Creating value by causing great connections and great experience with your guests is what we're going to be talking tonight about on the boosted podcast and we're going to be doing that with a successful short and rental host who we're going to ask questions of his business

we're going to find out his story and generally just all the tips that you as a host can learn from tonight.

So welcome to the boosted podcast. If you've not listened to this before, this is the podcast that gives to host the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly, the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings.

My name is Liam Carol and I'm Mark Simpson's co host and today we're going behind a host with Alex DeCamp and he's got an awesome short term rental company is based in around Detroit in the USA and he's got around about 30 listings which you can go and check out his company is called great stay which you can go and check out right now.

Great stay.co and you can go and check out his awesome website and going to see out to you a little bit more about his business, but first let's find out how he is creating the connections with locals and how it's adding value to his guests who come and stay with us. So welcome along Alex. Thank you for joining us.

Ali and thanks for having me here, a big fan of our boostly in the podcast and it's great to be here.

It's awesome to have you on and I know we've known each other from some of the trainings in in the past and from from boostly websites and stuff so it's great to have you on and get a chance to finally do this.

So for everybody listening, can you just give an introduction to your business and introduce yourself.

Yeah, yeah. So Alex the camp I'm here in Detroit, Michigan have roughly well, I have 26 properties right now in a mineboarding another five so right around that 30 unit count that you're talking about.

And really I've been in real estate for a while and over time we had folks that would rent from us and they actually operated our properties and short term rentals and I kind of caught the cut the cup of bug and I tested one out one of my buildings and a film love with it.

I actually traveled out to London for a conference and after I saw the technology that was coming along and the excitement that was in this community.

I just I just fell in love and I've been growing my business ever since I had a corporate position with a bank.

I did a lot of great community development endeavors worked on lending programs, nonprofit relationships and whatnot and at the there was a time where it made sense for me to kind of leave that position and I've been growing my company ever since.

That's cool and the you mentioned that you've done it in a couple of buildings and that's how you got started what sort of model do you use is this is this ones that you own or did you do any.

And love a charge or management what sort of models do you to use everything I have is either I own it or I co host so I will manage for for other folks or you know buildings that I own.

If there's buildings that I own it's multi family so for example in one of our apartment buildings which is three buildings we've converted one of the buildings of seven units into and basically a little mini hotel another building and.

In a nice part of town we've six units and my business partner he's actually operating or he's opening a cafe underneath in the in the garden level unit so we're really excited to have that you know that that amenity there for the guests and then I do co host for other folks mostly single family homes.

And it's funny because building this business you know it's it's important that you have a guest avatar at least I feel it is and I think a lot of people would agree with that because then you know who you're really marketing toward that then you know who you're building your product toward and whatnot so I've I've always had to struggle where I'm like well do I want to have in my my avatar is the business traveler the.

You know the folks that are in town that they're here for business but they also want to experience the local community and that's when we'll talk about the small businesses but you know and I've struggled Michael why am I taking out these single family homes and and i've really kind of found that the business traveler or they're also looking for that but that's more for midterm stays so that that's a part where we're growing but yeah so I have a multi family and I have a single family that I manage.

Nice nice and that really gives us kind of idea of where your business is at the moment take me back what did you do before all of this before you got into hospitality you mentioned you already in real estate but is that how far back is this oh wow so so you know I studied I studied at a never a degree in urban planning real estate development i've been like I was mentioning I was with a bank for a long time after I got my graduate degree I was like I want to be in a city Detroit family history here.

There's so many things to love about the city and if you've ever been here I highly recommend visiting it's it's I think I mentioned to you earlier you know I was I was with some travel writers last night and they were just amazed at the city it's it's it wasn't what they're expecting it was all the first time here but um so I came to the city and I worked on lending programs my background is lending with financial institutions and I had an amazing position where I was working with a growing bank and we worked on you know lending programs invest.

My programs just basically we worked with all the groups in the city who were working to improve the infrastructure improve the amenities and you know we we kind of did that but my the people that ran the bank we I was close with and they also knew that I like to develop so it was great they gave me the freedom and I acquired property and I developed property we have some mixed use buildings where we have restaurants and bars and and other retail businesses with departments above and that's where you know some folks started running from us

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