Seattle Broker Shares Airbnb Strategy & Real Estate Lessons That Last

Kristen Knapp (00:00.689)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen Knapp and I’m here with Kristi Jenkins, a real estate managing broker in Seattle. We’re gonna be talking about real estate, we’re gonna be talking about investing, and I’m very excited to get into it. Thank you for being here.

Kristi Jenkins (00:12.857)
Thank you for having me, Kristen, I appreciate it.

Kristen Knapp (00:15.153)
Yeah, so tell me all about how you got into real estate. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Kristi Jenkins (00:20.214)
back to the beginning. I had two young kids at home. I was working in corporate America, working in a marketing job for a big gaming company. And I thought that working full time was something I wanted to do even when I had kids, but I realized I really missed out on that time. So I fell into the trap. A lot of people fall into and thought that working in real estate meant that I could create my own schedule and have a flexible schedule. And I was really fortunate though, because I did partner with my mom in those early years. So she and I built.

business together and that really did allow me to have more of the flexibility than I would have now building this by myself. So I started in it because it was convenient and then I fell in love with it. It combined a lot of the things that I’m really good at, the relationship building, the marketing side of things, the negotiation. I was actually pre-law in college so there’s a lot of parts about the contracts and negotiation that really feel like they fit me too and so

It ended up feeling like a very natural fit where it wasn’t originally something that I set out to do or aspired to do. And now, 22 years later, I’ve grown a business that I’m incredibly proud of. And I think my kids are really proud of me too. And I think I was able to show them that you can have it all as a working woman. I still was able to be present for them and show them how to build a successful business. And they are now two amazing adults figuring it out on their own too.

Kristen Knapp (01:44.804)
that’s amazing. And was your mom already in the industry?

Kristi Jenkins (01:45.836)
Yeah. She had just recently started in the industry. She all while I was growing up had a huge daycare in her home, a home based daycare, and kind of got into it because she was completely burnt out. She was working 15 hour days and it was a lot of work and kind of fell into that. And she ended up really successful. Her first year was doing a lot of new construction sales and it ended up being that it felt like something that I could come alongside of her and assist her.

and make that transition from a corporate job and work with her. And then it kind of over the years transitioned a bit from me being her assistant to her being my assistant to the me taking over the business when she retired back in 2017. It was great. It was great in a lot of ways where we get along incredibly well. really close, but we have very, very different business styles. So it was great because we were able to share.

Kristen Knapp (02:31.029)
that’s amazing. How was it working with your mom?

Kristi Jenkins (02:45.334)
all of the different tasks pretty equally, but with very different strengths and weaknesses. So we really did balance each other a lot. And it didn’t hurt that they lived about five minutes away from us for a good part of the time and then moved in two doors next to us. And so whether it was trading off and her taking the kids so that I could do something real estate related or me sending her out because I was home with the kids, it really did work out really well.

Kristen Knapp (03:12.229)
That’s amazing. And can you think about, you know, as you were getting started, maybe a first deal where you were like, wow, I can actually do this full time. This is actually coming together.

Kristi Jenkins (03:22.285)
Yeah, think there was a client who was pregnant with their first child and they were a new family buying their first property and we had recently done the same. And I remember thinking, I really understand where these people are coming from. I can empathize, I can figure out how to proactively anticipate what their questions are going to be because I had just walked through it myself.

And it was during that transaction, I think I realized finding people who have walked through a lot of these same steps that I have is my superpower. mean, working alongside and partnering with them is really natural for me when it’s something that I’ve gone through. I think I’m an empath. I think I can feel and proactively figure out what it is that their questions and needs are. that…

That made me really valuable. And I think after that transaction, I thought I kind of now know who my ideal client is. And there was a lot of bumps along the way. And my strategy and my business has changed a little bit since then, but it has still all stayed along that path of I want to help those people who I really feel like I’ve been in the same position. I can answer their questions, not just adequately, but with expert advice and really direct them.

Kristen Knapp (04:36.444)
Yeah.

Kristi Jenkins (04:43.943)
in a good path, whether it’s buying their first time home or downsizing or moving into a retirement facility or community. I’ve done that with my parents now too. So all along those different stages with my own family, kind of mimicking that in the real estate world.

Kristen Knapp (05:01.371)
Yeah, and how do you go about building these connections and navigating them long term?

Kristi Jenkins (05:07.648)
I think it really did come organically. I was really involved with my kids’ school, with their activities, and so I made a lot of those natural connections. And I wouldn’t say I’m not aggressive, but I am assertive. So if people did have questions about real estate, I think I answered them intelligently without being salesy, without being pushy, and I think that earned me lot of just natural respect from people. And so the business really…

built organically and you have to remember 22 years ago, know, there was no social media. were, you know, it was a very different time to build a business than, you know, what people are doing now. So building those connections, building those authentic relationships, having people trust you because somebody referred you to them who had just recently used you, that was the core of your business. You had to provide exceptional experience. You had to get those word of mouth referrals because there was really no other way.

Kristen Knapp (06:02.769)
Yeah.

Kristi Jenkins (06:02.816)
to build a successful business than that. So it really taught me, you know, the real heart of what building a long-term sustainable business was.

Kristen Knapp (06:11.901)
Yeah, and it sounds like you work with clients like repeat clients over and over

Kristi Jenkins (06:16.585)
Yeah, yeah, I’m really proud. just closed a deal for a client I’ve been working with for 16 years. This is the 12th transaction I’ve done with him and it’s or his family. I it’s helped his son. I’ve helped his ex-wife, his mom three different times, his stepmom from investment properties, second homes, you you name it. We have we have gone through and done a lot of deals together. And it was just really special to close this last one because it was one that I had helped him purchase. And so we had kind of

you know, gone full circle in between. And it was the first home that I helped him purchase that I ended up helping him sell. And we’ve had a lot in between. But yeah, I mean, it really did solidify, you know, your realtor for life. That’s something I take very, very seriously. And and it’s a very personal statement for me because I do want to walk alongside of my clients through each of those stages of their real estate game and help them figure out, you know, how to how to play it with.

expertise with real confidence.

Kristen Knapp (07:17.983)
I love that. And then just give us kind of a rundown of where you’re at today with your business.

Kristi Jenkins (07:24.043)
Today, I feel like I’m drinking from a fire hose right now. mean, this is just, it’s been an unusual time in real estate. I’m really proud of the business that I’ve built and I’ve got several clients that I’m working with right now at all various different phases. One client I’ve been taking out to look at houses for eight months now, because I just can’t seem to find the exact right one, but knowing that we can also find off-market opportunities and

building those connections with other collaborative brokers too, who you can find some real gems and do things a little bit of a non-traditional way is also something that I think is really important when you’re looking at low inventory and, you know, tough transactions and tough sales and clients who are looking for something specific, you’ve got to get creative. And so I think right now my business has just expanded because when the market…

changes and shifts, you either change and shift to adapt to it or you really struggle and fail. you know, failure’s not, that’s not in my playbook, so.

Kristen Knapp (08:27.163)
Yeah, and talk about some of these creative deals you’ve done.

Kristi Jenkins (08:31.818)
I’ve had several clients. I think I’ve had a lot of elderly clients in the last couple of years and I think it’s just the nature of your business when you get connected to a couple people and you show your value and you’re really empathetic and you really can walk alongside of them. They tend to be a little bit more high maintenance, but knowing what they need and understanding how to help them, we’ve been able to do, they really couldn’t do the traditional.

Get your house ready, purge, have junk removal, stage, leave for the weekend. They were homebound. They had really specific medical conditions that didn’t allow for a traditional sale. And so finding off-market opportunities for them, connecting with brokers who had buyers that were looking for very specific things and connecting them that way, that came from a lot of networking that I did. It also came from being part of a great team with Real who

has connected me with a lot of various different brokers and just being open to those opportunities, we were able to get homes under contract. And when we do off-market sales in Washington state, that’s something that’s not, we aren’t allowed to advertise something before it comes to market, before it’s officially listed. So you have to really understand and support your client in a way that you would exactly if you were going to bring it to market. So doing a competitive market analysis.

making sure you know exactly what the market will sustain, pricing it well, having a pre-inspection going forward in good faith with estimates and all of that. I we did the entire pre-listing package and then we knew exactly what we could sell it for and then we found a buyer to match that exact fair-based market value and was able to negotiate the terms that exactly fit my client.

and it was just a really great experience because it didn’t put the same kind of pressure on my clients that a traditional sale would have and I earned, you even though that was probably their last sale that they’ll ever go through, a lot of family members are also involved when you’re selling older people’s homes and earning their trust and earning their future business was also really important.

Kristen Knapp (10:43.589)
Yeah, sounds like that’s a big part of your business is gaining trust and being transparent and walking people through things. I think that’s awesome. Sorry, something, it just slipped my mind what I was gonna say. Can you talk about the Seattle market and what makes it so special?

Kristi Jenkins (11:01.223)
Yeah, I mean, think we’ve got we have such we’ve got four seasons. We’ve got incredible schools. We’ve got just a lot to offer in the area. But in the residential communities that I work in, which is just about 20 minutes east of Seattle and based in Sammamish. So I feel like we’ve got the best of both worlds. We’ve got a very community, local, very organic community here with exceptional schools. But we’ve got

Seattle is just 20 minutes into downtown and it’s just beautiful here. The opportunities for outdoor activities is something that a lot of people are drawn to. We have a lot of transplants from places like Texas and Las Vegas and the East Coast who are looking for something that only a place like Seattle can offer. I mean, can go and be at Snoqualmie Falls in 15 minutes and hike down and just revel in the beauty that we have here in the Pacific Northwest. And then, you know, it’s…

great days in the summertime like it is right now makes you really appreciate the kind of place that we live in. And I’m so happy to have been in the same community for, we’ve been in the same house for 21 years since I was pregnant with my second child. So growing up, growing my family in the same community, really having a pulse on what it’s like to live in here, the parks, the, you know, everything about the community, how to involve my clients with their teachers for the, for the kids’ and.

and what dog parks they want to be close to, and if they can’t commute via car, making sure that they’re close to bus lines. mean, just being really hyper local, I think, has been really important for me and my business, and it certainly continues to make me appreciate what a great area we live in, and bringing clients in and taking them to see all of the touristy kind of things in Seattle, and doing all of that has been really, really special.

Kristen Knapp (12:49.893)
I love that. networking seems to be a big thing here where you’re just really good at relationship building. What would you say to somebody who’s a little scared of the market right now?

Kristi Jenkins (12:55.707)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Jenkins (13:01.916)
I think it’s a fantastic time for buyers in the Seattle market right now. mean, if sellers are selling, they need to sell. This is not a time in the Seattle market where people are just putting their house up for sale because they want to get the highest price or because they just want to test out the market. The people who are selling, there’s a life change and they need to sell.

I think for buyers that creates a really unique opportunity. think sellers, we’ve been in this kind of market for long enough that they’re aggressively, they’re pricing strategically. And so you’re really finding if your agent is doing a good job, you’re finding that the comps are supporting that you’re gonna have immediate equity in a lot of these communities and a lot of these areas. So, that again, when it comes into investing in an area, you wanna make sure that you’re making really

smart, strategic, long-term choices with these homes too. And I think when you can get in at a really great price, and I’m not saying everybody’s getting a fantastic deal, but I think everybody is getting a really, really exceptional, fair price on houses and seeing that this can sustain them, that they will build equity in these homes because they’re not buying at the top of the market like they would have been a few years ago.

Kristen Knapp (14:18.663)
Yeah, no, think that’s a great way to look at it and really encouraging for people. So let’s talk about your kind of your new venture starting to invest.

Kristi Jenkins (14:27.119)
Yeah, well, yeah, like I said, I really, feel like walking alongside as a partner with my clients has been a really important step. And my husband and I had talked about investing in real estate for a couple of years, but we just really didn’t know how to make that jump, how to make that move. And we ended up falling in love with the Scottsdale area and it’s got such a different climate, a different vibe, a different feel.

than we have here, it just made a lot of sense once we visited a couple of times to invest in that area. So we bought, it was a fully functioning Airbnb when we purchased it, we did a lot of upgrades to it. I really looked at it and treated it exactly like I would if I was going to stage and sell a home residentially. And so I think that was kind of, that was a very important piece of our investment was whenever I sell a home,

I want people to walk in and feel like it’s home. I want them to fall in love with the way that it makes them feel, what they can anticipate doing in the home, how they can see their family living, how they can see their family growing up in it, the activities they can do in the home. And I really felt it was important to look at an investment property the same way, even though it’s a short-term property, I want…

the guests who come in to feel like it’s a second home, like they’re on vacation in a place they can just relax and unwind and know that everything has been taken care of. from the games, from the pool, updating the hot tub, we did a new pool deck. mean, we really, we did some big ticket items and that’s not always the smartest thing to do on a short-term investment property, but we had a little bit of a different vision for it. And we want it to be someplace that people visit Scott still.

over and over and over year after year for different events, know, the golf events and a lot of different attractions that bring people to the area. And we wanted our place to be someplace that people come back to year after year and celebrations year after year and family vacations. And then in order to do that, you really have to create an experience for them at the home. And so we just took that approach. We knew that it probably wouldn’t make us money our first year, but again, it was a long-term strategy for us.

Kristi Jenkins (16:40.274)
and we went into it looking at it like that.

Kristen Knapp (16:44.293)
I mean, Scottsdale is awesome. I love Scottsdale. There’s so much going on, like so many bars and restaurants. It’s so lively.

Kristi Jenkins (16:47.11)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it really, it really is. And even, you we found too, we thought that this would be a really slow time at our Airbnb because it’s 116 degrees during the day. It’s not exactly welcoming for people to come and, you know, enjoy the outdoors. But, you you provide enough for people in the house and you can still create an oasis, you know, inside. We’ve got an Arizona room where we’ve got

a pool table and ping pong and air hockey. And so there’s just a lot to enjoy inside. And so if you can get out outside, maybe go do brunch, you know, get out for a little while in the morning and then come back. And during the hottest part of the day, you’ve got everything you need inside the house to still enjoy a really great, you know, family vacation or bachelorette party or, know, whatever the circumstances might be. I think we’ve created a really, a really special place.

Kristen Knapp (17:40.839)
That’s amazing. And I know that you said you’re managing it yourself. You found that you could do it yourself just as good as a property manager.

Kristi Jenkins (17:50.135)
Yeah, we, you we had a really tough experience with the first property manager that we had because we originally weren’t planning on managing it ourselves. We felt like, you know, being in Seattle and having the property in Arizona, we didn’t have the boots on the ground. We didn’t have the hyperlocal knowledge about what we needed to do. But our first property manager connected us with our house manager, and she’s also our cleaner. And she has proven to be fantastic and connected us with our pool person and our landscaper. And so once we put together that

boots on the ground team, then it was just a matter of the reservations and the Airbnb and managing the website and the social media. And that’s all in my wheelhouse. So I really felt like it was once we had the people on the team on the ground that we needed to do the daily and weekly activities, then it certainly felt like when we knew that we needed to market it better and present it differently, we knew that that was something that I could take on.

It’s been a learning curve and it’s taken a lot more time, I think, than I originally anticipated to get all of that off the ground. But now that we have it that way, I’m super proud and really pleased of, you know, kind of the kind of care that we’re taking of guests and the way that we’re presenting the house. So.

Kristen Knapp (19:05.287)
That’s amazing. can see how shifting from traditional real estate into the short-term rentals game, I can see how that would be a little jarring at first, kind of get the flow of it. What did that feel like?

Kristi Jenkins (19:18.175)
I think I, I’m, I’m very type A, I’m a little OCD. I’m, I don’t love to do things that I don’t know how to do because I don’t love to fail. But I think that once I got over kind of the fear of what could go wrong and we knew that we had support and people to kind of, I mean, we, we, put it live and all of sudden I got a, I got a reservation on Airbnb and the pricing was

horrible for that time. I mean, I had to learn through a couple of mistakes that, you we can’t just put it out there without thinking through a whole year in advance and comparing, you know, pricing and doing a market analysis, but not just for a specific period of time, for literally weeks and months into a year that we don’t really know what the market is going to sustain or what, you know, people are going to be willing to pay for those weeks.

and evaluating when the special events were coming to town and when it was a really key time and weekends versus weekdays differently. So doing what I already do in a market analysis, but doing it like to the nth degree, I think making a couple of those mistakes were important for me to understand the process and what we needed to do and how we needed to look at it differently. But that definitely, those were some growing pains that we…

we worked through and lost a little bit of money in that learning experience, but it certainly was worthwhile and it taught me a lot about how detailed we really need to make everything about our investment from the business side to the marketing side to the guest experience side.

Kristen Knapp (20:53.283)
that and then how what are you like what are your plans for the future?

Kristi Jenkins (20:58.088)
We’d love to invest in more properties. I think we’re just trying to figure out what makes sense. Do we continue to do the same type of properties and look for other short-term rentals? Do we get into more longer-term rentals where we can have year to two-year plus tenants in there rather than short-term guests? What areas do we want to continue to focus on, the areas that we’re now getting to know like Scottsdale, or do we venture into different areas and opportunities?

Do we still invest in this? We love this area. We’ve been part of this community for so long. We’ve got one of our kids still lives here and probably will continue to live here. We don’t want to be too far from her. And so what makes the most sense for that going forward is kind of at the, that’s the strategic part we’re trying to figure out right now. But I think we definitely have seen that this is something we both, my husband and I both really enjoy being a part of and doing.

and we’ve gotten our feet wet. I do feel like it is also, since I’ve helped so many of my clients purchase investment properties, it’s really given me, think I can help them even better because I can walk alongside them as a partner, which is, like I mentioned before, really what I want to do in residential real estate and investing. I feel like it’s the same way. Until I took this leap of faith and invested myself, I couldn’t provide the same kind of

expert opinion and you know process oriented evaluation as I can now.

Kristen Knapp (22:28.765)
Absolutely, I mean it’s interesting how both facets of what you do really feed each other.

Kristi Jenkins (22:35.351)
Yeah, yeah. And I think sometimes that comes organically and sometimes you really have to make those connections. And I think, I mean, I think some of it has come organically, but I think taking, thinking about the investing side of it differently and with different goals and the way that the house is presented and the way that we, the guy before us who owned the house in Scottsdale had taken, cut every corner, done things really, really, that he didn’t have great.

reviews, there was a lot of things about and he was just kind of, you know, running it from without a lot of care, a lot of attention. And we learned a lot from him too, taking that over and kind of understanding what he had done differently. And it was working for him. I mean, he was making money, but he wasn’t building the kind of experience that we’re trying to build.

Kristen Knapp (23:25.371)
Right. Well, this is all so awesome, and I’m so excited for you starting on this investing journey. How can people get a hold of you?

Kristi Jenkins (23:33.074)
Christie Jenkins Real Estate. That’s my handle on all social media. It’s my website. I’m always, I’ve got my phone attached to me 24 seven, whether my family loves it or not. so I’m, I’m always available and I, I, that’s a, that’s a really big and important part of my business is being available whenever people need me. So.

Kristen Knapp (23:52.805)
Awesome. Well, this has been so great. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope, yes, I hope everybody learned a little bit about both the real estate world and the investing world and got some mindset tricks as well. So thank you so much for being here. Please subscribe if you love this podcast and I’ll see you next time. Bye.

Kristi Jenkins (23:56.012)
Thanks, Kristen.

Kristi Jenkins (24:09.772)
Sounds good.