Bootstrapped Hospitality: Scaling Your Hotel Portfolio Without Major Capital | Austin Phippen E37

Today’s guest bought a roadside motel in a town of 900 people and turned it into a thriving hospitality brand.

In this episode of the Hotel Investor Playbook, Mike and Nate sit down with Austin Phippen, a 26‑year‑old owner of Chama Trails Motel, a portfolio of 12 short-term rentals and a scenic wedding venue in Chama, New Mexico.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The “Motel Hack” mindset: How Austin got in with seller financing and turned the motel into both home and business
• Scaling without overbuilding: Why he ran it “as-is” in year one and focused on reviews before renovations
• Bundling to build a team: How combining the motel, STRs, and a venue created enough revenue for full staffing
• Remote operations, done right: What you must know before investing in a rural town you don’t live in
• Marketing that works: Why Google reviews and great operations now drive over 85% of bookings directly

If you’re serious about hospitality investing, especially in rural or seasonal markets, this episode is a must-listen masterclass in bootstrapping, brand-building, and sustainable growth.

About Austin

Austin and Karlee Phippen are the powerhouse couple behind Turquoise Antler Hospitality, a growing portfolio of boutique rentals, a 16-room motel, and a stunning wedding venue in Chama, New Mexico. Since launching in 2019, they've transformed a small-town motel into a thriving hospitality brand with a team of 20 and over a dozen co-hosted properties. With Austin’s background in construction and Karlee’s roots in hospitality, they’ve created unique stays that blend rustic charm with modern comfort. In this episode, they share how they scaled their business, built community partnerships, and navigated the wild world of rural hospitality.

Connect with Austin

Email: austin@turquoiseantler.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-phippen-730569124/

Instagram: @chamavacationrentals and @phippenout

Website: https://chamavacationrentals.com/

Have a deal? Send it to us here: https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/form/28iLM67xiWWNkekg8ONt

Connect with Michael on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Email Us at info@hotelinvestorplaybook.com

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Invest with Malama Capital

Submit a deal

Transcript

Michael Russell 0:00

Ever wonder if a tiny roadside motel in a town of say 912 people could actually be a smart investment? On today's episode, we sit down with Austin Phippen, the owner of Chama Trails Motel in Chama, New Mexico. Austin and his wife moved to this scenic town to build a lifestyle and ended up building a thriving hospitality portfolio that now includes a motel, a wedding venue, and 12 vacation rentals. We talk about how they acquired the motel through seller financing, scaled operations without prior hotel experience, and grew revenue by three times through smart renovations and standout service. Austin also breaks down the realities of running a rural motel and what it takes to create operational scale in a tiny town and why marketing is really just great operations in disguise. This episode is full of tactical insight and a fresh take on motel hacking as a path into hospitality ownership. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Hotel Investor Playbook, your guide to building wealth and freedom through boutique hotel ownership, hosted by Mike and Nate.

Nathan St Cyr 1:07

Get in the game.

Michael Russell 1:21

On this podcast, we talk story about everything you need to know to make money investing in hotels and hospitality assets. On today's episode, we've got Austin Phippen, owner of Chama Trails Motel in Chama, New Mexico. And he also runs a portfolio of short-term rentals and operates a wedding venue with his wife, all in this small but really scenic mountain town. Austin, welcome to the show.

Austin Phippen 1:44

Thanks for having me, guys. Good to be here.

Michael Russell 1:46

Yeah, pumped. So Chama, New Mexico is this tiny little town. There's what, 912 people. I look it up on Google. That's the population as of 2023. So tiny little town, but when I think of New Mexico, I tend to picture like dry desert landscapes, adobe buildings, kind of like the southwestern vibe with lots of red clay and Native American patterns. But where you are, it's it's totally different. It's it's tucked up near the Colorado border and it looks nothing like the rest of New Mexico. There's big skies, rolling hills, tall pines. I mean, the town itself, it looks like this old country western movie set. I mean, I picture saloon-style buildings with horses tied up to wooden posts. It's got the that kind of charm. So when talking about your 16-room motel, I just kind of wanted to set the stage, or you've got a wedding venue and you've got these vacation rentals. Just wanted to have that image in mind because this place feels like it's frozen in time, but in the best possible way. It's like a real slice of the old west, and it's surrounded by all this natural beauty. So somehow you've built this apparently thriving business there, and that's what we want you to talk about.

Austin Phippen 2:52

Yeah. So to kind of get an idea of like where we're at, like other than description, as far as like pertinent places that people probably have heard of, Santa Fe is about two hours away. And we do drag a lot of people come up here from like when they're visiting Santa Fe, whether it's from the East Coast or internationally, a lot of them end up up here for a part of their journey. And then Taos, New Mexico, which is kind of like a combo of here in Santa Fe. It's high desert with mountains, it's two hours away. Uh Durango, Colorado, it's two hours away. And then Pagosa Springs is actually the closest town, Pagosa Springs, Colorado. It's about 45 minutes, and that's what we are most like. Like kind of like said, we're just under 8,000 feet, so it's super green here. Winter's long and summers are awesome. And that's kind of why we ended up here. We moved down from Colorado. But to get an idea of how we came down here, because it's such a small place. My wife's family's kind of been in this area for 40, 50 years. And we moved over from Durango to open this wedding venue. When we got married here in 2017, we kept all our family at this little motel in town. And owners were trying to sell this place. So if you walked in the door, you got the pitch. So they whenever we were there, they tried talking my wife's family into buying it. And in 2018, we came back to town. We stopped and said hi to these owners. They're like, Oh, you guys are coming back to buy the motel, aren't you? No, we want absolutely nothing to do with this. And we were trying to figure out how to open the wedding venue, and like it's two hours from where we lived in Durango. And how do you do that? And how do you move here and get a job? There's not a lot of work. We're like, well, we could sell our house and we could buy a home buy a home and a business. So we went the next day and we're like, what do you want for it? And so they gave us a price, and it just seemed too too low to say no.

Michael Russell 4:44

Uh-huh.

Austin Phippen 4:44

Well, what would you pay for it? We it's uh we'd signed an NDA with them, so I don't I won't give the number, all right. But the number this year, I will do 80% of purchase price in revenue this year.

Michael Russell 4:59

Okay. Second I asked for what you're doing in revenue.

Austin Phippen 5:03

Yeah, it'll be it'll be over four. So we'll do a little over four in in our gross, not not net, but our gross will be over four. So it kind of gives you an idea of where it was. And that's why like we're really not our purchase process was not very sophisticated. Like we walked in, sat at the table, had a cup of coffee together, and they're like, this is what we want. We're building homes in Durango, and we're like, we're selling homes for more there. Yeah. And we're like, we could live here, we could get this business up and running. It didn't need they they had loved on the place well, taking pretty good care of it. It had good character, it had good reviews. But it they were in their 70s, and it's just time. They're just ready to move on. And uh so move forward, they owner financed. We moved in and started construction after a year. The first year we actually, because we had no uh hotel, motel experience. And so we ran it the way it was because we're like, we want people to tell us what they like and don't like about this place. Year one. I wouldn't do that again now that we know what we're doing, but we came in without any experience. We're like, we don't want to put our stamp on this, like, and it's not necessary, and overspend on a renovation.

Michael Russell 6:08

Yeah. All right. Well, I I want to know what what you're doing is you're setting the table here as far as like, okay, how how you got involved with this this hotel. And part of it is that you wanted to build a lifestyle there. You saw yourself moving from where you were to build, have a life, have a a business and a nice lifestyle. And so there was an opportunity to make that happen. But we're coming from this, Nathan and myself, we are real estate investors. And so when we are looking to purchase hotels, oftentimes we see metropolitan properties and they're expensive. And so naturally, as you're doing your search, you gravitate with the search criteria and you see this low-priced asset under a million dollars, and you look at it, go, wow, that thing looks beautiful. And then you go, Well, why is it so cheap? I mean, that there's gotta be opportunity there. And so you start going through the mental cycle of figuring out, well, is this viable? I really want to know. You're in a rural area. Are rural motels financially viable? Or are these just simply like passion projects that are more of a lifestyle business? Can you walk us through that?

Austin Phippen 7:16

Yeah, we're kind of going through that process right now because we've seen many iterations of our business. So, like when we moved in, I mean, we are as owner-operated, like I'm scrubbing toilets, I'm doing the remodel, wife's answering the phone, we're checking people in. Like, that's day one. Then we moved into a different phase after three years, and a lot of that had to do with our wedding venue taking off pretty quickly. We hired a full-time manager, they moved in to the motel and basically took over operations the way we were doing it, with us kind of by their side. Now, as of like two months ago, we're moving into our third iteration of how we're doing operations. And so now we are like doing more of a team trying to have somebody like when you're asking a manager, a live-in manager to do basically what we were doing as owners is asking too much. And it just they were doing a great job, but they'd all get burnt out because it's just so much time. You're there on the property all the time. Phone rings at 2 a.m. You don't you don't get time off. So now the way we're doing it is, and it's we've been able to do this because when we started, it was just the 16-room motel. We now slowly but surely people have asked us to manage properties. So we we manage 12 vacation rentals in town, and then we also are partnered in another hotel in town. It's only four rooms, and it has a boutique on the main floor on the main floor, and they're more of like a high-end hotel room. We don't get as many stays, but it's the most expensive place in town. And so by running that entire portfolio, we've made it viable to make the 16 room motel more of an investment style. Like we're still very hands-on there, um, but day-to-day operations a lot more hands-off. And so a lot of that had to do with getting the revenue up because we're talking revenue's been up two and a half, almost three X from the very rough PL we were given whenever we first walked in to that deal. So that's how we've been able to do it to turn into more of like what you guys are talking about, and I think a lot of your listeners are interested in, is by bundling a lot of these things up to get revenue to a certain point where you can have a team for operations. When you're as small as we were in the beginning, you cannot. And it's you.

Michael Russell 9:26

You're benefiting from the economy of scale.

Austin Phippen 9:29

We're 26 years old. Like we're in a very different position. My wife's 24, I'm 26. We don't have a lot to offer on dollars and equity. We had our sweat at that time. And so that's how we got in. And so now we're transitioning somewhat out of that phase. I mean, I'm still very hands-on over there, but a lot less involved in day-to-day now.

Michael Russell 9:48

Yeah. So look, that's this piece of this puzzle that we see time and time again. And it works for you because you want to live there and you want to be hands-on. And you started with just one iteration, and now you you continue to iterate and you're growing your portfolio and you're gaining the economy of scale. But let's say someone wants to invest in a small town and they live remotely. How the heck do they do that? Is that even feasible? Is it possible for someone to identify a cool little town with a small population and purchase a property off site, or I guess where they're not present, and be able to hire the appropriate staff and be able to create enough demand and operate it effectively to where they can actually turn a profit? Or is it really, I mean, this model of investing in small towns is just limited to folks like yourself that live there and bootstrap and start small and scale from there?

Austin Phippen 10:37

I think you can, but you do have to have more of a presence locally. One of the hardest things in our small town, like you mentioned, 912 people. On our staff between the wedding venue and all of the hotel operations, it's 25 people. That's a pretty high percentage of the population for a very small business that we have. And so if you're not involved in a community this size, you're gonna have a hard time just because people aren't gonna like you, people aren't gonna want to work for you. You're the out-of-town investor. So I think you have to have a passion in a place, but there are so many people that do live in cities. I mean, a lot of the people that own businesses in this town are from Albuquerque or Santa Fe because they grew up here, their family's from here. So there are places all over for folks like that that have an interest in a place, um, but it will require a large time investment and personally, because you you have to be involved in a community of this size.

Nathan St Cyr 11:34

Yeah, you mentioned because it's one of the our first targets as we look at revenue, because you're right. We go, okay, we're gonna have a team. Like, so when we look at a property, we're like, okay, well, what what post-stable stabilized revenue can this asset generate? And that will tell us if we have interest in continuing down the path, if it's worth it. So if if we can't have a team, and that team can differ based on what that revenue is, but that is a a key indicator for us. And and you said that you have, I think you said 2x or 3x or 4x, the revenue of a family that had been operating this for it sounds like for a long time. They were extremely established. And so I'm I'm interested when you said that you did that to the revenue. Is that specific to the to the to the motel? Or is that all because you added other things?

Austin Phippen 12:24

Strictly motel, not including the other things. The motel, people all like vacation rentals are sexy, they look pretty. They you can have a nice cabin in the mountains with a beautiful view. They don't do what a motel does, it's not even close. Like you're talking 10x in revenue. And so it's just like our little roadside motel is strictly, and that carries half of our revenue for everything with all the all the 12 homes, the other four-room hotel. The motel is doing half of our annual revenue.

Nathan St Cyr 12:53

Okay, so how'd you do it?

Austin Phippen 12:56

So when we took over the place, I mean, these folks are still running with paper. So, like reservations are being written down on paper. They had a website, but it was just to prove they were real. No OTAs were being used. I mean, it was mom and pop and as basic as it gets. So day one, just strictly getting a website and getting where people could book it, that was like number one. We had a pretty good reputation. They already had like on Google and everything, so we kept the name the same. But just that alone, plus then in after one year of operations, we did a pretty big renovation. Gutted all the bathrooms and updated everything. That was really what's pushed us forward. We also have done it slowly. Like, we didn't a lot of people come in, you you do this big renovation, you up the rates very quickly. We've done it slowly over time. Like in the beginning, once we got the reno done, we did not push rates super high initially. Like we kept them pretty low because we were more focused on the reviews. We're like, this is very early in the process. We want good reviews right now, more than we want high rates. And so we kind of sacrificed them at that time. Like we our revenue could have been higher, but we were going for a higher occupancy, more review approach. And now we've transitioned over into a higher ADR, lower occupancy kind of now at this time.

Michael Russell 14:10

Hey guys, quick heads up. Malama Capital, our investment arm, is full steam ahead on finding our next hotel acquisition this quarter. If you know of a deal or you're working on something yourself and want to partner up, we'd love to hear about it. We offer a generous finders fee, or if it's a fit, we can bring you into the deal for a slice of the equity and give you a front row seat to the whole process from A to Z. There's a short form linked in the show notes. Just drop your name and a few quick details. And if it looks like a fit, we'll be in touch. Now, back to the show.

Nathan St Cyr 14:43

And you had said that, okay, we did it this way. We were gonna go and look for reviews and take the first year, but if I were to do it over again, I would do it differently. And are you describing is that what you're describing right now?

Austin Phippen 14:55

No, I think when I say I'd do it differently, I would not buy an old motel again and run it the way it was being run the first year. I mean, we didn't have AC our first year, but we were like, do we need it? I mean, the high is 75, typically in July. So, like, do we really need AC? And so, like, all these very basic things that when you think of in a hotel room, we didn't do them initially just because we were like, we want to learn. We don't know. None of us have my wife has a hospitality degree, but it's an events. You know, she's her the wedding venue is her bread and butter. None of us had worked in a hotel. We knew construction and weddings. And so we're like, let's learn before we try to do too much.

Michael Russell 15:34

Yeah, you're describing you're learning by doing. I love that. And you're describing a familiar playbook because we've been there before with with our hostel properties. We started out, we said, let's just go ahead and offer the best guest experience as possible. We'll worry about maximizing revenue and being more efficient and really work on our our bottom line NOI later, but let's just focus on the guest experience and then we know positive results will follow. And it sounds like that's something that you've pursued, but in recognizing, reflecting on what you did, you it sounds like you were a little undercapitalized. You just didn't know what you didn't know. And so going into it, you go, holy heck, cheap thing. Let's buy this, let's operate. And you don't realize, well, the previous owners have had it for a lifetime, and maybe they haven't invested in the capital improvements that now a modern guest prefers or or demands, like air conditioning. And so, well, what does that cost? And you learned after the fact that, oh, I didn't budget for that. So these are all things that people go through the first time around. But the cool thing is you were able to learn by doing and with a relatively little investment. You sell or financed. I don't know what you put down, but the purchase price was nowhere near what some of these other hotels are gonna cost anywhere near a metropolis. So from a risk standpoint and at your age, I mean, you had very little to lose and a lot of time to recover. So I love the gamble. You're just like, look, we don't know what we're doing, but we're gonna hop in and we're gonna do it and we're gonna figure this out. And now you're recognizing, well, we know what to do now. So the next time we go to apply this, we know the formula and we know the steps and we know what to do that's gonna maximize efficiency.

Nathan St Cyr 17:08

When when we look at the Hotel Investor Playbook is our podcast, and and there are playbooks, and there's playbooks within different types of assets. But what I'm noticing is this is like similar to Brett McManus and investors, right? They're they were 25 years old and they went in and and he said something to me that you said the same thing, and all of a sudden it kind of clicked. So the concept in investing in real estate as people are beginning, what one of the very common things is that you hear is well, I'm gonna go and house hack, right? I'm gonna go and buy my duplex and live in half of it, or a fourplex and live in one of them, and then I'll renovate each one as I go. But now I've heard this from both of you is it was like, well, wait a minute. I'm gonna go buy a home and a business. So this motel served as both of these things. Like, okay, cool. Well, I sold my home here, and then I was able to go buy this that acted as my home, and I get to learn and put my sweat equity in to actually creating a viable business that then increases its valuation. And then from there, now you've been, it sounds like growing and scaling and have have hit the next iterations of of the business. So this is like it's it's a different version of how to get involved by starting with a house hack, but it's the motel hack.

Austin Phippen 18:34

Exactly. That's and that's what we've referred to it a lot as. I never knew what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to live in the mountains in a small town so I could ski and hunt and fish and mountain bike. And that's why I'm here and that's why we did it. Is I was like, uh the motel just became a vehicle to get there. And so a lot of the move for a lot of folks like you guys are talking about listening to, like, you can do these in towns you enjoy being in. It just does require a little more sweat. But when you're 25 years old, even if you're older, like you can bring in the money and you're just like, we want to kind of retire. I mean, I look at now what we've learned. Like initially it was, I mean, it was 24-7, we were never off, but like now that we have experience in it, I'm like, if we sold everything and just ran the motel, like if we were if we wanted to move back in, yeah, we could pull a huge salary and hire people to work three, four days of the week. We we could run it three, four days, and it'd be a great lifestyle investment at that point. We just want to grow it more at some point, and we have we have visions of what we want it to be, so that's why we have a team now.

Michael Russell 19:36

Well, look, I want to I want to pivot back to the marketing piece here because you described how you were able to increase the revenue and you talked about how you focused on property improvements and you focused on the guest experience. But what about marketing specifically? How are people finding this? Yeah, you have a website, but who the heck is going to find your website unless like you put effort into Google Ads or social media or whatever? Are you relying on OTAs? Are you doing paid ads? Is it just simply repeat visitors? What's your marketing plan?

Austin Phippen 20:08

So this is kind of something that I think is a hidden hack in a town like this. So there are no, there are really no sophisticated investors here. And there's also no chain hotels. So we do use OTAs, but we use it very little. And other than in like during our busy season, I don't allow any OTA bookings until we're two weeks out. Um, we generate about 85% direct. And honestly, we're like we're not doing Google ads. I mean, our website I is pretty basic. Like we don't love it, but it's the best in town. Like when it comes down to it, we're still best in class in everything. So we don't do any paid ads, but our marketing is being the best. Good operations, good facility. And because there's no other everyone else here in town is mom and pop. The owners live on site, they run it. So we're like we're the only owners in town that we know of that don't operate. There is one Life House hotel managed by Life House in town. I always thought they'd be great. It's so poorly operated that I've never wanted to stay in another Life House property again.

Michael Russell 21:09

Well, well, look, what you're describing, I'm reading between the lines here, but if you do not have to rely on OTAs, then what that means, there's enough demand, just organic demand for this town. People are wanting you to go there, which surprises me because I looked on a map. I had never heard of this place. I'm like, where the heck is it? And why would someone go to this tiny little speck of a place in the middle of what seems to be nowhere? And then I started doing some research. I went to your website. Website's killer, by the way. Like it, your rooms are great. But then what I did, I started reading the Google reviews, and this is where I think what you're describing is you're going out there and you're just being awesome. And that's your marketing.

Austin Phippen 21:45

Operations are our marketing strategy. We do have so there's one national historic landmark in town. We have an old steam engine train that runs from here across the border into Colorado. And so there are very few of them left in the United States. It goes up over 10,000 feet. The ride is insanely beautiful. Tons of movies get filmed on this train. Indian Jones, all the train scenes are on that at the beginning of the movie. And so that brings in a ton of people every year. That plus, I mean, the weather is incredible, especially like you talked about New Mexico and how hot, dry, and arid it is. It's not here. The desert's only two hours away. So like when it's 100 in Albuquerque, it's 80 here. So we get a lot of draw for just the weather alone and how nice it is, and the proximity of not folks not having to drive up to Colorado. So did you know all this before you bought this place? I did because we lived in Durango. Durango's only two hours away. And I mean, like, like you're talking about this place and how surprising it was. When I met my wife, we were in Denver at the time, and she described trauma to me. And she's like, I want to open a wedding venue on my grandfather's ranch. She's like, it's stunning. It would be the most beautiful wedding venue in all in the whole state. And my thought at the time was like, I ain't moving to New Mexico. I'm in Colorado. It's beautiful here. I love the mountains. I'm not going down there. The first time they drove me down here from Durango, it's only two hours. I'm like, it's prettier here than Durango. Yeah. Like, this is Colorado, but nobody's heard of it.

unknown 23:17

Yeah.

Michael Russell 23:17

So you intuitively knew this place is awesome. Did you have any data? Like right now, there's got to be data metrics on how many people are visiting this little town. You said that there's all these draws from the train and from the scenic, just natural scenic beauty. People come hiking and are involved in winter sports and things like this. But how many people are visiting this town a year? Do you know?

Austin Phippen 23:36

I don't even know off the top of my head, to be honest. You just know it's busy as heck. People are coming. It is. And my wife's family's been traveling here for like her grandfather bought this place of almost 50 years ago. And in since that time in the 70s is when this place really started to develop like tourism. Uh-huh. And so they've been coming here forever. So they knew way more than me. They're like, it's busy.

Michael Russell 23:55

Yeah. So sometimes investing is really just like there's there's research, and then there's just knowing personally, intimately an area and knowing, hey, this is this is it, this is gonna work. We know that people want to come here. While we were talking, I looked it up. So I found this review. I wanted to, I wanted to read this review because it's testament to what you guys have done in your efforts to make this place special. Now, I'll preface when I looked up your hotel on Google, the first thing I saw was a roadside motel. And I'm gonna be a little judgy here, but I was like, oh my gosh, look at this place. Respectfully, maybe not so much, but like I had a I had a judgment. But when I read the reviews, it completely changed my perspective. So here goes. This is one of the this is your most recent review. Alex said, we stayed here before and after our snowshoeing trip in southern Colorado, and this place was a perfect 10 out of 10 in every way. The room was incredibly comfortable and spotless, and the customer service was outstanding. The owners are truly amazing. It's clear they genuinely care about making guests feel welcome and ensuring that they have a fantastic experience. They kindly held my work bag while we were out on our trip. And when I accidentally left my headphones behind, they even offered to send them back to me. Their kindness and attention to detail set this place apart. If you're visiting Chama, this is an absolute must-stay. Dang, that's powerful marketing. And it doesn't stop there. I went through, there's there's just review after review after review. You've got, I don't know, 250 reviews and you've got a 4.8, which presuming that initially when you started, some of these air conditioning issues, like that's probably weighing you down. But otherwise, everything that I can see recently is all five star. And so when someone's looking at staying somewhere, they go to Google these days. This is an excellent testament. Now, for comparison's sake, I looked up, there's only a handful of hotels. I went, I looked at another one. I'm not going to name the location, but I'm going to read you the very first review that they have. And it says this from Rachel. This is a different hotel, not yours. It says, My daughter rented a room here. The comforters had sticky stuff on them. Carpets were stained, TV didn't work at all. There were hornets living on the inside of the window seal. Makes you wonder when last cleaned or inspected. I could not believe it until I spoke to my daughters on FaceTime. My daughters both disappointed. Well, it's supposed to say my bodies, my daughters were both disappointed. They left and drove home. That's your competitor.

Austin Phippen 26:24

Sucks is that's people's opinion of town. That like the thing I hate the most, those people will never come back. They won't ever stay with me either, because they'll never come back to this town again.

Michael Russell 26:33

Yeah. I just I don't think you can overstate the value of pouring in to your project and focusing on the guest experience. And this example of reading reviews, I think is really pertinent, not just for marketing purposes, but also during the acquisition stage. When you're reviewing a location, uh, an area or a specific property, you obviously want to add value. So you want to pick the place where they have the sticky stuff on the comforters and the carpets are staying because that's where you can get a good value and then turn it into what you have. And so we're looking at a property right now in California. And when I was doing the due diligence on this, which we often do, I'm reading the reviews for this place, and it's very similar in this nature, but I started looking at the nearby properties as well and reading their reviews and comparing. And this is so important, not just to recognize upside, like value creation in terms of making improvements to the property. But what's cool is you can also learn a lot about the area, which applies in your hotel. I learned a ton about the things to do in this town by reading the reviews, and I could feel the passion that people had for coming and staying in this town that they, it was actually an attractive place to go. So reading the reviews, it's it's part market research, it's part acquisition strategy, ways you can develop more revenue in the future and add value. But it also gives you an idea of not just the specific property, but the general area. This property in California, it talked about all the different attractions, how close the transportation system is, what the nearby restaurants are, how walkable, how clean it is. And so that gives me confidence that I'm able to invest somewhere remotely without having been there and not actually from two hours down the road. My family didn't grow up there, but reading reviews isn't just specific to the property, it's specific to the area. And I found that to be very relatable to your situation here.

Austin Phippen 28:25

Yeah, I totally agree.

Nathan St Cyr 28:27

And then those reviews, Mike, what you just shared gave us the first step, right? The reviews of that area were like, okay, let's go there. And then when you go there, and then you actually feel what those reviews were saying, and you're like, holy crap, we have an absolute freaking gem on our hands, right? By going there and experiencing and feeling what those reviews said. You're I that's why I said I'm like, damn, man, when you read those reviews to me, I didn't believe it. And then we just came back from there, and I was like, dude, the the reviews were not just right on, but that place is special. I had no idea. So yeah, completely agree.

Austin Phippen 29:09

And talking about like that in reviews and like purchase and acquisition, I mean, because we really didn't know. We're one of the few, like our property at our motel is not ideal for this area. All of the other, like the review you probably read, that that property is probably stunning. Most of the hotels are along the river, and so they have beautiful cottonwood trees, they're all in the shade. You can walk down to the river to fish or float or do whatever. And we're right off the highway. Um, we don't really have any property. But initially, for us, without having any idea, like that worked out great for us because our property requires so much less maintenance. We were able to focus because we're splitting our time building two businesses of building this guy plus building our wedding venue. And we're also at the main turn towards the next town, towards Podosa Springs, Colorado. So, like in the winter, when the weather sucks, we are getting people there, they haven't seen a town for an hour and they're driving in the snow, they're stopping and pulling in and staying with us. And like, these are things we didn't know in like that you're talking about walkability and things like that. We didn't know those things initially, but they are huge when you're doing your research of where you want to be. Yes, like we're kind of in this neat little hole, our motel of on a weekend, our rates are pretty darn high because we're bringing in a lot of folks for our weddings, and there's a lot of people in town to ride the train, fish, do whatever. Our rates are pretty high then, but because we're just a standard roadside motel, purchase price was so good, we draw a little bit of everybody. So during the week, we have we might have construction workers in the hotel. Like it's a I mean, it's a pretty and the rooms are nice, but like we still fit the mold of filling so many holes. Like, I and everybody always talks about niche down, niche down, be specific, know your customer. And it's not something we have found to be true. I do believe it is true, but it's not something we have seen in this business specific.

Michael Russell 30:57

Yeah, I love this because we've talked about this all the time. Like, hey, how can we go and we can just buy these properties from folks that are tired that are that wanna? I mean, you literally had someone asking you to take it off his hands. Like, usually it's the opposite. You're trying so hard to find a deal and convince someone to sell it to you out of value, but the opposite occurred. Well, why doing with the the stream instead of against it? Right. And if it's possible to go and acquire these different properties and identify these metrics that you're talking about, demand and these little nuances of what could whether it's two hours so people stop there overnight because it's convenient or there's construction people, or whatever the K truckers or whatever it may be, is this feasible? And that's ultimately our question. I don't know in listening to you if it is feasible for us. We're not gonna move there. We're we're middle-aged men, we're yeah, families.

Austin Phippen 31:48

No, you I mean, you have to have size, and I think that's what I was trying to get across. Like, you have to have size, and that number to me, to build what we're doing now, because like my our team, we're training, I'm still doing it. So, like when I said we had an on-site manager, they manage the motel, so they manage the 16 rooms, and then I manage the other hotel, and then I manage the vacation rents. So, what we're doing now is we're bringing in the revenue from all these different lodging businesses, and we're combining them to hire a team that is there is. I mean, like, we're in the we this just started in March. So, like, this is all brand new. So, like, as of yesterday, I passed off our other hotel design. And so, like, they're now managing our front desk is running this four-room hotel that's a mile away, and our front desk is managing the 16-room hotel.

Michael Russell 32:35

You're taking over the town.

Austin Phippen 32:37

So, but then the goal for them is to manage the 12 vacation rentals as well. I'm still doing those currently, but that's like the next step in the in this process. And so, like, I think the number, like, if you just want to get a hard number of what you need, it's gonna be different for location like California. This this number's not correct, but around a million dollars in just net revenue is about what you need to be able to hire out a full operations team. I think that's the magic number based off what I've seen. Nope. We feel the same way. Okay, like moving forward, I know that now. Yep, because I've done it so many iterations of it, I now know that it's the learn by doing. So, like if you could acquire, like there are a couple properties here that are big enough that could do a million dollars if operated correctly. You could buy a place like that, but you're probably talking closer to 40, 50 keys, like minimum. And like, that's what's nice about what we're doing is by by combining things, we're able to buy these smaller assets that no one else is interested in. There's not competition to buy unless you want to move in and be a hotel operator.

Michael Russell 33:41

Well, so all right, you you kind of already explained this, but if we just button this up, so if someone is interested in purchasing a ro rural motel listing for under a million dollars, but they're unsure where to start, I mean, what advice would you give them?

Austin Phippen 33:55

If you're gonna go rural, I think it has to be somewhat passion, like to start. Like if you're not interested in a place, it's not going to work because it is hard. Everything here is hard. Our nearest lumber yards an hour away. I mean, everything rurally is more difficult. There's a reason people have moved to cities and have gone there. So I think it has to start with passion. I think Brett would even say the same thing, like of their project. I've seen it. If you don't love the place, you're not gonna stick it out till you get to the point that we've gotten to now, because the initial investment is gonna be some sweat. So it's gotta start with the passion.

Nathan St Cyr 34:29

You're right. And he was, it was his his passion was was mountainside. They wanted to have that ski, snowboard, mountainside throughout the year. That was his that was their passion, that was their dream. And so I think when you have some, when you have that why is big enough, and that why is actually your lifestyle and and dream, then you're willing to put in for the extended period of time that it takes to put in that sweat equity to figure out if it's gonna be financially viable. And and in both of your cases, it it has been, and you guys have done a really nice job.

Austin Phippen 35:01

Yeah, it has been, yeah. We hope to grow it. I mean, like the hard part that like people ask us all the time. It's like, what are you guys gonna do next? What's going on? And I'm like, I know what it took to get to get what we've got. And so that's what does scare me at this point. If we do grow, and we've had people talk to us, it'll be a different market. We're pretty tapped out for this little town, but probably going forward. And we're we're surrounded. What's awesome where we're at is we're surrounded by, I mean, national and international travel destinations within two hours of here. There's multiple of them.

Michael Russell 35:31

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're relative to us here, young guy. You got a good head on your shoulders, and you're gaining a lot of valuable experience. I also know you're doing some coaching, you're helping folks that want to kind of live a similar lifestyle and pursue something that you've done. If our listeners want to get in touch with you, they want to follow your story and your journey. How can they stay in touch with you?

Austin Phippen 35:50

Yeah. I'd say my email, I've done a little bit of consultation with people who are looking at buying and operating and rural. I would say like that. I mean, from this conversation, you can tell like that's our specialty is rural hospitality. So you my email, I can I'll give it out on here if you guys want.

Michael Russell 36:04

Sure. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes too.

Austin Phippen 36:06

Yeah. Austin at turquoiseantler.com. You can find us there. That's the best way to get a hold of me on Instagram as well. You can just search Austin Fippen, that'll be in the show notes, I'm sure, here as well.

unknown 36:17

Cool.

Austin Phippen 36:17

Not super active there or LinkedIn, but email's the best way to get a hold of me. I'll I answer everybody back.

Michael Russell 36:22

Right on. Well, this has been a great conversation. Appreciate you being on the show. We are Mike and Nate. He is Austin Phippen, and this is another episode of the Hotel Investor Playbook. We will catch you again next week. Aloha. Thanks for hanging out with us today on the Hotel Investor Playbook. If you got even one good nugget of wisdom about hotel investing, do us a favor, hit that subscribe button and leave us a five-star review. And hey, if you're feeling extra generous, drop a quick line in the review section. Something like Mike and Nate are the go-to hotel investing guys, or best podcast for anyone looking to crush it in hospitality. Or, you know, whatever feels right. Those little shout-outs go a long way in helping more people find the show. And they pretty much make our day. All right. Appreciate you guys. Catch you next time.