Short Term Rentals and Boutique Hotels with Kyle Fugatt

Let's chat boutique hotels. In today's episode, Kyle Fugatt explains how he combined the world of short term rentals with syndication to start his first boutique hotel.

Here are some highlights from today's episode:

• How he transitioned from flipping single family homes to boutique hotels
• How to make it work when going into business with your spouse
• How he leverages virtual assistants to scale and free up his time

Kyle Fugatt is an electrical engineer turned real estate investor. He quit his W2 in December 2022 and is now full time in STR management, a boutique hotel owner, syndicator and flipper.

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Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/short-term-rentals-and-boutique-hotels-with-kyle-fugatt/id1648166587?i=1000619281021

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Connect with Kyle Fugatt:
Website: https://cherokeerosehomes.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/the.str.syndicator

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Transcript

Ciaara: 0:00

Hi everybody. Welcome to Commercial Real Estate Bosses where we interview badass investors who are crushing it in the commercial real estate space. I'm your host, Ciaara Hoffmann. And on today's call we have Kyle Fugatt of Cherokee Rose Homes, so thank you so much for being on the show today.

Kyle: 0:16

Thanks for having me.

Ciaara: 0:18

Awesome. So as usual, I always like to start off by learning more about your story. So tell us, what you did before and how did you get into commercial real estate?

Kyle: 0:26

So I started as an electrical engineer. It took me forever to graduate, like most working individuals in college. So it took me about seven years to graduate with electrical engineer degree. And so I rolled into working like normal. And I bought my first rental house in 2019. And so I started the job and then I traveled for learning. Training for about four months. And then I came back in. I bought my first rental. It was my grandfather sold it to me. It was his mom's that he inherited, sold it to me. I bought it for 50 grand. Needed a ton of work. Turned that into a long-term rental and then cash out, refinance outta that deal, and then bought a mobile home on an acre. And that just rolled into buying my first flip. And then we flipped for about three years, about two and a half years. We flipped. And one day I was like, I just want build a war chest to get into like commercial, like apartments. I wanna buy an apartment complex. I wanna do this, I wanna do that just like everybody else that looks at like the next bigger and better thing. Yeah. And so we put like a war chest of money in the bank on the last flip, and we threw an apartment complex under contract in East Point near Atlanta in Georgia. And we went through the due diligence, we went through all that. And so it was really a shady deal from the broker. After we walked it, we ended up doubling the rehab projections. So we ended up terminating the deal. They weren't willing to negotiate for anything at all whatsoever. And then we started just looking for, it's 12, 13, 15, 20, LOIs out the door getting beat out by 50 grand or a cash deal. Or here and there. And I was like, goodness gracious. So we were in the STR space right before we threw that under contract, we had to flip and we said, okay, what if it was gonna be a long-term rental, then we were gonna flip it, and we were like, no, we'll play with the idea. And my wife was a high school teacher and she said, Hey look, on the second kid. I wanna stay home. I don't wanna miss the, like we miss some stuff with the first kid. I wanna stay home, so whatever we need to do. And I was like, oh, we're flipping houses and we're making decent money. Whatever. And she was like I saw this like short term rental thing and we can like Airbnb this house. And I was like, and it was just like a little two bed, one bath in a work town in Carrollton, Georgia, where it was, that's where we're from. And she was watching this podcast and found this mastermind that we could join to learn. And so she was like super excited about it and I've always been the excited one about the real estate. Always. Yeah. She was like, okay, and when you flip a house, like we're a husband and wife team, her goal was like, she comes in for design. I say, yes dear, we move on, we do it. And that's it. That's like literally it. And so we were like how do we get her more in the real estate with us? And so she came up with this STR airbnb thing and I was like, we'll try it. Let's just try it. Worst case scenario, we rent it to a college kid fully furnished or we just sell it like it's okay. What's the worst that's gonna happen? Yeah. And so about the time we launched the first one, just to test it, we joined this mastermind and she was like, this is what I wanna do. Let's do it. Let's say yes now and figure it out. And I was like, yeah, okay. So we did she was super stoked about it. One thing led to another and we crushed it with that house. Like average rents were like nine 50. We could have pushed a thou or 10 50, we could have pushed maybe 1100 for long-term rents. And we were grossing over 2,500 a month on that one, on short term rental income. And I was like, this works. Holy crap. And so at the time, like we kinda learned everything we could to the point where we could teach it in 10 weeks. Yeah. Eight weeks, whatever. And we were like, okay, we could literally teach this stuff. Like just with one property. Yeah. We learned so much through the mastermind, which is if you're not in a mastermind anywhere, like you need to get in one. So anyways, we did that and then we helped out a friend that had a school bus on a lake in Alabama. So we started hosting that and we turned her bus around for it was like two bookings in three months and we had it bookin'. It was a school bus now, and it was like we started at$60 a night and by the time we were really like done with this thing, it was grossing 3,500 a month or something crazy and was booking for$180 on the weekend. And so we ended up taking that one and we said, okay, like where do we wanna be if we were really gonna do this thing? Like where are we gonna be? And so we wanted to be in Blue Ridge. Yeah. In the mountains. And I was like, let's do it. We love, we only lived a couple hours from there. And we said let's do it. And so we did. And I got on bigger pockets. I was all over the place, like helping people out, just adding value. And then the first phone call comes in Nice. I was like, Hey, I wanna meet you guys. And so like on the phone, I landed that deal. And he was like, I've talked to four managers, like you're it. And I was like, sweet. So we went, we met him. One turned in the two, two turned into six. Next thing you know, we've got 15 under management now. We've got three more coming on. And then we were going through the journey and I was still looking for apartments, still looking for storage, still looking for the whole nine yards. And we ended up buying two flip houses on Lake Blue Ridge cuz I was like, I'm done flipping. I'm not gonna flip anymore. We're just gonna do this. And I'm just looking for commercial stuff. And my realtor Yeah, in North Georgia she said if you don't buy these, you're crazy. They're such good deals. If you don't buy'em, you're crazy. I was like, okay. So we looked at the numbers and they're, we're done with both of them now. And we have'em both listed. And so they're both multimillion dollar projects. So we've got one listed for$2.5 million. Wow. And one at at$1.6 million on the lake. Like they're nice, pretty beautiful houses. And we got done with the first one and listed it back in like around Thanksgiving is when it was. And this hotel came up and we were talking about getting into this boutique hotel space. And so it was just this new niche, like everybody, nobody knew about it, but everybody wanted to be in it. And so inside of our mastermind, our coach opened this little tight niche group about like 19, 20 people and said, like, here's the requirements to be in this group. Everybody in there owns a boutique hotel,, pretty much that's it. So when you have questions from Yeah. How to buy bleach to what kind of internet do you need to be running you have the answers in there. And so we joined it and we were under contract with this one, and I'm actually sitting in it right now. We were under contract here. Nice. And we said, okay we're about to close this thing. We need to, we don't even know what we're doing. As far as like the operations, like we bring our short term rental experience in it so we know what we're doing. But the whole like laundry room, how you operate 40 units, like how do you do that? And so what systems do you use to connect everything? Because like when it's just one house, it's super easy. Like for us it's super easy. But how do you connect 40 or 35 or whatever? How do you have a lobby that will Yeah. Pull you out of a big box hotel and put you in this boutique hotel space. And we are currently in renovation stage. We're two weeks into the demo and it's just taken off from there. So we have realigned, because I still look at storage, I still look at apartments and I'm like, is that really, we were looking at it like we already know the short term rental space so well. Why don't we just explode here? And my wife said why don't we, you know how to raise money, you know how to syndicate and all that stuff. Like why don't we join the two? And I was like, oh my God, that's a good idea. So we actually, last year we actually syndicated our first syndication. We syndicated a cabin$810,000, syndicated that with some friends, and I was like, okay. And everybody gets to stay a week, that kind of thing. So it's really like a personal deal, if you will. And then we found the hotel and I said let's underwrite it. And we underwrote it and we started raising money and we closed it. And the next thing you know, there's somebody who owned seven units down the street, five minutes from here called the main office and was like, Hey, you wanna buy mine too? I was like, oh, here the, oh, wow. Yeah. Here comes the deals. Everybody around here they come. So it's a really small town that's growing. It's only, it's five minutes from downtown to Kaysville, so it's a close place to all the tourism. And so we're trying to create this as the destination space, but we were like, Hey, if we buy that other hotel down the street, like we'll pull the competition outta this place. We'll just turn'em into apartments down there. Yeah. This will be the hotel. Like we'll be good. Yeah. Yeah. But so that's where we're at now. It's, like I said, it's 15 units under management, and then we'll add 35 doors to the portfolio of management. It's a 42 key hotel, and we're gonna, we're combining three rooms to do like a whole lobby. And then we're doing like a gym. Two rooms are combined right now to a game room, and then we'll have a laundry room, like paid laundry. They can go in and pay to use the washer and dryer and all that stuff, and it'd just be another source of revenue for us that was actually never counted for on the pro forma, which is good. So we have all this little extra stuff, but it'll be 15 doors plus 35. So we're getting up there in management and and so we're growing very fast, right? Very fast. That's where we're at now.

Ciaara: 9:20

No, I'm super interested in this short-term rental space. Me and my husband, we've done Airbnbs, but just in the single family and boutique hotels is something we've talked about, something that we're interested in getting into at some point. We haven't really pursued it very hard, but it's always been like at the back of our mind. So as far as short-term rentals, boutique hotels. Would you say that for you, does it have to be like within driving distance or is that something that you can manage, from

Kyle: 9:45

out of state? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you, we can manage one in Hawaii if we wanted to, and so we live in Georgia. So it's really about building the teams where you're at. So there's this myth of oh, you have, it has to be in your backyard, like they say about the multifamily. If you close one, it has to be in your backyard. It doesn't. You build the team. You have a good property manager that has great maintenance people. You have the groundsmen, you have everything. As long as you build that team, wherever it's gonna be. For us, it's a cleaning team. Most cleaners like their husbands or the boyfriends or whatever. They have handyman. Their dad, whoever is a handyman or they know somebody. Yeah. We find somebody that'll do the trash. And in the mountains it's crazy with the trash. There's no big trash company that comes through. It's like a guy with a truck and a trailer. So it's something we've talked about. We've talked about just opening a trash company up here because that's our biggest enemy is trash. Like without a doubt, it's our biggest enemy. I'll call one of my guys. I'm like, Hey, I need you to go out here to whatever Adventure Lodge and go pick up the trash. And he gets there and he's like taking pictures. It's piling out in the back of the truck. I'm like, the trash guy didn't come or whatever. And so we've talked about that. Yeah. But like as far as like you wanna run on the other side of the country, it'll take you a couple flights, to go out there, schedule all your cleaners up, and maybe a two day period to come by. You interview'em. Yeah. You see what they say? You get prices. The same, like you wanna structure everything while you're out there, but when you come home, you're gonna have like you're gonna have everything already set up. You're gonna go out there, you want to know the listing and all that stuff. So you'll take some videos and so you don't forget anything. Cause you're only gonna go there once or twice at first. And then from there you'll make a trip maybe every four months, every six months, or maybe sooner, depending on if you're having issues outta the cleaners or things, I don't know, things are starting to get broken or whatever. Yeah, try it and then pick your market and go into it.

Ciaara: 11:34

Yeah. So what should someone, if they wanna get into this short-term rental or boutique hotel business, what are some key indicators that they should be looking for in their market to see if that's even a viable business where they live or whatever market they're looking at.

Kyle: 11:47

So I would say there's a lot of different things that people travel for. It doesn't have to be tourism. So like for us, tourism is a big one in Blue Ridge. It's vacation. Outside of that, like our very first STR was in a work area. So people came, there was college families come in to see their kids graduate or whatever. That college also hosted a lot of classes for businesses all over Georgia and so they would come in, we had work family. We have workers come in, two or three people come in to do the classes at the school. We had a big nursing system there, so we had travel nurses come in a lot. Outside of that, if it's a heavily populated area like Atlanta, if you can at least stay in the regulations. Like regulations is a big one. But if they've outlawed STR altogether, then I wouldn't even try to look in there at all. So it doesn't have to just be tourism, but I would jump on Airbnb and just see because you think like the Poconos for instance, or Panama City Beach. There's a ton of short-term rentals in that area, but does that mean you stay out? No, not necessarily. Cuz if you can go in and do something, you're not reinventing the wheel, you're just doing it a whole lot better than somebody else. There. It just depends on where you go. If you don't see one short term rental in that whole city at all, like at all it could mean one of two things. One, they're outlawed or they have super heavy regulations and they won't allow'em, or nobody is traveling. But that could be a room for opportunity because if they don't have regulations, like everybody has regulations, but if they're restricted Yeah. Then I would stay outta those areas. But my brother-in-law, for instance bought his first one in a town with no other short-term rentals whatsoever in Bowden, Georgia. There's nothing there other than a couple wedding venues. His is got a-frame on the river. It is a beautiful place. It is booked freaking solid, like booked solid, like$300,000 house, I think, and it's making, I wanna say it's gross in probably$4,500 a month. Something like that. It's doing very well. And he bought it on a really good deal. I think he paid like$175,000 for the house. So he's smoking deal. But he just wanted to try it and was like if it doesn't work, then we'll sell it. And next thing it was like booking, booking, booking. And I was like, I was looking at his calendar the other day and I was like, oh my God, this place is killing me. And we helped them a lot on trying to get their feet off the ground doing that. So it's it's awesome. It's, if you're gonna look for a place to be I would also say like invest where you want to be. Just cuz it's your backyard or something. If you don't, if you don't care about where you're at, like if you hate the beach and the beach is in your backyard, then I wouldn't manage on the beach. If you hated it that bad, cuz in your work, it's not gonna be fun anymore. If you love the mountains, then invest in the mountains. Yeah. Because you can use that for personal use too. So it's a Right. And that's a double-edged sword because you go on vacation and you end up working when you're there.

Ciaara: 14:34

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you say that cuz me and my husband have talked about having an Airbnb in each place that we wanna vacation in. So maybe like we have 12 Airbnbs in each place. Maybe we spend a month in each place. Yep. So once the kids are grown up out of the house and we can just travel all the time, that's pretty much the dream. That's the goal of just being perpetual travelers. And then just visiting each place that we wanna be. And it doesn't have to be in the US too, we've talked about doing it. My family live in Canada, so we're like, okay, we'll have one in Canada, we'll have some in Europe, all over the place. Costa Rica, wherever. Just places that we wanna hang out and just be Yeah. In different places, whether mountains or beach. Like we love all of that stuff.

Kyle: 15:12

Yeah, what I get a lot from owners is Hey, I'll just book this. I'm gonna come here when there's nobody here. And then we start booking it and they're like, I can't come. I'm like, look, if you really wanna be here, you need to block out the month six months ahead, like next year you need to run and block it out. And we were the same way too. We said we wanna be making money remotely. And that's what short-term rentals, that's what gains you. And same for like commercial and stuff and multi-families. You don't have to be there. But we can work from home, like work from home, anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world, as long as we have internet. And we have a good team. That takes care of a lot of stuff when we're not there. But what it, like we said, we want to be able to travel for a month. If we want to go to California or whatever for a month or Hawaii for a month or Maine for a month or whatever we can do that. And we can do it for a couple reasons. Like one, we can go just figure out if we want to invest there, but if we want to just book a short-term rental or Airbnb or whatever Then let's just book it and not have to worry about the money, because let's say it costs four grand to stay there, but you're making 60,$70,000 a month. If you get to that point, like you can literally just go wherever you want. And that is a big goal of ours is and even if we don't do it, I wanna get to a point where we can do it. So it's kinda like buying a Lambo or something. Like I would, I'd love to buy a Lambo, but I don't know if I'd ever do it. I probably just lease one for a week so I could drive it around, take it to all my friends and be like, drive this. Exactly. But I'm with you because the freedom it buys you short-term rentals can buy you and commercial real estate can buy you as like aside from the money. Money's not even a thing now, right?

Ciaara: 16:46

So speaking about that, can you go a little bit more into your why? I know earlier you said you know, your wife, she wanted to be home with your second kid. So obviously it looks, sounds like you were able to accomplish that. So how has your why changed and what are you guys really striving for right now?

Kyle: 16:59

So I would say we have a couple of different why's. One is our time back for our kids, right? So like we can spend time with ourselves. We can spend time with our kids, not money. Money's great, but money doesn't really do anything but buy you the freedom. And so that's where it comes in. So our why is to be able to retire our family, to travel when we want to show our kids what can be done. So I worked at a great place, great job, great company, but you still have to ask off for vacation. You run outta sick days. Yeah. Everybody's why is different, right. So yeah. For us it's more like, To be able to do what we want, when we want. Your why never changes if you look at it that way, but your goals and stuff and your perspectives change all the time. And so I was sitting on the couch like three weeks ago now and I was watching my son run around and I said I told my wife, I said, I don't care how much money we ever make, I don't care if it's a hundred thousand a year or a million a year, or 10 million a year. It doesn't matter if I can sit on this couch or sit at home or do whatever. Pay the bills, be able to go where I want, when I want, and I can watch them run around like this. That's all I need. That is it? That is it. Yeah. I don't wanna worry about buying groceries, paying bills. Absolutely. I don't wanna worry about anything. Yep. If I can just, go where I want, when I want, if we want to go to the beach for a week or a month and we can do that. But if we can do that and watch the kids grow up like that is where, that is really what it's about is getting that time back and spending with the family. When we joined the Mastermind, they asked a similar question, like if you could take the money off the table, what would you do? Everybody says, oh, financial freedom, and I wanna do this. And yeah. What does financial freedom like really mean? Really what does it mean? Because if things didn't cost anything and you could do whatever you want whenever you want what would you do? What would your everyday be? What would your daily schedule look like? And a lot of times it's tied to money because things cost a lot of money. But if you look at it, you take money off the table and it's what is your why, like back to your question what would your day look like? And for us, it's family. Cuz I'm just like everybody else, like electrical engineer and my wife was a high school teacher, so we're just like everybody else yeah, just trying to make it through and trying to pay the bills and trying to have a good time and then as you grow you start to see like the real meaning of life. I quit my job in December. December 31st was my like, last with electrical engineering. Now I'm real estate full-time love. So it's, thank you. Congratulations. Thank you. It's shift is what it is. It's a shift, but there's no way I could go to a job 40 hours a week and manage the renovation on a hotel and all that stuff.

Ciaara: 19:32

Yeah. I think it's really cool that you and your wife are in this business together. Some couples can't work together and some couples who are great together, so tell me about like your role in the business and then what is your wife's role in the business? How do you guys divide up the work and what is your strengths for each of you?

Kyle: 19:49

So just like any other husband and wife couple starting something new, you're trying to figure that out, right? With flipping, it was just me doing everything. And she did design. With building the STR, it's building a business. She is mainly operations, like systems and operations. So she knows, like we have two VAs that work for us. We're hiring number three for the hotel to bring on like full 24 7 for the hotel. And She has built and implemented stuff with the cleaners, stuff with the, all the reset stuff. And the, and we've got our head VA is killer. She is amazing. She worked for Airbnb like five years, so she really guides my wife. Oh, cool. On where everything. Yeah. Like they guide each other. That's probably a better way to put that. And so they build the systems together. But my wife is really good at systems and I am more of a numbers guy. So originally I was doing all the sales and the prospecting. I was talking to all these people. It was, Hey, I'll get you a contract sent over. Here's our terms, here's how we do things. Here's a high level of everything. And then they were like, good, great. Send me the contract and I call my wife like, Hey, can you send so-and-so this contract I'm just letting it another one or whatever. And then she would be introduced and it would be like an email introduction. And then she would send like the list of furnishings over, here's a list of how many towels you need and extra sheets and pillows and all stuff. And then she really took on like the owner communication. But we both resonated with certain owners. So like I have certain owners that call me and she has certain owners that call her. She handles all the cleaners. She handles like the purchasing of like new supplies or if we need to replace something or spearheading on the claims or whatever. And so we both go meet new clients together if we both can. She's spearheading everything with the team. And then I back up and either look at the renovation stuff or whatever. And then at the end of the month I come back in and we're doing performance together and we're sending out performance to owners and all that stuff. But we work really well together when I'm not messing something up. So if I'm messing something up, then I definitely hear about it. But when we first started we didn't know cuz I was working a 40 hour job and I was also, we were doing pro formas at two o'clock in the morning trying to send'em to owners. And so like we've done a lot, we've gone through a lot of speed bumps and so now we're trying to not figure out where our roles are because we've fell into the roles like naturally. And then we said, okay, like I would be like messaging a guest at the very early on and she's no, that's my job. You do not touch that because when you message'em, it doesn't look like it's coming from me. So I'm like, yeah, okay, I get it. Or we'd both be messaging at the same time and she's stop messaging that is clearly where you stop. And I'm like, okay, I understand. I'm with you. Now what we're looking at is yeah, just any couple that's in business together where do we get our time back? And so when we're around, like when we're with each other, of course we're with each other in the office all the time, with the kids all the time. And now we're focusing on Okay, Kyle and Allie's time, like our time together. Not centered around business cuz we talk about business a lot, like naturally cuz we have a couple of businesses and we're doing it together. But more of like just us time because after the kids are grown and gone, there won't be any more kids there. It'll just be us. So if you don't work on that actively yeah, it will be lost. Like you, it will go away. So that is more where our, yeah. Where we're trying to figure out like how do we do this correctly now? And so we're going through like time blocking where Okay. Date nights once a week, like that kind of thing. We have a good split, I do my thing, she does her thing and when we're suffering, if you will. Like I've got too much on my plate at one point, or she has too much on her plate. We're like, okay, how do we swap? What can I do to help? Do you need me to hook up, price labs for pricing or something like that? Or do you need me to change the order of the photos. I'll just go in and do it cuz you have your hands full or whatever. So it's a lot of give and take.

Ciaara: 23:48

So that's awesome. Yeah. No, me and my husband are obviously, we're both in the business as well. I gravitate towards what your wife does. Also I like managing our Airbnbs, our short-term rentals and being the one that messages them. Like my husband would go crazy if he had to message these people, trying to get into the Airbnb at like 10:00 PM at night or whatever. He's like, I can't handle that. So I do that. But you mentioned the VAs now are these VAs based in the US. Are they overseas?

Kyle: 24:13

Nope, they're in the Philippines. Louie is our head va and I don't know what we'd do without her. I really have no idea what I would do without her. Yeah. She is amazing. And then, so we started talking about hiring somebody else and we said, look, we want to empower her to build a team under her. So as we grow, we want her to grow as well. Yeah. So it's not just, oh, I have a va. She's almost like a partner, if you will. That's the way we look at it. We said, look, we wanna empower you on Nice. Building a team. That you can manage, like of course we're gonna manage as well, but we want you to be comfortable with whoever you work with. She was like I already have some people in mind. And I was like good. So her brother actually came on board with us and. So she was like, yeah, I can manage him. If he does something wrong, I've got him. And so I was like, okay, that was perfect. And then we're looking at hire number three in here in the next month or two. And I was like, do you have anybody in mind? She was like, yep. I think it's her cousin. She was like, yep, my cousin wants to do this. And I was like more power to you. Nice. If they can pass your test, then they can pass our test. And she's a hard butt. I don't know if I can say what I wanna say on here, but she's tough. She's really tough. So it's pretty much opposite days. So it's 12 hour difference depending on time changes. 13 hour difference. They've got a great schedule. We pick up two evenings, I believe it is until we hire number three. And then they're gonna go full-time, so we'll have 24 hour coverage and it's growing and it's fun and, there's always kinks and it's not cupcakes and rainbows, but like I said earlier, like she worked for Airbnb for five years. She knows the ins and outs. She can literally she'd be like, yeah, I remember how to, I don't know, remove a review or something like that. That's awesome. We actually found them through our mastermind actually. There's a guy in there that kind of spearheads training virtual assistants and one of the guys in there is a virtual assistant that has built a business pretty much okay with my coach. And we hooked up with him and he was like, yeah, I got you. We'll take care of it. Let's interview a bunch of people. So I hear a lot of stories, a lot of horror stories about hiring a VA online and somebody that reaches out through Messenger and they're like, oh yeah, you could do this. And for$3 an hour I'll do this. And I'm like, good luck. They're like, oh, I can find one way cheaper. And I'm like, good luck. Like you pay for what you get. Yeah, exactly. It's fun. And you don't know what you don't know when you get into this or any business, right? People say, oh, I don't wanna be responding to guests at 10:00 PM because they can't get in the Airbnb. That's what you just said. But there's all these systems that can come into effect that says I technically don't have to respond to them. Not that nobody will respond to'em, but like you personally won't have to respond to'em. So that's how we have it set up and we have the VAs and we have automatic responses for stuff like that. But that's what it's about is scaling it and building it to something that is sustainable. Yeah. I don't know if I would want an assistant that does messaging here in the US because of the time difference. So you'd be asking somebody here to work night shift.

Ciaara: 27:13

I think VAs are awesome. I've been using VAs before anyone even knew what Upwork was. So it's just, Really great way to leverage your time, which is our most important Yep. Asset. I agree a hundred percent. So tell me about, so you mentioned that you're, right now you're working on renovating this hotel. What is next for

Kyle: 27:34

you and your company? So we want to keep growing. On both the single family side for short-term rentals, cuz we would like to get to a point where we could like almost package it. So if one day somebody wanted to buy the business, we could sell it with all the contracts. We don't plan on stopping growing on that side. But once you get to so many units, then it's just word of mouth and that's literally how we've grown so far. Anyways. Which is pretty incredible in my opinion. We've grown word of mouth with just single family. Yeah. Cabins pretty much. After this hotel is done and it's operational and we're solid, I want to identify the second one by the end of the year. And I want it to be on the beach. Like we talked about in five years, we do another one of these. I'm hoping that I've got a couple of these under my belt, but we syndicate, we raise money. I want the next boutique hotel to be on the beach. Now I say that hurricane insurance is through the roof right now. And that may be the one thing that stops us, unless we can get a crazy low price on one and it makes sense. Also if we. Buy one on the beach, I still have a team here in the mountains that we have all of our other stuff that we have to keep the guys working. I want to dive into some more commercial stuff, like more self storage in our area. So Jasper, LJ Morganton. Blue Ridge, even up here. So we're right over the line in Ducktown, Tennessee right now, and it's five minutes from the case Bill. So anything from like literally here all the way down to Jasper or Canton. Self storage, apartments, another hotel that will turn into apartments. Cuz the living situation up here is like really bad. It's super, super short. I had six or seven people that were living here Yeah. In this hotel when we bought it. And we've worked with a lot of them on getting'em out. So I don't wanna just kick a bunch of people out, but more or less that's pretty much what we did because you have to. People around here doesn't want people living here. But we've thrown around the idea of new building, a couple of new builds. If we can do a new build or two and keep the guys working, nothing crazy. Either sell'em or keep'em as short-term rentals, and that's what we'll do.

Ciaara: 29:35

Perfect. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Kyle. Where is the best place for people to find you online if they wanna reach out and learn

Kyle: 29:42

more about I would say Facebook. You can check out our website to direct book cherokee rose homes.com. That's where we list all our stuff. Our website for the hotel will be the mallard hotel.com. So you can check us out there. I put my phone number out on a lot of posts actually. So if you really wanted to know, you could just look on one of those posts. Call me anytime. If you find it, you could text me anytime. If you got any questions, anybody got any STR questions or boutique hotel questions or find something in the area, when they wanna shoot me, that's. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Love to JV on some deals if somebody wants to or just help, like if somebody just has a question with short-term rental stuff, I'm here to help. Including yourself, Ciaara, including yourself. Awesome.

Ciaara: 30:22

Yes. No, I'll be in touch for sure. Thanks everybody for tuning in today. If you guys enjoy today's show, please write us a five star review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Every review helps us to reach more and more people looking to get involved in commercial real estate.

30:37

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