How to Find “Hidden” Deals That Most Investors Miss (Even as a Beginner)
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Finding those hidden but high potential deals can be the key to accelerating your path to financial freedom. And we want to help you find those properties. And our expert guest today, Avery Caro, grew her portfolio to 250 doors in five years by finding what she considers hidden but high potential deals. Stay tuned because she's going to share with all of you rookies her exact tactics to find these deals, even in highly competitive and saturated short-term rental markets. ♪♪

This is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, and I'm Ashley Kerr. And I'm Tony J. Robinson, and do me a favor and give a big warm welcome to Avery Caro. Avery, welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Thank you all so much for having me. Avery, let's start out at the macro level. Interest rates are high, and the short-term rental market has definitely matured. So what are you seeing right now as opportunities or challenges for a rookie investor? So for a rookie investor, obviously the interest rates are high.

are a thing. You know, they almost...

I would say almost tripled over the course of six months and they did not come back down. But the opportunity for a new investor or any investor is because of that, there are not many buyers in the market at all. So if you are patient and persistent and make a lot of offers and make those low offers, I think a lot of investors still have PTSD from 2021 and having to offer 100,000 over on every single property. Make those low offers, offer that number that works for you.

And with some patience and persistence, you will be able to find great deals. But it's just there's not a lot of inventory on the market either, because by the same token that buyers don't want to be buying in a high interest rate environment, sellers that don't need to sell don't really want to put their properties on the market and take a hit on their value because buyers are now in a high interest rate environment. And then they also don't want to turn around and have to become buyers in a high interest rate environment. So it's kind of like a stalemate a little bit going on.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Avery. And I think right now, since there are fewer buyers, it is an opportunity for rookies because you can start negotiating things that a couple of years ago would have been unheard of. If there is something that pops in your inspection report, maybe you can get a credit for that. Or maybe you can ask the seller to fix those things. Whereas before, if anything come up in the inspection report, it didn't matter because there was another buyer behind you who wanted to buy it regardless of what's happening.

I guess, obviously, your expertise, Avery, both as a short-term rental owner and operator, you have the long-term rental portfolio, but you're also very much a high-volume agent, right?

Are you seeing sellers being more flexible with what it is they're looking for? Like if they're asking for $500,000, are you seeing them kind of give properties away at $400,000? Like what are you seeing on the agent side? Well, the joke that we have on the agent side is you want to be everybody's first love, second wife, and third listing agent because –

The way things are right now, a lot of times sellers are still anchored to that price that their neighbor got in 2021 that we're probably not going to get. And usually what I mean by third listing agent is it takes at least one agent worth of the property of the listing expiring before sellers start to realize like, oh, it's

It's not that my agent didn't list it hard enough. It's that my price is too high, which the number one reason that properties sit on the market is the price is too high. So my advice to new investors is look for those high days on market properties, A, because maybe that seller might be coming down to the realization that,

they're priced too high. And even if they're not, that first listing agent knows, hey, this thing's going to expire pretty soon. And they're probably going to put in a little more work in terms of doing everything they can to get their seller to accept your lower offer than somebody who just got the listing yesterday. So high days on market are great.

I just got a property that was listed for $699 for $625. It had been on the market almost six months. They'd switched agent. I was on their second agent. And they finally just agreed. As a matter of fact, they told us no at first. And then we said, oh, well, you know, we've got this other property that we're looking at too that's kind of right around the same price range. And our agent was just honest with them about that. And two hours later, their agent came back and said, hey, actually, they'll give it to you for this. And so we were able to get it for $625.

So looking into the 2025 market, what's something that investors can do, specifically rookie investors with not a lot of experience to actually stay competitive when making offers on properties? Well, that's the good thing about right now is you don't have to be competitive because there's not a line out the door for every single property. So you can go out there and take your swings and misses and you almost never will you completely miss a property. If you ever

Every now and then there will be something where you get an agent who listed a property wrong, like under market, like my very first deal when I was a rookie, very first deal that I ever got under contract. The agent was the seller's daughter and it was her very first listing, her very first deal ever. She'd just been licensed and she listed it with no photos and she was just going to get the photos up later.

My husband and I happened to be in the neighborhood when it listed, and we went and drove by it. We're like, my God, this house is really nice. But nobody else saw it because they didn't have pictures. So any little thing like that that you can take advantage of, I love properties with bad pictures. That often leads to the high days on market that we were talking about. But a lot of times properties...

are not as bad as they are in pictures. Sometimes they're worse than they are in pictures, but you can kind of tell if the pictures are bad, you can pretty much guarantee that the property is going to be in better shape than what it looks like if they're like blurry and dark. Now, if they have really, really good pictures, you know, that means that the listing agent knows what they're doing and they're probably making it look a little bit better. But if the pictures are blurry, dark, I

iPhone, you know, they've got the black bands on the side because they took it with their phone. I would recommend going to see that property immediately because you can really find some good stuff just because of people not listing things properly. Are there some other things in listings that we should be looking for that are kind of like red flags of, ooh, there might actually be something better to this? So not necessarily red flags, but

Look at the number of bedrooms versus the square footage. So in some markets, like here in the Florida Panhandle, it's really common to have one or two of what's called bunk rooms that don't have closets. But when you rent them, you put bunk beds in there and they sleep like a bedroom. But we're not allowed to list them on the MLS as bedrooms because they don't have a closet. So if you're looking at a property and it says it's a two bedroom, but it's like 3,500 square feet,

might be worth looking into that it probably sleeps as a higher bedroom count. So look at that bedroom count versus your square footage and see if that's way off, there might be the opportunity to be able to sleep more people than what it's actually listed for. And a lot of investors will be like, oh, million dollar two bedroom. Heck no. And they just swipe left when really it's a listed

It's more like a four bedroom, but they have to list it as a two. Everyone, one last follow up on on like the kind of lack of competition. Right now, interest rates are hovering around 7%, right? Somewhere in that ballpark. Is there is there an interest rate level where once we hit that you kind of see the floodgates opening? Like as you talk to buyers and sellers, is there a number that's kind of in everyone's mind? Like if we get here, then the floodgates kind of open six.

Six even. Something like 80% of mortgages right now are under five. Not that many are under three. So a lot of people, everybody's like, oh, everybody got a 3% mortgage. Not everybody did.

a lot smaller percentage than you would think. But somebody who's got a 4% mortgage right now, jumping to a 7%, that's not palatable. But jumping from 4% to 6% or 4.5% to 6% is much more palatable than jumping all the way to 7%. So I think once we get to that 6% number, there's a lot of people in that 4.5% to 6% range that will jump back in and say, okay, this is manageable. I can make this move now. We're going to take a short break.

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BiggerPockets. Okay, now let's get back into the show with Avery. So Avery, one of the tactics that you've used to grow your business is finding hidden deals. It's something you talk about in your new book that you just published with BiggerPockets, so congratulations. It's called Smarter Short-Term Rentals to Build a Dynamic Real Estate Business and Outhost the Competition.

So Avery, tell us a little bit more about these tactics you're using to go your business. So we talked a little bit about high days on market. We talked about finding properties that have bad photos, finding properties that have maybe more sleepable bedrooms than what we're allowed to list on the MLS list.

The other big one for me is buying in markets that are very desirable. And here's what I mean by that when it comes to short-term rentals. So markets where the tourism, very heavy tourism traffic has been that way for decades and decades. I read something on AirDNA a few days ago about Joshua Tree. So everybody was talking about Joshua Tree being...

being one of the most affected by saturation markets back in 2022. So it was on all these AirDNA best places to invest in 2020, 2021. Then it rolled off. Everybody said saturated. People aren't making as much money anymore because there's too much supply. But I read an article yesterday about how

That supply growth was like 20% in 2021, but that shrunk down to like 6% last year. So we're not seeing that huge supply growth. A lot of the people who bought in who maybe didn't need to be buying in weren't treating it like a business. Those people have sold now.

And now it is back being one of the best places to invest. And the reason for that is because the tourism didn't really change. That's a market that has a lot of tourism from L.A., a lot of the big Southern California markets. And so even though it became saturated, it's kind of leveled out. And so for me, that's a really big

good testament to buying in markets where there is high tourism demand. I think that a lot of people over the past couple years, at least in the short-term rental world, have kind of gotten on a path of, I'm going to go buy where nobody's bought a short-term rental before. I'm going to be the first short-term rental in this market. And I personally have never done that because I like to see a lot of tourism. And I think that, you know, I bet on vacation rentals in vacation markets starting in

10 years ago. I bought my first one in 2015. I've never sold one and they're all in those vacation markets. So it makes me feel a little bit justified with those statistics and my personal strategy that, you know, we saw the saturation and then now that's kind of the tide's gone out on that. And yeah,

still a great place to invest because of that heavy tourism. Avery, you make a phenomenal point. And, you know, we have quite a few properties in Joshua Tree as well. And I want to share kind of how we're looking at data. I want to get your opinion as well. But like there's a couple of things I'm looking at now as we're evaluating markets, both the markets that we're in and future markets we're thinking about and its supply and its demand on

On the supply side, we're looking at just like the raw number of listings. And then we're also looking at the listing growth, right? Like, like how has supply grown over the last couple of years? And then we're also looking at the demand signals. We're looking at just like nights booked or properties booked per night on average, right?

the rev par, the occupancy percent change, like if those things are looking healthy and we can kind of use all those metrics to get a good gauge on supply versus demand and the quote unquote saturation. And like you said, if we see a market where supply is growing at 20, 30%,

every single year, but demand was only growing at 6% or 7% every single year. That's where that imbalance comes. So those are the important metrics I'm looking at. I love that you're looking at that as well. I guess, are there any other kind of key data points that you found to be useful as you're either evaluating properties or evaluating potential markets? So for me, I've

always, I like the data, but I don't lead with data. I lead with where I feel like I have a competitive edge or knowledge of the market. So I bought my first property in the Smoky Mountains in 2015 before anybody was talking about it. There were no YouTube channels. There was really just the OG BiggerPockets podcast. That was it in terms of real estate content. But I chose that market because I grew up in North Mississippi and that's where we went on weekend vacation. So

I had a competitive edge at that point in that market because I was a tourist in that market growing up. The second market that I chose was Destin, Florida, again, because I grew up going there twice a year, every single year. So I knew I've been a tourist in this market for 26 years at that point. And I felt comfortable buying there because I am the target demographic. I know exactly what people go there for,

why and what time of year. So I had the competitive advantage of that knowledge. And then I bring in the data and say, okay, yes, this makes sense. And I think it's important for people to understand, especially new people. You don't have to just read a list and say, well, Avery said invest in this market. So I'm going to go do that, even though I've never been there and I don't know anything about it. Choose something that you do know, then bring in the data, check the regulations, make sure everything works. But there's really no substitute for really understanding a market.

Yeah, I love that advice, Avery. And, you know, I almost was forced to kind of take it from a different angle because me being in California, just a lot of the markets when I first started investing were so prohibitively expensive that it didn't make sense for me to go here where I was. Like when I bought my first cabin, the Smoky Mountains, I didn't even know where it was on the map. You know, I was like, well, you know, I'd never vacationed there before, but I did the research as we were kind of going through that process. But one thing that I found that I think has been beneficial for me is that as you start to kind of

go through the data, sometimes even when a market looks saturated, when you start to like slice that data up, you start to see that there are different pockets where there is saturation and there are other pockets where it's not super saturated. Like if you go to a specific market, maybe there's a heavy degree of saturation in the smaller properties, right? In the one bedrooms, the two bedrooms and the three bedrooms, right?

But when you look at the four or fives and the bigger properties, those are all doing relatively well. Or if you look at, hey, maybe all the five bedrooms are doing poorly. But then when you look at the five bedrooms that have a pool and a hot tub and an electric charger, electric vehicle charger and a gym, those are doing incredibly well. So as you're doing your research, don't you know, it's good to look at the overall market, but you also want to kind of break it down by property type, by amenities, by experience and see how those properties are performing as well. Totally agree with that. And

Hot, hot tip for new investors in true vacation markets. So don't do this in a metro market because you got hotels in metro markets, at least in the ones that I'm in and familiar with. Studios and one bedrooms almost always make up less than 1% of the available space.

properties for rent. And I own a couple studios in one beds and now I've owned them for over 10 years. And so we've been through a few ups and downs in the market. Those crush it no matter what. So it's not always about getting as much for your money as you can, getting the biggest thing you can afford. Sometimes it makes sense to get two one bedrooms rather than one two bedrooms. So not always, depends on the

There's nothing wrong with a one bedroom. As a matter of fact, like we've got one client who owns 30 something properties. He's got plenty of money. He could go buy the 10 bedroom mansions if he wanted to.

he only buys one bedrooms. That's it. In Siesta Key, Florida and the Smokies, that's all he buys. Avery, where can someone go to find this information? The data that you look at, what are your resources that you're using, for example, to look that, oh, there's not a lot of inventory of one bedrooms? I like AirDNA and Price Labs, and neither of those are gospel. You want to look at both of them. I look at Raboo sometimes too. Raboo's free.

but they give you a pretty good idea. So I'm never going to look at one of those and say, oh, well, AirDNA says this property will do $84,732. So that's exactly what it's going to do. I look at the data sources to kind of give me a range. And then I look at my property using the enemy method, comparing it to the other properties around it and basically just saying, okay, here's the properties that are available that

my guests, potential guests are going to be presented with when they're looking at my property. What are the things I can do to make sure that they choose mine instead of theirs? And a lot of times you'd be surprised. It's not always a lot. Sometimes it's just having a better listing than them. They could have a better property than you, but they present it in a terrible way, an unprofessional way. They've got one sentence in their description, their pictures are blurry, things like that.

So anyway, I like to use the data to kind of give me a range and then use the enemy method to figure out, you know, dial it in a little bit further. Avery, I started my first Airbnb in 2018. It was an Airbnb arbitrage and it was an apartment. And my partner and I went around to our mom's friend's basements and asked, what furniture do you guys have? And we threw it into there. And it did great for a long time. We actually just closed it down in December 2018.

That kind of strategy method doesn't seem to really work anymore. And you have to put more time and effort into the uniqueness, the experience, the design. So going into 2025, what are some of the...

ways that someone can optimize their property to really stand out in today's market? That's a great question. So you can't get away with the secondhand furniture that doesn't match anymore. Everything needs to be cohesive. I would say like West Elm level furniture or above, uh,

And you want to have really light, bright decor. And I want to say, though, that a lot of people, it's really trendy now to do the over-amenitization of having, we're having a pool, we're having a pickleball court, putt-putt, we're having all these crazy things. And the murals, and the murals are fine because a lot of times those are pretty affordable to do. But what I have seen, especially in the Smokies, is people over-amenitizing things.

And by the time they spend, you know, I've seen people,

$500,000 on a property and then another $250,000 in cash on amenities, you could go buy two more $500,000 properties with that. But what I see is adding too much to where in order to break even, you have to push your price per night up so high that now the demographic that comes to the Smokies can no longer afford. Like, yeah, you've got all this cool stuff, but now it's outside their budget. So again, that's

Before you start amenitizing, make sure that you understand who your target demographic is because the Smokies clientele, it's not Aspen. And if you start having to charge Aspen prices, you're not going to get booked. So you do have to find that happy medium of cute, clean, comfortable. We want to have as many amenities as possible, but we don't want to go so far overboard with the spend on that.

that we now have made it too expensive for our potential guests. I like that reference, the CCC, the triple C. If you bring up a really good point, I was just talking to some investors who were buying an Airbnb in West Virginia. And West Virginia has like the cheapest median home price of any state in the United States, if I recall correctly. And it's not a place where you can necessarily go out and have a property that's going to do $200,000, $300,000 a year in revenue.

And they were looking at this beautiful cabin. But then, like you said, they were looking at spending, I think, close to $200,000 to set the property up. And I said, guys, I get what you're doing here. But if you look at your comps, like the strongest figure that we have for your top line revenue is probably around like $120,000.

So even if you put all this money in, maybe you could do more than that, but there's nothing in the data to show that people are willing to spend more than what these properties have done. And do you actually need to spend all that in order to compete? So there very much, I think, is a fine line between trying to make your property stand out, but then not over-investing to the point where you can't get it back. It's almost like buying in a D-class neighborhood and putting...

marble countertops and beautiful walk-in showers and all those things you would put in an A-class neighborhood. But we see the same thing in the short-term rental space. It is something that you need to think about, too. I would not recommend doing the hyper-amenitization unless you're very experienced in your market because what can happen is

A lot of that amenity stuff, it does add income 100%. I am not disputing that whatsoever. But a lot of those types of things do not add value to the property in terms of being able to sell it. As a matter of fact, it can hurt. So speaking of being the third listing agent, we had a property not that long ago in Florida and it was hyper amenitized, had murals in every single room. It looked cool. The income was great. I was like, we're going to have no problem selling this. The income on this thing is great.

It expired with us. They went to another agent, expired with them. Then they came back to us. Thank goodness. We were able to get it sold. But all of the feedback that we got on that first round before it expired was at this price point, we're really looking for something that feels luxury and best

murals on the wall and things, it doesn't feel luxury. And so you have to know when you're adding all these things that if you have to sell, that you may have to undo them all. Or if you spend $250,000 on putt-putt and pickleball and all these things, that it doesn't necessarily add $250,000 to the property value. So if you end up not

not thinking short-term rentals are for you or needing to sell for whatever reason, you may not recoup that whole 250 that you spent on it. So that's something to think about too. I'm not disputing that it adds income because it does, but it's just a happy medium again. That's a great point. Like it kind of expands your pool of buyers because now it could be somebody that's just looking to use that as a single family home or a second home and you're not just targeting Airbnb host. Right.

So Avery, you gave the example of if your property is not performing that great, like don't like overdo the amenities, don't invest that $250,000 and not get that return.

What is your recommendation for maybe somebody who is in a saturated market and really struggling to create income? What are some of the things they should be doing? Or what's the point where they actually should exit the property? Oh, the point where they should exit. So I...

I, um, this was not a short-term rental, but I exited a property earlier this year that I had to learn, like I made a mistake with, and it can, you can do the same thing with short-terms and that's buying cheap property just because it's cheap. So I bought in a market that doesn't really appreciate, but across the board, all the properties across the board, cashflow looks great, bought several. And this one in particular, I'm

Had another apartment building across the street. And that apartment building just started getting worse and worse and falling into worse and worse disrepair. And then there's drugs and then there's crime and there's

people breaking windows and stealing cars. And eventually the city condemns that building. So nobody's supposed to be living there, but there's a lot of people living there. And the crime is now coming across to our building. The police do not care. Police don't care about landlord problems and I don't blame them. There's more important things. So after about, I don't

I don't know, a year and a half of having to, we've already rehabbed these units one by one as people have moved out like you do with apartment buildings. And then now people are breaking in and they're busting holes in the walls and they're doing all these things. We're having to rehab them again. And we found that

The time that we said, OK, it is time to sell is when that return on the energy we're putting in is no longer there. So if you've spent all this time and energy and you cannot make it work, if you truly have tried everything, you have to be honest with yourself about, am I doing the best job that I can or do I just want to find somebody to blame for us?

when it stopped being worth our time, like, my God, we cannot talk to each other about this property one more time. How much money have we lost on this thing? That's when the time to sell is. So there's not necessarily, and of course, just to make this all worse, the day after closing, magically everything's cleaned up and somebody has bought the property. And if we would have held on, you know, one more month, we would have been fine. But anyway, when it stopped

when it starts affecting your quality of life and you've really tried everything and there's nothing else you can do, it's just time to go. And your number will come up eventually. If you own enough real estate for long enough, you are going to have something like this happen just because it happens on your first one, which it won't always. But if it happens on your first one, don't quit. It just means you paid your dues early. You're probably going to be okay. You've learned.

Just stay in the ring. Ever want to talk a little bit about like actually finding the deals we talked about? Like, Hey, what are some market level things you should be looking at some strategic things, but I guess maybe is there a story there in your own portfolio or maybe with a client that you worked with where you actually were able to find that kind of hidden potential in a property and maybe walks through that rocks through that deal. Sure. So, um, about a month and a half ago, we got a client, a, a property here in Destin and

And it was listed as a three bedroom, but it was not a three bedroom. It was three individual houses, nice ones, not junky ones, like nice beach houses. And they each had their own pools, but they were on spread out on just two parcels instead of three. And one of the properties was kind of straddling both. So, yeah.

I don't know why they had it listed that way. I don't know. I don't know what was going through their mind. We got this for them for $1.5 million. It was a three bedroom, a three bedroom and a five bedroom. And then one of the three bedrooms had a lockout studio apartment. And to give you some context, a three bedroom with a pool in Destin comparable to one of these guys, like if it were on its own lot is easily unprofitable.

1.2 million. So we got them three properties, all of them good size, like they needed cosmetic updates, but they were cute and all had a pool for 1.5 just because they were all in the same parcel. But each of those, I mean, that five bedroom should hit 1%.

200,000, the three bedroom should hit 150 each. So that was a pretty good deal. That was one where I was like, dang, I wish I would have seen that before our clients saw that, but good for them. Good for them. Like right on the back guys. But that was probably the best deal I've seen ever. And it happened at the worst interest rate time. And you know, at a time when everybody's like, Oh, real estate's,

in the crapper. So the deals are out there. We interviewed a guest. Ashley, I don't know if you remember her name, but we interviewed a guest and her entire strategy for finding properties was looking for things on the MLS that were kind of mismatched like that. And she was an engineer. So she had some kind of Python script that she had created that was like scraping Zillow and was looking for like-

Ariel. Yeah, Ariel. Yeah, yeah. And she had this really crazy Python script. But basically, that's what she was looking for. Properties where the price points were super low in comparison to other properties. Properties where the square footage was really large in comparison to other properties. But I think that in and of itself could be like a deal-finding strategy for finding on-market deals is just looking for those –

incongruencies and saying like, Hey, something doesn't look right here and digging in a little bit deeper. Yeah, totally. And I maybe I'll call her. I want that. I would never do something. I wouldn't know how to use it, but yeah, that's, uh, Ariel Herrera and that's episode 429 of the real estate rookie podcast. If you want to check that out, it's also on YouTube too, to find that video. I'm going to check it out for sure. Yeah.

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Okay. Welcome back from our break. We are here with Avery, who has been giving us insight into finding deals on the MLS. So what's some advice for a rookie that's maybe just getting started? Are there any markets right now that stand out to you that they should actually be avoiding or types of markets? So I,

Types of markets, I don't like when new investors want to try to trailblaze and buy something. I'm going to be the first Airbnb in this market. If there's only three Airbnbs in this market, let me go do this. That makes me very nervous because not only is it a new asset class if you're new, you're also new to running a business. So it's not just a long-term rental. It's a hospitality business. So you're now...

learning something new, but also you're having to teach everyone, all your vendors about short-term rentals and how they work. Whereas if you buy in a market that is that markets that people tend to say, oh, that's saturated like the Smokies or Orlando or any of these places, Joshua Tree,

These are areas where the vendor network is built in. They are very plug and play. If you're new, you are fishing in a pond of 10 million visitors instead of a few thousand trying to be the first one there. And you're able to learn how to run your business without having to teach all your vendors how to do it too. As a matter of fact, you're going to learn from them because they've been doing it for all these other investors. These are areas where

This has been an industry for decades and decades, well before Airbnb, well before the internet. So I really like those big vacation markets for newbies because it's very, it's almost kind of intuitive. Everybody around you knows what they're doing, so they will help you learn what you're doing more quickly. Just one comment on that. My very first cleaner for the first property that I purchased was

taught me a lot about how to manage our Airbnb. She was the one that said, "Tony, you guys need to buy three sets of linens for each bed, so we keep one on the bed, one in the laundry, and one in reserves. Here's how much toilet paper and paper towels you should be leaving out for your guests for the size of your cabin." And you're absolutely right, Avery. When you get a vendor who knows the space, who's been eating, sleeping, and breathing short-term rentals, they can help you on that educational journey to make sure you get off on the best foot possible.

Yeah, absolutely. Or, you know, in my case, my very first cleaner, I was 25 years old. She was in her fifties, had been doing this for 20 something years. And she took me for a ride. She knew I was new and she knew she could get away with stuff from the very first person. I can't believe that you would let these people disrespect your house like this. This is so terrible. I need another $50 to clean this today. And I fell for it for a good six months. And

I remember Luke told me we stopped. We were riding his motorcycle every Sunday before we had kids. We don't do this anymore. We're too scared. We would ride motorcycles out into Kentucky and come back was when we lived in Nashville. And we stopped at a restaurant and he was like, go out in the parking lot and do not come back in until you fired her because I did not want to. I was so nervous. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, she's.

going to yell at me? And she, oh, she did. She screamed at me. I was so scared. It was the first person that I'd ever had to have any kind of conversation with, much less fire. So make sure...

Be cautious, take their advice, but most of the time, that's not going to happen to you on your first one. Mine was, I guess, the complete opposite of both of yours. My first cleaner was actually, my business partner owned five Subway franchises, and she was his supervisor that oversaw those five franchises. She was our first cleaner, just basically just helping us. So the three of us had no idea what we were doing.

doing. And we just kind of learned along the way. And then eventually she's like, you guys, this is like, I've enjoyed getting the extra money, but like, I can't do this anymore. We need to have someone else come in. And yeah, from there, but definitely was a learning experience. Isn't it? Isn't it? So Avery, what about some of the top markets going into 2025? What are you seeing as far as great short-term rental markets to be looking at to invest in? Oh, so Avery,

You know, all of the publications, all of the data companies, all the big property management companies, they come out with every January a list of top places to invest. And I looked at all of them. I look at all of them every year, mainly so I can talk crap about them. Just kidding. But I

I looked at all of them and none of them have any of the same markets on them. So my advice is there is no right market to invest in. There is a right market for you to invest in. So take your knowledge, places that you've been, places that you like to go. It's okay to buy in a place that you like to go. You know, it's not a long-term rental. Buy somewhere that you like to go. By all means, life is short.

And you're going to be a more authentic marketer if you like your product. So start with something that you know, bring in that data, call, you call, not your agent, not anybody else. You call the county, the city, find out what the regulations are and make sure it's all

that all the pieces fit together the way they need to and let it rip. There's no right way. Everybody wants there to be some like one right and only way to do things and you need a 17 step process to do it and somebody on the internet's got to tell you there is a right market for you and

you are the one that can piece all that together. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Avery. And I always tell people that like the best city for me to invest in is different than the best city that for Avery to invest in, different than the best place for Ashley to invest in, because you all have different motivations and we all have different priorities of those motivations. You might be doing it just because you want a really sick vacation home that someone else is going to pay for.

I may be doing it because I want to take advantage of the short-term rental tax loophole, so I'm looking for tax benefits. Someone else may be doing it because they just want long-term appreciation with some decent cash flow in the meantime. And depending on what those motivations are, it will lead us to entirely different cities. So we could look at the same place, and I could say, absolutely not. And you could look there and say, absolutely yes. So you've got to do the homework yourself. It's more important that you find a city that aligns with your specific investment goals. 100%.

Well, Avery, thank you so much for joining us today and congratulations on your new book. Where can people find more information about smarter short-term rentals? Well, on the BiggerPockets bookstore, of course. So biggerpockets.com slash smarter STRs. It'll be there. It comes out February 11th. Well, Avery, thank you so much for joining us. I'm Ashley. He's Tony. And we'll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.