $60 desk and a $40 chair and instantly I got so many so much more interest because it would be a couple traveling or someone that said yeah I work during the day but at night you know I'm finishing a c certificate or my spouse works at home while I go to work at the hospital or something like that right who here works at home or has a spouse that works at home yeah you need a desk right so get creative with your furnishings and your finishings and don't worry about making it so cute all right you've got your Market you've got your property it's furnished now how do you Market it you're going to get active okay I know this seems very very obvious but in in the short-term Rental World we make our listings so so beautiful we try to do everything we can so that we're at the top of the algorithm and then we kind of sit back and we go please work please work and you wait for that little ding on your phone like oop so and so wants to stay at your property and you're like oh score it worked this is a little bit of the opposite you don't get to leave the game so soon these people are living at your property they want to talk to you when I go on vacation I really don't care who owns the Airbnb but if I'm living there for a while I want to know who you are and I want to know that we can connect and this is the reason that midterm rentals are traditionally direct bookings is because that connection is really really really important just like it would be with a long-term rental right as landlords you want to have the chance to do a screening on them you want to know their credit score you want to know if they have a criminal history you want to know if they've been evicted before you want to have a chance to have a a lease where you get to customize it and put your house rules in there right so your listing is step one of the process it's not the whole process so you've got to get active you've got to make sure your listing is accurate you've got to make sure your listing shines you got to make sure your calendar is up to date these Travelers everything starts with the date everything because when their assignments up or when there's when they corporate job their corporate project starts that's not super flexible right so everything starts with that date uh next thing is to stand out which is like marketing 101 I know but so many people forget about it and they're like oh of course I stand out it's already great property but really stand out okay if you don't have professional photos you are losing money I don't care how good of a photographer you are I don't care how good of a photographer your buddy is you need to get professional photos they're so cheap and you make your money back so fast um that is like step number one you wouldn't believe how many people I know when all of you think of midterm rentals think about the person that or the face that you've seen and I've gone to them and I'm like would you please get some pictures taken your listing looks like crap get some pictures taken okay creative amenities you don't need bikes you don't need surfboards maybe get a Netflix subscription maybe put some dumbbells in there because they might not have a gym right but you can put a yoga mat there if you're dog friendly or pet friendly get a dog crate right get an a fresh dog bed every time they come um speak to your target tenant and not the masses there are so many different types of midterm Travelers that you can really tailor your listing and your property to that tenant type and you can get creative within that and then create a captivating headline please don't tell me that your property is cute or quaint you just told me it's small please tell me that you have free parking or that you have fast Wi-Fi or um that it is handicapped accessible tell me why I care okay last it's to network I know we talked about this once but it's just so important long-term rentals are a transaction right you hope you you sign that lease once every 12 months and you knock on one okay I please I don't want to hear from this person much right please God let me not talk to John shortterm is an experience like how cool can I make this property so that I get five stars and I can charge the most that I can charge and then we move on to the next one and there's nothing wrong with either of those that's just what they are midterm is the middle right you want to make a great home but it is a relationship and if you can get let's say you are going after medical professionals or even corporate Travelers someone's gonna their contract another person's going to come in so if I give Johnny a great great experience he's going to send suie to me next and I'm GNA keep rolling right so that relationship is huge all right so now I'd like to go to market insights um we're running so tight on time aren't we I'm sorry I talk so much okay I'm gonna speed through these furnish finder we have so many insights for midterm rentals we have all sorts of data that I'm I put together a snapshot here for you guys first of all average book to stay Windows 34 days it's short I'm actually surprised that number isn't shorter I get very often messages hey uh do you have any properties available tomorrow or next week um you would think that they're planning their their stay six months months in advance it is not true okay 93 days is the average length of stay um I know we say 30 days and up it's actually pretty rare that someone only stays for 30 days usually you're looking at three to six months one to six tenants per booking how different is that than short-term rentals a lot of Travelers go solo or just have a spouse but a lot of people that travel solo plan on I'm gonna mom come visit for two weeks or I'm gonna have my husband's gonna come in for a month right so they do want that flexibility and so many people have pets because if you're traveling alone you want a companion our inventory on Furnish finder is not greatly differentiated so you're going to have to find a different way to stand out almost 50% of our properties are studio in one bed so if you're a studio in one bed that's fantastic you need to get creative and you need to stand out and you have to do that by going back to the fundamentals it doesn't have to be crazy creative it just needs to be smart the tenant mix is getting more and more diverse every single day corporate Travelers and academics we're seeing a huge increase in this and this is our um q1 booking requests okay for those of you that can't read teeny tiny handwriting for 100 feet away um the percentage of medical professionals is actually decreasing and people think oh traveling nurses travel nurses and medical professionals isn't as big of a thing anymore it's like well hold on first of all Co had this huge Spike we're kind of we're we're returning to normal but what's happening is these other tenant types are just increasing so much that the medical professionals are just getting a smaller chunk of the pie but we're seeing a lot lot of corporate Travelers we're seeing a lot of um academics interns in like sophisticated internships things like that our top 10 markets by Supply I know these names don't line up where they actually are on the map I'm not an idiot I promise but I wanted to get the names out of the way so you could see the dots um big cities have lots of Supply shocker right but also what you can see is it's pretty diverse it's also spread out a lot you're going to have huge hot spots now when you get to demand it's also really spread out okay you're going to have some some creepers in like Nashville and Chicago that are more on the demand and they don't have as much Supply to keep up with them San Francisco same thing but the other thing I noticed from this is if you look at the East side of the country you see how it just kind of looks like confetti there's demand everywhere because there's so many different types of Travelers looking for midterm it's not just nurses right so there's people who are looking all over all right last thing I want to talk about is the furnish finder updates um because I know we asked who's heard of furnish finder can you raise your hands again all right now knowing full and well you will not offend me okay put your hand up if you think our website looks like it's from 2002 you are absolutely correct okay our website is a natural Beauty um it's real cute isn't it um so we raised the price 50 bucks so sorry about that but we're also really cheap still so sorry not sorry um but we did that because we need more support on to serve you guys and to make it maybe look like it's from like 2022 so we have hired in the past six months so many Engineers so many customer experience agents so much new leadership we have a brand new CEO our new CEO is the ex-president of verbo he's not messing around he knows how to do this he knows how to do it right he knows how to create a very balanced Marketplace because I know everybody's concern is MTR is the hot thing right now what happens when we have too much Supply then we have demand that is number one on his list and he knows how to do it so we're pouring in and investing really really hard in having a balanced Marketplace maintaining a balanced Marketplace and also giving all of this education because it's not the same as short-term it's not the same is longterm it's just different enough where you need you need those resources okay we're also listening like we've never listened before our calendar sucks you can't block off a date right now it's impossible we know it it's terrible okay our website is totally stuck in time we are also working on that um onboarding is also terrible hang with us it's going to get better the first step is admitting you have a problem and we know but for so long midterms we're renting we're we're growing so fast we're like we just need this to work we need it to work and now we have the resources and kind of the people that that know how to steer the boat to get us like exactly where we're like primed the goal is that you all can have a midterm rental use our site less and have more success all right so some of the things first on our list um we need new and improved landlord tools we're working on giving you guys um like WorryFree waivers all kind of all of the things that you need to be successful and just redesigning the site a little bit to make it a little easier to use okay everybody take a picture of this if you'd like this is all the most helpful resources that I have found not only by working as at furnish finder but by being a landlord myself um quick Millennial tip that I did not know that someone had to teach te me if you take a picture of this and then you also hold down on the QR code it still works I thought it only worked if you hovered your camera over so hopefully I wasn't the only idiot um but we have a lot of resources and we're going to keep growing more my favorite one is the podcast um I'm the co-host of the podcast we have interviewed over 75 midterm rental hosts that do everything from sober living to um Insurance placements to yes traveling medical profession professionals all the different types they're full of so many actionable actionable nuggets which is my favorite thing as an investor is things that I can take action on um and the you can spe you can you can dive in on one specific topic and get a lot of takeaways from those episodes all right so we've got 10% off as a thank you for tolerating our 2002 website we don't do a lot of discounts quite frankly because we're already low price and we're not here to try to get into like the game of who can give the bigger discount code but we also really value events like this where we get to connect and we get to help everyone um learn more about how to be great at midterm rentals those are Instagrams there the podcast is the landlord Diaries I'd love it if you guys all checked out or check that out um do we have time for Q&A we got a little over five minutes sweet hey I did it I made it all in 45 minutes [Applause] thank you so much for your talk um I'm a long-term property manager and I just was curious like what are the numbers you want to be looking for to make it worth uh doing everything you just suggested doing which is really cool relationship piece but seems like a lot of work is an extra 200 bucks a month extra 500 bucks a month what's the draw there so it's going to be very Market dependent which I know is a super frustrating answer but Baseline you're going to look at one and a half to two times long-term rent now if you have a larger property you can learn look at a higher number than that if you have a smaller property it's probably going to lean closer to that 1.5 to 2x um the nice thing is with larger properties sometimes you can actually rent them as midterm and then if you're getting an insurance placement or something like that they will come in and furnish it for you so you can always explore that option too um yeah Baseline kind of one and a half to two uh we have a four bedroom house in San Diego consider they putting in a fifth bedroom how would it work in this scenario would may be renting out the whole it's totally up to you it's totally up to you they can rent by the room you can house hack it you could split it and you could rent it Upstairs Downstairs it kind of depends on how you want to spin the wheel yeah you said 1.6 is the average so they're not particular about want the whole right and think about 1.6 is the average I always kind of in my mind it's a pyramid right you have the most inventory of studio and one beds you also have the most Travelers that are traveling independently and you kind of go up two bed three bed four bed five bed you're gonna have the fewest supply of a four five bed house you also have the fewest amount of Travelers looking like that that's like your insurance placements you're relocating families maybe families who sold sold their house they're looking for their next house but the market is tough and they haven't found it yet so the the supply and demand ratio still works there's just less of each so you kind of have to pick where on this pyramid do you want to be strategically hi thank you question from the like bedrooms probably is that tell me [Music] [Music] you know it depends we have a three-bedroom in our portfolio and we had one single travel nurse there who wanted a a yard or dog she don't want to live in an apartment right now we have a couple there so just because you have a three-bedroom doesn't mean you necessarily have to have a family um a lot of times these people are PRI are putting more priority not on the bedroom size but on is there parking um what's the location of it and how is it going to fit for their needs but there are a lot of families a lot of couples a lot of couples who want both like to have a bedroom a guest bedroom and an office right there's just so many different uses but it's going to really depend on on what that Community is like like what's driving the demand in that specific area right awesome let's give it up for Katie Lions all right all right come on let's give Katie a little feedback raise your hand today if you took away at least one actionable thing that you're gonna do on yes and you do this raise your hand for me if you're GNA go check out fish finder in the expo hall today as well can you poap again for Miss ktie Li yes thank you thank you