Airbnb Alternatives & Hotel Investing Strategies with Nemo Napijalo

Nemo Napijalo (00:00)
I was born in former Yugoslavia. I was in the war. You know, we fled on foot from enemy soldiers when I was three years old. I grew up in a refugee camp until I was about seven. And then I got bombed by NATO in Belgrade when I was eight. And the Yugoslavian Dinar ceased to exist. So my entire family’s, know, pension, wealth, everything that they had just disappeared overnight.

And when you see that as a child and teachers tell you, hey, you know, go to school, get a good job, save up your money, you know, put it into, you know, your Roth IRA or 401k or whatever it is. And eventually you’ll have a really good pension. You can live well. I said that that’s not for me because I saw that crash and burn when I was born into that. So to me, I always wanted to be an international investor. I always wanted to diversify my portfolio across different countries, have multiple passports.

Kristen Knapp (00:42)
Great.

Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Nemo Napijalo He’s a real estate entrepreneur, the co-founder of Furnished Habitat and Luxe Short Term Stays. So I’m excited to have you here. Thanks for being here, Nemo.

Nemo Napijalo (02:34)
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited about this.

Kristen Knapp (02:35)
So tell us how you got started in the industry.

Nemo Napijalo (02:38)
Yeah, I didn’t really do too good in school. I never really had that kind of, that knack for it. As soon as I could no longer do homework mentally, I pretty much started to fail and then I just quit school and I started selling Filter Queen vacuums door to door. And that’s kind of the hardest training for any sort of sales. And it taught me all the fundamentals.

And from there I got into construction. You my dad said, hey, look, you’re going to make more money in construction, do this. So I did. And the more that I did that, the more I saw, OK, you know, how do we add this and this and this? And how do we turn this into a business instead of just being contractors? And we did. We had 32 employees, ⁓ 6,000 square foot shop. We had a bunch of crews installing outside. Everything from Ontario to the east. We built RCMP buildings. We built the Yorkdale Mall.

in Toronto, the sport check there, a bunch of warehouses, like big government city council projects. And in the end, after my four or five years of putting everything I had into this, our partner ended up, you know, scamming us. And he had a big debt to the Niagara mob that we didn’t know about.

Kristen Knapp (03:39)
wow.

Wow. Wasn’t expecting the story to go there, by the way.

Nemo Napijalo (03:47)
So all of the, ⁓ no, wasn’t,

yeah, it was crazy. Cause we needed an engineer that had an engineer stamp and it was half a million dollars to get engineer stamp. at 19 years old, I didn’t really have 500,000 laying around. So we found a partner that could do the stamp and the insurance. And unfortunately he ended up, you know, four years later, I learned everything, know, outside installation, inside manufacturing, managing the team.

the sales, the AutoCAD, the design. And finally, when it was time to understand how the banks work and where does our money go, what do we do with it, how do we reinvest it, how do we buy material, I go in the bank and there’s no money. And I’m like, oh my God, what happened here? And he’s like, no, no, it’s just for a little bit, need to do it. Like, dude, you have like 50 % interest. You’re never gonna pay this off. It’s just not possible. And that was my university. So when everybody else was coming out of university and finishing their…

Kristen Knapp (04:34)
Wow.

Nemo Napijalo (04:41)
their studies. I was finishing my studies and you know I pretty much had no money to show for it but I had a lot of knowledge and training and just mental hardships to go through to get me ready for the next step.

Kristen Knapp (04:56)
Wow, so you get, you know, scammed by your partner. What’s your mindset during that time and what keeps you going and how do you recover?

Nemo Napijalo (05:04)
I didn’t keep going. went to my parents’ basement and spent six months there playing video games and just hanging out with friends and that was it. I didn’t want to participate in the world anymore. I was so mad because I thought I did everything right and things still didn’t work out. And that was it until I realized, okay, I got to pick myself back up. And there’s certain things that I just don’t know about business. Nobody in my family knows about it. My friends don’t know about it.

Kristen Knapp (05:15)
Yeah.

Nemo Napijalo (05:30)
their parents don’t know about it. So where do I go to find somebody that’s going to teach me how do you do business correctly so this doesn’t happen again?

And that’s when I went to the JT Fox Intelligent Millionaire Network event in Toronto and I kept going like every single time. Like some of them were great, some of them weren’t so great, but I didn’t miss a day. And that’s where I met my first real estate coach. She was like, Neema, what are you doing here? Like you’re here every single time, but I’m not really sure what you want. And I said, look, I’m, you know, I have this like HVAC.

business that I’m doing now and I’m just like fulfilling sales. It’s going pretty well. But I kind of want more out of life and I’m either going to start buying cars and just spending it on stupid stuff or I have to learn how to invest it and I don’t really know how to invest it. Nobody in my family has ever like been an investor. So I don’t know what to do. So she said, what about real estate? Have you thought about that? I’m like, man, that’s that sounds great. But other than buying a house, I don’t really know anything about it. She said, I’m having a two day weekend.

Kristen Knapp (06:51)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nemo Napijalo (07:13)
It’s about, you know, the 12 strategies of real estate. And if you can just come and hold a camera, sign people in, help out with the organization of it, you know, you can come free. I’m like, I’ll be there. And she was like, but I didn’t even tell you when. I’m like, it doesn’t matter. I will be there. This is what I was waiting for my whole life. And it just kind of took us there.

Kristen Knapp (07:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I’m available.

Wow, and you

were so young. mean, to have that future, like to be able to zoom out and see that you needed to invest your money and not spend it on cars and video games or anything, that’s pretty impressive, especially after you had such a big loss in your first deal.

Nemo Napijalo (07:51)
You know, what caused that to happen in my mentality was

I was born in former Yugoslavia. I was in the war. You know, we fled on foot from enemy soldiers when I was three years old. I grew up in a refugee camp until I was about seven. And then I got bombed by NATO in Belgrade when I was eight. And the Yugoslavian Dinar ceased to exist. So my entire family’s, know, pension, wealth, everything that they had just disappeared overnight.

And when you see that as a child and teachers tell you, hey, you know, go to school, get a good job, save up your money, you know, put it into, you know, your Roth IRA or 401k or whatever it is. And eventually you’ll have a really good pension. You can live well. I said that that’s not for me because I saw that crash and burn when I was born into that. So to me, I always wanted to be an international investor. I always wanted to diversify my portfolio across different countries, have multiple passports.

Kristen Knapp (08:38)
Great.

Nemo Napijalo (08:47)
I have four right now and a residency in Columbia. anywhere that I go, and COVID taught us a lot, right? You cause you want to travel, you just say, Hey, I’m a returning citizen. This is my country. Okay, no problem. Right this way, sir. Instead of, sorry, buddy, you’re Canadian. You can’t travel anywhere. So I went through all those struggles and I just disagree with that. I just want to be free. I just want to go where I want to go. I want to do what I want to do. And I want to have a diversified portfolio across different currencies, different countries, different markets.

that’s gonna make me feel safe. And I think that that’s the fear you kinda carry with you. You grow up like that, you always have this like, my God, it’s all gonna come crashing and burning down. How do I hedge against that? And that’s what drove me to do all

Kristen Knapp (09:25)
I mean, trauma can be very impactful sometimes and propel us into good things, like, you know, positive things. I mean, that’s such an incredible story. That’s amazing. And you do have so many ventures in so many countries. You function in Canada, Colombia, and the U.S. So kind of tell us about how you expanded and the challenges in each market.

Nemo Napijalo (09:46)
Yeah, I started flipping in Canada during the bull market. It was really great for me. We did really well. And that caused me to sort of save up like a nest egg. And everybody was saying, hey, man, just get some burrs going, get some, you know, buy, renovate, rent, refinance. And I said, dude, I don’t want to like $300 a month in cashflow doesn’t change my life, you know, but making 80 to 150 K per flip, that does change my

And if I can get more of these done, I can create something that I can take that and move it somewhere else and create a bigger splash.

And luckily that I chose that because when the COVID lockdowns came and everybody started to have ⁓ rent forgiveness, if you were a landlord, you didn’t have mortgage forgiveness. So you had to pay your mortgage and the renter didn’t have to pay you rent. So I’ve never been a fan of that. We do have some multifamilies in Detroit and some Section 8s.

but I have partners that are really good partners that take care of that stuff. I’m more, you know, big picture, like I love hotels. We own a hotel here in Columbia. And the reason that I love it is because it’s something that I can create a great experience and we’ll get another 20, 30, $40 average daily rate and we’ll get higher occupancy rate and it’ll happen instantaneously. Whereas my mindset is not tuned into how do I fix a

Kristen Knapp (11:19)
Yeah.

Nemo Napijalo (11:37)
parked in the toilet rather than the whole toilet so we can save on our bottom line on a multifamily project. It’s not how my mind works, which is why I have great partners that help with that. So when I went from Canada and we had to stop work orders, I just sold everything, took a loss on some things, but just went head first into the US and spent about half a million dollars on masterminds, networking, coaching, mentorship.

Kristen Knapp (11:42)
Mm-hmm.

Nemo Napijalo (12:04)
anywhere and everywhere that I could find these people that knew how to do what I wanted to do as well. And that really sped up my learning curve tremendously. It was definitely, definitely worth it to do that. I would probably say nowadays the masterminds are even better than the coaching plans because you can end up around a ton of great people that are just like you or that are already doing something and maybe they can be a partner or a co-venturer.

Kristen Knapp (12:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nemo Napijalo (12:30)
And that’s what I really found great in the US. People are willing to partner up. People are willing to collaborate. In Canada, people don’t do that. Everybody’s very risk averse. Everybody’s just taking care of their own self. They’ll share some stories to feel cool, but you’re not gonna get the secrets. You have to really dig for them and win their trust and maybe create some sort of win-win benefit for them to share any sort of information with you. Whereas in the US, everybody’s just…

Kristen Knapp (12:34)
right?

interesting.

Nemo Napijalo (12:56)
giving out information all willy-nilly, right? Everything’s on YouTube, everybody’s just giving, you know, it’s very transparent, but it’s also competitive. And I would say the US guys are way more competitive and they’ve put in a lot more effort into doing things 100 % right, whereas the Canadians have a lot of that, you know, risk mentality where they’re scared to do a flip that’s more than an hour from home because how am gonna manage this? And it’s possible, you just have to build the systems around it.

Kristen Knapp (13:22)
Yeah, yeah, and that kind of brings us to your venture Lux Short Term Stays, which is kind of approaching property management. Tell us all about that.

Nemo Napijalo (13:31)
Yeah, I really loved Airbnb because the three of the 12 strategies that my first coach taught me was wholesaling, flipping, and Airbnb. And those were the ones that stuck out to me that I really liked. I didn’t like too much of the other ones. So I ended up Airbnb-ing every flip that I couldn’t get the price that I wanted on. So I would just turn it into an Airbnb, run it into the better market, and then boom, suddenly we have another 50K on offer.

And in doing so, I realized that there’s a lot of money to be made in Airbnb. And I started to get just rentals that are Airbnbs with rental arbitrage. And then I realized, I’m like, oh my God, this is terrible. We’re investing like 80 to 100K in furniture. What’s my ROI on furniture? And especially when they started cracking down on the rules and regulations and licensing, we did a lot of stuff in Fort Lauderdale, a lot of stuff in Miami. And as the market started to kind of go down,

Kristen Knapp (14:14)
Mm-hmm.

Nemo Napijalo (14:25)
And the travel started to go down and the prices were crazy. It just didn’t pencil out anymore. So I was in Colombia and a broker friend of mine said, hey, why do you keep looking at Airbnb’s? Like, why don’t you look at a hotel? And I was like, well, don’t have, you know, I can’t get financing in Colombia and I don’t have 15 million in cash to just throw out a hotel. I don’t know how to buy one. And he says, well, they’re not a million.

They’re not 15 million. They’re about a million, million five, and they do like 300, 400,000 net operating income every year. They’re little cash cows. And I said, oh, what? Like, that’s crazy.

So I ended up looking at raising capital for this, and I ended up meeting my partner who has a large portfolio over like 150 rental arbitrages. Some are owned and some are.

⁓ You know managed for other people like co-hosting and He grew this through, you know sheer brute force just you know taking huge risks Making a ton of money throwing it out of out of building be like hey, give me every single apartment Let me rent this as a Airbnb and a lot of them were in New York So, you know, I like systems. I like building things out I like automation like my goal is to do nothing all day long and have nobody call me for anything That’s my goal

Kristen Knapp (16:22)
That

sounds great.

Nemo Napijalo (16:25)
It doesn’t always happen, but it tells you what you need to build on to make sure that it eventually does happen. So I said, let me build this out. Let’s partner on the hotel because I love the hotel. I really, really love buying hotels and let’s kind of like, you know, join forces and merge my operations and my remote teams. Cause I had a call center for wholesaling in Egypt. I had a call center in Columbia. That’s how I ended up in Columbia. Bunch of remote workers everywhere.

Philippines especially for Airbnb and he said sure like you know give me a proposal Let’s look at it. So I put together the entire plan of hey This is how you never have to interact with your business ever again And we put one person at the head of this that we will just get reports from And he said wow, that sounds great. So we ended up doing that joint forces and we launched luxury term stays So now we offer 20 % of gross for co-hosting where

We’re in the top 10 % of Airbnb hosts. We have a large corporate housing contract as well with sports teams, medical field, business trips that are going with their entire company. And we’re able to really increase the ADR and the occupancy rate of people that work with us. Just because of the large portfolio that we have, we’re getting a ton of leads all the time. And especially during the busy season, we have more than we can handle.

So we’re always looking at, you know, we’re charging 20 % for management, but you’ll make more than what you’re gonna end up paying us because of the corporate housing contracts, because of our massive portfolio where we have 150 inquiries. And if we’re 100 % booked during the busy season, you know, we probably have somewhere between 700, 800 leads that are coming in and people are saying, hey, where can I stay? So the more that we manage, the more we have to place these during these seasons.

And this kind of led to a furnished habitat, which a lot of the money that we lose in Airbnb management and short term rentals is actually to Airbnb. You know, we have a full time staff that we’re always, that’s always fighting with Airbnb. And right now, I mean, people can say three weeks later, even three months later, hey, you know, I didn’t like that place. Like the toilet didn’t work. It didn’t flush right. And Airbnb is like, yeah, no problem. Here’s your money back. So.

Now you have to go and fight that. And if you don’t have a team, you’re like a random investor. You got to steal your W2 job. And you’re trying to run this little Airbnb project. Now you got to pick, I go to work or do I spend time on the phone with Airbnb? Or do I do it on my lunch hour? Like, how does this work? Because they literally took my entire three week stay and just took it out of my account. So we thought, OK, we’re going to launch Furnished Habitat, which is going to be a competitor.

to Airbnb and it will have two things that are going to differentiate it. It’s going to have a mediation team, a live mediation team for everybody, which means that if you have an issue, it gets escalated. Boom, there’s a live person that’s following the rules and protocols of the company. So if a toilet breaks, okay, did you give the owner 12 to 24 hours to fix it? No? Okay, then your claim is denied. Sorry. But then if it took three weeks to fix a toilet, all right.

You you probably deserve your money back. It’s probably a bad host. He could have got it fixed within three weeks. So it’s just about putting logic to things rather than letting like an AI run this because I don’t believe that AI can do this yet. You know, toilet is maintenance, right? A toilet is going to break. You can’t predict when it’s going to break. I don’t think it’s fair that somebody loses money because a maintenance item broke because their own toilet at home could also break. And what are they going to do then? They’re not going to charge.

They’re not going to pay less rent. They’re going to just go and say to the landlord, hey, this is broken, come and fix it. And they’re going to fix it. So why should the landlord or the owner in Airbnb also pay? So that’s what’s going to separate Furnished Habitat from Airbnb. It’s going to have this feature. And we’re looking at taking large portfolios, people that have either great reviews or they’re really interesting. They’re great hosts. I don’t want to make it for everybody. I want to make it for great hosts.

Kristen Knapp (20:23)
Mm-hmm.

Nemo Napijalo (20:23)
And this

way we’re going to have a lot of great experiences for the users as well. And the second thing is it’s going to have a crypto feature. So you’re going to be able to pay with crypto. You’re to be able to receive in crypto. And if you want to just collect your funds in crypto, you can. If you want to use the app and stay in whatever place using your crypto to pay, you also can. And some of the recent news articles that we’re seeing in the US have been looking pretty, pretty good.

and in favor of what’s already being built in the background for this. So I’m pretty excited about that.

Kristen Knapp (20:54)
Yeah,

that’s amazing. I mean, developing a platform that’s more friendly for the host, you’re going to get better hosts and you’re going to get a better crop of, yeah, like rentals.

Nemo Napijalo (21:04)
Yeah, that’s what we want. We just want to make sure that it’s using it in the original Airbnb days where, you know, those are the golden days. Everybody had really nice places. All the guests were really nice. But now it’s become something that people are abusing in a way. And I think it’s happening on both sides. So, you know, if you want to abuse, go to a hotel, right? You come to my hotel, you have any issue, no problem. We call the police, they take care of it. Or something’s broken, you know, their staff, they’ll repair it.

If something’s happening and you need help with something, there’s always somebody there that can help. But in Airbnb, you have to understand, even though it’s turned into a business, this is still just a family home. It’s not a purpose-built building. Things go wrong, mistakes happen, managing Airbnbs is extremely difficult, managing cleaning, managing your supplies, a lot of times you’re not gonna have everything perfect. So does it make sense to not give the owner a chance to…

sort of reconcile that issue and just take all the money back, it doesn’t. But also, we can’t let owners get away with everything either. We have to hold them accountable to make sure that they’re providing good experiences. So that’s why something that’s like, you know, a little bit more elite, a little bit more exclusive, a little bit more private is what we want to introduce to the market where people are going to have a great time using this and they’re going to know what they’re going to expect every time. And we don’t have a problem kicking people off, right?

Kristen Knapp (22:21)
Mm-hmm.

Nemo Napijalo (22:24)
and this is going to be handled very, very intimately. So if we constantly are seeing, because we know this, we’re already doing this. So if we see people constantly trying to come back on our platform and we know they’re not a good host, there’s multiple ways to just ban them from that. So we just really want the ultimate experience to be predictable, to be safe, to be enjoyable, and that’s for both sides, the user and the provider.

Kristen Knapp (22:37)
Right.

Yeah, I imagine it protects the guest as well because I’m sure there are some hosts out there that try to, you know, maybe get an extra buck on cleaning or something breaking or whatever it is. Yeah, that’s amazing. So, I mean, this has gone by so quickly. You have so much going on. Tell us how to find you and how to find all of your business, businesses.

Nemo Napijalo (22:57)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah,

you know, Instagram real estate Nemo and that’s probably the best way to reach out. I’m always checking that real estate Nemo dot com. You can look at also LuxureTermStays.com and humanitarianinvestments.org. So that’s our Detroit multifamily and commercial ⁓ department. So anything that you guys want to talk about, whether it’s from lending or just business or just real estate, I love this stuff. This is my bread and butter and also

what I’ve done for the past 14 years. So always more than happy to share and help anybody that’s interested in getting started or if they just want a little bit of advice or if they’re looking at partnerships or joint ventures, I’m always looking to throw some good money at good projects as well.

Kristen Knapp (23:47)
Amazing, yeah, it sounds like you’re kind of like a master networker.

Nemo Napijalo (23:50)
I tried, I tried.

Kristen Knapp (23:52)
Yeah.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here. I mean, this has been awesome hearing about, you know, everything you have going on.

Nemo Napijalo (23:58)
Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

Kristen Knapp (23:59)
Yes, and thank you everyone for listening and we will see you back next time. Thank you.

Nemo Napijalo (24:03)
Bye.