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Welcome to Real Talk Real Estate, the show where we cover how to build wealth in real estate with no fluff, no BS and no sales pitches. I'm David Green and I've been doing this for over 10 years. I've seen the ups, the downs, and everything in between. This is the show where we pull back the curtain and show it to you too. So if you want to build wealth through real estate or you just love learning about it, you found your home. Alright. Now today's show is actually a continuance of last week's show which was part one of the Bear Cub in Transformation. We kind of shared a lot of the before and after pictures. We talked about the struggles that we had when we got the property. We talked about the fact that the property manager kept all of the money and then some because of all of the expenses that were associated with it and how horrible that was. Well, in today's show, we're going to get into what we did that turned it around. We are going to talk about how your pricing is so important and tips and tricks that other people aren't sharing unless you pay a whole bunch of money to be in a course. And we're going to tell you how we manage my properties to make them profitable and how we can help you do the same for yours. So thanks for being here. Angela, welcome to the show again.
B
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
A
I'm glad to hear that. I think everybody's excited to see you because they're going to try to figure out how are you guys making STRs work in an environment where they suck. So let's get into part two.
B
If you're looking to do small upgrades and you don't want to spend a lot of money, you also don't have to do it all at once. So like David mentioned, there are some photos that we think are ugly, but they weren't that important for the photos. Can you see them? Yes. Is it going to be a make or break for someone booking it? Probably not because we changed the comforters as David mentioned earlier. We'll go to it again. But we changed some small things that made a very big difference in the photos. And I think that those things were most important to, like you said, break up the color with the pine and the wood and the yellows and the browns so you can do some of those things. You don't have to spend $100,000 and replace everything at once and replace all the chandeliers and the lighting and the comforters and the artwork, you can do it and get the biggest bang for your buck. What's going to make the photos look the best? And that's obviously something we can help with too. But you don't have to do it all at once. Because I was in this position where when I had my beach house, I'm like, I have money to buy this house. I don't have a lot of money to update it. So went to Home Goods and Hobby Lobby, and my mom taught me to never buy anything full price. So I'm really good at finding a good deal, and that's what I did. So, yeah, you don't have to do it all at once. I think it's one of the other big.
A
And we kind of talked about that. Do we go one cabin at a time and do every one of them as good as we can and then get the picture because that feels cleaner, or do we kind of shotgun as much as we can of what would make the other ones better to try to get them booking just because they're not booking at all? Ultimately, I think we made the right call. So when you go big on one cabin, your other ones are going to be struggling. Now, hopefully most people don't take over 12 properties at one time in one area, like we had to do. Hopefully people are only going one at a time, so you kind of can do that. But the thoughts were, let's break this into three tiers. We've got stuff that's like the most bang for the buck. Adding some of these arcade games that are used, adding some wall art, changing the comforters, getting pops of color in this thing, getting a fire pit in the backyard. That to me, highest ROI we're going to get. What's the next tier? Okay, let's improve the bathrooms, let's improve the kitchens. Let's go in and maybe add like a more expensive amenity. This might be hanging. This might be adding some hanging egg chairs, putting some furniture in the. The very front deck like. Like where we have the buffalo plaid rug. We could get some nicer stuff. We could even hang some chairs from the rafters right there. And then you got your third tier. This is like expensive amenities. This is if you're going to build the cowboy pool with the deck around it, that's when you would do it. So we just started with, where's the most ROI you can get? Get new pictures taken. Get those on Airbnb and vrbo. Now, here's why that benefits you. You're now getting bookings, you're getting Money that you weren't getting. The money that you got from phase one can fund phase two. Now you've got phase two. Now your ADR goes up, your occupancy goes up. Now you've got even more money. If you want to do phase three versus we're going to spend $150,000 and blow this thing out and have an incredible like themed property that people say do great. Yeah, it's going to be seven years before you get your money back on some of those things. And that's assuming that you do. So that was our thoughts. I think that it went well. When I look at it though, I still see what could be better. So at some point we probably will do another round. We'll go find a place that we can get some stuff, we'll order it, there'll be a sale away for Amazon Prime Day and then we'll send the photographer back and just like, hey, can you take another round of pictures? And no one likes paying for pictures, but if you get one more booking for a couple of days, that is more than what you paid the photographer to do. And you can see the difference in the pictures between what we had and where we went. That's definitely going to get us one more booking. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So we're going to share how abysmal it was when we got it and how hard it was to get bookings with a brand new property on the OTAs. And then we're going to share since we had those pictures taken. Actually, I don't even know if it was since we had them. I think we've only had them for like a month. Right, the photos, the final photos.
B
Oh, yeah. We haven't had them that long.
A
So I think the last. We're going to share what we've done the last two months of the last two months. One of those months, the most recent was the pictures you saw. And the month before that was the, what I called the progress photos that were taken with our cell phones of the work we did ourselves. So, Angela, the fir from when we got it, basically January through. Was it July? Seven months through July. Yes, January through July. What was the gross revenue for this cabin?
B
The gross revenue was about $13,000.
A
Ouch. Thirteen grand. Now, as much as that hurts, that is still 17 grand more than when somebody else was managing it and keeping all of the money. Okay, so keep this in context, folks. It didn't go from 52 to 13. It went from negative 4400 to positive 13. That's a $17,000 swing. But. But obviously 13 grand is not good. That's a result of having old pictures that were terrible and deferred maintenance that we had to deal with. And what's the other thing I was going to say, not being ranking high in the algorithm, you have to get reviews, you have to get stays. You need staying power for Airbnb and VRBO to feel good. Putting you at the top of the algorithm. They don't want crappy houses because then the person's not going to book on Airbnb again, they're not going to book on vrbo. They're going to go to booking, they're going to go to whatever the new thing, Airbnc, whatever that's going to be. So since the pictures were taken, how's.
B
It been since the pictures were taken? Also, we use Hospitable. If you haven't talked about this before. Yes, very easy to see your metrics in Hospitable. I can click around and find this stuff super easily, even though I look at this every single day. But since we've had pictures taken, our occupancy has increased by 23%, which I knew they were going to be good. When we updated the cabin and then we got new photos, we knew that was going to happen. But 23% is pretty, I mean, I, I feel pretty good about that.
A
Yeah. And the revenues doubled.
B
Yeah. So we, yeah, it was. The revenue in the last two months is two time. Yeah, it's double what it was from even December of last year. So we had Christmas and then we had July, which is the busiest month in the Smokies. All of those things considered, we still outperformed with making these simple changes, inexpensive new photos. We doubled our revenue and increased occupancy by 23%.
A
Now this cabin, which was just struggle busing hard, four wheel drive, struggle bus. We were lucky to get a two day stay. We were looking for those people that were like, oh crap, we didn't book a cabin. We need an emergency. Where are we going to go? This is what's open. It's very different. Now. What is the average guest staying for when they book this property?
B
Yeah, so we previously we were at about 3.9 days. That was the average person, that was the average stay of a guest. And now we've increased that to about 6.7 days. So what that tells me is they see these photos and they see the amenities and they say, well, oh, this is a place I could be comfortable For a week with my family. So we, again, it's a smaller cabin. So you're often, often getting a couple with a couple of kids. We've had people, parents bring their adult kids and they're in the smokies hiking and taking advantage of all the things that the smokies has. But yeah, so now they're seeing this as a place, oh, I can stay for a while and be comfortable for five days, six days, seven days, and they don't. It's not just a tiny little cabin. They'll be cramped and uncomfortable.
A
All right, let's get into how to make money in real estate. So when you're in a short term rental, your. Your revenue is gonna be based on two things, your occupancy and your average daily rate. So you want them both high, you want people staying there more, booking more, and you want them to pay more for all their bookings. But those things have an inverse relationship. The more you charge per night, the less bookings you're going to get. So you can't just say, well, I'm going to charge 500 bucks a night because I want to make up for all the people that didn't book. You'll lose it to the other people that are charging less. So our strategy here was let's sprint to get high occupancy. Let's just get people in the cabin making some kind of money and see what more deferred maintenance is needed, what they like, what they don't like, what kind of people are visiting, who's booking it. Like, let's get a feel. Once we get to that point that occupancy was high, we're like, all right, now we're going to look at how to get more per night, and we're going to play with that and continually increase it until we go too high and we're not getting bookings. And then we'll just lower right back to where we were. And we kind of know this is about the most we can get for this property in its current condition. And at that point, we go back to the drawing board, you start the cycle over. That's where we get the new lamps, the new artwork, maybe some new furniture. We maybe paint. We get the new. We paint the cabinets, and we get rid of that valence that I hate in the kitchen. We add some cornhole to the decks. Like, we get some more, like, work done. And now we can probably bump that average daily rate again. Is there anything you want to share when it comes to the strategy of, like, it's only been two months, so I think the revenue is going to keep climbing. I, I would picture myself that we have about 50% more revenue that we can get to if we give this thing time. We continue to get good reviews and we get it pumped up a little bit. But like, for people that are managing properties that are struggling because most people are, their short term rentals are not doing well, what advice do you have based on what you learn from how this one turned around in the process I just described?
B
First of all, I'd say look at your competition you mentioned earlier, we are looking at tons. We're looking at our competition every single day. So there's a lot of ways to do that which I'm not going to get into because it'll take too long. But look at your competition. I look at their calendar, who's booked? Maybe they're booked, but maybe their rates are really low. There are a lot of ways to see what your competition's doing, who's booked, what amenities are people looking for. And I think that people, the mistake that they make is they buy properties in these, I guess you can call them hot markets, whether it's a beach market or a mountain market, whatever it is. And they don't know anything about the actual guest that's staying there. So, so is it just, is it just couples going to this area? Like your Destin Florida market's gonna be very different than the Smokies. Like your avatar is gonna be very different. So first of all, you need to know who you're who if you're struggling and you are the person that said it and forget it, which I did the same thing. We're all guilty of it to some extent. Figure out who your avatar is, figure out who your guest is. Who are you trying to market to? Are you trying. And some people in the Smokies, they're have studio cabins, they're only renting to a couple. They don't want kids, that's fine. But if you do, people have kids, you want arcade games, you want get, you want board games, you want a tv, you want stuff for them to do, stuff for people to entertain their kids with while they can also enjoy their trip. So I think that's one of the big things. And just figuring out how, if you want to spend a lot of money, that's fine. But most people in this market are not trying to spend a lot of money on upgrading their cabins. They're like, well, I can't get rid of this thing and I gotta keep It. So what do I do? Look for those inexpensive ways. Look for those creative ways, which again, is something that we can help with. Because I think, David, the one thing that you and I are good at is not looking, is not putting a cookie cutter approach to every single property. So, you know, you have a property that's very close to the one that we just showed, and it's a completely different guest experience then. And it's all. It's a little bit bigger, but it's a completely different guest experience. So I think you have to look at it from the lens of not. Not a cookie cutter approach, because every cabin is going to be different.
A
And the reason we do it that way or that I do it that way. And then by extension, Angela and all the other people that work with me is I feel like every property has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. The location, the drive, the view, the floor plan, the. The size, the type of person that's going there. And what I want to do is figure out what. Who is this property meant to appeal to and how do I maximize that? Not how do I make it fit the mold of a property that was made completely different. And that's a feel thing. Like, what's the best use of this space? What kind of rug should I put here? Should I be putting a rug? Do I want to put anything on the ceiling? What color paint should I be using? What would. If you're looking at the pictures, what's going to catch your attention and pull you in? What order do I want to put them in? And if you're struggling with that, if you're a numbers person, if you're just looking at a spreadsheet and you're like, I just want to be able to get more money or more revenue, you're probably the guy or the gal who thinks about the algorithm. You're probably trying to figure out what word to put in your listing description. You're asking chat GPT, how do I do this? Well, here's what I don't like about that. That's what everyone else is doing too. You're just homogenizing your property to look and sound like everything people saw. And that is not what catches a human being's attention. There has to be something that grabs you. It has to look different. Okay, so like, one thing that we'll do, literally Angela and I, is we will look at all the top performing Airbnbs and we will look for patterns in their hero shots, the COVID photos. And what I noticed is a lot of them are Color related. So it's super popular right now to get this shot of like the Thomas Kincaid look purple sky drone shot. All the lights on in the house, yellow glow cafe lights outside, perfect box cabin inside a perfect bigger square. Okay, that's doing really well. Those ones are showing up well, you know what, people are going to get over saturated with that. They're going to just the reticular activating system is going to turn off and they're going to not like it. What? Your first picture is not supposed to look like all the other ones. Your first picture is supposed to make them want more. So what can you do that's different but still appealing? If everyone else has got purple colors, I want bright green. If everybody else is putting bright green, maybe I need like the best shot of the bathroom. And the another thing that we'll do with a lot of the cabins is the hero shot. Won't just be one picture, we'll make like a collage so you get a good woo that looks nice and then underneath it three smaller pictures of other features of the cabin that hopefully have really bright colors. So like if we do a movie room and you have like a dark movie room with really nice like LED lighting around it that will catch attention when juxtapose with a picture like you saw for this cabin with all green, the black will stand out and make them like what is that? Oh, that looks cool. Click. That's what I needed. I just needed you to get interested in me and click on me. And then once you click, those first five pictures have to be like whoa, that thing is awesome. That's what you're looking for with your cabin. You're going to have to work to get there. And it's not just cabins. This is going to be the case. If you've got a midterm rental in Columbus, Ohio, this is going to be the case. If you got a short term rental on the beach, this is the case. If you got a condo in Hawaii or a five bedroom property in Cincinnati, it has to be something different that people don't see all the time and then it has to be something that makes them go wow. So with that in mind, hopefully everybody who's listening to this can kind of go back to the drawing board with their rentals and see what they can do to make some improvements and get some other pictures taken. If you guys would like us to manage it for you or would like to hire us to help you with the design package that is budget friendly. Angela, can you tell them where they can reach out to you and talk to you.
B
Yeah, absolutely. So a couple ways you can reach us. Reach out to us on Instagram, which is ctcgetaways. You can email us infoasttocoastgetaways.com you can also check out our direct booking website, which is coasttocoastgetaways.com but the best way, I would say, is probably email.
A
There you go. Check out the site and let us know what you think. I'm going to be writing blog articles on there about different vacation rental areas. So if you guys are listening to this, you're like, I want to go to the beach. Send us an email. Tell us. Let us know. Make sure you do in the email. Hey, I'm a subscriber to the David Green Show. Angela has been told if you guys are a loyal subscriber and fan, that we will give you pretty healthy discounts. So let us know if you want to go to Maui, if you want to go to Fort Lauderdale, if you want to go to New York, if you want to go to the Smoky Mountains, wherever you are, and if you've got a property and you would like to be performing better, we've got a lot of people that book our properties that are in our email list and that come through our direct booking site, are featured in our newsletter, and we can get you better in the algorithm with Airbnb like we're doing for our own. So please do reach out as well if you would like someone else to take over the headache of looking at it. You know, one thing we didn't talk about, Angela, actually, before we go here, is pricing. What I notice is there are three kinds of people. There are the people that say, I don't use dynamic pricing. I don't use pricing tools. I just come up with a price with Airbnb or vrbo and I don't pay attention. That person's probably not listening to us right now, but they exist. Then there are other people that use the pricing tools. What are a couple of the common ones? You got Price labs. What else do you have?
B
Airdna Price Labs. Yeah, I. The best one. We use Price labs. I'll come out and say that because right now they do have all of the levers, the different levers we can pull. Sometimes you can't pull price on. You can't change price. I mean, you can. You can always change the price. Price. Right. But sometimes that's not. Is that may not be the reason why your cabin is not booking or your property is not booking. So price Labs has a lot of different levers that you can pull, but.
A
There'S some other companies, what are the other ones people use?
B
Hospitable has dynamic pricing now, which is our property management.
A
So that's your second tier. You've got dynamic pricing where pricing adjusts based on demand combined with seasonal pricing where you set a baseline based on the season that you're actually in. And that's what like your, your higher level operator is going to be doing that. They're going to be paying money to have these tools. The third person is what you really want to be and nobody is. And that's the hybrid of I start with a baseline of dynamic pricing and seasonal pricing and then I add a human element where I tweak it daily. I look and see what's booking, what's not booking. Like we have some other cabins that are just non stop. We can't get them to, we can't get openings. Right. We're always pushing the price up on that, especially if it's further out. Let's see how high we can go for this thing. And then we have others where it's like, okay, in, in, there's nothing coming up for this weekend, there's nothing coming up for next weekend. We could get nothing or we could get something. We're going to lower the price on that. And it's not just pricing by the way folks, you have to be paying so much attention to this that you're also looking at what is your minimum day stay. Because my philosophy is if I drop my price 20% below my competition, but I get another two days, I get a five day stay instead of a three day stay. I made way more money. I don't want those days in between the weekends. I want them to be as booked up as possible. Okay, so we are much more likely to say hey, it's a minimum of six days, it's a minimum of five days. When we're in peak season, you want this beautiful cabin, you to want. You're going to have to book it for six days, you're going to have to book it for five days. But then once we get like two months out, three months out, we will drop that. Okay, a four day stay will work here, a three day stay will work here and then ultimately we will end up dropping the price to get there. But if you're not looking at this, if you think that you can set it and forget it and let the computer do that for you, you're just going to miss out. And if you're the owner operator who does it yourself because you want to save money or you're like me, you were getting ripped off. Whatever the case would be. You probably don't realize how much you're leaving on the table by not having a person with a fresh set of eyes look at it and say, we could get better pictures and we could change this. We could get more longer bookings. If we do it this way, we could improve your adr. We, there's an event coming up in the area that we know about. We are advertising to Jeep weekend or we're advertising to the card show or advertising a rod run or whatever the case is. We're putting stuff in our listings that's like huge flat driveway for your lowered cars. Right. Garage parking for your Jeeps. We're looking at the stuff that your normal person listening to me, you're like, man, David, this podcast is an hour and a half. I don't have time. I got to get to work. You think you're going to have time to look at your short term rental the way you need to be to be able to beat the competition? I think that's one of the reason people are struggling right now, is when there was crazy demand, you didn't need to look at it that much. It was just booking on its own. Now you're in a crazy competition. Your competition's full time at this. If you're not, you're probably losing. Do you want to add anything? Which is because you're the person who's looking at pricing every day and you're the person looking at our competition and you're the one grabbing ideas from what other people did and we're like, ooh, we could go try this.
B
Yeah. I mean, I was about to say the whole pricing and minimum stay conversation, that could be an episode on its own that all of our nerds can listen to, because that's really what it is. But there are so many settings in price labs and we actually create market dashboards for every single one of the properties that we manage. And it will help guide us. But we can see kind of where the market trends are. But if like David, like you're saying, David, if you're not looking at all of those events, if you don't know the events that are going on, I mean, I'm so tuned in to not just price labs, but also Facebook groups, which I don't love being on social media all the time, but I'm on all of these groups, so I know about all of the events that are going on. And even the small ones, I know that, okay, there's a motorcycle event. Well, these people are looking for a cabin. This cabin's not going to work for them. But this one will. I mean, I was laying in bed and I actually just did this this morning where we had someone that was trying to stay in a cabin and I knew it wasn't going to be a good fit for them because of the reason why they were there. So I looked at her calendar. I said, hey, we actually have this one available. They switched to the other cabin right away. It was super easy. I got them while they were still thinking about it. But, yeah, I mean, the whole pricing conversation can be a whole other episode. There's so many strategies that people are just, like you said, leaving money on the table. There's, there's orphan gaps, there's last minute pricing, there's discounted last minute pricing. There's. You can set up codes in hospitable to see if people want to come a day early or stay a day later or. Oh, there's so many levers people can pull and so many people aren't doing that. And so the last thing I want to say is that it's a tough market out there ever. It's, it's, it's really, really hard right now. And so don't be discouraged. If you're one of these people that are struggling. There are little things you can do that you can tweak and we can help you with that stuff or keep listening to the podcast. We'll share some of it, not all of it on here for obvious reasons, but there's, there are little things that you can do. If you're stuck, let us know. We see how we can help you.
A
Absolutely. And I would recommend that you don't delay this because it doesn't get better three months down the road, six months down the load. If you're not committed to this, your competition is they're just three months further ahead than you. They're just six months further ahead than you. And we know that because we had a cabin that we took over and just threw it out there like it had been done before. And we see what it was making. It wasn't doing very well. It took a lot of effort to get this one to where it's at. And we think it's going to keep doing better. But if you're not doing that, you're just falling behind. All the people that are. The guests are booking that cabin instead of yours. The guests are booking that beach house instead of yours, you had one in Crystal beach, right?
B
Crystal Beach, Texas.
A
Yeah. And you were told this was a hot market. You got to get in there, everybody's doing great, and you bought one. And what was your experience?
B
It was not great. I knew within probably six months. Oh, shoot. What did I just do? I just put $100,000 in, which was a lot of money for me. This is the first time.
A
That's your down payment, right?
B
Yeah. Put $100,000 into this house. And I knew so quickly, oh, my gosh, this was a mistake, and I didn't have the money. I mean, the market's not great, but I still sneakily look at the listing from the person that bought it, and it was the best decision I made. But.
A
Well, what I was going to ask you, and I've never asked you this before, if I were to look at the pictures of your beach house and compare them to all the other beach house I could rent, did yours look just like all the other ones did?
B
It looked like the other ones the same. It's a beach market, so they have a lot of the pastel color and.
A
Right.
B
Gosh. So you followed the mold, white porches. Yeah, absolutely. It was. It was nothing special. And I didn't know. I certainly didn't know what I know now. But, yes, it looks like all the other beach houses. The tiki torches, the picnic tables, the bright colors all look the same. So there are a lot of things I would have done different.
A
So we don't want to break the mold. You still want it to feel like a cabin, but we want to move away from the mold. I don't want to have a bunch of bears. The bear rugs that you saw, the brown comforter with brown wood with brown wall art, that's a problem. What we want to do is be eye catching, but still in the mold. Right. So I'm not against adding tiki torches to the right cabin if that makes it fun. Right. I don't want to put them in a beach house where everyone has them and everyone's seeing it. I'm not opposed to using splashes of bright colors like you saw with the outdoor rugs, like Angela would have in her beach house. I don't want too much of it. I don't want it to feel like a beach house, but I would like a little bit of something different that just catches somebody's eye. It still feels like a cabin, but it's a fun cabin. So we. Because we're exposed to real estate from all across the country we get some of these ideas and you can see it's just enough to catch somebody's eye which gets the booking. And now that thing is turned around, it's starting to do better. So don't despair. There is advice out there that doesn't require you to spend $200,000 to pay someone 50k to design and then they go spend as much of your money as they possibly. We do it at a ridiculously low amount compared to everybody else. And then the items that we recommend people buy, we get them on sale. We're looking for you stuff. We're looking for stuff on like Wayfair and Amazon, as cheap as we can to make the biggest impression that we can. So stay tuned for future shows on other properties where we've done things like adding wallpaper or painting wood or adding amenities that other people are not doing. Lots of cool stuff coming even with the arcades and the game rooms that most cabin owners haven't even thought of. And we look at their pictures, we're like, yeah, I see why you're not booking, man. It's a big, beautiful cabin that looks boring as a brand muffin. And you need a little bit of pop tart in your life if you want to get those bookings, right?
B
Absolutely.
A
All right, so it was info at coast to coastgetaways.com if you want to reach out and talk to Angela. If you guys would like to join a mastermind where we talk about real estate every single week. The David Green Mastermind is still around. We just met yesterday and we are meeting all the time. So you can also email her about that. And if you would like to learn more about my faith based mastermind, just go to Instagram and DM me the word faith and you'll get a reply. That one's free and I lead it myself. Anything else I can do, folks, let me know in the comments what I can do to help you, how I can help you, and where it is that you are struggling the most. You can also go to davidgreen24.com and use the chat option there. Get a hold of me directly. We will have you back, Angela, on future episodes to talk about cabin improvements, property improvements, even some of the issues that you've had to deal with with the city that's made your life hell. And we will be bringing it to the masses. For those of you that are still here, thank you very much, we appreciate it. Please make sure you subscribe to the show and share this with somebody else who's managing a short term rental and hates their life. We'll see you guys next week on the David Green Show.
B
Sa.
The David Greene Show Episode 106: Behind the Scenes STR Reveal Part Two with Angela Heydorn Date: January 9, 2026
This episode is the second part of a deep dive into a short-term rental (STR) project nicknamed "Bear Cub in Transformation." Host David Greene and guest/co-investor Angela Heydorn share actionable strategies, lessons learned, and real numbers from their STR turnaround. The episode focuses on optimizing underperforming properties, incremental improvements, dynamic and human-driven pricing, and the critical role of photography and guest targeting. Whether you’re struggling with occupancy, pricing, or upgrades, this episode offers a candid, unfiltered look at how to boost STR performance in a competitive market.
(01:15 – 05:27)
(05:27 – 08:39)
(09:31 – 13:56)
(11:35 – 13:56)
(19:47 – 23:03)
(25:56 – 27:17)
(27:17 – 29:07)
"You don't have to spend $100,000 and replace everything at once... you can do it and get the biggest bang for your buck." — Angela (01:16)
"The money that you got from phase one can fund phase two. Now you've got phase two. Now your ADR goes up, your occupancy goes up. Now you've got even more money..." — David (03:18)
"But obviously, 13 grand is not good. That's a result of having old pictures that were terrible and deferred maintenance that we had to deal with." — David (06:13)
"23% occupancy increase... We doubled our revenue and increased occupancy by 23%." — Angela (07:44)
"The first picture is supposed to make them want more. So what can you do that's different but still appealing?" — David (15:38)
"Every cabin is going to be different... don't put a cookie-cutter approach to every single property." — Angela (12:56)
"If you're not committed to this, your competition is... If you're not doing that, you're just falling behind." — David (25:16)
"It looked like the other ones—the same... so there are a lot of things I would have done different." — Angela (26:50)
"You need a little bit of pop tart in your life if you want to get those bookings." — David (28:56)
This episode provides a rare, unfiltered look behind the scenes of short-term rental transformation—with granular tactics, strategic insights, and a heavy dose of encouragement for any STR operator aiming to stand out without overspending.