Ashley:
We all want to make money, and today we have another real estate related revenue opportunity for rookie investors that doesn’t involve buying a property.

Tony:
Today, we’re bringing on the host of the BiggerPockets Bigger Stays YouTube channel to break down the lucrative world of Airbnb co-hosting. Garrett Brown is going to walk us through his step-by-step blueprint of how you can start up a co-hosting business and how to be successful.

Ashley:
This is The Real Estate Rookie Podcast. I’m Ashley Kehr.

Tony:
And I’m Tony J. Robinson.

Ashley:
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Tony:
Well, Garrett, welcome back to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, man. Thanks for jumping on to join us today.

Garrett:
Always happy to jump on and talk anything real estate related that we can talk about.

Tony:
Garrett, we’re here today to talk about co-hosting. And I think before we get too deep into the weeds, for all of our Rickies who may not be familiar with the phrase co-hosting, can you just define it for us? What does it mean to co-host as an Airbnb?

Garrett:
Sure. So Airbnb kind of popularized and coined the phrase co-host, but it’s essentially you’re doing property management for a short-term rental. And you got to be a little careful with the term property management because reason Airbnb developed the co-host term is because a lot of states have legalities around being a property manager. I’m doing air quotes here, how you can collect money and there may be a license involved. But Airbnb has kind of changed it to where you don’t necessarily retain the money from an owner. You only get your percentage cut that you get from the management side. So they’ve kind of circumvented some of these legalities. And I’m sure a lawyer probably could explain those things better, but basically you’re just helping out an owner with their property and most likely getting a percentage cut of the rental revenue that’s coming in.

Tony:
And I think there’s a bit of a sliding scale here as well because I think when I think about a traditional long-term property manager, and Ashley can check me if I’m wrong here, most of them probably all do the same thing. They kind of full cycle everything from lease up to tenant issues, turnover, whatever it may be. But in the short-term rental space, there’s some co-hosts who only deal with guest messaging and they’re just in there to help you respond to guests and do all those other things. But everything else, your pricing, the maintenance and consumables, you’ve got to handle yourself. And then on the other end of that spectrum, there’s the full service option where they do everything. Not only are they communicating with the guests, but they’re taking those maintenance requests. They’re going out and finding the vendors, they’re doing everything, they’re managing your pricing, they’re keeping it stocked.
So there’s a bit of a spectrum there, Garrett. So for you, where within that spectrum when you talk about co-hosting, do you actually fall?

Garrett:
I only do full service. It’s from a perspective of … I’ve seen people try just messaging and some things like that, and they’ll do lower percentages. But what I see is that it doesn’t really make a functional relationship between the owner and the co-host. And so I personally only do full service management where we handle everything top to bottom for these owners. We also get paid a lot more on the percentage. Ours typically is 20 to 25% and we’ll dive into the full numbers of it and how we set it up. But usually the messaging or more hands-off co-hosting is probably between five to 15% tops. And those particularly didn’t align well with the business model and my own real estate investing journey that I’ve kind of been on. So we do full service.

Ashley:
Well, it has to be kind of hard to do your job if you’re relying on the owner to do a certain part of it. And I’m not doing that. And I say that as an owner myself, that I probably would have to be nagged to get stuff done so they could actually perform their job. But Garrett, I’m curious as to what came first, the chicken or the egg. Did you become a short-term rental investor first, then a co-host, or did you start co-hosting first?

Garrett:
I was a short-term rental investor first myself. I owned the units. I started off with three units back in 2019. I was managing them myself. I learned a lot and I ended up selling those units and getting into bigger, more profitable units once I learned some things, which I still was about three units that I was managing myself. I think that anybody that wants to get into this space is going to need to at least have some experience. And you don’t necessarily have to be a full-fledged investor, even though this is bigger pockets and we always are talking and trying to educate that real estate investments are where the wealth is built and even on the short-term rental side. But if I didn’t own properties, I would’ve gone and worked under another co-host or a property management company or vacation rental property management company is a better way to put it, to just get some experience and learn the ins and outs because there’s a lot of things you don’t know.
And it’s also a lot harder to get co-hosting clients if you have zero experience. Still possible, still a ton of people that do it, but I always recommend to at least get your feet wet in the game the best way you can to make sure it’s even something you like and will develop the skillset that is kind of needed. But I will caveat that saying that I know plenty of people that didn’t have any experience were able to hustle and get their first client and they’ve grown to 30, 40 units and are very successful. So there’s a little bit here and there that happens, but I would suggest you at least have some experience before you start going pitching co-hosting primarily is my advice.

Ashley:
At any point during your journey, did you use a co-host at all or have you always self-managed?

Garrett:
I have always self-managed. And anybody even watching this, I always will preach to people to try self-managing. I went to school for hotel management. I actually, there’s a degree for that. People are always shocked, but there actually is a hospitality degree and I went to college for that. So I’ve knew a lot of the ins and outs. I’ve worked in hotels. So I came from the mindset that I never was going to need a co-host, but anybody that is considering hiring one, if you’re listening on that side, I would do your own self-management for a couple months or whatever to give it a try so that way you know exactly what a good co-host is doing. I see too many people buy a property, they hire a property management company or a co-host or whatever you want to call it, and then they’re like, okay, cool, we’ll just run it.
And they don’t have any idea if they’re even good. They don’t know the ins and outs. They don’t know how they’re managing the guests. Is that the proper way to probably do it? So you learn a lot when you self-manage, but I’ve seen a lot of people self-manage, decide that they hate it, and then that’s when they hire a co-host. And I think that is the best recipe for success to know that if you’re hiring somebody that’s actually qualified and is going to make your life easier, which is what the point of a co-host is.

Ashley:
Tony, you only self-managed your properties. You’ve never used a co-host or a company, have you?

Tony:
Actually, the very, very first short rental that we bought when we purchased it, actually I think it was the second short-term rental that we bought, the current owners had a property manager on it. No, actually it was our first one too. I think it was maybe the first part too. Anyway.

Ashley:
Actually, that one I went and stayed with you at.

Tony:
Yeah, I think that was one of them.

Ashley:
And Smokey Mountains, that one had to have the property manager for a little while too. Yeah.

Tony:
Exactly. Yeah. So when you’re buying from an existing owner that already has a property manager in place, a lot of times they’ll say like, “Hey, we’ve got reservations that extend past your close of escrow. Is it okay if we continue to manage those reservations so we don’t have to cancel? We’ll still take our management fee and then we’ll give you whatever’s the net profit.” So we’ve actually done that a couple of times, but it was always like a very short time period, 30-ish days after closing for them to kind of wrap things up and then we always took it over ourselves. So Garrett, I’m curious, man, co-hosting, I think the benefit is that aside, if you compare it to buying real estate, you don’t have to worry about a down payment, you don’t have to worry about paying to furnish or add amenities. You don’t have to worry about anything really financial, right?
But maybe it’s not the right fit for everyone. So I guess what questions should someone ask themselves before they even think about jumping into the world of Airbnb co-hosting?

Garrett:
So I definitely think that co-hosting mixed with buying some of your own short-term rental properties or properties in general is a true way to balance your own, the issue of not having enough funds to get your next place, but also getting the cash flow that you need in place. So if you have never managed, and this is why I’m so adamant about at least maybe trying to work under a company to know if it’s something you like. Short-term rentals is nothing but real estate investing mixed with the hospitality business. And people always underestimate the hospitality business side. I kind of think short-term rentals are like a gateway drug to either going buy more real estate investing or go and buy your own business or something along those lines because it’s kind of like a happy marriage of both. So if you’ve never done it and you don’t have any hospitality experience, I would 100% try to work under someone and decide if this is for you.
There’s so many softwares and automations now that it has become so much easier in the past few years to manage your properties and not be stuck texting guests all day and doing things. But short-term rentals are never going to be fully passive. If it is, then you have probably the best co-host that’s ever existed and they probably need a raise because there’s always going to, even as an owner, you’re still going to always have to step in and make some decisions and help the co-hosts with some things. So I would just try your best to get experience either managing your own property, working under someone, or like if you have a family member that happens to have a lakehouse, like do some studying, go to the BiggerStays YouTube channel, reach out to me, I can help you through some things and try to give it a shot that way.
And there’s tons of things we can talk about of how to set up your systems, but some of the time trial by fire is the best way to know if you’re going to learn it. But if you hate fixing things, hate having customer or guest interactions, and this may not be the business for you because there’s still going to be a level of hospitality that you have to implement in your business.

Tony:
Garrett, one of my biggest hesitations around jumping into co-hosting personally is the idea that now as a co-host, not only am I kind of focused on and beholden to guest satisfaction, but now on the other end of that spectrum, I also have this owner that I’m beholden to and I have to worry about them being satisfied. Is that a concern for you? How do you kind of navigate that balance of keeping your guests happy, but also having to answer to an owner?

Garrett:
Yeah. And that is easily one of … Even within my team, we kind of joke all day of how much we love owning units because it’s like we only deal with the guests. But when you co-host, you are serving the guest and the owner. My biggest thing that I’ve learned, I’ve taken on … When I first started co-hosting, I probably said yes to way more than I needed to. Any property that was coming to me, Airbnb has the co-host network now where you can put yourself on there to be a potential co-host within, I think, 60 miles of your area that you’re working in. And I used to say yes to almost everybody that came along. And then I eventually realized that not every property makes sense to have a co-host. If they’re going to make $30,000 in the year, it’s probably not worth anybody’s time for you to be the manager of it and dealing with what the money you’re going to make probably $2,000 that year, unless you live right next door to it, probably not the best move.
So now we’ve gotten better with vetting owners to where we know the property is going to make a certain range. I personally now only take either really unique stays or places that are either lakefront or have some type of massive pool or something, like some big draw feature that I know it’s probably going to make $100,000 in gross revenue that year.That’s my personal baseline. And I also have questions to ask the owner. You got to vet the owner out and make sure that it’s going to be somebody you want to work with. Guests you can’t do anything about. They’re always going to be a wild card, but the owner is going to be a consistent. So we ask the owner, “Would you be willing to put a budget in to improve the property and spend money on the things that need to be done? Will they do a deep cleaning before you even take over the … Pay $500 for a deep cleaning?” Little things like that and talk about your operations.
And if you’re getting signals from them that they’re like, “Oh, that costs too much for the cleaning.” Or even for one owner in particular, we charge 20% on the rental. We also have a tech fee each month and we also have a setup fee. This owner kept messaging me, “Hey, can you do 17%? Hey, could you do 18%? Could you do 16%?” I think three different text messages. That already is a massive red flag. If they are trying to negotiate a two or 3% deal with you and y’all haven’t even started, those type of red flags, if your gut’s telling you like, “Hey, this owner probably is a little difficult,” unless it’s just a cash cow, multimillion dollar place on the mountains or something, you have a great opportunity, you’re probably going to regret taking that place after a while because the owner is just going to … We call them golden handcuffs, basically, where you’re stuck to the owner, they get to make all the rules, but they’re kind of making your life more difficult.
I had another owner that was arguing with the cleaning fee of what we charge and what the cleaners have. And it’s like the fact that we haven’t even started and you’re worried about what my team is charging that you have nothing to do with, probably a bad sign. So there definitely is a little bit of just feeling out the owners. And I can’t recommend enough of getting some baseline questions and just being very candid with the owner and seeing what the reaction is and trusting your gut.

Ashley:
That’s great advice because I’m thinking of myself as an owner and you would not want to be my … So before we go to break, I have to hit you with some rapid fire questions because I want people to continue listening to this episode. And I think these are three questions that everybody is already thinking. How much time a week are you spending co-hosting?

Garrett:
So I spend 10 to 15 hours. I have a big team I have built out though. That is one thing that has … The cool thing about co-hosting is it’s helped me scale my cash flow so much to match my own investments that I now have the loose cash to hire a team. I have three full-time assistants, an operation manager that’s on salary, a full social media team, all kinds of things. But that come from co-hosting and having that cash flow to be able to put back into my business.

Ashley:
How many properties are you co-hosting for? I

Garrett:
Think it’s 16 currently.

Ashley:
And how much are you bringing in a month?

Garrett:
Co-hosting a loan, I’d say, because some of them have different variance rates, and that’s one thing that I’ve been able to … I even have one co-host client that I get 65% of the bookings. I can go into the details about it, but we make probably $50,000 a month between the 16 rentals, I’d say. A few caveats of where that money goes and how the payouts go. But we probably retain profit-wise, I’d say $20,000 a month, maybe a little less between … But some of those come with a lot higher rental agreements that I was able to work out with certain tiny home builders that I partnered with.

Ashley:
Well, we have to take a short break, but I hope that really caught your attention if you’re looking to make an extra 20K. And not to forget, Garrett works a full-time job and has his own rentals too. So we’re going to take a short break, but when we come back, we’re going to show you how to step-by-step implement your own co-hosting business. We’ll be right back. Okay. Thank you for taking the time to check out our show sponsors. We are back with Garrett. So Garrett, can you walk us through a step-by-step business plan for getting co-hosting off the ground? What are the tools, the resources we need? What are the first things we should be doing to actually start co-hosting?

Garrett:
So the first big thing with co-hosting is getting … Let’s say you don’t have any co-hosting clients at all. And let’s just have the idea that you don’t even have a short-term rental even. We’ll make this as simple as possible for people. There’s two real ways that I have seen me, and I know there’s a lot of other options out there, but there’s two real, I want to say free, but there’s probably a little cost associated here, time cost for sure. First is you can go on Airbnb and find properties that are … They look like they’re struggling. They maybe have really bad photos, their ratings, the reviews are really bad. Whatever sticks out to you that is not working for their listing, I want you to … And Airbnb makes this a little tricky. I’m a realtor, so I have my real estate license.
So I have a lot access to a lot of data on the backend in Texas of who owns a property and things like that. But if you don’t have that access, you go on Airbnb, and this is fun to me because it’s kind of like being a detective to figure out who the owner is and how to get in touch with them. So you go on Airbnb, you start looking at the photos and Airbnb will show you a general location to where that property is. So you already at least kind of know where it is. You can see some streets. Sometimes it may even show you the exact streets it’s on, but you look at the photos, see if you see any street numbers on … Sometimes photographers will leave, you’ll see the house and they’ll have one, two, three, six on the house. So that may be the street address.
You also look at the aerial photos to see what houses are nearby, kind of like the orientation. Is it facing a lake a certain way? Is it facing a street a certain way? And then I use my real estate license. Maybe you know a realtor in your area that can help you pinpoint something, but there also is some cool softwares like PropStream is a really good one. You can get into PropStream and start searching around that exact area and click a few listings and they’ll pull up photos from past MLS listings or wherever the data they get from. And eventually you’ll probably find that house in PropStream and they’ll be able to show you the owner.You’ll see the house, be like, “That’s the house.” I can see it in the Airbnb photos. They’ll give you the owner contact information. One of my favorite co-hosting listings that I ever have, which is easily one of the most profitable ones I ever have was a really unique stay.
I’ve been trying to get in touch with this guy for months. I knew exactly what the house looked at, but I couldn’t pinpoint it down. I eventually got on … I used PropStream this time because I was working within the software already and I was like, “Let me try some more things out on it. ” This was a year ago when I first really got into co-hosting really, really tough. I ended up finding the guy. I took his information. I can’t remember if PropStream had his telephone number or not, but you also can go to whitepages.com. It’s like $5 a month. You can type that address in. I got his text, I got his phone number, I got his email, all that. I just text the guy and I was like, “Hey, your property’s basically way nicer, way more complete, but like, hey, I could tell your property’s been struggling a little bit.
We do co-hosting in the area. I know we can bring it to the top of the market.” And instantly, the guy was super excited to finally hear from us. I’d send him some letters and I never heard back from him. And so I was like, “Let me get this guy’s phone number.” I text him, started a great relationship, easily one of my best. So you can go the Airbnb investigative route, which is fun because you got to piece clues together and be like, “Oh, this property looks at it like it’s at this cross street.” But the other really cool route that I’ve seen a ton of people be very successful with is get into Facebook groups. Every single little city, even in my area, one of the counties is called Polk County and they have a massive Facebook group with 80,000 people in it that is Polk County talk.
There’s people all the time popping up like, “Hey, does anybody know a cleaner for a vacation rental? Does anybody know a photographer or a contractor?” I’ll send them a message and go, “Hey, I work in the area. Let me know if you need anything.” Or there’s also Airbnb owners Facebook groups. And sometimes people will, you can join those and in Texas, there’s like an Airbnb masterminds of Texas free Facebook group. You join it, hosts will all the time jump in and go, “I’m not getting any bookings. What should I do? ” I’ll send them either a DM with five or six very simple … I’ll go look at their listing and send them a DM with five or six simple things that I think will help their listing and show value. I don’t ask for any money. I don’t ask for anything. Don’t tell them I even co-host.
I just provide value to them. And then it’s up to them at that point to decide, okay, this guy actually knows a little bit. Maybe I should talk to him a little more because he actually gave me some great insight and didn’t even ask for any help. And 99% of the time you go on their Facebook list or their Airbnb listing and it’s like, “Hey, you need better photos. Hey, you need to adjust your minimum stay. Hey, you need to be pet friendly.” It’s kind of simple stuff, but to the owner, it’s revolutionary because they’re not thinking about this. Even with the property-

Ashley:
They’re literally describing our first call together that we did for Fingertips. I didn’t want to throw you under the bus, Ashley. Those are literally the thing. Except for the photos. I did use a professional job. You did have

Garrett:
Good photos, for sure.

Ashley:
But you did have me rearrange them, that was for sure.

Garrett:
Yeah. But you’ll be shocked. People underestimate Facebook groups so much. I will always stand on this soapbox until years to come. Facebook groups are one of the most underutilized way to gain traction in any type of real estate investment or business that you’re looking for. You just have to look in the right Facebook group and know how to provide value. That’s what it all comes down to is providing value.

Tony:
Garrett, that was an amazing masterclass on sourcing potential clients. And I just want to add my own experience. So we at one point explored the idea of co-hosting and we’d actually put together a pretty solid approach for sourcing clients. And it was similar to yours, but we actually used, and you can use either AirDNA or you can use a PriceLabs market dashboard. But for example, if you use PriceLabs in their market dashboard tool, when you go into a certain market, PriceLabs will give you all of the listings within that market. And then what we did was we sorted it in reverse order from lowest review score to highest review score. And then one of the columns that PriceLabs and both ARD&A give you are the latitude and the longitude coordinates for that listing. So we would then take those lat and those long coordinates, plug them into Google Maps, do StreetView, confirm that it was the right address.
And sometimes it’d be spot on. Other times it’d be right down the road and you have to take the blue man or the yellow man walk them down the road. But pretty quickly we could find the actual address and then we would do what you did where we take that address, put it in the prop stream, get the owner’s information. And our approach was creating postcards, but what we did with the postcard was we would actually take a picture of the front of their house and then we would put the negative reviews on the postcard. And a lot of the listings now that Airbnb added … So you guys know Airbnb has like top 1%, top 5%, but they also have a bottom 10% and it’s right above the review. So if you’re listing this in the bottom 10%, it’ll literally say right above your reviews, this listing is in the bottom 10% of homes based on guest experience or whatever it may be.
And we took a screenshot of that and we mailed those out to a bunch of owners and that’s how we kind of got the phone ringing initially. Very much like a sniper approach, but the response rate was actually pretty solid. It looks like one of the guys actually forwarded that letter to his property manager because then we got a lot of threatening calls from that PM after the fact, but it was a very, I think, effective strategy to try and source people.

Garrett:
Yeah, no, I love that. I actually didn’t even know that you could get the latitude and longitude from price labs or air DNA. So now I’m like, my brain’s exploding even more there because like, oh, I can’t wait to really dive in there. But yeah, no, that is a great approach. We had a little success with postcards. We didn’t do something like that, but I do love that idea. I’m sure there were some property managers very upset, but you should be performing better if we have to point this out. I mean, come on.

Tony:
Yeah. Imagine paying someone and you’re listening to the bottom 10%. It’s crazy. So Garret, going back to like the 30,000 foot view, the step by step. So it sounds like step number one is to identify potential clients and then reach out to them. I guess, so let’s say that someone picks up the phone or they call you back from a postcard. What does that initial conversation look like to get them from, “Hey, I’m potentially interested,” to them actually signing on as a client?

Garrett:
You have to figure out their pain point. Even in all my realtor days and everything, I don’t want to call it a sales call because in the end we’re like, we’re value in a service based thing. But most of the time, the reason the owner ended up calling you because they realized there’s an issue and you are probably the solution for it. So when I take the, I call it the lighthouse is the one that I’ve referred to a few times where I text the guy, got his number a few years ago. When we had our first initial call, my first question just right off the bat, like, “How’s it going for you? Oh, we’ve had one booking all year.” And I was like, “Well, what’s the issue? What have you seen be the biggest pain point?” And he’s like, “Oh, well, we have to have a three-day minimum because I’m worried that we’re not making enough money and I’m always worried I can’t drive up there.” And they just start rattling off things.
You just need to be a good listener and figure out what their biggest issue is that they have and solve that immediately for them.
And this is why you need to be prepared too. You can’t just send out all this stuff and you don’t know anything about co-hosting or running a good short-term rental because you’re going to get questions and you’re not going to be able to answer. You’re going to be like, “Oh, well, dang, that sucks. Good luck.” But he presented like, “Hey, I have to do three-day minimum because our cleaning fee is so expensive.” And he started rattling off things. And I took each one, I reiterated the problems. I’m like, “Okay, so you’re having an issue with getting things fixed. You’re worried that you’re going to be on vacation with your family and something’s going to break.” And then I address those problems of how we solve those. And I have a team in place. I don’t live far from the area. Sometimes that’s even just not … You don’t want to put yourself out there as being the runner of sorts, but if you’re just starting and you don’t have a team, you are the team.
You’re the coach, owner, player, and mascot. So you got to wear all the different hats there. So figure out how you can solve that problem for the host. And there’s always common issues. Like I said, the most common by far is, I can’t deal with it when I’m not there, we’re struggling. We have to block off dates because I just took over another one not long ago. She was like, “We’ve only been able to run it a couple months a year because we live in Mexico 10 months of the year.” And I was like, “Well, that is a super simple solution because my whole team’s in place. I live near the area. We have systems and structure. We have a cleaning team that handles everything. We have 24 hour coverage to assistance and all that. ” Between AI and just having a couple of virtual assistants, you can achieve all that.
You just have to make sure you understand what you’re, I don’t want to say selling to the host, but make sure you understand what you’re providing to the host. But easiest way to get more clients, figure out their pain point and solve it for them.
You always be shocked at what the small issue is that allows them to decide that you’re the right one for the property. It’s never like 20 different issues. It’s usually one or two big things that you can easily come up with a solution and they’re more than willing to at least probably give you a chance.

Tony:
Okay. Let’s talk, right? I mean, because after you do all of this active listening and you’re understanding what their pain points are and then you present your co-hosting as a solution, what are maybe the biggest objections you typically hear and how do you overcome those?

Garrett:
Biggest is always like, “Oh, it costs too much.” Or like, “Why am I going to give you 20%?” That’s usually the first one. Like we even mentioned earlier, some people will be like, “Well, what about 17%?” And you got to stick to your numbers, but then you also tell them how I kind of frame it is even with the person that had one booking all year, we presented it as like, “Hey, we can do this tweak. We can make you pet friendly. Our cleaning team will be enhanced.” And then that price becomes … And we’ll also work on, we have dynamic pricing. So you’re not even going to see that 20% from your bottom line because we’re going to increase your revenue so much that If you’re making $20,000 this year and if you can bring us on and pay us 20% and we can still make you $40,000 that year and you work less, which one sounds better?
You got to just kind of talk to them in plain numbers and tell them how the reason that the 20% or whatever rate you want to charge isn’t going to be a big deal because you’re going to increase their revenue with the tactics that you have. So also I get very tactile as far as helping them understand of why pet friendly is so big because it’s the number one search filter on Airbnb. We talk about how high level our cleaning team is. And then we also talk about how we’re going to adjust their calendar to make it book better. And it’s good when you have case studies and experience, because I can very easily rattle off numbers that we do in the area and have an idea of what they’re going to make. But some real simple solutions is a lot of owners don’t know what air DNA is or price labs or something.
Go on air DNA or price labs and get the revenue that is expected. It’s not always guaranteed. It’s a suggestion more than anything. But take that number to the host. And then also I bring some competitors in their area and say, “Hey, this place that is two streets down from you is making double what you’re making. Air DNA says you should be making 50K and you’re making 25K. Our company can take you to that next level.” The other thing too is you need to stand out because there’s a lot of people. And two really cool ways that we’ve stood out recently is there’s a company called Breezeway.
They have a short-term rental safety inspection certification, a lot of words there. But it was like three or $400. And there’s a great guy, Justin Ford, he’s amazing. We took the course, it saved us thousands of dollars on our insurance bill with proper insurance too, which is my own units. But as a co-host, now we go and tell owners like, “Hey, we’re short-term rental safety certified. We know what to look for to make sure guests are safe.” We walk them through all the liability things, which is something that owners care a lot about and they don’t think about. We talk about how they need to get specific short-term rental insurance from proper or steadily or something like that. And then the other really big thing is we tell, because they’re always worried about parties and damage, we tell them like, “Hey, as a part of our co-hosting fee, we can supply between 1500, it depends on how big the property is and how much it costs, between $1,500 and $10,000 of guest damage insurance that we will cover in our percentage.” We use a company called Safely.
It’s like five to $7 per night that we pay it out of our thing. But that peace of mind for owners is … We’ve sold so many owners when we tell them those two things that we’re short-term rental safety certified and we also can provide our own damage protection that they don’t even have to worry about. And it came in handy. A week ago, a guest at one of my co-host properties broke the door jamb. They said if the door just fell off, which is hilarious because we all know that didn’t happen, broke it. I take security deposits, but I didn’t even go to the guest. I put it into Safely. It was like $600. I sent an invoice, my handyman fixed it. They paid it out within two or three days. Guests never got charged. Owner never … They knew because I wanted to show them how good the insurance is, but I didn’t even have to tell the owner.
We could have just handled it and kept it moving. So those are two really cool benefits that I’ve been able to bring on a lot of owners recently by just showing that I’m a little different and that I really care about the owners and their property and their place and their revenue.

Ashley:
So for that software, is that fee paid, the owners are paying that directly or is that part of your fee structure that you have set where some of these different things that maybe a normal co-host wouldn’t know to get the safely insurance coverage or whatever? But how does your fee structure work and what are some of the things that you include or don’t include?

Garrett:
So we include that in our fee structure. We kind of consider that not at cost of doing business, but more like I said, it’s an upsell of why we are a full service premium concierge co-host. We charge 20% for the nightly rental rate of almost every property. Like I mentioned, I do have some where I get 65%, which we can talk about, but completely different structure. That’s more of like a partnership between me and the tiny home builders. But most of them, we do 20% nightly rental rate. We collect the full cleaning fee, which most of them are pretty even with what the cleaners charge me, but there’s a couple where I still make maybe 20 or 30 bucks off the cleaning because of logistics and other things too, and how we’re able to price it.

Tony:
Garrett, let me just ask you really quickly. So on the cleaning fee, are you just sourcing the cleaning out to third party cleaners or does your property management company actually have cleaners on your team that are doing the turns?

Garrett:
So I’m in two markets where we have multiple units in each. One market, I actually have hourly cleaners that work for my property management company. The second market, we do a subcontractor. She’s been with me for three or four years. We kicked the tire on bringing her on hourly and did a couple different reasons. It wasn’t going to work for either side fully. So we pay her per project and she has a full team out there that she kind of takes. I kind of consider her in- house, but she’s still a 1099 subcontractor. So we outsource it, but she started with one property with me and she’s grown to five or six people that work under her. And so I trust her. She knows how I operate. And so we always turn the cleanings over to the team that we have in place there. And there’s a lot, again, Facebook groups.
I found all of my cleaners through Facebook groups. People think I’m crazy, but every single cleaner I work with and that is on our team came through a local Facebook group through a little trial and error. And so we do that. We take the full cleaning fee. Most of the time we don’t make money on it. Sometimes we make a little bit. We also charge, and this is something recently I’ve implemented, we charge $1,000 property setup fee for each time we bring on a property, and that is to get new pictures. There’s so many things that I learned that you would expect owners to do. And then you get to the property and you’re like, there’s 10 Amazon boxes here and you didn’t unload any of them. Now you’re expecting me to do it, which is fine. But that’s when I started implementing the setup fees.
So I can bring myself or my helper to go out there and to get the pictures and the videography. And then we also now have implemented $100 a month tech fee. We used to not do this, but honestly, the softwares are what run a lot of these properties. And a couple properties, there’d be some months where they weren’t as profitable as we want and we were almost barely breaking even on them. And a lot of it was because of extra software that we paid between Logify is my property management software. We have Price Labs, we have HostBuddy, Turno, my business line of phoneware. We do just having our website hosted that we have to have another property on there, things like that. So that’s why we started doing $100 a month tech fee, which I just implemented that. So I know some people that do that and some people that don’t, but I think going forward, it’s kind of something that people should go ahead and start charging to the owner.
But when you’re just starting off, one of my friends, Alison Kraft, who I think she even was on the rookie podcast maybe at some point, I can’t remember, but she’s a rockstar. She’s got like 20 or 30 units. And her first unit, she was like, “I took like 8% on the co-hosting. I didn’t know or like 10%, something wild, but she still made like two or $3,000 a month.” So there’s ability out there to have some flexibility. And when you’re first starting, you probably can’t get to what we did where you can do 20%, $1,000 setup fee, $100 tech fee. We can do that because we’ve built the reputation and have the numbers that back us. But sometimes when you start off, you might have to take a little lower or not be able to do that and just get the trial by fire going so that way you can learn all these things as you grow the business

Tony:
Side. Gary, we’ve learned so much already and I appreciate you sharing all this with us. We’re going to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to go over how do you set yourself apart from other co-hosts and really what kind of boosts your income as a co-host in this space as well. So we’ll be right back after we’re from today’s show sponsors. So we’re back here with Garrett. And Garrett, I want to understand, you talked a little bit before the break about liability and the track record that you have, but as more folks come into the space of Airbnb co-hosting, what are some of the things that they should focus on and that you focus on to try and separate yourself from the other co-hosting options that exist out there?

Garrett:
So I touched on a couple earlier when I talked about the liability side and understanding that to educate owners on the guest damage side, the insurance they need, and also how you’re going to set them up for success on the safety of their property. I personally think my hot take going into 20s, 26, and I don’t think this is much of a hot take because my numbers and my bookings will tell you this, we do like 90% direct bookings now, is pricing is going to matter a lot less in 2026 and marketing is really what is going to move the needle for short-term rentals everywhere. There’s so many options now, so many things. And if you’re just trying to do like, “Oh, we have the best…” Everybody has dynamic pricing. I can’t remember, I think I was talking to Sean Rocky Geech a week ago and we were talking about how 70% of listings now use some form of dynamic pricing.
So it’s not an add-on bonus anymore. It’s kind of a necessity. But if you can somehow, which this is kind of one of my strengths I feel like, and it is the marketing side, but if you can learn some small things about marketing, whether it’s how to really build your search engine optimization for your website, how to even run some simple TikToks and IG reels or hire somebody to help you with it. And even like paid ads, even in my company now, we have a full-time paid ads person that we are able to show this to owners, say, “Hey, we have a person that works full-time on the ads. We have our own marketing spend that we spend each month, but would you want to contribute your own personal marketing spend that only goes to your property to increase your visibility and increase the bookings and your revenue and all that?
” We break it down in a business sense. So if you’re a co-host, there’s no more negotiables on you got to know pricing, you have to have top-notch service, top-notch automations and guest concierge to it, but that extra bit that I guarantee you is going to not only make more revenue for you, but also close more deals is that you can speak a little bit of the marketing language that is going to be needed going into 2026 with some of these properties. And I say all that too, on my main website, we have all of our properties, right? But each week we will go in and write a blog for one of the particular houses or not each … Once every few months, each property gets its own blog basically that is search engine optimization driven. So we have a property, the Lighthouse again, it’s on Lake Livingston.
We will do a blog that says the best vacation rental near Lake Livingston or near Houston or whatever the keywords we want to use is. Now, that blog will live on Google and there’s a good chance of somebody typing in, especially the higher your site gets ranked and you do some things. If somebody typing in best vacation rental near Lake Livingston, there’s a good chance that blog is going to pop up and you’re serving the owner with more additional outside marketing that really is free. You can create a blog in 15, 20 minutes now. So I give that as an example, but I just want to incentivize people to learn the marketing side a little bit or turn it over to somebody that does know it because that going into 2026, everybody has professional pictures, everybody has dynamic pricing, everybody’s listed on multiple platforms. That’s not a way to stand out anymore.
Now it’s about getting your property in front of eyeballs that were not on Airbnb and all the OTAs already, and you need to capture them before they get there. Instagram is the new OTA, if you want to be honest. So that’s where everybody’s searching TikTok and Instagram. That should be where a lot of your focus is going into into 2026.

Ashley:
Gary, you’ve mentioned a bunch of times that you’ve built a team to really help you run this business, but what about for a rookie investor just getting started? Do they need to hire a team right away and who would be your first hire?

Garrett:
So if you work full-time like me and you have a busy life and you’re going to at least need boots on the ground and the first hire always is going to be your boots on the ground team. You don’t need the virtual assistance and all that, like operations manager, all the stuff that I have now. But when you first do it, you have to have a rockstar cleaner, a backup cleaner as well. You’re going to have to have one. People always shy away from that, but there’s going to be a time where your main cleaner can’t make it, and then you need a rockstar handy person and you need to know all the subcontractors in the area. That alone is going to save you and pay your cleaners and handy people well, because they’re going to go above and beyond for you, that way you don’t have to always drive out to the property and handle all these things that you really shouldn’t as you’re building a business.
But if you get that set up and you start to, you’re a little overwhelmed, I’ll give you the easy … I don’t want to say the easy route. I’ll give you the route I would do going forward is using something like HostBuddyAI or any kind of these AI tools that are out there. There’s one called Conduit. I even got an email today of a new one called Hosto or something like that. But some of these AI tools are better hosts than even me. They’ll answer questions overnight, they’ll reply in two to three minutes. I even sometimes like a guest will send me something and I have to copy it, put it into ChatGPT and go, “Make this nicer, make my response nice because I have too much emotion in this. ” And then I’ll send it back. But HostBuddy and all the other ones out there, they take the emotion out of it and they’re a host on twenty four seven for you.
And it’s like $10 per property. It’s going to be very integral into getting back your time when you have one or two properties. You’ll still have to have a human touch to it. So you’ll have to monitor it and do a few things there. But if you start growing after that, it would be easily getting a really, really good virtual assistant that can handle a lot of these very mundane tasks and things as you grow. But for your first couple properties, I don’t think you really need a team if you get an amazing cleaner and an amazing handy person there because you can handle most of the other thing and automate a lot of it for the messaging and all that kind of side. But boots on the ground, there’s no AI for that unfortunately yet. Maybe coming. I don’t know.

Ashley:
And Garrett, you really helped me open my eyes to a lot of this. I started using Hospitable and just when I used to have somebody co-host for me, they would message me and say, “I’m going to be on a flight. I won’t have WiFi. Can you just watch the messages for me? ” So I just thought that was a standard thing. Now that I have Hospitable and it literally responds to pretty much every message for me, I’m on the airplane like, “Oh, three messages taken care of. I didn’t have to do anything. Here it is. ” So that was a big eye-opening thing to me too, because usually I’m very skeptical of AI, but I have never ever seen AI this good because you do the chatbots on website when you ask for help and it’s just like awful. This is so good and I have to agree way better than I ever could.
They have the little improve button and I’ll just like, if that, it will make it so much nice if I even have to respond to the person.

Garrett:
And most of the time they never even realize they’re talking to AI. It just does so well. And some of these tools, Hospitable has a great AI engine. They most of the time think they are talking to you and that’s all we want.

Ashley:
Everyone thinks Ashley is so nice.

Garrett:
Yep. I love it.

Tony:
As we wrap things up here, I think just what is your long-term vision for co-hosting? Do you want to build this into the next Vacasa or Evolve where you’ve got thousands of units or tens of thousands of units? What’s your goal? How big do you want to scale this thing?

Garrett:
So I definitely do not want to get to that level for a million different reasons we won’t talk about on this podcast. But the cool thing about, and what I want to lead people with this, and even into 2026, I’m really geeking out basically over commercial real estate. I mean, I know Tony, both y’all have probably been involved in some projects, but the really cool thing about co-hosting is that you can get, say you get … I have 20 … Or I think I have 16 now, but we’re growing a lot more. If I get 50 contracts in a couple years, you can sell those contracts as a business to somebody that is looking to either buy your business or a private equity firm or whatever. And a lot of people, so you have 50 contracts and you’re making 20% and they’re estimated to make, let’s say $50,000.
So 50 times 10, that’s the $500,000, somewhere around there. I’m sure my math maybe is a little off. You could sell that business with those contracts to somebody for like between a one or 3x multiple, depending on your teams and your operation and all this. And you could sell that and exit out at a million dollars possibly evaluation and maybe even … There’s so many exit routes when you have a business because you can sell it as a business or I can just keep it in internal as long as I want and let it … Because now that I have this team and all this, it makes my units that I own more profitable because I’ve had the economies of scale where I’m spreading out the marketing, I’m spreading out the cost of my VAs, I’m spreading out the cost of my helpers and things.
So the really cool thing about it is you can sell it as a business or it can make your own real estate investments even more profitable going forward as you figure out what your exit plan is. My exit is I probably want to sell the co-hosting business in about five years and hopefully exit out in the great fashion that I just outlined.

Ashley:
Well, Garrett, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you let everyone know where they can reach out to you and find out more information?

Garrett:
Yep, of course. Bigger Stays YouTube channel is the BiggerPockets short-term rental YouTube channel. We also have our Bigger Stays newsletter that goes out each week. And on Instagram, I am Garrett Brown RE. Always happy to chat and talk anything Airbnb or real estate investing in the world for y’all.

Ashley:
Thank you so much for joining us. We always appreciate you coming onto the show. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys next time.