How This 24-Year-Old Built a 30-Property Airbnb Business Without Buying Real Estate

Thomas Morey (00:00)
Yeah, I crashed my car

in February because I fell asleep while driving. I rear-ended somebody. The good news is I have a 2022 car, so the automatic braking system kicked in. So I fell asleep at 50 miles an hour. I woke up at about 10, and then rear-ended somebody. That could have killed me, right? Car accidents kill people every day. And that was sort of my realization of,

It’s not that I want to transition from self-employed to a proper business owner. It’s that I have to, or it will kill me. My definition of the difference between those two things, I wish someone had told me this sooner. self-employed means if you stop working for a week, everything stops. Business owner can go on vacation for six months and things have grown when they come back.

Michelle Kesil (02:12)
everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Thomas Morey, who’s been making serious moves in the real estate Airbnb space. So Thomas, I’m glad to have you here today. I think our listeners are really going to take something away.

from how you’re approaching the Airbnb and rental business. So let’s dive in.

Thomas Morey (02:44)
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Michelle. So I want to start this by stating that I’m 24 years old. I started the company two and a half years ago. And I dropped out of college in December after my first 10K revenue month in October. So yeah, I manage short-term rentals, Airbnbs, for the homeowners. So.

The reason I decided to get into management is because of the three ways to get into real estate, manage, rent, or buy. Of those three, management has the lowest financial barrier to entry. And I, as a college student, I couldn’t buy a house, right? I had about five grand in startup capital that I had scraped together from a series of minimum wage jobs.

Yeah, that just led me to, okay cool, financial barrier to entry. And then…

Okay, so I need to be a realtor for long term or a licensed property manager for long term rentals. Okay, I don’t wanna do that. Sometimes I need a degree for other things. I don’t have that yet. So that led me to managing short term rentals. Because there’s very low financial barrier to entry. No, you don’t need a degree at all. You don’t need a permit, you don’t need a license. You just need to actually be good at your job. Which I have been able to prove that with time. So yeah.

Michelle Kesil (03:58)
Wow,

yeah, that’s so fascinating and yeah, super intelligent to get into this industry at this age. So how did you like hear about this? Where did this idea come from?

Thomas Morey (04:13)
So that’s always going be an interesting story. I had a college roommate who’s from Arizona. He told me about Scottsdale, Arizona. He told me about how a house can make $100,000 or more as an Airbnb. And that…

blew my mind at the age of 21 because I didn’t understand real estate at all. from there it let me down a rabbit hole. I was originally going to partner with him. He ended up not being trustworthy. So I then went on and went, okay, how can I do this on my own? What can I do to figure you know, with no capital, no experience?

pretty much nothing but teaching myself and then finding resources on the internet, how can I get this going?

So I ended up joining a mentorship program that I found And the first one was Bologna. So then I joined, I was looking around and managed to find a second one and that one helped a lot. Today helped me a lot with getting the ball rolling. Now, it took me about 150 nos before I got my first management client.

That was tough, particularly because around like 110 or so, everyone had kind of given up on me. But I wrestled for 16 years. I was not good at it for the first six years at all. And I am very stubborn and committed to actually accomplishing my goals, is the way I like to see it. So I changed my offer a few times.

was originally trying something called Airbnb arbitrage. think that is a horrible idea for anyone to ever do. Primarily because that’s subleasing an Airbnb when you rent a long-term rental and then you sublease it as an Airbnb to keep the profit.

The issue with that is that the risk scales with the number of units you have because the rent scales, right? So if you have one unit, you’re paying 2K a month. It’s not that bad. If you have 100, you’re paying 2K a month. That’s, you know, COVID hits and all of a sudden you’ve got six figures worth of rent and no revenue coming in. That’s a problem, right? With management.

I don’t own the house, I’m not paying the mortgage, I’m not paying the insurance, I’m not paying the cleaning companies, I’m not paying the furniture, none of that. I am owning an Airbnb, a passive investment for a homeowner who is usually a multi-millionaire because you have to be to own an investment property. then whatever they did to get that wealthy keeps them so busy that they are focused on doing that plus they usually have a family who want to retire eventually.

So yeah, that’s where I come in.

Michelle Kesil (07:21)
Wow, that is super fascinating. Yeah, that’s such a testament to your strong will and perseverance and trusting that you’re gonna get to the end goal.

Thomas Morey (07:31)
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, it was definitely sort of a pursuit or pivot kind of thing. Like, do I just buckle down and work as hard as I possibly can to pursue something, but also recognizing that I need to change my goal. I need to switch from that arbitrage to the management. And as soon as I switched, things got a lot easier with the scaling. And after I got my first client, that house did $110,000 in revenue in the first seven months.

and that allowed me to go, guys, I know what I’m talking about, and then I got 13 properties in a month. Yeah, so that, yeah. Oh, I guess I never mentioned how many I’m at right now. I was up to 30 under management. I fired two homeowners recently and dropped down to 21, but I also cut my working hours in half per week, so I’m very glad I did that.

Michelle Kesil (08:03)
Wow. Where did?

Wow, that’s incredible. Where did you learn these skills? Because that wasn’t part of your education.

Thomas Morey (08:26)
Yeah,

yeah, so it was a lot of research on the internet YouTube is I mean seriously underrated for the value it has and then it was also a lot of networking a lot of finding people who Had larger management companies or owned Airbnb is talking to them about like hey, how’d you want to do this? Networking that kind of stuff being in the

Being in a room full of people that are where you want to be in two years is a consistently good strategy, is what I’ve seen. You just have to change the room you’re in occasionally.

Michelle Kesil (08:57)
Yeah, absolutely. And where are you finding these people to network and connect with?

Thomas Morey (09:02)
Yeah, there’s a variety of people on the internet. Jeremy Worden, Pace Morby, Bill Faith, Mike Shrogan, a few others like that that run teaching groups. And they also, I was just at a conference that three of those guys were running in Nashville a week ago.

that was 1200 people, 1200 people, about 80 % of the audience was a multimillionaire, which was very interesting to be able to interact with those people, right? Because I’ve only been generating revenue for about 18 months. Yeah, actually exactly 18 months. that, it was really interesting to be able to have conversations with these people and realize, hey, I can provide value for you.

and you can provide value for me, should talk. I think I got about 50 people’s phone numbers in network like the world’s biggest extrovert.

Michelle Kesil (10:28)
Yeah, relationships are everything in this space.

Thomas Morey (10:31)
but later.

Michelle Kesil (10:31)
So

tell me more about what your tasks look like in this position.

Thomas Morey (10:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,

so…

Managing an Airbnb means you’re involved in dynamic pricing, marketing, basically SEO work for the listing, and then you have to deal with talking to the guests, talk to the homeowners, insurance claims, weird emergencies at two in the morning when someone’s drunk and can’t figure out how to open a smart lock.

and then damages to the properties, right? variety of things like that. So for the first year or so I was a one man army and that was starting to really wear me down, if that makes sense, particularly because, I mean, you’re getting texts 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day.

from guests, homeowners, everybody in between. And so what I realized was I needed to build a team, but I wasn’t making enough money to hire a lot of people from the US yet. So I went on to OnlineJobs.ph, which is a website to hire people from the Philippines. And the thing about the Philippines is that they speak English and the median salary is around $2.25 an hour.

median so half the population makes less than that which means I have a guy on my team was a master’s degree in engineering and I’m paying him six dollars an hour and that’s twice what his last job paid him. Yeah so it’s definitely an interesting combination of like okay the thing about virtual assistants is that a lot of people take advantage of them and it is truly

Michelle Kesil (11:56)
Wow.

Thomas Morey (12:07)
It’s not a good thing, right? And what I’ve noticed is that if I treat my guys like they’re humans and not disposable…

It goes a long way. I had a guy that I brought on as a $2 an hour virtual assistant as a trainee. He’s now worked his way up to $4 an hour in a year, which is, you know, a 100 % raise in a year is pretty good. Separate from that, that’s more money than he’s ever made in his life. And…

He actually came to me six months into his employment and he told me that he only had enough money in the bank for about a month when I hired him. And if I hadn’t hired him, he probably would have been homeless again in about a month. And he’s one of my managers now, right? I have a lot of respect for him. I will say that we’ll think about onlinejobs.ph is maybe like a one in every 10 applicants are actually worth talking to.

Michelle Kesil (12:45)
Wow.

Thomas Morey (12:59)
But when you take the time to filter through it, it’s worth it, right? I mean, I’ve got a nine person team and I’m paying about $4,500 a month total.

great way for smaller businesses to do the remote stuff and yeah, be able to actually scale.

Michelle Kesil (13:16)
Yeah, I love that you’re supporting people and supporting yourself. That’s so important. Yeah, so every operator I know also has a moment where things got real in their business. Maybe a deal went sideways or you had to make a fast pivot. Do you mind sharing one of those moments for you?

Thomas Morey (13:22)
Thank you.

Yeah, I crashed my car

in February because I fell asleep while driving. I rear-ended somebody. The good news is I have a 2022 car, so the automatic braking system kicked in. So I fell asleep at 50 miles an hour. I woke up at about 10, and then rear-ended somebody. That could have killed me, right? Car accidents kill people every day. And that was sort of my realization of,

It’s not that I want to transition from self-employed to a proper business owner. It’s that I have to, or it will kill me. My definition of the difference between those two things, I wish someone had told me this sooner. self-employed means if you stop working for a week, everything stops. Business owner can go on vacation for six months and things have grown when they come back.

It’s about not being a bottleneck for any of operations.

It’s so much easier to scale when you’re not the bottleneck for anything, right? And it’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, six months ago, my guys, their families don’t get to eat because I’m the one who’s majority of the workload, right?

In the last two weeks, I’ve turned off the notifications from my property management software and Airbnb, which means I don’t get any of the notifications to my phone from the guests. I used to get like 30 or 50 a day, and that’s not including texts and everything else. I’m still averaging 15 to 20 phone calls a day, which is why I was late to join. Sorry about that, I had the three back to back. But,

It’s gone from 50 to 60 hours a week over seven days a week down to like 20 to 30. It’s a huge change. So, yeah.

Michelle Kesil (15:48)
Wow, yeah, that’s such an incredible way to look at something challenging that became like a wake up call for how to set up your business.

Thomas Morey (15:58)
Thank you.

Michelle Kesil (15:58)
So let me ask you this, what is like that next real goal for you?

Thomas Morey (16:03)
Yeah, we’re trying to hit 100 units by the end of the year, which is very ambitious, but it’s one of those goals where if we accomplish half of it, I’ll still be really happy. From there, I want to buy my own properties, because at this point, there’s been two separate examples where I found a property on Zillow.

Cole called them, explained to them that the house was better as an Airbnb, designed the interior, furnished it from scratch using their money, but I did all the labor with a team, and then I got that house to generate six figures in yearly revenue. Average Airbnb makes 50k in the US. clearing, we were doing, I think we were on track to hit 150k for the first one, and we were at 130 for the second one, which.

It’s good, I’ve seen better, but it’s also like…

I was able to hit the revenue projections that I made. then for variety of reasons, I stopped working with those homeowners. So it would have nice if I done all that work and actually owned the property. And kept all the revenue and the equity. yeah, next step is definitely buying some of my own, diversifying and scaling.

Michelle Kesil (17:06)
Yeah, and how are you planning to scale?

Thomas Morey (17:10)
Yeah, I can’t share most of that, but it’s a lot of cold outreach that’s really targeted. I’ve got a guy on my team who can change his accent to sound like an American. So that’s he’s a great cold caller. And when we have the right data, we’re able to actually get people to pick up the phone who genuinely are happy that we called them, which is pretty rare with cold calling. Usually you’re just like, stop trying to scam me.

A lot of cold outreach, working on, I mean, the thing about marketing is you have to try everything and then double down on what works, because you can’t really predict, like, I know a guy who’s running a wholesaling company off of TikTok ads. I never would have thought that would work, ever, right? You’d expect it to be Facebook, but everyone’s on doing Facebook. lot of people are doing, I don’t know why it’s working, but he’s making money from it. So, yeah, just gotta try everything and double down on it.

Michelle Kesil (17:56)
Yeah, absolutely. And are there certain marketing strategies that you found have been like the most successful for you?

Thomas Morey (18:03)
Well, you’re legally limited by certain things, right? You can’t do bulk text, AI phone calls, or voicemail drops anymore to cold contacts. I’ve had cold calling, emails, Facebook ads. I haven’t tried TikTok for property management yet, but I mean, if it works for wholesaling, it’s worth a shot.

And then building an inbound source is the next step for me really. So there’s a couple of different ways I’m working on that. Mainly ads and my website.

Michelle Kesil (18:32)
Well.

Thomas Morey (18:32)
While we’re on the topic, it’s easystayretreats.com and that’s my website if anyone wants to reach out. Email is thomasat easystayretreats.com

Michelle Kesil (18:43)
Thank you for sharing. And yeah, if someone maybe is also like new to this world and they’re curious to get started, like what would you suggest for them?

Thomas Morey (18:55)
Reach out to your network first. There’s probably a friend of a friend of a friend who’s in real estate. That’s always a good place to start. And then find a mentor, find someone to learn from. I personally am not running a mastermind or a mentorship program. I find that is much more time consuming than I want it be at the moment. I do know people who are doing that stuff. And I do know…

can point someone in the right direction as to which ones are legitimate and not just taking someone’s money, if that makes sense.

Michelle Kesil (19:22)
Yeah, that is valuable to know where to go.

Awesome. Well, yeah, before we wrap up here, I know you just shared like your contact information, but if there’s people that want to connect with you, reach out, learn more about everything that you’re doing, like where can they find you?

Thomas Morey (19:40)
Yeah, yeah, would say my

phone number

We can do Instagram. It’s thomas.m12 underscore or my email which I just shared earlier. I’m usually better at messaging me on Instagram. Email me, either one works. And I get so many texts a day. That one’s probably, I’d probably miss something. So yeah, yeah, that’s it. There it is. LinkedIn, LinkedIn too. Yeah, Thomas Morey, Easy State Retreats.

Michelle Kesil (20:05)
Perfect. Yeah.

Perfect. Well, listen, I really appreciate your time, your story and perspective. We need more people in this space who are doing things in this right and innovative way. So thank you so much for being here.

Thomas Morey (20:21)
Thanks Michelle, my pleasure.

Michelle Kesil (20:22)
Amazing. And for those of you that are tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you’re subscribed. We’ve got more conversations coming with operators just like Thomas who are out here building real businesses. And we’ll see you all on the next episode.