“As I grew my Airbnb portfolio, I focused on finding buildings that I could get rent from at a nice price that I liked, compared to what I thought market rents were,” he says. “And then I’d get the landlord to give me rent for free on the front-end in exchange for a longer lease or a fast move in or other forms of influence.
Which helped me pay for furniture. And then I put it on Airbnb at a huge margin and then that cash flow came back and I had more cash to reinvest.”
“And I snowballed my Airbnb business off of the concept of low rents, high nightly rates, and free up-front lease concessions to be able to fund my furniture purchases,” he goes on. “So now I’ve got over one hundred apartments on Airbnb, and I’m paying rent on all of them, but because they’re fully furnished and have utilities, they make these huge markups.
Now I think this is where a lot of people get tripped up. We are using real estate, yes. An apartment or a house. But just because it is the same product, the same literal square footage that you would use in a real estate business, like a long-term landlord seeking a long-term tenant, the product is no longer the same. We are now taking real estate and moving it into a real estate-adjacent industry.”
“And a lot of real estate investors get too focused on where they want to make their money, which slows down how much they can make, right? They wanna build equity in a property.”
“So they take out a mortgage and buy it and put a tenant in there. But, the problem with this model is once you get to scale, once you get to four, five, six properties, those twenty-percent-down mortgages become really cost constrictive for the business.
And this is where the millionaire mindset comes in. If I’m gonna invest money into a business, I wanna get the greatest return as fast as possible. Airbnb rental arbitrage (not owning the properties) achieves that.”
Let’s take a look at the high-level overview. Sites like Vrbo and Airbnb are online travel agencies. You take a property typically rented out long-term (with permission from the landlord of course) and you rent the property out short-term.
If you want to get real creative, you could even skip using sites like Airbnb and just do your own marketing.
When done right, you actually don’t need much up front cash. Profit margins are good and the money comes pretty fast. I mean, take a look at Sean who used this process and now he’s a millionaire. Don’t get me wrong though, this system isn’t a perfect science. It can be pretty competitive.
If you’re using a travel agency like Airbnb or Vrbo, they could ban you at any time. You also have to convince the landlord to let you rent out their properties as well, which could be pretty challenging. Sound good in theory? Definitely. Easy to execute? No, but it could be worth it!