Managing Serviced Accommodation Agents From Abroad

#80
Acquiring high yielding assets is the smart investor’s way to stay ahead of inflation and high interest rates.

But with so many short-term rental businesses going under during Covid due to an over reliance on Airbnb, Serviced Accommodation investors ignore the power of direct bookings at their peril.

Mark Simpson is the host of the Boostly podcast, and the author of three books on helping hospitality hosts thrive.

He’s on a mission to help one million short term rental businesses cut down on their over-reliance on Online Travel Agents.

This episode explores the ways in which expat and remote investors can manage their management agencies.

Mark highlights the questions to ask your managing agent to see whether they’re maximising your returns with direct bookings.

By drilling down on your avatar, and concentrating on referrals from existing clients, you can sweat your asset even harder.

Mark also has some handy hints for due diligence in your target areas.

If you’re into SA, this is a must-listen episode!

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market research, management company, cold calling, work vans, hotel market, data analysis, direct bookings, ideal guest avatar, referrals, repeat business, engagement, feedback, mortgages, customer avatar, niche, existing customers, referral system, AI technology, voice technology, branding, Boostly podcast, serviced accommodations, weekend market, 80 20 rule, market segment, Air DNA, GPT, dynamic pricing, saturation, target audience, sales and marketing, TaskRabbit, LinkedIn, Gumtree, Facebook groups.

Transcript

0:00

Every management company should be looking to increase their direct bookings. They should be looking to increase a network that is full of contractors, companies, etc. And if you find that your management company that you're working with isn't, and they've got over 80% that are via an Ota, then you should be putting a bit of pressure on them, giving them 30 days to actually sort it out. Because if not, there's a plethora of other management companies now in the UK who are actively looking to build their networks. You're listening to Expat Property Story, a podcast in which I share my story to smooth the way for you to. Have your own expat property story. Hello there. This is episode 80. And that was Mark Simpson, host of the Boostly podcast, author of three books Helping Hospitality Hosts to Survive and Thrive, and a man with a mission to make sure a million serviced accommodation specialists cut down on an over reliance on online travel agents such as Airbnb and booking.com. Before we hear from Mark, I just want to point you in the direction of our newsletter, which you can get hold of by subscribing to our mailing list. And the easiest way to do that is at www.expatpropertystory.com, which is in the top right hand corner of your screen where it says subscribe. If you're on a laptop or if you're on a mobile phone, then just scroll down until you see the words subscribe to our newsletter. And if you do choose to subscribe, you'll also receive a free copy of our 23 Step Guide to Analyzing an Auction Deal, which we've already had good feedback on. So if you're thinking of buying an auction and you should then sign up to our humble little expat community and grab yourself a PDF at www.expatpropertystory.com. Now, if you listen to last week's trilogy of shows telling the true story of how we made 126,000 pounds buying two three bed semis in two mad days in November 2022, then you'll know that our plan for these two properties is to run them as serviced accommodation. And I know we have several listeners who are short term rental remote investors because they've been in touch. But how about you? Have you thought of following this business model? Today's guest grew up in this environment, so he knows what he's talking about to such an extent that it even influenced his property song of choice. There's a Thailand property disc. Do you have a song that relates to property that springs to mind? The one that I always associate and I related to property in bearing in mind that it was like the granary we used to have in the tea rooms and the restaurant when we were growing up. We used to have music on all the time, and I was always in charge of the music as much as the customers, and my family used to hate it, but I've always got on my spotify. Now thanks to six years of playing it at the farm. It used to be on all the time in the tea rooms. It was Sam Smith, any Sam Smith playlist that you could possibly think of on Spotify because it was the perfect setting. Breakfast, you could play it in the tea rooms, you could play it evening, you could play it. It's like that sort of chill out Eve. But it was always SamSmith first. And so now, years later, seeing that we've exited that business and I've got my spotify up, it's always Sam Smith that comes on first. So I will have to go Sam Smith. Do you have a particular Sam Smith favorite song? I couldn't really tell you a Sam Smith song. I just know the whole repertoire. They all sound the same. You know, the Bond one was really good, but they all just sound the same and they're just perfect for like that acoustic, tea rooms, cafe, laid back vibe. They were all just like lovely. Mark, how do we say goodbye to the OTAs? Well, I don't think we'll ever say goodbye to the OTAs. Let's see what AI and GPT brings in first. I'm just at a podcast and a YouTube video talking about will Chat GPT be the end of Airbnb? Basically, the thought about that is with Siri on your iPhone and you've got Amazon Alexis and you've got the Google home, it's really crap. Still, like the technology. If you talk to this Siri, the response that you get back at best is like a free out of ten service. So with Chat GPT and AI and what's coming around the corner, the first thing that I think all of these companies will look to update will be these things. And when that happens, it'll be untold what you could actually do on these things with Voice, you will have like a 24/7 assistant and I feel like vacation booking, flight booking, et cetera, will just be a heavily used part of that service. And so if that's the case, you won't need Airbnb because you don't need to search. Your robot friend here will do it all for you. And predominantly, if you've got your pricing set up right, it will always go to your direct booking website over Airbnb booking.com verbo. It depends on how that goes. That literature could go 50 50. There's loads of ways that could go but say that Airbnb managed to capitalize or booking.com capitalize, et cetera. And we don't know if this AI thing doesn't actually take off as much as what people think it is, then will never say goodbye to them because they'll always be needed. But what everybody needs to do is to stop calling himself an Airbnb business. This is the biggest problem, is because hospitality owners like short term rental business owners are branding themselves as Airbnb. You are doing their work for them, which is crazy. You should be promoting your own business, your own brand and that's a massive problem in this industry. My whole stick and my whole spill is obviously direct bookings, but if anybody's listened to me long enough and you can go back on the 600 podcast episodes that we've got, I'm always saying you need to make them work for you and not the other way around. And what that basically means is don't rely on them, but use them when you need them. When you've got an empty period in your calendar, utilize the OTAs of that. Don't go giving them your best dates. All these things that I'm saying, it sounds common sense to people who aren't in a hospitality industry, but those who are in it, they do it all the time. This is a podcast for expats, so most of us, myself included, will be working with SA managers in the UK. So if you're working with an SA agent in the UK, how can we incentivize them to go for direct bookings as opposed to just using the OTAs? Every management company should be looking to increase their direct bookings. They should be looking to increase a network that is full of contractors, companies, et cetera. And if you find that your management company that you're working with isn't, and they've got over 80% that are via an Ota, then you should be putting a bit of pressure on them, giving them 30 days to actually sort it out. Because if not, there's a plethora of other management companies now in the UK who are actively looking to build their networks, who are actively working with contractors, corporate companies, healthcare workers, professionals, building a database, building a list, who are increasing their direct bookings, that aren't just working in one specific area, they are working all over the UK. So if you are an expat and if you've got property in the UK and you've handed it over to a management company, I would 100% be buying the book. Direct playbook what everybody should be doing. And you can literally then go to your management company and say, are you doing this? Are you doing that? Are you building an email list? Do you have a Google business listing? Do you have a direct booking website? Who's your property management? And you'll catch loads of them off guard because everybody just wants to snap up that passive homeowner that doesn't really care who just wants to get better returns than if we're going to do a long term let. So if you marit with a little bit of knowledge and you catch them off guard, then that's a red flag for me instantly. I'd be handing in my notice as soon as possible and looking to get somebody else in. If you were looking to get somebody else in and you just said that there's a plethora of competitors who could. Take on that job, do you think. It'S important for SA managers to be in the location of your SA units? How important do you think that is? I personally think it helps because you know the layer of land, you know the area, you know the type of clientele, the type of guests that are coming to that town, that city, that village, that state, whatever. I would argue it's better to go of a smaller management company that is based in the town of city or wherever where you are got your property. But again, just because they're small doesn't mean they're good. You've got to be asking the questions like, what's your database looking like, what's your networks, what's your connections? Don't let them just Fob you off of an answer. Ask for proof of it. Ask to see their direct booking website. Ask to see what their database is like. Don't judge their social medias because a really good company could be solid on the direct business, have a big database, but then just have like a crap social media presence. That's absolutely fine, that's common. But the main thing what they need to do is they need to have a database, they need to have a list, they need to have a property management software, they need to have a direct booking website, they need to have a list of people. And the same thing goes for the bigger guys. You may be looking to work with somebody who's one of the bigger companies, who is nationwide, but again, they may not have a decent direct booking business behind them. So I will be swerving them massively. You've mentioned your book, which, as you say, would be a vital addition, especially for expats who want to manage their own serviced accommodation, managing agents. But can you give us a snippet of the contents of it in terms of what they should be doing to drive direct bookings? Your three top things? Yeah. Well, the book itself has 101 tips. What I've been doing for the last seven years is producing lots of podcasts and blogs, et cetera. Somebody came to me saying, listen, what's the top three? Or whatever? So what I did is I took everything and I was inspired by the Tim Ferriss book, tools of Titans. It was a really good book and it's basically 200 of his best episodes of the podcast. He put them all together for a book. The reason why I called it The Playbook is that it's not a book that you read page to page, from page one to page 300. The Playbook is one that you can open it up like a sports playbook and you can dip in and out. So if there's like a specific drill you want to learn on email, et cetera, you can go do that. In terms of the book, the way that it's laid out is the first big chapter is the most important one, and it's about creating your customer avatar or developing who your customer avatar is, who's your ideal guest avatar. And what that means in simple terms is number one, who are the majority type of guest that is coming to your town, your city, your location. And then look at your property and go, okay, so what is my property best suited for? And who is my property best suited for? And then it's all about getting in front of their eyes, making sure that your pictures, the copy that you use, the website that you have, is speaking to your ideal guest. Because the biggest problem is that I see people that are just trying to appeal to everybody. We've got properties that are trying to appeal to every single body. That the most common answer specifically in the UK. It's like a tongue in cheek when it's whoever's going to give me money. Which is totally the wrong answer because when you appeal to everybody, you appeal to nobody. You've got to have a niche and you've got to have a guest in mind. Because if you've got a property that attracts A, okay? And if your property is set up to attract B, then that's where the mismatch is. You've got to have a property A to speak to property A, that is literally it. And when that happens, it just makes life so much easy. This is a big worry for a lot of hosts, management companies, whatever your model is, because they're thinking about the type of customers that they're not attracting. But you can't think like that because when you think like that, you get stuck back in. That when you appeal to everybody, you appeal to nobody sort of methodology. You've only got a limited amount of inventory. This is the thing about hospitality. If you've got one property, you've only got 365 days in a year to sell. Now realistically, you're looking at average a week long bookings, give or take a couple of weeks for maintenance. That's 50 weeks. That's 50 guests, that's 50 bookings that you have to come in. And when you think of it like that, you go, okay, that's a lot more attainable. So really dive down on a niche. Find out what your property is best for, who does it best suit, and what are the type of people that will come into the area. And that is why that first chapter, that first main chapter about the avatar is absolutely crucial and key. If I could push you for two more. So one was about the avatar, the. Other one is the do you know anyone? And again, the do you know anyone? Is another big part of the book. This is one for business owners in general. This isn't just for hospitality. This is for anybody who's got a business. Whether you're employed, self employed, limited company, whatever. It as a nation, as a generation, we are always focused on new money. We are always focused on new customers. When if you look at it from a logistical point of view and just from a common sense point of view, the true profit is in the people that have already given you money. The people who already jumped that barrier that know like love and trust factors there and what you're going to do. You can go to anybody who's done any business with you over the last twelve months. You can reach out to them via a text message, a phone call, an email, and just say, hey, we like working with you, you're awesome. Do you know anybody who is just like you that needs help for what we provide? And again, you can substitute those words for whatever industry you're in, but it works time and time and time and time again, especially in hospitality. Because if you've got, let's say, a business guest that you've HOMEED and you've looked after and you stayed with you for like a couple of months and they've left the property in a great condition, they've spent a good chunk of money with you because it's a business guest. The business world is very ancestral. Everybody knows everybody. Now that guest, that person may not be coming back to your town or your sea, but somebody else in the company may, or they may know somebody else who's coming to your town or city. And if you go to them and say, bob, listen, do you know anybody who's coming who needs a place to stay? Do you know anybody who's coming to the area that needs a place to stay? It could be for an event, it could be for a catch up, meetup, whatever. If you do, please set up an email Fred. A WhatsApp chat, a text message, fred and just introduce me. If they book on the back of your referral, then we will send you X. X could be anything. It could be cold hard cash. If you know that person, you know what they like. Football tickets, football shirt, signed football shirt, whatever. 50 6000 pound spend. If that ends up being a four grand, five grand booking, that 100 pound spend in comparison to the commission cost that you would pay from if they come from another third party is minor. And again, because it is a referral, social proof equates to 93% of all purchasing power in the world. That social proof is so much better than you just cold calling somebody. So tap into the people that have stayed with you over the last year. If you don't want to go through every single person, then just work out the 80 20 rule. So look at the 20% of guests that have brought in 8% of your profit and start there. And then you just whittle it down. Wow, we've got the gold and the silver. How about the bronze mark? Ah, well, the bronze is the rest of it. Like literally there's 101 tips and there's so many other ways to skin a cat. And when it comes to marketing, you literally got to figure out and play with one thing that you want to give a go. There's a simple reason for that. There's so many niches, there's so many markets, there's so many locations, there's so many places. If you're struggling after those first two of what to really do, then the third one should be just go look through the rest of the book, see which one you can easily implement. So what can you literally do tomorrow and do that? And so you've got 99 other picks to pick from there. Great. So I'm just going to pick you up on one of those things. The first one was think about your avatar. I was talking to a service accommodation manager because we're looking to target contractors. He was saying you should be aiming for the contractors, but because the contractors are there only during the week, you also want to target people at the weekend as well. How does that work in terms of. Because that goes against what you're saying in terms of the avatar looking for one particular guest type. It isn't, it isn't. Number one, if you can get your property filled for like say 30 weeks in a year with these contractors and you can get them to pay for the weekend as well, you're fine. You don't need to worry about it. But if you've got a situation where they're coming Monday to Thursday, check out on Friday. That opens up the Friday to Sunday. And you've got the ability in your business, so you've got the staff to do the changeover quick enough from Friday to Sunday and you can capitalize on that market, then all that you need to do is, number one, figure out what your 80 20 is. So what 20% of your actions are going to bring in 80% of your profit. Once you absolutely nail that and it is all guns and blazing and it's working really well, then you will tap into the other. So let's just say for this example, it's contractors. Contractors are your bread and butter and you've got it nailed down. You build up all of the contacts, all of the networks. It literally gets to a point where someone from your team can just message your company and say, here's the invoice for next month. Fantastic. Then you go, okay, so let's look at these leisure bookings, let's look at the weekends, right? These contractors are absolutely fine doing Monday to Thursday, check out Friday, and I can get these guests in for the other ones. Or let's just say that you pick up another property, the third property, and that's going to be solely for tourists. There's going to be no contractors going there. It's going to be literally full of tourists staying two free nights, whatever. So you will have your avatar for your two properties that are contractor heavy. And then you've got your third property, which is all about the leisure. So once you've nailed down number one, that's when you move on to number two, and that's when you would figure out your avatar for there. So it's the same it's just different strokes. And this is the same methodology when it comes to social media. This is such a big problem. I see it all the time. That shiny object syndrome. So people who are crap at Facebook are suddenly trying to get good at TikTok? No, you focus on one channel, get epic at that, build that up to where that's running like a fine tune machine, and then you move on to the next Shiny Object Syndrome. Whether that's TikTok, Instagram or whatnot, that's how you do it. I asked Mark about the concept of reverse engineering everything by finding out where the most demand is for direct bookings before purchasing a property for serviced accommodation. Before you invest in anywhere. Doesn't matter where your property is. Part of your market research would be to cold call companies and just pretend that you have got a management company, whatever, and just to see what's the deal like, how many staff do they need, how many staff come to the area, where are they staying at the moment? A simple way of doing this would be to get somebody to drive around the town that you're looking

to invest in between seven and 10: 18:11

00 at night and drive to the Ibis, drive to the Travel Lodge, drive to the Premier Inn and look at the car park and look to see what work vans are parked up between seven

and 10: 18:22

00. Make a note of the name, make a note of the number. And that's how you start your market research. So if you do that for about a month, you'll have a good 20 numbers that you could call, and then you call them the next month and say, oh, I was just at the Insert Hotel the other night, I was meeting a friend and I saw one of your vans was packed up outside. Who's the person who is in charge of booking the accommodation for these people? And I'll go, Why? So? Well, we've got a management company that deals with accommodation. We've got lots of properties in Insert Town or city, and we work with contractors. Our niche is contractors, business people. And compared to Ibis Travelodge Insert name, we have not just a hotel experience where you stay in a box, like your members of staff can stay in a full house with a kitchen. You actually save money and your workers have a much better stay experience while we're on the contract. It and they'll go, oh, yeah, brilliant. So. And then they'll go from there, because who wouldn't want to save money for their company, for their boss? Or even bet. You're speaking to the boss and it's like, you can save them money and he'll tell you everything that you need to know and you get 20 of them and you'll get a decent idea of what's going on in that town. Or city and you can make a judgment call. Combine that with the data analysis that you run on Air, DNA or from whatever else deal analysis that you're doing. I would 100% be doing that part of my market research before I purchase a property in a brand new town that I don't know anything about. How do we look for whether there's market and whether there's Saturation? There's not Saturation because like I said, you've only got a certain amount of heads on beds to get Saturation. And all that stuff is just media talk and it's just people panicking because they're crap at what they do and when they haven't done the proper train and then they haven't discovered who their avatar is. And again, if they haven't got a decent database, they complain about Saturation. But it's not saturation. It's just that they have signed up to Airbnb in 2020. 2021, when it was at its absolute peak, when staycations were a thing, when you literally could just open up a listing, take a couple of crappy pictures on your phone, list it on airbnb, and if you hit it right at the right time, you'll be booked up for weeks with no sales or marketing at all. And this is the thing about airbnb booking.com verbo hospitality is that we are very lucky. You can start a business, put it on one or two sites and be guaranteed to get revenue in. I don't know any other industry like that. Part of what we do is website design. I can't go list boostly on one website and be guaranteed to get revenue. I have to drag customers kicking and screaming to users and then you basically give them a great experience and you ask for referrals. You do what every other normal business owner does. But for some reason in hospitality, you get spoiled. And when it is so easy, you become complacent and then you get lazy because it is literally just like I'll just leave it for Airbnb. You literally become reactive because you're just waiting for the Airbnb ping to happen. And so with that being said, those now in 2023 who are looking at this industry like it's oversaturated, it's not going to work. Nah, this is just what it was in 2018. This is just what it was in 2019. It's just that everybody who jumped in at 2020, 2021 got spoiled. Which is madness, seeing that loads of other industries got really hot. So with all that being said, you can do that from other side of the world. Tap into LinkedIn. It's literally a case of you find somebody on TaskRabbit, which is basically booking a handyman or delivery driver or whatever, or you go on Gumtree or put a post up in a Facebook group, say, listen, I'm going to pay someone 100 pounds to just go and drive around wherever, get me a month's worth of data. Go on LinkedIn, find the details and cold message them on LinkedIn. You can easily start the conversation on the other side of the world and you can jump on a zoom or whatever and have these chats with them. So, yeah, you can easily, easily do that. And there's no such thing as like, oversaturation, it's just there's too many people are trying to appeal to everybody. This podcast is all about pushing the boundaries of what expats can achieve from the other side of the world. And you've just given some some more gold there, Mark. But what about the opposite end of the scale where I'm not worried about saturation in a particular town that I'm looking at the moment? It's the opposite, there's not much there. If I go on booking.com, there's really not many SA properties there. Is that something that should worry me? Well, again, you need to have a bit of local knowledge. What I would be doing is I would be contacting the businesses, I would be finding, like, who is coming to the town, the city, the area, et cetera, and just see how much demand there is. In a place where there's tons of people, that's a good sign because it's obviously very busy. And in a one that's not so busy, it could be that it's about to be the up and up. It could just be about to absolutely take off. And it's just one of those untapped sort of forgotten places in the UK. The places that you're talking about absolutely is, in my opinion. I know the area as well. So, I mean, it's all about your due diligence. You do the due diligence and you go from there. If there's not a lot of people listed on, say, bookings or Airbnb or Verbo, then there's a sign that that could be like the next untapped place. But then you got to do your due diligence deeper and again, try and find out the businesses that are in the area and whatnot. Let me ask about Occupancy versus average daily rate. Do you have a kind of philosophy on that? The big worry is when someone comes to you saying, yeah, I'm booked out solid for the next six months, 100%, because that means they're charging way too low. Every single management company who comes to you? The first question I would be asking everybody is, who's your dynamic pricing software? Who do you use for dynamic pricing? And if they go, we don't have one, I'd be swerving them massively. I would be looking at somebody and again, if you don't know what pricing management software is, go pick up the Blueprint, which is the other book. So Playbook is all about marketing. Direct Blueprint is all about the systems and the structures and the softwares and the tech stack to have behind the scenes to build this business. And a price and software tool is absolutely key. Pricelabs is the big one. You have that in place and again, you got to go. With the data. And this is really exciting for me because for the first time in forever, small businesses doesn't matter if you've got one property or you've got five or ten properties, they've got the same technology as what the big, big hotel chains used to have. And it means now that we don't have to guesstimate when it comes to pricing, we don't have to guesstimate what to put in our listing. That was a tool called Rank Breeze, R-A-N-K-B-R-E-Z-E. It's a fantastic tool because it helps you know exactly the words and the description, the amenities to put in on Airbnb in your town or your city that's going to get the biggest click through rate, which is fantastic. It's a fantastic tool. There are so many tools available now that can really help any short term rental or hospitality host succeed. At present, Mark doesn't actually run any serviced accommodation units himself, which may come as a surprise given the depth of his knowledge and expertise. He explained why Boostly is everything. We exited our family business in 2021 for seven figures, which was lovely. We've had that in our family for years. In 2016, when I started Boostly, it was literally to help people in Scarborough and then over time, the last seven years, it has grown to be a behemoth. We've got over 2000 clients all over the world. Boostly takes up my morning, noon and night and I've had many, many of years of being in service accommodation, hospitality, short term rentals, et cetera. So, yeah, now Boostley is everything and my mission is to help 1 million hosts cut down on their overlies on Airbnb. However, he hasn't ruled out buying his own short term rental properties once he's achieved his mission, but was understandably cagey about the location. I know exactly where I'm going to be and what I'm going to do, but right now, Boost is my core. Core focus. You're going to tell us what you're going to do, where it is? No, I got to ask, right? You got to ask. Yeah. Where would you be looking if you were me? I know it's a bit of a wide question. This is where you got to use the tools, tools that are available. Air DNA is a fantastic tool and it's only going to get better and better. I'm sorry to interrupt, but is it always accurate? Well, it's as good as you're going to get and it's going to save you a lot of time and it's only going to get better. They had a massive investment last year and I had a Pod cast interview with one of the heads of tech and he's so excited about what's going to be coming with Air DNA because now they've got millions behind them that they can actually improve the tech so much. I love it how you can keep life simple. It's a massive time saver and again, the next step to all of this, with what's coming with GPT and how I started this conversation with GPT and AI, is that it's only going to speed up the time that we spend on this. We're looking at potential areas, looking and running it through deal analyzer sheets and everything like that, and to see if it's a good one, it's only going to be quicker. The key to everything is to start to build those offline relationships with estate agents, with sellers, with people who know off market deals sooner rather than later. Because what will happen is when GPT and AI become more widespread and everybody's using them, it's going to be snapped up like that, because the system will be able to find someone within seconds that would normally take you hours to do. So what you need to start doing is find deal packages, find estate agents, start building relationships with them, getting on their books, et cetera, and finding these off market deals sooner rather than later. And that's what I'd be doing, because at the end of the day, relationships is going to be the most important, valuable commodity that is out there and your network is your net worth. So go old school, build up those relationships and partnerships and whatnot, because it will pay off tenfold when literally there's a computer that can find a property like that and give it to the people that are utilizing that software. So there was a property that I bought a block of four flats. They're all one bedroom flats. And Air DNA came up with these amazing figures, absolutely amazing figures. And then I found an essay manager in that area and he said, no. It'S not going to work there. Why? He claimed he had local knowledge. Well, you could have been talking to an idiot. You're saying that Air DNA is very reliable, it wouldn't throw up these anomalies or it's possible. Just because they call themselves an expert doesn't mean it if anything, you can't take somebody's opinion from it. You got to get your due diligence, go to Air DNA, go get a few people and go to somebody that you know and trust and who's done it time and time again and work with you and you go from there. The Air DNA, it was around in 2019. 2020 is not going to be the same idea in 2023 and 2024, it's going to get better, from what I. Can make out from my limited knowledge, one bedroom properties, you're competing with the hotels, so that's probably not such a. Good thing to be looking at. The kind of properties I'm looking at would be ideally three bedrooms and then with two reception rooms, and you can convert the second reception room to a fourth bedroom. Or would you say that there's probably a more of a market for two bedrooms and convert one of the reception rooms. So you've got three bedroom, so it's. Going to be a nine, but I'm going to come back to its avatar. It literally depends on who are you trying to appeal to? Who do you want to have in those houses and then do your research and your due diligence to say, okay, well, I'm going to be working with people that are family relocations. I want to be working with insurance companies. I want to massively appeal to that crowd. And then your answer is given. It's like, well, families that are going to be coming back from overseas, expats, et cetera. Your biggest part and pain point is that when they finish their contract, it's getting reestablished and they need a place to stay before they get there. So it's like, right, well, I know what I need now. I know that I need at least a free bed, I know that I need to be situated here. I know it needs to have all of these amenities and all these things to make it work. So the answer to your question is you've got to know your avatar inside out, backwards and forwards, because then it will answer all of the next questions. And it's not just like who you think should be in there. You've got to go and do the due diligence of who's coming to the area, who's it predominantly known for, what companies in and around, so it's about knowing the area, knowing what's coming, and that will answer your question. If people want to contact you instagram. At Boosley UK, that's the best place to get hold and boostly is B-O-O-S-T-L-Y. Perfect. So I really do appreciate your time. I know you have to go quickly. All right, thank you so much. There's so much value in this week's show. It's hard to pick out just three highlights, but here goes anyway. Firstly, Mark pointed out that an absolute minimum of 20% of your reservations as a short term hospitality host should come from direct bookings. And if this is not the case, you might want to consider switching management agencies. Secondly, you really need to get to grips with your avatar. Who are the people that come to your town or city or location? What are they looking for? What do they need? What would improve their stay? Instead of trying to appeal to as many people as possible, you and or your managing agent should be focusing on that avatar and speaking to them in everything that you do, from your website to your photos to the language you use. And if you have two different avatars, then maybe you could consider setting up two different properties, each arranged to serve their separate needs, which would be much better than trying to appeal to both. And finally, rather than concentrating all your efforts on finding completely new guests, maybe you'd be better off asking your existing customers for referrals. Mark suggests asking happy clients the question, do you know anyone just like you? The true profit is in people who have already given you money and targeting their friends and associates. Before I reveal this week's exotic listener location, I thought you might like to know how many different countries we have listeners in now, and I'm happy to say we've recently reached 120, which is astonishing, really, and is a reflection of just what a great place the UK is for property investment. Anyway, this week's pick is the capital city of Nigeria, which is not Lagos, as I thought, but Abuja. Are you our listener in Abuja? I'd love to hear about the difficulty of getting a mortgage in Nigeria, as according to the Corruption Perception Index, which you can see by subscribing to our newsletter at www.expatpropertystory.com, nigeria sits at number 154 on the list, so don't be shy. Get in touch if you'd like to tell us more about your expat property story. And that goes for everyone else, too. Thank you to Mark Simpson for appearing on this week's show, and to you for listening. And to use Mark's words, do you know anyone just like you who would be, or even just might be interested in this or any other episode? Then share the show to spread the word. You've been listening to XPat property story.