665: Building a 150-Unit “Lease Arbitrage” Empire and the STR Furnishing Playbook
BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast
BiggerPockets
4.8 • 16.5K Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2022
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Short-term rental arbitrage seems like an elusive concept. As a real estate investor, it can be a little hard to wrap your head around it. You lease a property, rent it out, and then…profit? That’s right! Without buying a rental property, dealing with maintenance or large-scale repairs, you too can make just as much money (if not more) than the landlord down the street without ever owning the property in the first place. It sounds like a dream, but in reality, you’ll need an airtight system and team to make it work.
Thankfully, Jeff Iloulian has all that and more. Before 2014, Jeff was living as a lucrative lawyer, billing high by-the-minute rates and making money every second he worked. This was during the “wild west” of short-term rental investing, where mom-and-pop owned vacation rentals were starting to become a serious way to make passive income. Jeff initiated his portfolio with just one “lease arbitrage” unit and eventually ballooned his empire up to 150 rentals!
Now, Jeff does more than just run his short-term rental portfolio. He runs the buying group HostGPO, helping link up short-term rental operators with vendors who can provide better, time-tested, industry-specific products. Not only that, Jeff manages numerous other vacation rentals, so he knows everything from furnishing to cleaning, check-out procedures, and more. He gives a furniture and furnishing masterclass in the second half of this interview where many of his tips could save you thousands over the lifetime of just one rental unit.
In This Episode We Cover:
Rental arbitrage and how any investor (no matter their budget) can use it to make passive income
Breaking out of the “not enough time” matrix to start investing on a busy schedule
Furnishing your short-term rental and why IKEA may not be the best bet for bed sheets
Building your short-term rental dream team and how to manage a large-scale portfolio
The mega-niche investing opportunity of renting soon-to-be destroyed homes
Leaving a lucrative career to invest in real estate and why it’s almost always worth it
And So Much More!
Links from the Show
Get Your Ticket for BPCon 2022
Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place
Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts
Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools
Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area
Airbnb Rental Arbitrage—The Ultimate Guide
The Ultimate Guide to Short-Term Rental Properties
Creative Ways to Furnish Your Short-Term Rentals on a Budget
How to Build Your Dream Short-Term Rental Team
Get Exclusive Short-Term Rental Investor Discounts with HostGPO
Books Mentioned in the Show:
Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat by David Greene
Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth by Avery Carl
Connect with Jeff:
Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-665
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Bigger Pockets Podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Show, 665. |
| 0:04.5 | I think a successful investor is someone who is willingly ready to pivot whenever that needs to happen. |
| 0:12.7 | So, I think anybody who has a strict mindset and is rigid on this is what I'm going to do |
| 0:20.2 | and is unwilling to actually look at the date in front of them or look at what the deal is in front of them |
| 0:25.0 | and pivot what they were hoping for is destined for failure. |
| 0:29.1 | And I think that somebody who is flexible and treats each deal in each property like a snowflake is more likely to succeed. |
| 0:40.1 | What's going on everyone, this is David Green. |
| 0:41.6 | You are host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate Podcast here coming at you today from Scottsdale, Arizona |
| 0:47.1 | where I am checking out rental property and making fire content along with my partner Rob Abasolo. |
| 0:51.6 | Rob, how are you today? |
| 0:52.6 | Well, it's Friday, I'm feeling great, I'm excited to hit the weekend, maybe catch a flick at the cinema by myself and have a little bit of me time. |
| 1:01.1 | How about you, sir? |
| 1:01.6 | Maybe check out Bed Bath Beyond if you have enough time possibly. |
| 1:05.1 | That's my therapy these days, just going to the container store and I'm like, I wish I could organize like this. |
| 1:11.1 | Speaking of Bed Bath and Beyond, we get into it with today's guest Jeff Illullian talking about how to furnish your short-term rentals. |
| 1:20.1 | Obviously short-term rentals are all the rage I've jumped into that and bought several of them for myself. |
| 1:25.6 | Robby here is a specialist in the short-term rental game and this is one of the hotter asset classes in our space. |
| 1:31.6 | So you often hear about analyzing the deal, finding the deal, managing the deal, but you don't always hear about furnishing the deal. |
| 1:38.1 | So in today's episode, we give you some really good advice about where to go to find the best furnishings that you can and tip or end hint. |
| 1:48.6 | It's not a Bed Bath Beyond. Rob, what were some of your favorite parts of the show? |
| 1:51.6 | You know, this one is multi-faceted. |
... |
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