After 3 corporate jobs, Avery Carl realized that she did not make a good employee! Her first foray into real estate catapulted her into short-term and vacation rentals, and The Short Term Shop was born! Thanks to her go-getter attitude, she has over 30 properties under her belt and was one of The Wall Street Journal’s Top 100 Agents in 2020.
This week, Avery talks about her vacation home loan hack, the diversity of her rental portfolio, and her reasons for focusing on drive-to markets. Know more about how she built a successful team, her recruitment process, and her WHYs for pursuing real estate investing.
—
Listen to the podcast here
How The Queen Of Short Term Rentals Rocks A Thriving Business With Avery Carl
We have an incredible show. This has been one of my favorite episodes. Avery Carl is a short-term rental genius, master, whatever you want to call it. She’s built these two businesses of a short-term rental portfolio for herself. It did so well. She started helping other people acquire short-term rentals in these tertiary vacation rental markets. If you read the episode, you’ll figure out why she picks those markets. She’s scaled so quickly. She was the 83rd best agent in 2020 or something like that.
In the entire United States. That is quite an accomplishment. She said they sold over 300 deals. She’s got a powerhouse team and she’s an eXp agent. We like to be eXp proud over here and I’m excited to share her story.
Let’s get her on the show.
—
Avery Carl, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
I’m doing awesome. Thank you, guys, for having me.
Thank you so much for being here. I remember hearing you on the BiggerPockets podcast a couple of years back. I’m excited to have you on board. You’re crushing it in all facets of real estate investing and as an agent.
I’m doing my best.
With that being said, we want to hear where you started. How did you become to be the master that you are? How did you first hear about financial independence? Tell us a little bit about your story.
It was by accident. My husband and I moved to Nashville in 2013 from New York City so we could buy a house to live in. We didn’t have any intentions of investing in real estate. I didn’t even know what it was. I didn’t have my license yet at the time. I was working in the music business. Our real estate agent at the time was trying to get us to buy in this super hip, quickly appreciating part of Nashville. We didn’t want to because we were coming from Brooklyn. We were sick of neighbors. We wanted to move out in the country, so we did.
We had a little bit of money left over and we thought, “Maybe we should buy one of those ‘rental houses.’” I didn’t even know it was called real estate investing at the time. We thought we were buying a rental house so that maybe one day it would appreciate enough to sell when our future kids went to college and we wouldn’t have to pay for their college.
We had no idea what we were doing, but we did buy a house in that neighborhood. Luckily, it ended up being a good one. Cashflow is $1,000 over the mortgage every month. The mortgage is like $600. We paid $122 for it. We still have that one. After we got that one, we thought, “We want to make this a thing. We want to build this. We want to make a business out of this.” We started educating ourselves, reading books, listening to podcasts, and learning about real estate investing and financial independence.
I hated my corporate job. Everybody says this. I finished my Master’s degree and learned very quickly that I don’t make a good employee. I had three corporate jobs in about three years and it was the same thing every time. I started thinking, “How can I get out of this?” We had about one single-family home down payment worth of capital left to invest. We thought, “What can we buy with this that will make the most amount of money so that we can go buy another one quicker?” We landed on short-term rentals. We didn’t want to do that in Nashville because the regulations are nuts. I don’t recommend buying in Nashville at all.
We went a few hours east to the Smoky Mountains and we thought, “This is a place where we’ve been on vacation several times and we’ve rented cabins on Airbnb or Vrbo or what have you. That’s what everybody does here. This makes sense.” We looked into the regulations, super friendly and again, we didn’t have any idea what we were doing, but we did buy a short-term rental cabin in The Smokies.
Long story short, that ended up doing well. We scaled that into five over the next year and a half. I started my real estate sales business during that time, again, by accident, because none of the agents that we came across could answer our questions about return on investment, how much things should make, self-management specifically. I became that agent, not even on purpose. I got my license because my husband’s a difficult client and I felt bad for the agents that we worked with. From there, friends said, “How much are you making on that cabin? I want one. Teach me how to do it.” My business, The Short Term Shop, grew from there.
Do you mind running us through that first deal that catapulted you into the next five? It seems like an interesting one.
In that first short-term rental deal, we did a 10% down vacation home loan, a conventional product. Any lender can do it as long as they don’t have bank-specific overlays that keep them from doing that. If you are planning to stay in the property for about fourteen days a year, is the Fannie Mae guideline right now, then you are allowed to rent it out when you’re not there. That’s like a little hack for getting into a short-term rental for little money down.
Buying rental houses is already called real estate investing. Share on XWe did a 10% down vacation home loan. We found one property. It’s a cute, true log cabin. It had been rented long-term to some people for 4 or 5 years. They had trashed it, but you could tell it would be a cute place to rent if there weren’t cigarette butts all over the floor. It didn’t need actual rehab. It was just gross. We cleaned that up and got it up to what we felt was a nice standard to be able to rent it to people.
We didn’t go nuts with the over improvements and trying to make it stand out or anything. We wanted to be a cute, nice place to stay and we’ll see how this goes. We refurnished it, nice, deep clean, and then got it on Airbnb. It was booked before we even had the entire listing set up right. We forgot to charge a cleaning fee to the first booking because it started booking so fast.
How much did you buy that one for? What was the mortgage payment? What were you making on Airbnb? Do you remember those numbers?
I almost don’t even want to say because the market has gone up so much now.
It’s so different?
Yeah. It was a one-bedroom with a loft bedroom. You rent that as a two, but for tax records purposes, it’s the one bedroom. It’s a two, two, and we paid $175,000 for it. We were able to get some closing costs in there. That one grossed about $45,000 in its first year. It did $61,000 last year, but it did $45,000 its first year.
I love that you mentioned that you listed it before it was fully done before everything was all quite set up because that’s something that I tell people to do a lot. I have one that I’m starting now that’s going to be a month-to-month furnish rental. The moment we’ve got it staged, at least you can put up some baseline photos, get it rented out ahead of time before you are sitting there going, “I have this vacancy now because I didn’t get people ahead.” You can put that listing out two weeks before you’re ready to go live and then have the dates blocked until then.
One of those great things about short-term rentals is you don’t need to have that much vacancy if you plan it right. Craig, do you want her to talk about that first deal that was outside of Nashville or at least in one of the little suburbs or do you think you want to focus more on these short-term rentals? It sounded like a good deal.
Yeah. I want to see what leveraged your success. It sounds like you made $45,000 off of that first one in year one, but I don’t think you can buy five properties for $45,000 or maybe you can. If you can, please tell us. If you can’t, then what did you do?
That is a good question. This is not lending advice, but at the time, the 10% down vacation home loan rules were a little bit looser than they are now. There are some lenders who will still do it. We did the 10% down vacation home loan for the first one in my husband’s name. For the second one, we did it in my name only. We got two 10% down vacation home loans. Our lender said it was fine at the time. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. The third one was a teeny tiny studio. We still have that one, too.
We happened to have enough capital to snag that. We like to use a lender that can do a 15% down, conventional investment loan. The last two we bought with a partner. He was the money guy and we were the sweat equity people. He did the down payment, we did the management and then we split 50-50 after we paid him back 50% of the down payment. That’s how we got it to five that quickly.
You’re basically leveraging your resources, leveraging your network and people you know. You mentioned that maybe you couldn’t do those 10% vacation loans anymore. You still can because I’m about to do one, depending on where you are and what lender you’re with. Regardless of what the circumstances are now, they’re different and there are things available now that weren’t available back then, resources now. You have to use the cards dealt with you at this moment to make things happen. Avery, you went out and you made it happen. Look at you now.
You can absolutely do the 10% down, but they don’t want you to do two spouses in different names.
Correct me if I’m wrong. You can have a vacation home as long as it’s not in the same city. You could do more of them in other places. If you wanted to invest with Avery in Gatlinburg and then you wanted to also invest with Avery in Florida or one of her other little markets, you could still have vacation home loans in your name, in different places. They just don’t believe that you’re going to have three vacation homes in the same town. That’s what they’re saying.
You can have one per market. They have to be over 65 miles apart or they at least have to make sense to underwriting. It’s a cool product to be able to get A) Into a short-term rental at all and then, B) Into several different markets. It’s a cool product.
What year is it here after you’ve purchased your 5th or 6th, after that swing of properties?
2016.
We’re towards the end of 2016. What happens after 2016?
After 2016 we thought, it was never our goal to have a big empire of short-term rentals. The goal was always to get as many doors as possible, and a lot of those are long terms, and then like a lot of people, eventually multifamily. Chattanooga was a good market to get some deals at the time. It was like halfway between Nashville and the Smokies. We picked off a few single families and a few duplexes there. The whole portfolio up to about 32 doors, picking those off. That was up until 2019.
Obviously, with Coronavirus and some weird stuff going on, our goal at the beginning was to get a multifamily like a 10 to 12-unit. With the eviction moratorium starting, we didn’t feel comfortable moving into a new asset class right then. We bought a few more short-term, moved into a couple of new markets there. We are under contract on a twelve-unit in the Midwest. We like to keep the portfolio like 25% short terms and then the rest long terms. I like to think of the short terms as like a little cashflow turbocharger. There’s nothing wrong with going and buying a ton of short terms and that being your entire portfolio, but it’s good to have a little bit of everything, in my opinion.
I totally agree with that, too. I like that mindset of diversifying and basically taking some risk to 25% of your portfolio and 75% is like your safety net. How did you go about buying 32 houses? At some point, your conventional lending lets up, right? Are you doing more partnerships and stuff like that?
I personally have two conventionals left, which I’m about to use up on probably two vacation rentals in two different markets. We switched to commercial, build a relationship with a local bank thing. We’ve got a few in a market in Alabama. We built some local bank relationships to get those.
It sounds like it’s more and more. Do you have a cashflow number you’re trying to get to or a number of doors or is it like, “Every time we sell up on to homes and we’ve got cash, we’re going to put it into a house?”
My goal is 100 doors. Luke, my husband’s cashflow goal is ridiculous. He wants it to be at $82,000 a month. We got a long way to go to get there. I’m happy with reevaluating at 100 doors, which looks like a few apartment buildings away from getting to, but that’s the goal, to never stop.
What is he going to do with $82,000? That’s like a lot of shoes. What does Luke like?
I don’t know. He likes muscle cars and motorcycles.
He could get a lot of motorcycles and muscle cars for $82,000 a month. With these twelve-unit apartment buildings and all that, these are your traditional rentals, correct? Are you not on short-term?
Right.
My second question is, how do you pick a market to do short-term rentals in and how do you take off running that quickly? Are you building a team out there? What does that look like?
There are three types of short-term rental markets. There are your metro markets like Nashville and New York, places like that. The big-ticket vacation markets like Hawaii, Aspen, Disney where you have to fly to them. I focus on the regional drivable vacation markets and the tourism-dependent markets, but they’re affordable vacations. You don’t have to get on a plane to get there. Most of the tourism is driving in and not flying in.
The Smoky Mountains, the Panhandle of Florida, Destin, Panama City Beach area, places like that. I like those places because they’re mature vacation rental markets. You don’t run into all these short-term rental bands and clashes with the city councils that you do in some of the metro markets where traditionally people have stayed in hotels, but as of the past years, they’ve started staying in short-term rent.
I stick to markets where it’s been normal for tourists to go there and rent a beach house or rent a mountain cabin and not stay in a hotel forever. The municipality has figured out how to monetize that decades ago. That’s why I stick to those markets. Generally, it’s very easy to add to a portfolio in a market. It’s more difficult to start a new one. All you need is a cleaner and a handy person. You can get away with pretty much anything until you build out the rest of your team with those two people.
We’ve got like two Airbnb experts on here. I feel I had a handful, like maybe 4 or 5, but nothing compared to what you guys have. I love how you’re not trying to fight the government because the government wins every single time. It’s not a matter of if you get caught. It’s a matter of when you get caught.
I know I got caught with my Airbnbs in Denver and was forced to transition them to a full-time rental. Luckily, I make sure my deals work in two ways. Short-term rental is Plan A. Plan B is a long-term rental, less cash flow, but still works. I love your approach where you probably have a plan B and your plan B works, but plan A is so scalable and sustainable because the government is already on board. It’s a great way, and I never heard of that way to pick a market before for short terms.
It's definitely a really cool product to be able to get into a short term rental at all and then be into several different markets. Share on XI’m curious if you guys are still self-managing everything because it is a bit of work. How are you guys leveraging that?
We don’t self-manage our long terms anymore. We were at first because when you only have like three doors in a long-term market, you’re not super attractive to property managers and it was difficult. There are very few and far between in Chattanooga anyway. Once we got enough to where we could get somebody to answer the phone, we had a great one. We don’t self-manage being long terms anymore, but we still are self-managing all of our short terms. We have some VAs that help a lot with my sales business and all the little tasks that go along with that. They also monitor Airbnb’s inboxes if we’re away or something like that. For the most part, we’re still self-managing all the short terms. The long-terms, we’ve offloaded.
For me, I don’t know. After a while, it started to be that the only things that escalate to you are the problems. What’s lovely about Airbnb is the relationships and the people and the stories and the traveling. After you get to where you’re doing so much volume, that started to weigh on me because it was only hearing about the destruction and the complaints and stuff. I don’t know if you’ve experienced much of that or you’re like, “I got a lot of stuff going on. I don’t care.”
The general public is pretty stupid and complain-y and horrible. Luke and I both came out of the bar business. He owned a bar in New York and I bartended for years before I went and got my Master’s. We’re both pretty used to dealing with people in that sense. Airbnb guests are typically a lot easier to deal with than drunk people at 2:00 in the morning in New York City. That served us well at experience. The trade-off is that you make that much more money, but you have to deal with some garbage.
When did you switch over to eXp? Was that your brokerage the whole time or is that a newer thing for you? We’re both at eXp, so we love to talk eXp.
I switched in March of 2019. I hopped around brokerages before that. When I decided to start teams in other states, I needed to have a brokerage where I could do that. eXp gave me the best opportunity to do that.
Their brokerage model is unmatched. That’s exactly why I went with them, too is because we’re looking to maybe expand and have that flexibility. When did you decide to get your license? It sounds like you were an investor before you were an agent, is that right?
Yeah. It was after our second deal that I got my license. That was the end of the 2016 summer.
Were you getting your license to help other people or was it mainly for your own stuff at first?
At first, it was just for me. I had no intention of selling real estate. I wanted to do our deals because, like I said, Luke’s a difficult client. It’s easier if you happen to find something at 11:30 at night, then you have the information and you don’t have to email somebody to get it. I got it for our own ease of acquisition, but it turned into what it is now.
Can you describe how that change happened?
Yeah. Honestly, I got to a point. I was still working at my corporate job. I’ve done 3 or 4 of our deals and a few friends said, “I want a cabin. I want to buy this house.” We were still living in Nashville at the time. I started getting clients that I didn’t know outside my spirit of influence who wanted to buy cabins for me and wanted me to teach them how to do it. I tried to resist that because the cabins were three hours away and I was in Nashville. After my first full year of real estate, I sold maybe $10 million and most of it was in the Smokies. A friend of mine’s parents hired me to help them find a place outside Nashville. They fired me because I didn’t know where to find the serial number on a $50,000 mobile home that they wanted to buy.
In my brain, on the way home, I was like, “I’m selling cabins from now on because that’s what I do and that’s where my expertise is. I need to stop trying to be this jack of trades and do all these things, go full cabin, full short-term rental.” That’s what I did. From there, that’s when everything exploded. It was when I focused on one thing.
A common mode of success that I’ve seen is people niching out and owning a niche. I’ve had decent success in my first job as an agent here in Denver as a house hacking agent. I focused on house hackers or buy and hold investors. I don’t do much with flips or BRRRRs or anything like that. I did nothing compared to you, but 100 deals my first year is not a bad first year for a lot of people. I wish I could say I came up with that myself. I took the advice of everyone who came for me, like you, Avery and even Zeona. You guys are both niching out. That seems to work. You never hear of anyone that does everything. There’s a reason for that. That’s tremendous. Z, anything else you want to touch on at this point? I was going to transition to how she built on the team.
The only thing I want to highlight that you said at the very beginning that I loved. You said, “I’m a bad employee.” For me, that was one of those things that became apparent right away. I never had a corporate job because I was a bad employee. If you’re an entrepreneurial person, you can poke holes in people’s things. They say like, “I’m the manager and you have to do it because I say it,” you’re like, “No, there are better ways to do stuff.” I want to encourage people with that entrepreneurial mind that it’s okay and you might not know what you’re going to do right away, but you’ll find your niche and build your own thing. I was excited to hear that because I could totally resonate. Craig, are you a bad employee?
You can ask BiggerPockets.
You seem like a good boy.
Avery, if you still talk to Scott or the BiggerPockets team, why don’t you ask them how I was as an employee? They’ll laugh at you. Scott still makes fun of me to this day for some of my things. I’m not the best employee, but I like to think I’m a decent entrepreneur. Speaking of entrepreneur, you’re a one-woman team agent here. How do you go from there to leveraging your team and building your team? That’s a big next step.
I had a real hard time getting started because I was not coming from a mindset of abundance. The first agent that I hired was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, but also in a way, it was the smartest thing I ever did because I learned so much because they saw that I was starting to do well. They were trying to steal my client list and my processes and then left. It was this big thing that hit me in the stomach. It was horrible.
I learned a lot from that. The very next one that I hired, I did things a little bit differently and that works well and we had a good rapport. She still works with me. I built on that because everybody is motivated by the income. As they started to trust that they would make more money with me than going to try and do it on their own and stick to my processes and my resources that they would do better, then it’s been great.
What was that thing that you did? What did you do to number one that made you regret it and what did you change for number two? Could you be a little more specific there?
For number one, it was somebody that I knew and I trusted them. I didn’t have any legal paperwork involved that I needed to protect myself and my intellectual property and trade secrets and stuff. She thought she was going to come work for me for a little bit and then compete against me once she learned everything that I did. The second one, I implemented more of a hiring process and more of a checklist like, “This is how this will work.”
Once they start to trust that, I’m going to give you a good lead. I’m not going to hand you a list of people that clicked on my name on Zillow and that you’re going to have to call a bunch of times. I hand my team leads that are ready to buy and ready to start looking and ready to go. I take a lot of that work out of the process for them and then it works a lot better. Whereas with the previous one, I was like, “This person called me, here you go.” It works a lot better. My team is much happier when I do all the front-end work and give them to them ready to go rather than have them warm up the lead.
Any real estate agent business, the growth of that starts with leads. How did you become this lead-generating machine and able to sustain so many agents?
I don’t know, honestly. It was a glitch in the matrix. The thing about investors, they buy more than one thing. If they’re successful, they’re going to buy more and they’re going to send you people. Maybe I started out with five organic clients and then they each sent me five people and then they all bought five things. All of a sudden, you have this many people. When you’re working with investors, the mistake a lot of agents make is they are scared of investors because they think that investors are never going to make good offers.
They’re going to make them do a lot of work and not ever buy anything or, they want to offer 50% under on everything. The thing about investors is if you get them something that is successful, they will keep doing it. They will keep buying with you. They are the best lead source for a real estate agent because a primary home buyer might buy one house every seven years, but an investor might buy ten in one year from you. I was positioning myself as an investor agent because those leads compound because they all buy more than one thing.
The thing that we both focus on is that you could nurture someone that’s going to be buying five homes, even if it’s over five years, but you build those relationships. It’s rewarding to put that energy and see where these people go and see how they become financially independent. I love hearing that.
I love working with investors and how sack is because it is. It’s that re-occurring type of business. Real estate investing is very male-dominated. I like to be sensitive to this topic. Did you find any difficulties working with investors in that space?
Yes. A good 50% of people, when I’m first talking to them and they’re like, “Do you own anything?” I say, “I own 32 doors.” They’ll say like, “You manage them?” I feel like if I was a guy, they might not ask if it was my investment or if I manage them for other people, but they always say, “You manage them for other people. They’re not yours.”
I love that like mic drop type stuff where it’s like, “No, they’re mine.” That must make you feel as demeaning as it sounds and can be. It must make you feel good that you can come back and be like, “No, they’re mine.”
It’s very telling of the person. You’re like, “I don’t know if I want to work with you and I have the choice because there are people lined up outside of my door. You might have missed your opportunity, buddy.”
The last brokerage I was at before eXp was a big local brokerage in Nashville. I got rookie of the year in Nashville that year. I can’t remember how many I sold. My brokers didn’t know who I was, but they invited me in for lunch or something to congratulate me. The very first thing that the owner of the brokerage said was, “How did you do it? Is your husband a developer or something?”
No way.
You’re like, “Bye.”
As gut-wrenching as that is, I almost feel like it’s cool. If I were a woman and someone would say that to me, I’d be so proud denying them and be like, “No, that was 100% me.”
I did get to do that. The next year, my name was in Wall Street Journal and not his brokerage.
You’re making a whole lot of money, I’m sure, with eXp.
There's nothing wrong with going and buying a ton of short terms, and that being your entire portfolio. Share on XeXp rules.
Talking about eXp, do you have an agent goal? Are you talking about 100 doors or are there a certain number of agents you want working under you or is it like a volume thing that you’re hoping to accomplish?
Just like I was a bad employee, I’m going to go ahead and throw it out there. I am a bad EXP agent when it comes to agent recruitment. Most of the agents that work for me on my team came from other brokerages. That counts, but eXp for me is more about me being able to scale the business and help people bring in extra streams of income for their family in as many markets as possible because they’ve given me the tools to do that and I should recruit more than I do, but I don’t.
You have that responsibility to provide those leads. If you get too many agents, but they’re sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, they’re not going to be happy. You have to hire as you get more clients in that market. It sounds like you’re not having problems finding clients, but I don’t know if certain markets are more popular because you’ve talked about them or been in them longer, like Gatlinburg.
That’s true. Are you always trying to attract new agents to the short-term success team, or are you letting them come to you if someone hits you up and says, “I want to join your team,” then you let them, or how do you recruit that in that sense?
If they want to be like on my actual team on The Short Term Shop and not come to eXp, then I interview them and there’s a pretty rigorous checking of if this is going to work. I’ve got to have agents who know how to talk to investors, which is not always the same skillset as agents talking to primary home buyers. I always ask them if they read Rich Dad Poor Dad. If they haven’t, that’s fine. If they have, I’m like, “This is a person that I can probably coach,” because they already have at least read the Bible of real estate investing. I had one come to me who is an agent at another brokerage and he wants to get into short-term rentals and he happened to be in a market that I was thinking about getting into. I was like, “Yeah, this works great because I’m thinking about getting into your market. I’ll hire you.” It depends on the person and what the deal is at the time in that market.
It’s not outward seeking. It’s more in inbound is what it sounds.
Yes, unless there’s a market that I would like to get into and I have to find an agent to work there.
Have you guys thought about offering management or is it something that you don’t want to deal with? It sounds like in all those markets, you’re reliant on people doing their own thing.
We teach all of our clients how to self-manage. That’s our thing because we want them to make as much money as possible and be able to keep as much of their money as possible so that they can scale faster. Most of them self-manage remotely. There are very few clients that we have that want a manager. Most of them want to bootstrap and squeeze all that cashflow out. Eventually, they may get to a point where they have enough that they’re like, “I’m going to outsource this now.” Most of them are coming from a place of, “We want to get started and make this thing work.” A management company doesn’t make a lot of sense for them.
What markets are you in? Maybe we’ll switch over to the last four questions, right, Craig? Go over your markets so people know where they can find you.
I am in the Smokey Mountain market, which is Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge area. The Panhandle of Florida, Destin, Panama City Beach area, it’s called the Emerald Coast, Gulf Shores, Alabama, and also the Forgotten Coast, Florida, which is like the Mexico Beach and Alligator Point, Port St. Joe area and Blue Ridge Georgia.
A lot of these I haven’t even heard of.
Many of them I’ve never heard of.
I’m like, “Blue Ridge, what’s happening there?”
Forgotten Beach? If anybody wants to get into the short-term rentals and those markets, hit Avery up, TheShortTermShop.com, but first, let’s get into the Final Four.
Question number one, Avery, what are you reading?
I am reading Who Not How.
What’s that one about? Give me a little low down.
It’s about leveraging other people rather than trying to figure out how to do everything yourself.
I need to read that book. I needed my assistant read the book and then tell me what it’s about.
You can outsource, read the book. You’re already getting the point of it. I read that book. It’s like The E-Myth and all that. Sometimes you got to read the right book at the right time. For me, it was the right book at the right time. The second question is, what is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Ready, fire, aim is the best advice. That’s what we’ve done with our real estate investing. You can’t necessarily do that all the time. The point of it is don’t analysis paralysis yourself out of every single thing. Sometimes you have to pull the trigger and learn as you go.
What is your why? Why are you pursuing all these rentals and training all these agents? I imagine you could sit on the beach and not do anything by now. What keeps you going?
My family and my kids. I want to set a good example for them in terms of working hard but still having enough time for family, which is what real estate has given our family, not having to be sitting at a desk at an office, away from them all day. Granted, we do still have to work, but we get to spend many more hours a day with them than we would otherwise.
Last question, who do you know that reminds you of a character in a TV show or movie?
My husband reminds me of Larry David.
Who’s Larry David?
Curb Your Enthusiasm, right?
Yeah.
I haven’t seen that.
You have to watch it.
Wait, that guy?
Not because he looks like him, because he acts like him.
Learn how to self-manage to make as much money as possible and be able to keep as much of your money as possible so that they can scale faster. Share on XI have seen that guy.
They don’t look alike.
I was going to say, “Man, who are you married to?” That is hilarious.
Tell Craig a little bit about it. What is the personality trait that makes him like him?
Grumpy about everything, but in a funny way. You have to watch the show. That’s your homework. You have to go watch the first few seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
We’re looking for a new TV show to watch. We’ll have to give that a shot. Avery, where can people find out more about you if they want to get in touch?
You can find me at TheShortTermShop.com. There are phone numbers, email addresses right there or on Instagram, @TheShortTermShop.
Hit her up if you’re looking for a tried and true vetted short-term rental specialist in these hot markets. Maybe we haven’t heard of those markets because they’re not fly-in markets. They’re just local vacation spots. It sounds like you’re doing something right. Anything else you’d like to add, Avery? Otherwise, we’ll conclude.
That’s it. Thank you, guys, so much for having me.
Thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a pleasure.
—
That was Avery Carl, everyone. Z, what do you think?
I love that show. Obviously, we’re both like Airbnb queens. It’s fun to chat with Avery about her Airbnb process. It’s been so different from my approach, but I learned a lot from her. I love that she talks about drive to markets. It’s something I’ve dabbled in a little bit when I’ve been managing around the country. It’s valid, especially since COVID, a lot of people don’t want to fly, but they do want to get out of town and have little vacations. Lots of these drive-to markets are blowing up. She’s onto something. Especially these markets we’ve never heard of, I bet those are going to turn over real fast.
As you said, especially with COVID and everything that’s going on, people don’t want to fly. People still want to take a vacation. Living in Colorado, in 2020, I only flew once or twice and there was like a ten-month span where I didn’t fly and we were taking vacations through Colorado. I can’t imagine I’m the only person that’s doing that throughout the entire country. She’s got a great niche there. Clearly, it works if she’s going to sell 365 deals in a year and crush the game. I’m looking forward to see her grow and see if she can ever hit that number one spot.
Her husband’s going to keep her busy, trying to get $82,000 a month. That’s a hefty amount of money.
I need to meet this guy. He’s like Larry David.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us. If you loved our show and you like us in general, like us, share us with your friends, leave a review. It’s helpful for us. We’ll see you next episode.
Important Links
- Avery Carl
- eXp
- BiggerPockets podcast
- Rich Dad Poor Dad
- Who Not How
- The E-Myth
- @TheShortTermShop – Instagram
About Avery Carl
Avery Carl was named one of Wall Street Journal’s Top 100 and Newsweek’s Top 500 agents in 2020. She and her team at The Term Shop focus exclusively on Vacation Rental and Short Term Rental Clients, having closed well over 1 billion dollars in real estate sales. Avery has sold over $300 million in Short Term/Vacation Rentals since 2017.
An investor herself, with a portfolio of over 100 Doors, Avery specializes in connecting investors with short-term rentals with the highest ROI potential and then training them to manage their short-term rentals from their smartphones from anywhere in the world.
