Airbnb Account Suspended → How We Pivoted to Direct Bookings (Higher Profits)

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In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Kristen interviews Brandon McLean, a multifaceted entrepreneur involved in real estate investing, property management, and a med spa business. Brandon shares his early influences in real estate, stemming from his mother’s career as a realtor, and recounts his journey into property flipping and rental management. He discusses the challenges he faced with Airbnb and how he pivoted to direct bookings, leading to the establishment of Red Carpet Furnished Homes. Additionally, Brandon talks about the creation of Bright Sky Aesthetics, a med spa he runs with his wife, highlighting the importance of teamwork and adaptability in business. The conversation concludes with insights on navigating the real estate market and the significance of having a solid business foundation.

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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

Brandon McLean (00:00)
it was December, mid December of 2022.

two weeks before Christmas. I got two little kids. They canceled 22 reservations over $22,000. It’s like my whole month of money canceled in an instant.

And I had to figure out what to do. We were actually able to salvage 15 of the 22 reservations. 15 of the 22, I was able to get them on the phone and explain what happened. I was super honest with them. I did a dumb thing about a service dog.

Kristen (00:22)
Hmm.

Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Brandon McLean. He’s an investor, realtor, marketing expert. He runs red carpet furnished homes, handlebar marketing, and bright sky aesthetics. He’s got a lot going on based out of North Carolina, so I’m excited to get into it. Thanks for being here, Brandon.

Brandon McLean (02:18)
Hello, thanks for having me. Excited to talk.

Kristen (02:21)
So yeah, so you have a really impressive, kind of like diversified, diversified jobs. Tell us how you got into the real estate industry to begin with.

Brandon McLean (02:32)
Oh It’s a lot to unpack there on the first question. I love it To be honest with you. I always knew since I was a little kid My mother was what I would call a billboard agent You know a real estate agent. She was with remax for the majority of her career Top producer we went to Disney and stuff like that every couple years for the conferences and you know, she was just always My mom always said if she didn’t have ten closings on the books. She was freaking out. She didn’t have if she didn’t have

Kristen (02:44)
Mm.

Brandon McLean (03:01)
And this was in the early 90s, mid 90s before the internet, know, she was doing everything with paper contracts. And she didn’t have 10 closings. She was like, pound and pavement looking for clients. And she was just always there, but she never invested, never. And one time when I was like 11, she picked me up from guitar lessons and we went to Burger King parking lot to meet this guy. His name is Nick Janikis. You can look him up. He’s a real person.

Kristen (03:12)
Wow.

Brandon McLean (03:30)
Unfortunately, I died a few years ago, but he owned a whole bunch of locations of Burger King, but I grew up in Rhode Island and we drove up to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It’s like a 20-30 minute drive and We were in them. I got in the back seat of this guy’s probably at the time. It was probably like a 1993 Mercedes S-Class or whatever the big one the big black one and I’m like sitting in the back of this guy’s car with my backpack and stuff and I’m just like

And the whole time the guy’s turning, he’s driving and he’s pretty much ignoring my mom in the front seat because they’ve done a whole bunch of deals together. He’s talking to me the whole time. And he’s like, Brandon, what are you going to do with your life? He’s like, do you know where we’re going right now? And I was like, no. And he’s like, we’re going to buy an apartment building. We’re going to take a look at it and I’m probably going to put an offer. I’m probably going to buy it. It’s three units. It’s three floors in Pawtucket. He’s like, I got 40 of these things. And he’s just talking to me. And he’s like, you know, your mom.

is she’s gonna help me buy it. At the time, I think it was probably like $200,000 or something. He’s like, your mom is going to make a couple thousand dollars on her commission like she does a couple times a year with me. But as soon as I buy it, I’m gonna clean it up, rent it, and then people are gonna pay me to live there for as long as I own the building. I’m gonna get a monthly check. Your mom’s gonna get paid once. And he’s like, I’m gonna get paid 12 times a year from this building. And I was like sitting there and I was like, damn

Kristen (04:56)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (05:49)
Went toward the building, looked at it. It was like a B, C class rental property in kind of the neighborhood, you know? And we get out of there, we get home, get back in my mom’s Chrysler Sebring. And on the way home, I was like, mom, is that guy Nick, is he for real? Like, is he serious? And she was like, oh yeah, he’s very, very wealthy. She’s like, I’ve done a lot of deals with him. I’ve been his agent for years. Anything he buys or sells, uses me. And I was like, wow.

Why don’t you do that? And she was like, I don’t have time. I don’t want to be a landlord. It’s not for me. And then my dad got hooked on the Carlton Sheets. Do you remember that guy from back in the day? He was the late night infomercials for how to buy houses with no money down. My dad bought the thing, watched the first couple videos, talked about it a lot, but I watched them. I watched that video series three times when I was like…

Kristen (06:34)
Thank

out.

Brandon McLean (06:48)
12, 13 years old. And I was like, why can’t we do this? I just wanted to flip a house so bad since I was a kid. I don’t know why. And then I always knew I was going to play music and be in a band forever. And I was either A, going to get really rich from that and buy rental properties and be an ⁓ investor. Or I honestly in the back of my mind knew at some point I might just have to turn to real estate to try to make the money.

And I realized that somewhere in high school, I just realized it was going to be very difficult to make money as an artist. I was like…

Kristen (07:23)
Wow, that’s still really early.

Brandon McLean (07:30)
So I was new. I didn’t know if I was gonna have to use real estate to make the money or if I could make money being a guitar player. ⁓ I had to go with flipping and stuff.

Kristen (07:42)
That’s amazing.

You knew from such a young age that this was a passion of yours. I think that’s so special. lot of people don’t have that. So then when you transitioned into doing this yourself, did you feel like it came naturally because you knew so much information or how did that go?

Brandon McLean (08:00)
⁓ I spent a lot of time, my mom had a home office and she had like the office in the remax, you she had a cubicle and then she had like her own little office for the office mate for a while. And I spent a lot of time in there doing my homework, like after school and stuff. And I guess I picked up a lot from just being around it, just the way my mom talked to people, the way that she, just hadn’t no fear, had big confidence talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Kristen (08:17)
Right.

Brandon McLean (08:25)
She would show me the commission checks. She would be like, remember that house I took you through, you helped me put the sign up. I would help her put signs up. I would help her stuff envelopes. She would show me. She would show me a check for $5,800 or something. Mid-90s, that was a lot of money. She’s like, this is why you get to afford to go to that cool summer camp this year that you like. And she would show me that. But always, as I grew older, I’d be like, why didn’t you just buy the house? And sometimes we would sit there at the dinner table, and she’d be like,

She’d be like, I took a listing today. I’m going to sell it to him for a hundred thousand. They said they would take 35,000, but me and my dad would be like, why didn’t you just buy it? Why can’t we just do this? I don’t have time. I don’t want to be a landlord. I’m not going to do a construction project. We’re not doing that. And like, I don’t know. I just knew I was going to get into it, but I think I picked up a lot more when I was a kid than I thought. And I really knew.

Kristen (09:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean that’s amazing that you could even have kind of the vision at such a young age of kind of like thinking big. I feel like at that age, you’re very narrow minded. It’s difficult to think big like that. So now you were in the flipping world and now you’ve transitioned into long-term, short-term rentals. Tell us a little bit about red carpet furnished homes.

Brandon McLean (09:48)
I will. But I just want to go back to that one point. I have an uncle who is extremely wealthy and we were like poor compared to him. And I know you’re not supposed to compare people or whatever. Grass is always greener. Comparison is the thief of whatever, right? But like we would go to my uncle Steve’s house and like we would look around and I’d be like, wow, I want to be rich someday. Like I always, since I was a little kid, I’ve always just wanted to have.

nice things and the ability to have freedom. Although he had an accounting firm with hundreds of employees, he was basically free. He did what he wanted. He did his own golf course a lot. I was very envious of that because I like playing golf too. It’s time consuming and it’s expensive. ⁓ Red Carpet Furnished Homes was born when I got kicked off of Airbnb in 2022.

2022, I made a big mistake about a service dog. And they didn’t even tell me what was happening. Airbnb is kind of shady in that regard. They just started canceling reservations. I found out I was losing my Airbnb profile because I got a guest that was like, hey man, I’m on the way to your house. We’re about three hours out, but I just got a message from Airbnb that my reservation’s canceled.

Kristen (11:18)
I do.

⁓ no.

Brandon McLean (11:42)
What did I do to get my

reservation canceled? And I was like freaked out, went to the laptop. By the time I got to my laptop, I got another call from another guest that’s like checking in next week. They’re like, hey, why am I getting canceled? And I was like, I don’t know, let me figure this out. But I knew what was going on and it was my fault and it’s a long story. But um what happened was I had to, it was,

it was December, mid December of 2022.

two weeks before Christmas. I got two little kids. They canceled 22 reservations over $22,000. It’s like my whole month of money canceled in an instant.

And I had to figure out what to do. We were actually able to salvage 15 of the 22 reservations. 15 of the 22, I was able to get them on the phone and explain what happened. I was super honest with them. I did a dumb thing about a service dog.

Kristen (12:31)
Hmm.

Brandon McLean (12:39)
was… And they were like, okay, well, we still want to go to your beach house. Can we just Venmo you? Can we just pay you directly? And I was like, absolutely, please do that. And so that was my first step into direct bookings.

Before that, I was all Airbnb all the time. I used to not like Verbo. I had my rates set 20 % higher on Verbo so that I could deal almost exclusively with Airbnb. At the time, 85 % of my reservations were through Airbnb. And now we have a direct booking website and Airbnb is under 30 % now. And we stay relatively booked across the properties. And

Kristen (13:20)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (13:23)
I had to come up with a name for the direct booking site that I was building and the brand there. And we kind of just kicked around some names and she was, I guess, eight at the time. She’s 11 now. And she was just Googling, eight years old Googling things that mean luxury. And she just like, how about red carpet? And I was just like.

I kind of like it. I googled it. There was another property company that was like defunct like out in the Midwest somewhere called Red Carpet Homes. I didn’t really care. I just went with Red Carpet Furnished Homes and made up a little logo and a little website and now it’s three websites. Now I split it up.

Kristen (14:08)
Yeah,

I think that you highlighted something important that it is in the short-term rental game. It’s something, something to think about when your whole business is reliant on a third party, because that can go away at any time. They can go bankrupt at any time. Um So I think that’s important to kind of have those systems in place. How did you transition from Airbnb to the direct bookings? What did that take?

Brandon McLean (14:33)
There’s so many stories like mine. There’s so many stories of people that they wake up and their account is frozen or suspended. And even if they get their account back two months later, it still messes up their whole everything. So I mean, it happens a lot. And well, when it happened, before it, I was already using a property management software, PMS, called Hospitable. I was already using that.

And I wasn’t really satisfied with it. And I was in the process of shopping around for another one. And I was kind of courting owner res. So when I went down on Airbnb, was already like in the middle of a plan to transition from hospitable to owner res. And then it happened and it just forced me. So I spent pretty much that December, that second part of December of 2022, just like with my nose in the laptop building everything. And.

Yeah, so my first direct bookings were those Airbnb ones that got away but came back. Some of them were sketched out. Seven of the 22 reservations were like, no, we’re not gonna do that. We don’t know who you are. We don’t trust you. And I get it. Airbnb, is an element of trust, know, that third party, you know? So I mean, some random stranger calls you and is like, hey, just Venmo the money instead. Yeah. I get it. But now our… our

Kristen (16:15)
Yeah.

Right. To verify.

Brandon McLean (16:40)
Direct booking site is legit. We collect everything, credit cards, they get the legal agreement, they upload their ID, security deposit, stuff like that.

Kristen (16:51)
Nice. Yeah, I think that’s a really good lesson for people. You know I think it’s good to even have that as a backup or something running laterally with your Airbnb. ⁓ So I really want to talk about Bright Sky Aesthetics. It’s the med spa that you and your wife own. ⁓ I think it’s a really interesting story how you guys transitioned. You were renting and now you’re owning the property, kind of how you’ve been able to build another business off a property that you guys own.

Brandon McLean (17:20)
Yeah. So, um, honestly, my wife had been talking about it for about eight years. She originally got like some training to do Botox and filler, um, probably 2017 or something like that. And she worked at the hospital. She works at the biggest nonprofit hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina. And she was in high risk obstetrics for the last about 15 years. High risk obstetrics is.

Pregnancies that are going bad like angry unhealthy ⁓ Obese whatever high blood pressure crackheads no normal pregnancy, so it’s you know a pregnancy That’s just not going right you go to a specific place in the hospital And that’s what my wife did for 15 years, and it just really taking a toll on her I mean you know just people that are ⁓

Kristen (18:12)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (18:17)
50 years old and got pregnant and they’re having twins, know, anything that’s high risk, was high risk obstetrics or two. Once a week it was a girl in in shackles in an orange jumpsuit and shackles with two police officers in there. And she’s like, you know, scanning their baby and stuff. And it really started to take a toll on her. So she always wanted to get out of that environment and go to something that is kind of polar opposite, like just people that are happy to be there. ⁓ You know, just.

talk about skincare, you know, make people feel good about their lips, paying cash, not insurance and Medicaid and fighting about $4 copays, right? So she always wanted to do that. And then one day she came home from work and she would cry once a week. Once a week she was come, she would come home crying and it was just like, what is happening? And she was like, well, this happened and that, and I just can’t really even tell you, I can’t talk about it. I was like, you need to make a move. You need to get out of here.

Kristen (18:52)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (19:17)
And she was like, yeah, I’m going to, I’ve already made it in my mind. was like some day where I just like poked at it. I was like, you need to make a move. And she was like, yep, I am making a move. And she’s like, I signed myself up. I’m going to get re-certified for the Botox and fillers and stuff. And then that kind of just all happened really fast. She got the certified, she found a connection to rent a eight by nine room in the side of another salon, like deep inside of a shopping center behind Sonic, not even in a really nice section of town.

She got up and running quickly and she had, she had clients the very first week that she opened. And even though it was only a thousand dollars a month in rent, we were like, what if we had a building like this and then we charge other people rent and we’re not really going down that road too much. kind of managing everything, most of everything in house, but we did identify a property after she was open for about eight months. We identified a property in an area.

Kristen (19:52)
Bye.

Brandon McLean (20:17)
of town, um, closer to us actually. And with no competition when she was in Raleigh, she had, I mean, you could just Google 15 or 20 other injectors and med spas in like a five mile radius. There were just so much competition out here. We’re pretty much the only one I’m sitting in the office right now. Um, but we bought an old house built in 1910, which was a no-no because several years ago I stopped buying houses older than

1925 and then a couple couple houses went by and I changed the rules to 1935 then I changed the rules to 1955 then I changed the rules to 1970 I won’t look at houses older than 1970 unless it’s Like this so it was built in 1910. It was and it was like an auction It was a state-deal auction and in our state these auctions are not cool because of this terrible upset bid period I don’t know if you’re familiar with it

but on any kind of foreclosure or an estate deal, you make your bid, you got your bid on record at the courthouse, anyone in the whole world has 10 days to upset your bid. So I can just walk into the courthouse five minutes after you leave and upset your bid by 5%. And some of these things just get dragged on and they go on for literally months. And because in my opinion, the auction should be done when it’s done. But

It has an upset bid period and it’s just a pain and I don’t like dealing with it. So this had that and it was built in 1910 and I was just like, you know, I just don’t think this is the right house. And my wife was like, all right, let’s keep looking. A couple of weeks went by, was like, you know, that White House in Wendell is still on the market. She’s like, you want to go look at it? And I was like, not really, No Let’s just go look at it. I was like, okay, I’m an agent. So I just took out my phone, booked the showing for ourselves.

We went out to lunch and on the way back we went and looked around in there and I was like, you know, this is the weirdest house. has all these compartmentalized rooms. They added onto it like three times. It’s just, I was like, it already looks like an office in here. I was like, you know what, maybe I will break the rule. Let me peek my head in the crawl space really quick. Go around the back. Crawl space is like 14 inches, like muddy, disgusting. There’s dead animal in there.

First batch of contractors that came to look at the property with me after I won the bid and did all this stuff. was a couple months later, fast forward a couple months. Every contractor looked in there and was like, ooh, I don’t want to work on this house. And I was just like, yeah, no, no one does. They spent two weeks digging out the crawl space. So the crawl space is 30 to 36 inches in the hole under the house now. So that’s nice. Makes contractors a little bit happier.

Kristen (22:55)
Yeah.

Right.

Brandon McLean (23:08)
And it was supposed

to be like a hundred thousand dollar project. And we went just over 200 and ⁓ got it, got it ⁓ rezoned at the same time, which was a literal nightmare. Had to go and fill out these applications and answer all these questions and make a little speech in front of the town commissioners and get them to vote on it. And they did. It just turned out that this house is straight in the middle of their long-term plan. They, every town.

⁓ Not every town, but a lot of towns have this like comprehensive plans that they, this one is particular, it’s called the Blueprint 2030 Plan. And right in the thing, they say they wanted to rezone this whole road to commercial. And there’s a chocolate shop across the street, so it was pretty easy, but it was still a process. It was still a process. It could have been a lot worse. And the people in the town were super nice, helped us through every step of the way. I’ve done…

Kristen (23:56)
Right.

Brandon McLean (24:04)
a lot of real estate deals but I’ve never done a rezoning. I never had to go and talk with the mayor and the commissioners and the staff and the planning board and all these meetings and these Zoom meetings. I never had to do anything like that before. So I would have my contractors calling me, hey man, I need another load of gravel for this thing and I need more concrete and then I’m like emailing, answering this 400 question thing. I was very busy for a year and a half.

Kristen (24:33)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (24:34)
damn near killed me and ⁓ got through it and we joined the chamber of commerce did the ribbon cutting and ⁓ we got five clients today in here or something like that she’s been um yeah it’s been well

Kristen (24:49)
That’s really cool. think

it’s a good… It’s using your property in a different way. And I think it’s really cool how you guys were able to rezone it and identify the property. And that’s really, that’s really challenging, all of that.

Brandon McLean (25:05)
I have to give credit to my wife too. mean, she, when we first got into real estate investing in 2014, she was very timid. When I was like, I want to flip a house. was like, you do? I was like, yeah, not only that, I want to collect rental properties and make generational wealth and be a landlord. And she was like, doesn’t sound fun. Both of her brothers are appraisers and her dad is a commercial appraiser in Ohio actually. And, uh,

You know, they were like, we’ve dabbled, we’ve seen the real estate, we’ve seen the ugly, you know, maybe the, maybe the flipping is better than the landlording. I was like,

And she was very timid at first, but then something happened when we got like six properties under our belt and we had like six rentals and like the money started to actually come in and it started to cash flow. Like when we had a nice little handful, she changed. she just, every house we’ve, every ugly house we drove by, she was like, look at that one. Why don’t we stop and write the address down here, write it down. She’d be taking pictures of houses and texting them to me.

Kristen (26:01)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (26:07)
sending me pictures of Zillow listings and stuff, you know, it’s just, so she jumped on board right on. And then with this property, like she was, after a while as an investor, you get a gut feeling about stuff. you can just, there’s not a lot of market research you have to do when they are doing all this downtown improvement grants and this blueprint 2030 and they’re building a Starbucks a mile down the road. I mean, Starbucks knows what they’re doing, right?

Kristen (26:32)
Nice. Right,

that was a lot of data.

Brandon McLean (26:36)
There’s a Publix there now. I mean, all this stuff has just popped up in the last couple years. We don’t really have to guess anymore on this, in this little area. So like, you know, she knew it and she just felt it and she, you know, was very persistent with me of let’s come on. I know it’s 1910 and it’s going to suck, but let’s do it. It’ll be worth it in the end. And she was right. And I have to give credit where credit is due for her identifying it and pushing me to follow up on it. more

Kristen (26:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Brandon McLean (27:05)
because

I was, admittedly I was resistant.

Kristen (27:09)
Yeah, but I also think that’s a…

You guys have two different perspectives on it where you kind of wanted to jump in and she got comfortable and now kind of has built up to it. And I think it’s two different ways to look at real estate. And I mean, it’s cool that you guys have both of those dynamics in your relationship. ⁓ Well, I mean, you’re so impressive. I love your stories. You have like so much going on that’s, I mean, hopefully really inspiring to people. How about you tell people where to find red carpet furnished homes and bright sky aesthetic?

as well.

Brandon McLean (27:43)
Yeah, Red Carpet Furnished Homes is actually over the last couple of months I’ve been splitting it up into two things. We operate in two different markets. We got a couple properties in Eastern Wake County, which is the eastern side of Raleigh, but then we have a couple at the beach. So I just thought it was confusing to like people that were direct booking to like look at the properties and some of these are at the beach and some of them are not. So I split them up into OceanIsleGetaways.com.

and Eastern wake extended stay.com because the extended stay name, think we’re getting a lot of contractors. We’re getting a lot of people that are waiting on a house to be built where they’re just need a place to stay for two or three months. It’s kind of the local ones here have kind of transitioned to like a midterm rental instead of like a straight up short term weekendy kind of thing. So I kind of redid a lot of the marketing there and I’m still working on both of the Eastern wake.

and the Ocean Owl getaways sites, having some problems with the images loading really slow, it’s just the files are huge and I need to go through and make them smaller. Anyway ⁓ but yeah, that’s there and we’re on the Instagram and stuff and the Facebook and we love direct bookings. When I get that little noise, I set a specific noise on my phone for when the email comes through, I like to do a little happy dance because people can read between the lines that go, they find the properties on Airbnb or Verbo or Booking.com.

And they can just see that we look more like a company instead of just like a small time host. some of them are smart and they just go to a new tab and they Google Dolphin Cove, Ocean Isle Beach, and our direct booking site comes up first. And it’s at least 15 % cheaper. So some people just get it. And we’ve got to be really careful on our listings. We can’t direct people. And if people even ask, hey, can I book direct? We have to say no.

Kristen (29:27)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (29:38)
on the Airbnb platform, we’re walking on eggshells, know. We gotta be like, nah, don’t, don’t, you’re on Airbnb now, so let’s just continue here, thank you for your business. You know? But yeah, you can find all of our rental stuff easy that way. And then the Bright Sky Aesthetics, I’m pretty sure we’re the only one called that. We spent a long time trying to find a name for this damn med spa, and anything we came up with was taken. Anything that we thought, it took us a month.

Kristen (29:47)
Yeah.

Brandon McLean (30:08)
of just kicking names around. And then one day Shana came to me and she was like, how about Bright Sky? And I was like, you talking about? She was like, Bright Sky Aesthetics. And I was like, that sounds good actually. So I Googled it and there was nothing. And I was like, I think you did it. I you came up with the name, like finally. And I was like, if you’re going to do it, do it now before someone else takes the name. So we like went straight to GoDaddy. We’re like, brightskyaesthetics.com, buy it. But you know.

Kristen (30:10)
you

Brandon McLean (30:37)
I don’t use GoDaddy anymore because of the marketing agency thing. But ⁓ yeah, that’s that’s, she’s that is the one that has the best socials too. So if you’re into kind of funny med spa socials, definitely follow Shona at BrightSkyAesthetics on Instagram. We got a young lady named Wen Li that works with us that helps with the social media stuff. She’s really taken it to a new level. It’s been awesome.

Kristen (31:06)
Amazing.

Yeah, well, I really encourage everyone to check that out. Thank you so much for being here, Brandon.

Brandon McLean (31:12)
Thanks for having me. It’s been fun. Thank you.

Kristen (31:15)
And thank you everyone

for listening. Hope you got some inspiration for your own business, maybe rethinking some of your systems. And we will see you back next time. Bye.

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Airbnb Account Suspended → How We Pivoted to Direct Bookings (Higher Profits) | Brandon McLean

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