Everybody. It is Ken & Danille. Hello.
So we are here with Jack.
Hey, what's up, Jack?
Jack Walker. He.
Jack has a big Airbnb company.
And we're excited to have you on because there's a lot of people, like,
first of all. Home prices are.
They're sky high.
So people are looking at Airbnb as ways to still buy
so I'm excited to have you on because it's like this new.
It's always been there, but now it's like almost a necessity for for for buying.
So it's true. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.
We also know you are.
Yeah, we did do a webinar.
It's now on our premium page.
But Jack's, you know, we want to have you on because the webinar
was so great and I think so many people are starting to do Airbnbs.
And I have friends that are starting to do Airbnbs, and people
make a lot of mistakes, you know, when they're trying to do it on their own.
And I think that you add a lot of valuable insight and you also add insight
to what to look for in an Airbnb company if you go that route as well.
Right, right.
And so before we start, I think it's important that you talk
about your background because a guy is like this.
This is a business like it's not something that you just like
throw some tenants in there and put some furniture
and like you've taken it
like to another level, which is really why we wanted to have you on.
I know Danielle already did an interview with you.
It's people I think sometimes think real estate is like a stock.
You know, you buy it, you go away.
Same thing with Airbnb.
But it's there's a it's actually hard it's extremely difficult.
Yeah. It takes a lot of time.
There's a lot of time constraints, too.
There is a so much that goes into it that most people do not understand.
So happy to add value to to your to your following.
Let's start on your journey. So my journey,
it's been a long journey.
So, you know, I'm 27 now, right?
I started in entrepreneurship when I was 19.
I got my real estate license when I was 19.
I got it through a business elective classes kind of by mistake or
I hit 19, got my real estate license, started selling houses.
So fast forward 21, 22, 23.
I'm starting to make six figures now.
I'm starting to sell multiple houses, 20 plus houses a year.
Here's what happened with the Airbnb business.
Okay, so at 23 years old, so five years ago
we started our company, BKC, my business partner.
There's three of us who own the company.
My business partner, Patrick, he's, he's my mentor, right?
He's in his fifties or I use mentoring me as a young guy.
He showed me how to sell real estate, right? Yep.
And Patrick was going to flip a house here in 85 to five for the buyers.
Came to Patrick and said
hey we want to, you know, he had it listed, we want to buy the house.
And Pat's like, why, you know, curious, you know,
you guys are in Canada, why do you want to buy the house?
They're like, we want to do Airbnb.
So my partner Patrick is like, Wow, that's, that's interesting.
Let me look into that. Right.
So five years ago, it was, you know, five years ago
the Airbnb market was not as prevalent as it is today.
He actually Patrick took that house off the market and he listed it on Airbnb.
Right.
It was our first one.
I wasn't really involved yet at this time.
Naturally, Patrick helped Patrick and I and us helped sell these Canadians.
They had a fund of about 6 million bucks.
We helped them buy three homes for Airbnb, and they needed a management company.
So now we got four, right? It's crazy.
And then the person across the street
was moving and saw like all these cars coming in and out, started
seeing the numbers, and they're like, Oh, we want to do that, too.
So now we had five and then six.
And then and then fast forward to present day.
Right now, we're at about 60 properties with about
$75 million of assets under company management.
And we'll do a little over 10 million in sales this year.
Crazy. So what are some of the.
How about pick on yourself?
Like what are some mistakes that you made, you know, in the beginning now?
And what have you tightened up,
you know, in the, in the six or seven years of doing it?
So the first mistake that comes to mind was I used to call myself trash man.
Jay right?
I would literally drive to these eight properties
and pull up the trash out and then the next day pulled the trash in.
And the funny part is, is a lot of properties,
as you know, the recycle will go out on one day in the trash on the other day.
So I call myself trash man Jay until I figured out a company shot out Kan Monkey.
We were one of the first to use them.
They're actually pretty big now.
They they made a beautiful subscription model.
It's 35 a month and they so we hire them on all of our properties
and they simply just they show up to the house.
We all the cans out the next day after they're emptied, we'll the cans back
is awesome. It's quite what a great service.
The second thing that the mistake was linens right.
Linens is is such a difficult I keep hearing you got to really go high
end you've got to go high in on linens and you have to buy constantly.
But the mistake that that most of our competitors make is
they they have
linens that are particularly tied to each property.
Right.
So let's say red linens go to red house blue linens go to.
So what we've done is we've made them universal, right?
So we have we have all of our owners buy into a
the same linens that we've been using for several years.
We found a company and everybody needs to buy their. Correct.
And then the cleaning team can use the linens on any property.
Right.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't have to be red to this house. Okay.
They're all white and gray and that up made that really efficient.
Made that efficient because we don't want to do any laundry inside the property.
That's another mistake.
Laundry inside the property.
You're using the washer and dryer often right.
It's going to the more you use the washer and dryer like like that.
It's not it's not designed a washer and dryer is designed for a family,
you know, a couple of times a week
not like every three or four days, like eight loads.
We have a couple of different models with different cleaning teams,
but we have a laundry service that picks up and drops off
four times a week at their office. Right.
So it's it's super efficient.
They let us know all the damaged linens
and then we replenish them as they need them.
So so sounds to me like you've just taken every piece,
including pots and pans and everything that's done.
And you pick one, maybe two preferred vendors
and you say That's it, that's non-negotiable.
That's correct. Yeah.
So like for a blender, for example, a lot of,
you know, we made mistakes by buying the cheapest stuff sometimes, right?
You want you want to save cost.
Saved us. But Vitamix. Exactly.
But you want to get like like we buy the ninja blender.
Yeah, it's 75 middle ground.
I'm not looking to get a $300 blender, but I'm not looking to get the $10 special
either you want it's going to get use a lot.
So you want to get the one in the middle
for most most because the person that's going to pay 500 a night plus.
Right.
Is going to want that kind of blender and they're you so. Right.
They have it at home or the coffee maker. Yeah. Right, right, right.
That makes sense.
Now do you inventory all of those items or how does that work?
We do it.
So once a quarter we have an inventory sheet
and we'll go through the properties and see what's been damaged
because guests break a lot of stuff, right?
Wineglasses in particular is the one thing like it seems like
every six months I have to get wineglasses, people knocking them over
and then you know, it's not so efficient to take inventory like once a month or so.
That's what we do every quarter.
But, you know, we do listen to the guests and that's why our company is so valuable
as our service right?
So there's a lot of times
where a guest is like, hey,
the blender doesn't work well, it'll be there in an hour.
So, Deac, you know, when you so now people are you know, they're self-managing,
maybe they're self-managing. Their own property.
How do they know when it makes sense to hire a company like yours?
I think there's a lot of points with that.
Number one, I we all know
the police officer who's also a realtor.
Right.
And we all know that when you do a couple things
at a time, it's not going to you're not going to perform at its best.
Right.
So I've always had this notion and belief
that like because I've had some different opportunities
come up, but I've stayed focused on just one thing.
So I think that if if people who are self-managing,
I think that you're going to make so much more.
I think it's a it's a revenue play as well as just a piece of mind play, too.
So I think revenue and peace of mind is going to be it's going to be your best,
best bet.
They're with hiring a management company.
So you think that their revenue would increase
and then their peace of mind as well?
Absolutely.
Like there's there's some of our competitors that charge 17%
or 15% or whatever.
But we ran the numbers against them and you're actually going to make more
when you pay us our 25%. Right?
What we charge 25% major property.
Another thing with us is I really want to take care of my clients assets, right?
Like I really want to make sure they're, you know, salt's
being add to the water softener and their air filters are changed and we're doing
light bulb checks like we have we have this dialed in right at scale.
Now I can understand like when you have just one singular
property, it's a bit different.
But when you when you start to scale things again, yeah, that's great.
Yeah. That's when things get wobbly.
It's like, how do you define success in your company?
In what sense?
Like for like the the owners or the employees
or my my guess or my owners or just kind of anything.
I would say, like if you're going to get a client.
Okay, so most of our clients,
it's, it's, it's revenue.
Awesome. Jack. Well, thanks for being on the show.
How can people get a hold of you
if they have any questions on Airbnb or you have questions about your company?
Yeah.
So Instagram is going to be the best way for me.
Jack Walker, Z and then our, our business.
Instagram is vacancy vaca. Yeah.
Vaca Y, Z,
you can also, you know,
hit us up to our website, but I'm pretty available through Instagram.
Okay, great.
And we'll put all that in the show notes on YouTube and the show notes as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'd love to see where you guys are heading with all this.
It's I'm sure you're going to scale up.
It's exciting and congrats on everything, man.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me. You guys are awesome.
I appreciate you guys.
Very honored. Thanks for coming in. You bet. Yeah. Thank you.