Defining the Super Property Marketing Buyer Personas and Fully Loaded Design with Bill Faeth of Build STR Wealth

Speaker A: So it's a two bedroom condo in the shittiest building in Panama City Beach. The oldest building on the far east side. It's called Regency Towers. I've got about 30 condos that my students own. From my inner circle to my mastermind, they're doing about 85 to 95,000. We did 127,000 in our first year and we're pacing to do 134 this year.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Vacation Rental Show. This is your essential playbook to grow and scale your vacation rental business with. With advice and insights from the best in the biz. I'm your host, Lynnell Gordon. Welcome back to the Vacation Rental Show. Today we're continuing a conversation packed with incredible practical insights for vacation rental professionals. If you haven't listened to that previous episode, be sure to go back and catch up. Now let's jump back in. Tell me this, you talk about super properties, all right? Most people don't know what that definition is. I want you to give us that definition. I want you to tell me this. In today's market, it's so crowded, what separates an average short term rental from what you call a super property?

Speaker A: Funny you should ask. I even have my book sitting here which is my first bestseller actually. So I'm going to tell you what a super property is not, and I think I get pegged with this quite a bit, is a super property doesn't have to be the largest property that's won the amenities arms race. I mean I have one of those, only one, but that's a 10 bedroom, sleeps 28, like two saunas, two hot tubs, a, uh, glow in the dark game room, movie theater, some of those crazy things, right? That's not the definition of a super property. I'm going to give you my number one super property that I own. My wife and youngest daughter are actually there right now. So that hurts my super property status because it's a prime week that they're there in Panama City Beach.

Speaker B: It happens to be July, so yes, I would agree.

Speaker A: So it's a two bedroom condo in the shittiest building in Panama City Beach. The oldest building on the fart east side is called Regency Towers and it's a two bedroom. And the average high performing two, the low performing two bedrooms in that condo development do 45 to $55,000 a year in revenue. I've got about 30 condos that my students own. From my inner circle to my mastermind, they're doing about 85 to 95,000. We did 127,000 in our first year. And we're pacing to do 134 this year. And that's the definition of the super property. It is the highest performing property in the market. And um, doesn't matter what it takes to be able to get there. My wife prides herself on saying that she came up with, because she's our designer, is that we equip and design our properties on a restoration hardware design on a home goods budget. And we have studied and we know the things that will move the needle to upgrade a property, to be able to take it from the 50th percentile to the 75th percentile. But there's only so much Linnell as you know that we can do inside of a property and a lot of it starts on the buying side. So when I say this property is doing like tracking to 134, a lot of people say, oh, I can do 200. Well this is a two bedroom in the worst building and the worst part of PCB that I paid $395,000 for. We're not talking about the $2.8 million mansion I bought in Montana. That is a super property. It is the highest performer, but that's all it is, the highest performing property. So when I look at a, uh, moving mountains or Robin, Rachel at a boat or whoever that get these massive adrs, right, and you know, the $30,000 a night properties in Deer Valley, it's more than just what we equip inside the property. And my biggest separator, what I call creating the gap, is marketing. And there is no way that somebody that's listening to your podcast that has a hundred or 300 or 800 properties or 39,000 can compete with me on the marketing. You just can't do it at scale. That I can do as a bespoke small property manager or a small co host or owning a small portfolio. I believe that great marketing allows for great revenue management. And if we don't have great marketing or great rankings, that pretty much ties one hand behind the back of our revenue managers. Right? So my job is to not only acquire customers from off platform direct marketing, but it's also to make sure that I am ranked as high as possible on both Airbnb and VRBO to earn the right for my revenue managers to command the premium pricing, which is my portfolio runs at about 152% of air DNA. So I'm not in the 90th percentile, I'm not in the 90th percent. I'm like 53% above the 99th percentile because of the things that I do off platform.

Speaker B: In revenue or occupancy?

Speaker A: Just in revenue. My occupancy is so low and it's different. Right. I'm in Whitefish, Montana and all four of my properties are super. I have the number one three bedroom of the number one one bedroom of the number one two bedroom of have the number one basically five bedroom plus because I have 10 bedrooms and my occupancy rates there run. I averaged all four of those properties. My occupancy rates are probably around 61, 62%. Panama City beach two bedroom condo I run at about 90 to 93%. It's a different model.

Speaker B: You can afford that 728 week. What are you talking about? 90% occupancy. You can afford to give that week away.

Speaker A: I'm not saying that I can't, but I have the number one tier two property in Gulf Shores, Alabama that I built in 2021 and my daughter loves going because it has a private pool. Right. So six bedroom, four bath, private pool. And we haven't done under 300 grand in this property since the day that we opened it. We're doing beachfront revenue in tier two. I don't let her go there. You can go there in fall break, you can go there in spring break. You are not going there during the summer.

Speaker B: That's what I tell my guys. I gotta tell em. I'm like, yeah, I know you want to go to the beach in July. That's not going to happen. I'm sorry.

Speaker A: If you want to go to Dragon Flying Gulf Shores in July, that will pay for your first year's tuition at UT next year.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. Exactly 100% I agree. I love that though. I love the fact that we all deal with that. Every. All property owners that have family, we all deal with that. Yeah. So that's part of it. So the answer to the question was truly marketing. Marketing is the differentiator.

Speaker A: It's really value stacking, Linnell. It's small things that we do. And uh, here's where it starts, to be honest with you. It starts when you're buying a property and obviously property managers and co don't get to buy the property. But I believe that most people in our industry that do some whatever type of management of properties should be pumpkin planning their properties. If you have ever read the pumpkin plan by my good friend Mike Michalowicz and they have too many PETAs. Pain in the ass properties. Pain in the ass owners and those don't generate enough revenue to stay inside of their portfolio. And just in the last year I have helped four property management companies get acquired by away day by optimizing their portfolios before they get into an LOI and eliminating the small ones. So I think from an owner's perspective it starts when you are buying and I believe in buying what God built because anybody can do the amenity race. You can go in and put up murals and coffee bars and hot tubs and whatever. But you're not going to replicate my small little nor average 32 cabin. That is the prime real estate on a river in Montana with views to a lake and the Rocky mountains in Canada, across the border into Canada. When you sit on the back deck or in the family room or in the hot tub enjoying those views, we can't replicate that. So I buy what God built. Almost every one of my homes. Not as much with condos. Can't be replicated. That's number one. Number two is really understanding. Before you design, before you buy that you should be trying to attract one buyer Persona. You can't have a uh, couple's retreat in a two bedroom and a family retreat. Those buyer Personas don't cohabitate inside that Venn diagram. So if I draw the Venn diagram, they don't meet in the middle. Right. You and your husband want something completely different on a weekend getaway when you haven't been on vacation for four months versus taking your kids along with you. So I only buy and design and amenitize and market to one buyer. And you are her Linnell. It's wealthy Wendy. Wealthy Wendy is even in my one bedroom condo on Whitefish Mountain that the average condo there's does $19,000 a year as a one bedroom. We did 94,000 in our first year. Wealthy Wendy, wealthy Walter are our avatar. And it doesn't matter what property, everyone. Even if I buy that $395,000 condo. That's who I'm trying to attract. So I'm designing for them, I'm equipping for them. Um, I'm marketing to them. I build my direct website, my copy. So I know you and I really didn't know each other until today. And you can see my personality. I speak fast, I'm um, blunt. I've used a couple of profanities already. Everything that can turn a female off. So I use an app called Whisper Flow. I voice over my copy for my descriptions. It goes under my images. Then I drop it into Jasper AI which my COO, Chris, I've been using since 2019 to soften my copy to write it specifically for you. There is a reason that I am advertising in my master suites only. I have robes, I have slippers. I don't do it throughout the entire house. Because you're typically going to be the booker, right?

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Even I have a Park City condo that it's about seven steps from two bedrooms from the master bedroom to the kitchen. But in seven, maybe five of my long steps, right, walk out the door and you're right there and you can get to the coffee bar. But every one of my properties, with the exception of the one bedroom condo, has a small private coffee bar in the master suite. Because if me and my wife are staying in the other bedroom and you and your husband are in that bedroom, you're going to feel way more intimate and have a great morning not having to get up and just enjoy that time with your husband in the morning and grab a cup of coffee, right? So those are things that we think about all the way down to our bathrooms. And I leverage in my marketing. No disrespect to the legacy property managers, but we call it the property management starter kit. The one roll of toilet paper, the one roll of paper towels. You know, almost no amenities in a bathroom, so you have three different types of makeup wipes. When you stay with us, you got the towel, you got the single, you got the cotton swabs. We have Q tips. When I hosted a mastermind at, uh, Soaring Eagle Lodge, my big place in Whitefish, Montana, I had an AI expert there, and he travels a lot and he's going through my kitchen. He was staying in the house with us, and he's like, hey, Bill, is there really a need for four different sizes of tongs? Do you know you have 15 tongs in this drawer? And I'm like, well, my goal is for grandma or mom to be able to do an entire Thanksgiving feast in every one of our kitchens and not have anything missing. So what that does, Linnell, is that allows us to use a term that has been one of my key leveraging aspects for about six years. And it's called fully loaded kitchens, fully loaded bathrooms, fully loaded en suites. And then I can explain what fully loaded means. And I don't have to say anything or mention the property manager starter pack because they've already had that problem. We carry mentally all of our issues moving forward. If we've ever been cheated on in business or cheated on in a relationship, when we were younger. That's carried forward with us the rest of our lives. If we have a bad experience, and this is what I think most hosts don't understand, is that when a guest has a bad experience, and that happened at Property A a year ago, and now we're Property B that we're messaging with, or they're want a direct book or whatever your sales process is, or they've even booked and now they have a little bit of remorse because now Airbnb's marketing is, hey, book today, pay later, or book today. You know, decide to pay later. And they're emailing guests in the first five days after we book. I just went through this in Chile. So we want to be fully loaded and we're trying to cover every negative connotation you're bringing to us as a guest. Right? Every bad experience that you've had. Running out of towels, running out of toilet paper, bad check in experience, whatever that is. I use that in the markets. And we go through like when I went into Park City, which is, I just did that in December, we went through about, I think it was probably four or five hundred listings, not just the two bedroom condos that are going to be our competitors. We're looking at three and four and five bedrooms. And then we ran Rob and Rachel's. So I go through and I grab all of her and I know how amazing they are, right? So we're looking for positive sentiment and reviews and negative sentiment. So we literally scrape now with an AI tool to be able to do this. But even back then I was doing it manually. We go in and we'd copy reviews and we'd ask ChatGPT back then, hey, give me the top three positive and negative sentiments. Then we would have it correlated into a table. And then we make sure that we are going to be able to offset those because all those are objections. Just like in sales, we're trained to get over objections and a lot of us don't focus on those things. So that's part of my marketing. It's not just like Facebook ads and doing that type of stuff. It's in the preparation from purchase or setup as the co host/PM to identify those things to create the gap and build my own objection library inside the property in our communication with a, uh, guest and understand a guest today, in my opinion is not a customer. They are not a customer until they're inside of our cancellation policy in our mind, in their mind, they're really not a customer until they've checked in. So we're nurturing our guests just like they're a highly qualified lead. That's it. So this is the one thing that I think blew Steve away when he first saw this. And I did this on Sunday. I took seven bookings for our portfolio and I am actively, I'm an active manager and active owner. Don't think that I just have seven nine VAs. I don't that it's me and my wife that we do all of our property management co hosting in our own portfolio. So I had to step off and it was funny. We took a five minute break and I was on stage. I walked out into the hallway and I immediately as, um, I'm walking out the door with still everybody behind me, I pick up the phone and I say, hey, Lynelle, this, my name is Bill Faith. I'm going to be your host. Thank you for booking Clancesca in Banner Rock, North Carolina. Me and my wife are super excited to host you. By the way, make sure you check out these three things before you arrive in three weeks. Blah, blah, blah. 28 second video. It's called a welcome video. And I literally uploaded that to Airbnb. Then I shot another one which was on vrbo and I texted it to them. Then the third one I believe was back on Airbnb. I shot another one and because we can upload videos now, uploaded it to them in the video. And that's something that is almost impossible for a PM that has 300, 400, 500 properties to be able to do.

Speaker B: So what they have to do in that case is to have their homeowners who are interested offer it as a feature. We're going to allow you to do this and let the homeowners do that.

Speaker A: Or they can automate it. They can use heygen.com and they can go in and they can create an avatar and they can have that literally integrated into their PMS and they can automate it. You won't be able to. Well, now you can actually address it personally, right? And if you don't want to use an avatar, you can just take a shoulder up like a belly up photo and hey, Jen, you'll have hand movement, they'll match your tone, your speed, everything. I still believe that personal connection is they'll be able to tell the difference. Especially when you have a standardized background like this versus me with a, uh, conference. And I tell them, hey, I just stepped out of this conference, I'm hosting in the Smokies and I do them on airplanes. I do them all the time. So that welcome video. I announced this three years ago at my second STR wealth conference. And I started doing it when I was building the second fastest growing limousine company in the world because I hated flying into LA or LaGuardia and seeing all these wrinkled sign with horrible my last name written in horrible Sharpie pen. And then it was iPads and I wanted that personal connection. So we trained our staff and this is part of the two extra steps. Our dispatchers and our chauffeurs. Our dispatchers responsibly. When Linnell, when you're coming into Nashville and you're using grand avenue or my two companies, Silver Oak, they are looking you up on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram to find one so we can get a good headshot of you. We can recognize you if there's anything wreath. They do this literally 20 minutes before they're dispatched to pick you up. If we know like you post on Instagram, hey, I'm coming to Nashville to the VRMA conference or something, then the chauffeurs educated on that. Hi Ms. Gordon, my name's Bill. I'm going to be your chauffeur today. We're taking you to the Lowes Vanderbilt Hotel. I have room temperature water, cold bottled water waiting for you. Can I grab your luggage? And it looks like you're going to the VRMA conference. So if you need anything, we've done a little bit of research, we can help you with that as well. That's the personalization that I think every day it's becoming more and more important with our guests. One because of the way that Airbnb has refundalized the guest experience to where they can cancel now without penalty. And our strict cancellation policy is gone unless we have it prior to whatever it was January 18th of last year.

Speaker B: What if three days could define the next horizon for your business? Streamline Summit 2026 is coming to the Rosen Creek Hotel in Orlando, Florida, September 15th through the 17th. Visit StringlineSummit.com to secure your spot today. Here's what's in store. Day one kicks off with roundtables, one off one meetings and a welcome cocktail event. Days two and three bring keynote speakers, expert led sessions and panels, plus an exhibitor showcase built around the tools that are transforming our industry. Each evening brings something to look forward to as well, capping off with a farewell event on the final night. Because three days of momentum deserve a property send off. This is where vacation rental professionals come together to connect, to grow and to move forward. Don't miss your seat at the table. Visit streamlinesummit.com and register today. We'll see you there. Some of these things really blew me away. They're very, very good ideas. They really are. And they're like you say, they're ideas that property managers can replicate. There are lots, especially with AI it moved the needle in so many ways.

Speaker A: Well, it also earns the right for us to fail. Right. And so you're making that personal connection and earning trust. I'm a big believer that. Excuse my Frenching and. But nobody gives a about the name of your company. Whether you're a property manager or an H Vac company or whatever it is. We all, as human beings, want to buy from other human beings. You said you're a Swiftie. I'm a Swiftie because my two girls made me a Swiftie. She was a client of mine. I love Taylor Swift because she's Taylor Swift and because of how she connects with her community and her love and how she takes care of them. Her music's secondary to me. Right. I don't care if she's on Big Machine Records or Universal Music or who owns the label or who owns her recordings or anything. I'm, um, making that personal connection with her. And I think a lot of us honestly could stand to pay close attention to her and what she does with her community because she is absolutely the best community builder in the history of planet Earth, with the exception of Jesus.

Speaker B: But, guys, one of the things that you just got from Bill are competitive advantages. Competitive advantages that go beyond lowering prices. Not once did he speak about lowering a price when he talked about ways to make money here. Not once, because that's not part of the strategy, obviously. Now, Bill, you often talk about building businesses instead of creating, uh, another job for yourself. What shifts there are most important when you're scaling your str. So you don't create another job for yourself, you just build your business.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that kind of goes back to Michael Gerber and the best book, I think, that's ever been written for entrepreneurs. The E Myth M Not the Mastery, but literally the Revisited, the original version. And that was a pretty fundamental impact in my life because I was the small business guy until I read that book. And I was. If you've ever read that before, I was the technician. I was working in the business. A lot of people use the term working in the business versus on the business, and that's 100% correct. That comes from Michael Gerber. But there's different layers of that that goes into it. So for me, as I scale One, I have my outcome determined first. So so many times in this industry, Linnell, as you know, people talk in terms of properties. I don't care about the number of properties that anybody has. What's the outcome that you want? What are you getting from those properties? Your 20%, your 25%, your 30% commission, whatever that is. We should be building businesses based on how it's going to affect our family outcomes, how it's going to affect our personal outcomes, how it's going to impact workload, which workload takes time away from family. You take time away from family. Now you're at, uh, risk from separation from your spouse, you're at risk from separation from your children. And I didn't identify those things until 2015. You mentioned I started investing into short term rentals around 2015. It was 2015. And it all comes down to building a life plan. In my opinion. If you. I didn't have a life plan until John Barden forced me, one of my mentors, to build a life plan. And he's like, Bill, you have a business plan, you have customer acquisition strategies. Do you have a, uh, spousal retention strategy, just like you have client retention strategies? And he's like, I was in a room with nine successful business operators and we all had, the majority of us had really good relationships with our spouse. Lynell. I would say I was at 85% connection, but that extra 15% is what happened when I built a lifetime and we defined retirement. This was in 2015. It was 11 years ago. I'm 53. I was only 42. Most people aren't thinking about retirement at 40, and I wasn't either. But my M.O. m, I've done 43 startups. Was that, uh, and John's like, you're 41 by the time you're 50, which John Aaron, who was sitting on the other side of the table, you're going to do 3.5 more startups. You want to put your family through that again. And so there's this realization that building a business, that we have 100% control. And that's kind of what I was alluding at yesterday. If you have 300 properties and you're listening to this right now, I want you to look at all 300 of them and then go down to the bottom 10%, your bottom 20 to 30. And I promise you little to no impact if you fired them today financially, because you can recover and add on some bigger clients, but it will probably free up so much time for you if you're operating in the business, your team, your client services, managers, whoever that is. And that's why I think the Pumpkin Plan is one of the best business books ever. We've got to kill the pumpkins that get disease, chop off at the vines, remove them. So the pumpkins that we're trying to grow on the right and the left hand side, we get more chlorophyll, they get more sun, they get more water, nutrients and they have room to be able to grow. We don't create room to be able to grow. So today in the last 24 months has been a major game changer for me. I mean I was still up until about 24 months ago a 50 to 75 hour a week guy. In the last 12 months I am working 3 to 4 hours a day, Monday through Friday. AI has changed everything for us. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that PMs and co hosts make is we don't communicate well enough with our homeowners about the revenue that we've generated for them over the last 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and like right now is biggest, in my opinion is the biggest churn risk. We are in a 30 to 60 day window. If you're in a summer market to where you are, this is where your clients are at the highest risk for churning. So I created this CEO dashboard that we give to every one of our homeowners. It shows revpar, it shows occupancy, it shows reviews, it shows everything that most of us as PMs lock our owners out from seeing in our PMS dashboards because I want them to know everything. And most importantly, it shows their revenue run rates, what we're forecasting annually and it shows them year over year. From this year, it'll go back to three years depending on how long they've been with us and the owner confidence level. So I grew up in from 2005 to 2012 in the HubSpot world. What I learned from them is the most important thing in the culture of HubSpot was chi, their client happiness index. And even after they went public, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, the two powers, the entire company is focused on chi because CHI is their direct correlation to revenue and to profit. The client happiness index. And that's one of the things that I see is like these owner dashboards can help fix because we as a whole don't do a really great job of communication and that changes the culture inside in the relationship between you and the owner. So like I advise, if my students are doing Co hosting, property management and they don't have that type of a dashboard. Every time that you send out an owner statement you need to make sure that you're sending out the amount of revenue booked over that last 30 day period, the revenue forecasted over the next 90 days and your year to date revenue. And if you're afraid to do that then you're probably not doing a good enough job for your homeowner. So it's really simple. So I'm looking at really what's probably my number one skill. Lanell and I didn't really realize this until Chris, my COO had been with me for about four or five years. I just kind of took it for granted. I guess my number one skill is turning my clients into friends.

Speaker B: That is a very good skill and

Speaker A: I think that most of us as owners don't pay attention to that. We look at our clients as transactional. And like my very first co hosting client, if uh, I can share this two minute story with you. One, he is still a co hosting client. Four years. We vacationed together three times. Like snowmobiling in Yellowstone was our first vacation with about three or four other couples. And my wife is friends with him. He just went through a divorce. The now ex wife is taking over the property that I manage for him. And how many managers do you think would be able to stay on through that transition? She's excited to have us, me and my wife and we're prepping for that transition right now because I'm friends with both of them. I did have to make a stipulation, hey, I don't want to know anything about your divorce proceedings on either side. I'm here to serve both of you. Don't get me caught in the middle. I'm not going to share information from one another, that type of stuff. But it's been an easy transition just like anything else because I was friends and I believe when you become friends with somebody you earn trust from them. Right. And that's where a lot of my relationships and my so many friends, I can't tell you how many friends that I'm still friends with from old industries. I've been out of the limo industry as an owner since 2012 and as what I do here as a coach and a marketing agency and that type of stuff since 2019. So seven years and we still have these close relationships that we travel to. I went back to Dallas to speak at a limousine event for the first time in five years last October and it was standing room only in the room, not because I'm the draw or because of the content. It's because I still have so many friends that we've made. And I think that's one thing that a lot of people in business don't focus on, is turning your clients into friends. You know, one call, one zoom and an owner statement every month is. And that's what I'd like. It's a huge connection with me and Steve. Steve's huge into culture, not just within Casaga and his property managers, but in how they're building relationships with their homeowners. He is very homeowner centric and I think that was one of the huge downfalls of a casa, amongst other things.

Speaker B: That list is very long and distinguished there.

Speaker A: That's a whole nother five podcasts, right?

Speaker B: That's true.

Speaker A: But I think being homeowner centric more so than just being transactional with monthly statements and invoices and stuff is going to help. Specifically right now, it's earning the right to fail.

Speaker B: Well, we're going to leave the conversation there for today, but we're not finished yet. Join us again next week for the next episode where we'll continue to share real world experiences, uh, strategies and lessons that shape the vacation rental world. Before you go, please remember to subscribe to the Vacation Rental show wherever you listen, guys. This really helps to support the show by leaving a rating or a review. And it also helps other property managers and hosts and operators to find the show and become a part of this conversation. Hey guys, don't forget to sign up for Streamline Summit where you will learn about all the cool things that they're doing at Streamline. This is filled with AI and new product that's coming out with Streamline. You do not want to miss this Summit. If you've never been to Summit before, this is the one to go to. If you've always gone to Summit, do not miss this one. It is going to be the best ever in terms of really cool stuff that you can do with your product and you are not going to want to miss this. And if you're not a Streamline user, come anyway. You will really enjoy seeing what they're doing at Streamline. Don't miss this Summit. To sign up for Streamline Summit right now, you can go to streamlinesummit.com and there's a button. You can just register now. So don't miss it. It's really going to be extraordinary. January, guys. This year is a year not to miss.