JF2141: Short Term Rental App With Jon Crosby

Jon is the CEO and Founder of Click2Flip, a mobile app to instantly analyze rentals and short term rentals. Jon loves to create streamlined processes that help make his short term rentals pretty much self-automated. He shares all of the automation he has done for friends, clients, and himself to create a smooth process and experience for both him and his guests.

 Jon Crosby Real Estate Background:

 

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“I created the app to quickly instantly give me a high-level return to see if the deal was worth investing in further” – Jon Crosby

TRANSCRIPTION

Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless. This is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast where we only talk about the best advice ever; we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff. With us today, Jon Crosby. How are you doing, Jon?

Jon Crosby: Good. How you doing?

Joe Fairless: I’m doing well, and I’m glad to hear it. A little bit about Jon – he’s the founder and CEO of Clik2Flip, he started investing in 2015 after a company that he worked for ended up being purchased, he owns and manages four short term rentals, he’s a limited partner in two multifamily LLCs and one air medical hangar commercial investment, based in Rocklin, California. With that being said, Jon, do you want to give the Best Ever listeners a little more about your background and your current focus?

Jon Crosby: Yeah, thanks again for having me on the show. It’s an honor to be here. Currently, I, as you mentioned, own Clik2Flip mobile app. It’s a mobile app to instantly analyze flips, rentals and short term rentals. Also, in addition to the real estate investment that you mentioned, I’m also a partner in an assisted living facility project here in the Sacramento area, which has been a bit of on hold at the moment because of what’s going on with the COVID crisis. So my day job is a technology consultant for Fortune 100 companies where I focus on app development management, managing app dev teams, and I did that in my previous career in the company that sold. So I was laid off from that job. It gave me the opportunity to bridge my passions, and I brought technology and real estate passions together with the Clik2Flip app. I created it because I wanted something that was in between the 1% rule and 70% rule, but I didn’t want to have to do full underwriting on all the properties I was looking for. So I created the app to quickly, instantly give me a high-level return to see if a deal was worth investing in further.

Joe Fairless: You said between the 1% and the 70%. Is that 7-0 %? What is the 70% rule?

Jon Crosby: It’s the 1% rule for flippers. So that is yet to be a really good one for the short term rental markets. I’m hoping Clik2Flip can actually help bridge that gap as well.

Joe Fairless: What is a 70% for flippers? Will you educate me? I might have heard of it, but I can’t remember what it is.

Jon Crosby: Yeah, the 70% rule just says that the max allowable offer should be 70% of what you expect the ARV to be, the after repair value.

Joe Fairless: Okay, got it. And then, Best Ever listeners, 1% is taking the rent that you’re getting on a annual basis and dividing that by the all-in cost. Is that right?

Jon Crosby: It’s the monthly rent versus when you purchase, the purchase price of the property in a nutshell.

Joe Fairless: Okay, monthly rent.

Jon Crosby: Back in the day, we were left in– it used to be the 2% rule, but it’s whittled down to the 1% rule, and in California, you’re not going to find any 1% rule.

Joe Fairless: Right. I remember when I had my single-family homes, I only had, at most, at one time, but then I had 3 for five to seven years, however long it was. They were all around 1.3%, which is nice, until someone moved out. Then I don’t know where that percent would have plummeted, but that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Let’s talk about you and your short term rentals. Do you currently own four short term rentals?

Jon Crosby: Yes, I liquidated two of them. I have one, and the other one was one that I helped manage with somebody else. So I’m down to one right now. I was trying to liquidate, get some capital for this next round that I was hoping was coming… Because I wanted to expand. I was mostly focused in the Lake Tahoe area. So I wanted to be able to diversify a little bit, but I currently still have the one, that’s doing well… Not right now. It’s turned off up there at the moment, but I believe after this crisis is over, we’ll have quite a bit of pent up demand. So I’m taking the time to do what my other passion is, and that’s creating business automations. So I’ve built a lot of automations into my short term rental models so that literally for any booking, I don’t spend more than 30 seconds.

Joe Fairless: Really?

Jon Crosby: Yeah, I plug it into two spots, and then I have email communications, I have door locks to trigger, I have comms back and forth to my housekeeper setup, and I did bare-bones almost online. I’ve done some pretty complex ones for some friends that included even a signed addendum that once they signed it versus in a DocuSign, it automatically sent their instructions to check-in and can coordinate the door locks. So it can get really sophisticated and I just love doing that stuff. It’s really fun to optimize those processes when I can.

Joe Fairless: Now when you said you spend 30 seconds on each rental, is that literally?

Jon Crosby: I timed it once. It’s more like a minute, maybe a minute and a half and that’s just me plugging it into a calendar, and then the rest happens on the back end. Now don’t get me wrong, if toilets break and somebody doesn’t know how to work a door lock, you’re going to get a phone call. But I’ve easily gone five to six bookings in a stretch without ever even knowing anybody was up there.

Joe Fairless: What were the main timesucks that you automated?

Jon Crosby: One was communication. So notifying guests – going to Tahoe can have some treacherous travel, so I wanted to have consistency so that everyone had the same pre-travel communications. So that helped there as well as just–

Joe Fairless: What did you do? What did you do exactly with that?

Jon Crosby: For that one, I set up an email that goes out the day before their check-in, and it provides them with the information. It provides the links to Caltrans to click this button, make sure you check your travel, any road conditions before you head up the hill. Here’s another link for weather conditions… Just as much info as I could that I had found I was giving them personally before I built this, and I just laid it out in an email template.

Joe Fairless: Okay, and you send it the day before they check in. You don’t send any other automated emails prior to that?

Jon Crosby: No. I do have one company called Evolve that handles the initial booking and payment processing piece that they get an email for. So I take over managing as they approach the check-in time, and so that’s where I’ve focused all that email communication; but I can build it if we didn’t have that piece with its own. I’d do it for the whole process.

Joe Fairless: So is there anything check-in related the day before the check-in that sent that they might be wondering prior to the day before, that they’re asking you about? And I’m thinking of my wife in this example, by the way. We rented a place in Florida and she was reaching out to the host, because my wife had questions about the check-in process and other things, and she was wondering about that weeks before, not a day before check-in. So I’m wondering, to address curious cats like my wife who wanna make sure everything’s set up properly, do you communicate with them before that?

Jon Crosby: Yeah, so they get something 30 days before check-in, that’s a little bit high-level. It has my contact information as well as my wife’s that they would use if they have any questions, and I do [unintelligible [00:10:10].25] things like that that they want to know; should they pack coffee, or things like that. So that we can certainly answer for them; and then on the day of check-in, they also get a full welcome email. Go check the binder on the coffee table, this is where you can have all your information. Here are some of our favorite restaurants… All the stuff that they need to be successful and relax once they get there.

Joe Fairless: So that is one part of the process that you automated, the guest communication, that was taking up a lot of time. What else?

Jon Crosby: The other part was the housekeeping communication. So the housekeepers, as soon as they get a booking, an automated email goes out to them that says, “Hey, Joe Fairless booked May 5th to May 9th, please schedule and reply once you confirm it’s locked in.” So that way, I get confirmation that they got confirmation that they have it in their system, and we’re often running on that part, and then the other part is the automated door locks. So every guest that I have, it’s always their code to get in is the last four digits of the phone number they booked with. So creating that consistency makes the automation much easier to facilitate, as well as the email communication part.

Joe Fairless: Got it? How do you program the lock?

Jon Crosby: There’s two tools. Usually [00:11:29].07] is the actual hardware, and then we can connect it through Nexia, which is a home automation hub. But a newer one that I’m using, I can actually automate totally seamlessly now. Whereas, the Nexia one, I had to actually spend an extra 30 seconds to go plugin. But on this one, I can actually even skip that step, and that’s using the Samsung SmartThings Hub. So that one’s fully dialed in.

Joe Fairless: A rough segue into something that I mentioned at the beginning in your bio – you’re a limited partner in one air medical hangar commercial investment. Please talk to us about that.

Jon Crosby: Yeah, that’s an interesting investment. It’s a friend of mine who’s a commercial real estate broker named Greg Geary, great broker out here in the Sacramento area. He started a niche building out these air hangars that were needed for medical lifeflight helicopters and planes and such and crew quarters. So what he built was this system or, I guess, process, by which they can be built very quickly. He’s partnered with some construction company that allows these to be built very quickly. They’re even mobile to some extent, so that if they want to take it down and move it somewhere else, that’s possible, and then rest of it’s a lease commercial investment type scenario with payouts. There’s cash flow in the lease payments, and then there’s equity buyout after I think seven to ten years.

Joe Fairless: What gave you the confidence to invest in that and how long have you been an investor in it?

Jon Crosby: I’ve been in about six months now. They’ve already spun up their first hangar and lease payments have just started flowing through. So that’s been really positive. I think with most investments, it’s the operator. It’s the person running the investment. Greg, I’ve trusted him, I’ve seen his track record. He was actually part of the real estate team that was part of the company I worked for for 20 years as well. So there was trust, and he just has some great experience and insights in the industry.

Joe Fairless: Let’s talk about your company. Clik2Flip. You mentioned what it does. It initially helps with initial analysis of flips, short term rentals and rentals. I think that’s what you said when I was taking notes. What differentiates it from an online calculator that if I googled quick flip analysis spreadsheet?

Jon Crosby: The difference is, as far as I know, it was the first of its kind to not require any data entry. I built it so you can walk up to a house, geolocate, hit the address and it will go pull all my API data and feed it back in to give you the high-level return cashflow analysis.

Joe Fairless: Wow.

Jon Crosby: Yeah, so some of the magic is in the API. To get even more accurate of a return, you would at least go into your settings one time to just program your particular investment metrics. So things like, if you’re a flipper and you have an average price per square foot for rehab costs, you want to put that in there rather than use the default that it has. Or if you have a property manager that’s only charging you 5% and it defaults to 8%, those are the little things you’ll want to just fine-tune one time, and then every time you analyze a property thereafter, you’ll get that instant analysis.

Joe Fairless: Now, a lot of the times, someone’s not going to be in front of the house, they’re gonna be in front of their computer. So how is it working then?

Jon Crosby: It also has an address lookup.

Joe Fairless: Just punch in the address.

Jon Crosby: Yeah, you just punch in the address, and even it will do — you can even put in parking numbers as well and it’ll pull those down for you. Additionally, we added the ability to view up to 20 local comps for the property, as well as a place for an itemized rehab worksheet if you want to get in that level of detail.

Once again, as I mentioned, it’s not a full underwriting tool, but it’s a tool so that you don’t have to go do a full underwriting on every single property that you’re interested in. You have a smaller subset to go take it to that next level of underwriting.

Joe Fairless: I like that; that is a true differentiator, and you’re clearly positioned as “Hey, this initial analysis and it’s going to save a lot of your time, and then you can go do your more extensive analysis should it check out.”

Jon Crosby: Yeah, and I’m actually excited. I’m adding one more component later this month, and that’s the ability to send a postcard mailer.

Joe Fairless: Wonderful.

Jon Crosby: Yeah. So I think that’ll be a really nice one-two combination. You see a property, you get a really high level “Hey, this looks good. I’m going to go ahead and just send a mailer out right now while I go into due diligence”, and so you can just stay ahead of the competition as much as you can.

Joe Fairless: That’s great. I definitely see a need for it, and the way that helps investors save time and now connect the dots whenever you have the mailer component. What has been the biggest challenge with this app?

Jon Crosby: I think what I learned is double down on your strengths and pay people to do the other things. I tried to do too much. I tried to learn everything I could about marketing, I tried to learn everything I could about UX design, just things that I’m not either passionate about or didn’t even have the time to try and focus on. So I probably wasted more time than I needed to going in and getting help on those pieces.

Joe Fairless: Taking a step back, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?

Jon Crosby: Whatever the pro forma says is never going to come to; it’s never going to be like that. So trust in– do your due diligence on the operator, because that’s going to be where the successes and plan for probably either a six-month delay in whatever payouts you see, or definitely not as quite as the rosy returns that are showing in the pro forma; and if you still want to do that deal and you still think it has a good risk to reward ratio, then go for it.

Joe Fairless: What’s a deal where you’ve lost the most amount of money on?

Jon Crosby: I don’t want to say I’ve lost it, but — I haven’t lost it… I’m in a note deal right now that the principal is due back in January, and that still has come back.

Joe Fairless: Okay. So it’s delayed.

Jon Crosby: It’s delayed.

Joe Fairless: So for everyone listening, that’s about four months from the past.

Jon Crosby: So that kicks into a whole new cycle that– I had confidence that will come through. I actually like those note investments; but I’ll say that my biggest loss has been — and it wasn’t too bad, but it was the assisted living facility I was working within was broken up into a real estate component and the actual business component, and I ended up liquidating the real estate side, which I didn’t want to but I wanted to use those funds to continue my short term investments. So I did take probably from the equity side a 10k-15k hit on that.

Joe Fairless: We’re gonna do a lightning round. Are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?

Jon Crosby: I am.

Joe Fairless: All right, let’s do it. First, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.

Break [00:18:12]:06] to [00:18:55]:03]

Joe Fairless: What’s the best ever book you’ve recently read?

Jon Crosby: Raising Capital for Real Estate by Hunter Thompson; I had great insights.

Joe Fairless: Best ever deal you’ve done?

Jon Crosby: My first short term rental.

Joe Fairless: What’s a tactical mistake you’ve made on a transaction?

Jon Crosby: Not getting a plumbing inspection; always get a plumbing inspection.

Joe Fairless: What happened?

Jon Crosby: I can’t tell you how many things were going on there, but I had put in an entire hardwood floor only to find out there was a root in the middle of it, had to rip it all out, dig 16 inches through concrete to fix six inches of pipe, and then put the floor bathroom.

Joe Fairless: It sounds like it’s still painful for you to talk about.

Jon Crosby: It is. I’ll never make that mistake again.

Joe Fairless: Well, just to pour a little salt on your wounds, how much total did it cost you?

Jon Crosby: I think it was more ego than anything, but it still costed a good 6-7 grand.

Joe Fairless: How can the Best Ever listeners learn more about what you’re doing?

Jon Crosby: You can check me out at clik2flip.com. I’m also on Facebook, Twitter. You can find me at LinkedIn. Just search for Jon Crosby.

Joe Fairless: Well Jon, thank you for being on the show. Thanks for talking about your business, Clik2Flip. Thanks for talking about different ways you’ve automated your short term rental business model with guest communication, housekeeping communication and the door locks as well as the note deal and how to qualify the operator or really how to qualify a deal. It’s primarily the operator based on what your feedback is, and how to think about it from a limited partner standpoint was your best advice. So thanks for being on the show. Hope you have the best ever day and talk to you again soon.

Jon Crosby: Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it.

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