Hi, welcome to the new episode of the Boosely Podcast. This is the podcast that helps give you the tools, the tactics, and the training, and most importantly, the confidence so you can go out there and get some more direct bookings.

Today, we are doing the Behind the Host series. This is the mini series on the Boosely Podcast with myself, Liam Carolan, and we dive into a successful and interesting short-term rental host journey.

Find out all about their business and see if this stuff that you can take from their experience that you can go and implement into your business to help you with hospitality and getting those excellent reviews.

Today, I'm really excited. We're joined by Julian Foster. He's joined from the Richmond Property Group, and his specialty is managing luxury properties and something which I'm interested in because I know there's a huge demand for high-end properties at the moment, and also in general, we're going to find out how you actually go about managing properties which are both international but also very high-end and was involved in that. So, Julian, welcome along.

Hey, Liam. How are you doing? Very good. Very happy to be on the podcast. I'm excited to have you here. Thank you for joining, buddy. So, let's start off. If you can introduce yourself, tell us a bit about yourself where the business is based, how many units and that cool stuff.

Yeah, cool. Also, like you're saying, my company's Richmond Property Group, and we've got a portfolio of properties that are the mainly luxury properties and they're located globally, really.

So, we've got properties down in Cornwall, in Central London, in Bournemouth, Amsterdam, a couple of properties in France, and a couple of properties in Chicago in the USA as well.

And yeah, the thing that bones them all together is their luxury properties. So, I think that's the main thing that I want to talk to you about today, really, about how I manage them, how I found them, and to give you guys some tips and tricks if you want to approach luxury property yourself.

That's amazing. I know there's going to be a lot of people listening in with ears, very much open to this. So, let's start off with more about your journey, Julian. How did this come about?

What did you do before this, at the moment before the hospitality, and how did this opportunity of managing luxury properties come about?

Yeah, so, okay. So, my background was originally, was actually working in events when I was kind of fresh out of college, I was working in the events industry, and that pivoted.

So, eventually I was working in selling commercial office space, that's what my background was, was selling commercial office space in Central London, and that was an incredibly boring thing to be doing.

I look after some commercial space now, which is part of the portfolio that I look after, but there's no doubt that that is the most kind of boring part of what I do.

It was about 2019 when COVID, when that crept in as well, I was already looking for a way out and something new and something exciting to do.

And first opportunity came up, where it was just this one person who had quite a large portfolio of properties that he needed looking after, and he bought me on board with just to kind of look after those.

And that went from strength to strength, and eventually we decided that it would be better to structure it as a kind of personal company, my own company, and that's where it started from.

So, I really had this kind of base portfolio of luxury properties, and that's where the kind of fun and game started really.

It was really about kind of being kind of thrown in at the deep end, so having to manage luxury properties was a challenge and something that was very new to me at the start, and having to manage properties in more than one location, likewise, was just something that I had to kind of get used to and work out solution through all of these complicated problems.

You know, like not just the kind of classic ones you might think of, like working with different time zones and all that kind of stuff, but even looking after properties that are in foreign countries was something that was new and exciting.

I could speak a moderate level of French, but I don't really know how to what the French is for changing the internal bringing of a pool cover or changing hot tub filters in Dutch.

It's all new kind of stuff that I had to kind of work out, so that was part of the fun and games.

And one of the things which definitely, you know, I'm thinking about because just setting up any property even locally can can be some mindset challenges to get over.

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