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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Q Edmonds speaks with Tyler Kabat, a successful property manager specializing in short-term rentals. Tyler shares insights into his business, Doorway Travel, which manages a mix of short-term and mid-term rental properties. He discusses the importance of building strong vendor relationships, the challenges of managing properties in remote areas, and the need for effective crisis management. Tyler emphasizes the significance of discipline and systems in achieving peace and success in property management, as well as the importance of networking and client retention for growth.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Tyler Kabat (00:00)
Yeah, we had a situation just about a month ago actually. So it’s a recent one where the guests said, they went, they messaged us in the morning. said, Hey, we had water last night and this morning we don’t have water. Okay. Well, we’re there in the house. They should have water. Right. The first thing we look at, we look, go to our cheat sheet. It’s an internal sheet that we have all the properties. First thing we got to check is, is it on a well or is it city water? Cause if it’s city water, okay. Now I’m reaching out to my client did you pay the water bill?Was the water shut off? No, it’s on a well. Okay. Did you trip a breaker? You got to go through this whole check process and it’s Friday. It’s Friday. It’s in the middle of summer. Turns out the problem is the well pump. Well, you can’t just send a handyman to replace a well pump.
Quentin (02:12)
Hello, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I’m at it again, y’all. I’m excited because I have another exciting guest. I’m just so privileged just to meet some just incredible people. And this is no different. And you know what we do. We talk all things real estate. so this gentleman has made some incredible strides in the real estate space, specifically around short-term rentals.property management. But what I love about this gentleman, he has a system that he put into place and he is particularly focused on being a good steward of the things that are put into his hands. So he has a system that he runs that is working. And I just want him to talk to us about it. sit back. This is going to be a great podcast. I’m super excited for you all to peek through his lens, see things through his experience. so
Please help me introduce Mr. Tyler Kabat. How you doing today,
Tyler Kabat (03:10)
Hey Quentin, I’m doing awesome man. Thanks for having me on.Quentin (03:13)
man, thank you for being here. Super excited, I’m gonna echo a lot of the things that I’ve just said, know, our listeners are in for a real treatment and it’s not to put pressure on you, I just know that it’s gonna get great value from this conversation. But what I’m talking about, pressure ain’t gonna break you, all pressure’s gonna do is make a diamond. So you’re just gonna come shining through anyway, but I’m just not trying to put any undue pressure, but I do want you to just take us into your world.Tyler Kabat (03:34)
That’s right.Quentin (03:39)
tell us, know, what’s your, which, which you’re focused on these days. Tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe what market you’re operating in pretty much, you know, I just want you to bring us into your lens. And so I’m going to, I’m going to stop talking and turn it over to you, man. Talk to us, Mr. Tyler. Tell us what you want about,Tyler Kabat (03:56)
Yeah, yeah. So our main business is Doorway Travel. It’s a vacation rental property management company. We do a mix of short term and mid term properties. So anything that’s furnished and it’s full service management. So maintenance, cleaning, guest relations, all the operations on the back end. You know, for people not familiar, short term rentals is really a hospitality business. And so you’re running a hospitality business plus managing the property.My wife and I personally own 20 units, a mix of long, mid and short term. And ⁓ we’ve been managing our own short term rentals for coming up on five years. And we started taking on clients January, we unofficially launched January 1 to 23.
So coming up on three years of growing the management company. We’ve been growing intentionally the last few years, slowly intentionally, like we talked before, Quentin, and it’s really a blessing to be where we’re at. just crested 50 properties under management just in the last month. And, uh, you know, there are days that I wish we were at 150 and then there are other days like, I’m just blessed to be where we’re at and, you know, focused on at this time, how can we.
⁓ dial in the operations to the point where we can now intentionally grow in ways that we kind of held back in the past.
Quentin (06:00)
I love it, man. I love that you have built a discipline within your system. Actually, I was just telling the other guest and I’ll use this verbage and you’ll understand that he got it too, is that there’s something about discipline. Discipline, you can learn from it. And once discipline is finished, it brings a life of peace. And so sometimes when you know your system, when you know your discipline,it will produce a life of peace if you let discipline do the work that it’s supposed to do. And that’s what I love when I hear about the systems that you have in place, not growing too fast, but looking at what’s right in front of you and being consistent about that, that discipline has produced you guys only 20 units and 50 under property management and it’s void peace. And now you can think about, okay, now what’s the next step? And so I love that.
Tyler Kabat (06:49)
Yeah.Quentin (06:50)
I know it’s not always easy in this climate, especially being in the service that you’re in, trying to find help. I know I was talking to one property manager and he was like, you know, somebody had a package delivered. like, well, who does the package go to? You know, it’s so many different lenses that you guys have to, you know, peek through. And so I guess my question is, what’s been the key to that machine running smoothly? What’s been the key to keeping things on track?Tyler Kabat (07:16)
Yeah, I think a big part of it is building good vendor relationships. So when we, I do annual calls with all the cleaning teams and all the handymen that we work with, those are our two main vendors that we’re communicating with on a daily basis across the different properties in the markets that we’re in. So first you have to find a quality vendor and I’ll tap into my social networks at time. Just quick Facebook post. We’ll usually get a few leads and someone to reach out to.And then once you find a good one, we’d really try to foster that relationship and I’ll meet with them annually. We’ll sit down where we reevaluate, how’d the last year go? How do you think things are working? What’s broken? How can we improve? And what’s it look like a year from now, two years from now?
because we want to grow alongside our vendors. So can our handymen handle more volume? Can the cleaning teams handle more volume while still maintaining the same quality that we’ve come to expect from their work? So that’s a really huge key to our success. know, all the systems that we have internally to run the operations, that comes with time and just putting stuff down on paper so it’s recorded and you can train people on what to do.
but it’s a people business like any business out there. So you need to have that strong vendor network. And I’m grateful that we do. We spend a lot of time on it. And like we talked earlier, one of our challenges, biggest challenge is finding good vendors in remote markets. You know, we’re located in Northeast Wisconsin. We’re just outside of Green Bay. A lot of our properties are spread across central, central Wisconsin. We’re up North Wisconsin.
You get travelers from Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, they want to get away. They want to be on the lake. And so you get into communities where in the summer there’s 20,000 people in the winter. There’s two. Well, of those 2000, how many of them are cleaners and how many of them are good? How many of them will follow your systems and match you on pay and actually show up and do the work? That’s, that’s our biggest challenge as a company right now. So we spend a lot of time on that.
Quentin (09:16)
Thank you so much for sharing in your right. And that’s why I love talking to different people specifically, somebody that’s in your field, because there is different things that we may not think about. There’s intricacies and nuances that we may have never considered. I’ve specifically asked this question to people that’s in your position. I’ve asked this question in the past, and people have brought up raccoons and boats.things I would have never thought that they had to manage, you know, within the space that they do. So I’m going to ask you the same question I asked them, because again, I love looking at the unique lens, you know. There are moments when things get real, when things go sideways, times when you got to pivot extremely fast. And I just want to know, if there’s a story that you can share of a time when you had to pivot fast, because again,
People see the success, but there’s a journey and a process to the success. There’s nuances to the success. And so are there moments where you have to kind of pivot fast within your sphere of the things that you do?
Tyler Kabat (10:54)
Yeah, we had a situation just about a month ago actually. So it’s a recent one where the guests said, they went, they messaged us in the morning. said, Hey, we had water last night and this morning we don’t have water. Okay. Well, we’re there in the house. They should have water. Right. The first thing we look at, we look, go to our cheat sheet. It’s an internal sheet that we have all the properties. First thing we got to check is, is it on a well or is it city water? Cause if it’s city water, okay. Now I’m reaching out to my client and Hey, did you pay the water bill?Was the water shut off? No, it’s on a well. Okay. Did you trip a breaker? You got to go through this whole check process and it’s Friday. It’s Friday. It’s in the middle of summer. Turns out the problem is the well pump. Well, you can’t just send a handyman to replace a well pump.
So now the guests are, they’re on their end of summer vacation. They’ve got all their kids there and their family and they’re just trying to enjoy their stay. I they have no water. They can’t do anything in the kitchen. They can’t do anything in the bathroom.
And so, you know, they’re going out for the day while we’re trying to troubleshoot and we’re trying to offer them different solutions. And I spent that entire day on the phone with different vendors trying to get somebody there. And at the end, we were able to get a new well pump installed, a new pressure tank installed for those people that aren’t aware with a well, you have a pressure tank and a pump that pulls the water out and gets it through the house.
And we had guys in the crawlspace working all day on Saturday and we were able to get it done. But by then the guest was burnt out on the experience and they left early. They’re supposed to be there for four day stay. I mean, I feel terrible that their vacation was ruined because they didn’t have water and they couldn’t wash their dishes or take a shower. Like that just ruins your experience, especially when you travel from afar. So in those situations, you just have an open, honest conversation with the guest about where it’s at.
They understand to an extent it’s a house. Things happen. You you explain what happened to your client and you tell them how you fixed it. And so, hey, this is what happened. This is how we handle the guest. We did have to provide a full refund and I’m not going to charge a guest anything for that kind of experience. You know, at the end, the guest says, thanks for handling it. We’d still write you guys a good review on Google because of how you handled it professionally and bend over backwards to make it happen.
You know, we offered to pay for their lunch. We offered to pay for their breakfast and their dinner. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it cost my money company and my client lost out because they had to pay for a new well pump and all that. we got the property fixed. We got it cleaned up and, ⁓ you know, the next guest was able to stay with no problem. And now as that client’s looking at their CapEx, they know that their pump is their well is set for the next 10, 20 years, hopefully.
So sometimes you just got to be to react quickly and it might eat up half your weekend. That’s just the business that we’re in.
Quentin (13:28)
Yeah, again, see, these are stories that we just can’t get, we can’t even, I can’t even think about that. I wouldn’t even imagine that kind of things going on. Because again, we’re just looking at the shiny rental property. This guy’s doing short term rental. We’re like, oh, this is going to just be great. But within all of that, it comes this, you know, the real.things that you have to manage, the real things that you have to see that comes up sometimes just like that, just out of the clear blue. And so, man, thank you, thank you so much. To me, this shows the difference between somebody that just dabble to somebody that’s in it for the long term. And this troubleshooting perseverance, again, it shows me the lenses of somebody who has discipline because when they had that system in place, like.
Imagine five wells breaking on you at one time in one day, right? Like you just had the discipline to put the system in that way you was able to respond accordingly. So I love it, Mr. Tyler. Thank you so much for sharing, sir. Now, listen, let me ask you this. What are you most focused on scaling or solving next? Like, Mr. Tyler, what’s the next real goal for you,
Tyler Kabat (15:16)
Yeah, like we were talking offline, you know, we’ve been doing this business now almost three years. And so like any entrepreneur would know that started a business from the ground up, you’re sitting in all the wrong seats from the get go because you to do everything. And we’re at a point where our operations are really dialed in. We have a great team in place, handles our guest communication and the cleaning management and the vendor management on maintenance side.And so I can put more of my energy into growth and client retention, maintaining those client relationships. You know, at our size company, we have 30 different clients. That’s 30 different people with different goals, different personalities, different expectations.
So managing that, making sure that we’re continuing to serve them and be good stewards of their property, you know, which they’ve entrusted us to care for. And now we can target some markets, go after the Vacasas and the Evolves of the world that are mismanaging client properties, you know, and not delivering on their promises. And hopefully start scooping up some of that market share because we do provide a quality product.
We do have high reviews. You know, I think we crested 2000 five star reviews on Airbnb over the summer. You know, that’s a testament to the effort that we put in in serving our guests and maintaining properties. Even if they’re not high end luxury properties, guests still come in expecting, you know, hotel level clean. Everything should be clean, should be organized. It should match. We always tell cleaners every time I interview a cleaner, I say you are eyes and ears in the property. When you walk out of that place,
it should be an Instagram worthy condition. Cause a guest is going to be on Airbnb and they’re going to see these gorgeous photos and they walk in that better match or we’re going to be in a bad place. So we’ve done a good job of managing that. So now I’m very grateful we’re at a place where I can start focusing on some, some intentional growth and really kind of sink some roots into some markets that we think will be more lucrative.
Quentin (17:10)
That’s big, man. And, you know, I know my word don’t matter much, but I know you’re ready for it, man. Again, I could just see the through line of discipline, the through line of having systems in place, having people who you can count on, retaining people that you can count on. And I know we still need to find more, but it just shows me that your heart is to connect with the right people and to make sure that your clients, people who are expecting you to serve them, you’re serving them well. And again,You use that word stewardship, which I absolutely love. So it’s no doubt in my mind that if now is the time to grow, then it’s going to happen. And I’m excited for you, And so, you you talked about relationships and I think it will benefit people hearing this because relationships are so key. When it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?
Tyler Kabat (17:59)
think doing things like this, being on different podcasts, I’ve not been on a lot. I’ve only been on a handful, but they’ve been from different areas. And so it gets my voice out there and, ⁓ you know, it creates expertise in the marketplace, sharing on social media. So I try to either write a post or put a reel out at least five days a week. So that’s just creating that persona online, that online presence.Going to local real estate events. Oftentimes I’m the only short-term rental guy in the room. just like, you know, some people, people in the room might own a couple, but we’re the only management company in the room. Cause I don’t know, our competition doesn’t go to the local Rio events, but when somebody wants to invest, you know, our name doorway travels, the first one mentioned because we are involved in those groups. So doing that.
and just networking with our local network has really helped. We’ve grown through word of mouth and almost half our clients have come because they’re like, hey, I saw I’ve been watching you on Facebook. You know, they’ll shoot me a DM. Hey, I’ve been watching you on Facebook. I have this property. I’m looking for someone to manage it. Or I just sent out a contract over the weekend to a property, woman.
posted in one of the short-term rental groups in Facebook saying, Hey, we’ve been self-managing for years and we want somebody to take it over. So I’m just spending time, you know, online, finding, staying in those groups and, know, be the first one to comment, be the first one to send a DM. And then, ⁓ you know, I’m an open book with how we run our operations. And I think just by, ⁓ it just comes from experience and being confident in the product that we provide.
You know, we’re good at what we do. And I say that confidently, not breaking in any way. It’s because I know that we can deliver.
Quentin (19:37)
I love that type of talk, Mr. Tyler. You know, listen, we ain’t being arrogant. We just confident. We know who we… So one of my favorite sayings, I got this, I’m gonna be honest, especially from a preacher and it’s changed my life. When you know who you are, you know what to do. And so you’re confident, man. I know who I am. And therefore, whatever, and it’s way you put me in, I know what to do. I always like to say responsibility is the ability to be able to respond.Tyler Kabat (19:37)
youQuentin (20:04)
I can respond based on my ability. And so I like that talking, talking, sir. You’re confident. You know who you are. You know what to do. And so I absolutely love that, man. Absolutely love that. Listen, before we wrap, there you go. Absolutely, man. I love it. I love it, man. Listen, you, listen, man, the type of person you are that can actually wake the way you, you know, we ain’t talked about it much, but I know you just naturally motivate people. so.Tyler Kabat (20:15)
Yeah, I like that. I gotta put that in fluffy mug or something.Quentin (20:30)
Yeah, man, put that on coffee, Mar. Keep pushing people to be what they supposed to be, man. It’s over that in my mind, you already do that. So yeah, I don’t know you much, but that’s one thing I’m kind of picking up on is just your spirit, man. You just a people person. I love you,Tyler Kabat (20:42)
I appreciate it, Clint.Quentin (20:42)
So listen brother,absolutely man. Before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, or maybe collaborate with you, or learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you,
Tyler Kabat (20:51)
Absolutely.Yeah, find me on Facebook, Tyler Kabat, K-A-B-A-T, or you can search us on Instagram, Facebook, our business page is Doorway Travel. You go to doorwaytravel.com and reach out to us through there.
Quentin (21:04)
Absolutely. I love it, man. I love it, man. Well, listen, sir, I thank you for being here. I thank you for your time. I thank you for your story. I thank you for your perspective. We definitely need more people in this space that’s knowing it the right way. It has the integrity and the heart that you have. And so again, sir, I just thank you being here,Tyler Kabat (21:22)
Awesome Quentin, thanks for having me.Quentin (21:23)
absolutely. All right, everyone. So you got it right. You listen, my man, Mr. Tyler, Kabat has came through. He’s giving you value. And we want to make sure you continue to have access to these valuable conversations. So go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Just one easy click. That way you can come back the next time because we’re going to continue having incredible people just like Mr. Tyler. So again, thank you, Mr. Tyler and to everyone else. We will see you on the next time.Hmm
