Delia:

I see, it makes a lot of sense. And I’ll like to ask you about how much did it cost you to buy the caravans?

Emily Groove:

That first caravan I bought because it was old, it cost me 25,000 pounds, which is probably more expensive than you would buy if you bought it privately because I bought it from the park, it’s like the difference between buying a car from a, you know, from a showroom or buying it from somebody privately. And the second one cost 35,000. And the second caravan is newer and it has got double glazing and it’s got central heating, gas central heating, you know, so it’s a lot cozier and warmer in the cooler months.

Delia:

I see and you didn’t have to do any kind of renovations in that, aside from what you told me about electricity and water connections from the park?

Emily Groove:

Yeah, they do all of that for you.

Delia:

Okay, that’s great! So you didn’t spend that much, I guess. Do you think you’re going to be able to get a good return on investment with your rentals?

Emily Groove:

Yeah, I guess eventually, if I take into account the purchase price, the plan is to get a return on investment, is probably not the best return on investment, but what you do get is a solid kind of cash flow income, you know, we’ll see, we’ll see what happens.

Delia:

Okay, hope it goes great though! How much do you say is your cash flow going against your expenses? Do you have many expenses there?

Emily Groove:

So initially, I bought not so, so they give you do vase. But I’ve bought new vase because I want a bigger like king size duvet, I bought lots of bedding and towels. And, you know, other soft furnishings to make it cozy, like cushions and I buy tea and coffee and biscuits for my guests. And you know, cooking oil and salt and pepper and things like that. So I’ve spent lots of money initially on that sort of thing probably or when we installed WiFi as well, so there was that cost to this WiFi in both the caravans. We had to buy the key safe for each of them as well. So yeah, there was quite a lot of what felt like a lot of initial outlay, maybe something like 1,000 pounds or something per caravan maybe a bit more. Let me see if I’ve have got a list of it all somewhere, but I haven’t really added it up yet because there’s lots of it. At some point, I’ll have a look and see, you know, whether I’m when it is there’ll be a time when I feel like I’m going to break even I’m sure that’s going to be some years now.

Delia:

Okay, I see. What do you think are going to be your higher months like your most PC months?

Emily Groove:

Well, May was very busy. The problem I have is that I’ve been taking holiday myself this month and in August. So I don’t have anybody staying in the caravans when I’m not here because I want to be the one to go in and make sure everything’s okay when they’re gone. So ordinarily, I would say June, July, August would be the busiest months. It’s the school holidays here in July and August. You know, because it’s a good price, we get lots of families come, you know, because there’s this swimming pool and there’s children’s play parks and things like that on the site, you know, it’s good for families because it’s a reasonable price as well.

Delia:

And how much do you plan to raise your price during that season? Or do you plan to stay at your rate?

Emily Groove:

Now, that’s when I put it up a little bit. So on the first caravan, it’s, I’m trying to think I might have put it up to 70 pounds. And in the real peak season on the second caravan because it’s a nicer caravan, the rate starts at 55 and it goes up to 100 pounds a night in the peak season.

Delia:

And are your rates comparable to the other rentals in the camp?

Emily Groove:

Yeah, I think so. There are some other rentals, but they’re bigger than mine and more extravagant than mine and so they obviously charge more. There is somebody there has one, he has a caravan that’s similar to mine and he charges a lot less than me, I think he charges 30 pounds a night. Yeah, I think it’s kind of average.

Delia:

Yeah. I also think your price is good, right, average comparing to the other ones, giving that you also offer like a lot of good amenities, I think it’s worth it. Can you tell me a little bit about the challenges that you have so far with, you know, short-term rentals, Airbnb, whatever you think has been more challenging during this time?

Emily Groove:

So it’s not been so bad, I think isn’t challenging is that if there is a problem, I’ve messaged with Airbnb, and then they responded and they’ve been very helpful and I know that’s not everybody’s experience. But you know, I’ve not had a problem with them when I’ve needed something or when my guest has got in touch with me because they’re concerned about something before they’ve even arrived. They’ve got in touch because they’re concerned about something. It’s quite easy to go on to the Airbnb site and find the answer to help them. I suppose when it comes to people’s reviews, that’s a bit of a bone of contention, isn’t it? So my caravans interestingly, I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this already, I they’re all plant based. So I request that my guests don’t bring meat or milk or eggs or fish into the kitchen and you know, I’m not saying they have to be vegan, but while they’re in my kitchen, they should be vegan, they can eat out, you know, and a lot of people just come and they eat out because there’s a, you know, there’s a restaurant on the park, so they don’t need to use the kitchen. And some people really like that and they really, they really appreciate it and I have like eco friendly things as well. So I have eco friendly cleaning products in the caravan and a lot of people really appreciate that. But I had one guest who, although I’d messaged him to make sure that he was aware well in advance of him arriving about the plant based kitchen situation, he ignored my message and then his review was, “oh, vegan kitchen, that’s a bit weird” and then marked me really low on everything, you know, and there’s nothing really I can do about that. So had he marked me in the same way as everyone else has marked me because I get quite high marks or high, you know, ratings from everybody apart from that one person, my current rating is only 4.7 because of that one person. So that’s a bit annoying and there’s nothing really, you know, I’m not going to be bothered to, you know, complain about that because that’s his view if he really wants to give me that rating and it’s not really affecting my bookings. So, you know, anybody with any kind of sense will look at this review and think “well, you just didn’t read the listing?”.

Delia:

I also saw the little, like, how do you say these, the little thing that indicates that your kitchen was plant-based. But I didn’t ask about it because I just forgot, I think that was like a rule. Can you explain a little bit more about it? That’s very interesting.

Emily Groove:

So because it’s my kitchen and it started because we lived in the caravan for a few months before we rented it the first caravan and because we’re vegan and I thought I don’t really want to be cleaning up, you know, that people’s meat and whatever, that they’ve cooked in the caravan. I also believe that, you know, with the world would be a lot better if people didn’t eat meat and eggs and milk in so many ways, I’m not gonna go into it because I have this conversation a lot. So I would prefer, you know, if the whole world didn’t eat meat or milk or eggs, but I have control over my caravan to a certain extent, obviously, I can’t really control what people do in there, but if I request that they, you know, eat plant based while we’re there, most people comply with that because they tend to ask me questions about it when they’re booking, it’s clear to me that some people don’t follow those rules. But I don’t, you know, I don’t mark them down particularly for that because I’m not a horrible person. Um, you know, if otherwise, they’ve kept the place clean and tidy and you know, tidied up after themselves and everything was fine, then yeah. If they don’t want to follow that rule, I can’t really stop them.

Delia:

I fully understand and I think it’s really something that for me, will be really easy to respect if you don’t want that, I don’t see why other people can’t do it. But I kind of understand that there are some people that are not going to respect it and are going to be a little bit harsh about it, right?

Emily Groove:

Some people get angry about it actually. I did when I realized that I hadn’t made it very clear, I sent messages to everybody that had booked and I said, “I’m really, really sorry, I wasn’t clear about this rule. You may have missed it, you know, I’m very happy if you want to cancel because of it, you’ll get a full refund” and probably half of my bookings cancelled because of it at the time. They all got booked up again, you know, so I didn’t actually lose anything from it. It felt bad at the time, you know, because everyone read my message and they were like, “what? I’m not allowed to bring milk?” and I’m like, “No, I’d rather you didn’t” so lots of people canceled. But then yeah, lots of people were fine with it and so it’s actually fine.

Delia:

And now you included it in your set of rules? Like the first message that you sent to that guest when their first book?

Emily Groove:

I don’t send them a message, but it’s in every paragraph in the listing pretty much and it’s in the house rules as well. So, you know, I want to make a big thing of it, but I don’t want to make a big thing of it. So that’s why I really get annoyed if people if it’s obvious that people have cooked meat in there. That’s only happened once. And you know, I’ve had like 22 bookings and any once I’ve I noticed, you know, that’s that people have put meat in there. I’m not going to, because I haven’t, you know explicitly message them and said, “By the way, don’t eat meat in my caravan”and I can’t really complain, I suppose.

Delia:

I’ve like a year ago, I saw like a post on Facebook, a person was running her own house and she was vegan and she personally requested everyone to not cook meat in her kitchen, you know, because it was the same pans and pots she used and all the comments were really harsh about it. How do you think you can with your kitchen, you know, with your plant based kitchen, bring awareness to people, right?

Emily Groove:

I think there should be a category on Airbnb, actually. So there’s another site, it’s called veggie visits and they call themselves the vegan Airbnb. But I get no bookings from them at all because it’s very, you know, it’s international and it’s very niche and nobody looking for a holiday that’s vegan is going to think, “oh, I want to spend 40 pound a night in a caravan on the king coast”, so I don’t get any bookings through there. But it would be good if there was a way to like, I don’t want to put the word vegan in the name of my holiday home because I don’t want to put people off, you know, you don’t have to be vegan stay here. I don’t want it to be like a really big thing, but it would be good to have a like a checkbox or a category or something in Airbnb, that would mean that if you were specifically looking for a vegan place, then it would come up. But it would come up anyway, if you were looking for some place, you know, on the king coast reasonably priced.

Delia:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I actually agree with that. I’ve seen there’s categories for basically everything, so I don’t see why there shouldn’t be some for vegan, right? It should be. So the last thing I’d like to ask you about if there’s any tips that you would like to share for other Airbnb hosts or future Airbnb hosts?

Emily Groove:

When people review me, they say that my place is very, very clean and I give great attention to detail when I’m cleaning the place and I use a antiviral spray because of COVID afterwards, that smells amazing, it smells like cherries. And so when people open the door, they smell this amazing smell of cherries and people have actually said, you know, “I opened the door and it smelled amazing and just felt really clean”. And the other thing is that I’m very responsive on the messages. So people message me a lot before they arrive. Some people don’t talk to me at all, that’s fine. But if people message me before they arrive with any sort of questions, I go out of my way to find the answer and people really appreciate that.

Delia:

Okay, so the trickiest will be cleanliness and be responsive to your guests, right?

Emily Groove:

Yeah. Normal customer service really!

Delia:

That’s right, but I guess some hosts aren’t really aware or prepared for that, especially for the attention you have to give to your guests, right?

Emily Groove:

Yeah.

Delia:

Especially for that one. So yeah, that’ll be it for today. Thank you a lot for your time. Thank you for telling us about your story, about your journey.

Emily Groove:

It’s my pleasure!

Delia:

And how did you come with the idea of that one quarantine account you have?

Jason Centeno:

So I’m a retired firefighter and we always have like multiple plans. So I just take and think like “okay, everything’s great, but what happens if something goes wrong?”. So I just started to put up these measures in case and test them out and, you know, it was necessary. So I like at least a Plan B and Plan C with everything I do.

Delia:

That’s good to know. And one thing I’ll like to know about is why did you decided to quit on Airbnb, even after all of these buildings you already owned and all this profit you were making, why did you decided to just quit that?

Jason Centeno:

A few things. COVID was the big reason for a lot of it because I just had to get out of most of the arbitrage units. It was taking more than it was giving because of what I mentioned moving in bad elements into one apartment building affecting one account. Travel was just shut down completely in Philadelphia for like, longer than most places actually, so it was more like to stop the bleeding. The ones I own, were the last to go. I actually, I moved through Philadelphia, so I was like I mentioned, I was a firefighter, I retired and when COVID hit, I decided that I just want didn’t want to live in Philadelphia anymore because I didn’t like what was going on. I thought it was ridiculous. I saw what the administration was doing. We’re not going to get into all the specifics just because people feel the way they feel. I just felt for me and my family, I needed to us to be out of there. So I decided to leave, I said, I can go and start to somewhere else. So we ended up moving in Tampa, just in time. When I got here, you know, my management that was still in place for the ones that I still had, wasn’t really doing a great job, I thought I had a pretty good handle on it, but come to find out when you’re, when they say the cat’s away, the mice will play, it wasn’t so much that, but everything that used to cost me let’s say $10, when I was there would cost me six and seven times that. So every little thing just got way more expensive for me to do and it got to the point where I was like, you know, this long distance handling of it, it’s not worth it to me. It bugs me, right? So that I started seeing some things about Airbnb I didn’t like specifically and it was accumulation of things. And then some of it was instinct that was just like it’s getting oversaturated, I would rather pull back and do something in the industry, but not that because I personally like to operate in places where there’s like, I have a little niche. I had one there that I really liked, but again, being far away, it wasn’t really working anymore and the travel industry across the board was kind of knocked sideways. So I was just like, “well, you know what I think I’m just going to pull out and then start over when things get better or when I like the environment again”. To that end, I sort of just did nothing for a year, I kind of unattached myself from everything so that I could kind of look at it from like 1000 foot view instead of being too close to it and that’s kind of where my tech company kind of came from, which was one of the things that bugged me the most was trash became such a problem, something so small, but it affected everything. You know, if you ever go on the boards, people are like, “Oh, this area is sketchy”. In urban areas, there’s not a lot of room for things, right? Like there’s just, we don’t have a lot of garages, we have some alleyways, we don’t have big yards or anything, so storing trash, you know, if you’re in the hospitality business, trash is important because if you don’t get rid of it quickly, you don’t get the bedbugs of people bring the bedbugs, but you’ll get the, you know, the roaches, the fleas, the flies, the rats, you’ll get everything, as clean as you keep your building, they’re going to find it, right? So if you can’t store it outside because the neighbors or because you get fined or whatever and you can’t store it inside because you’re attracting these pests and affecting reviews and getting, you know, you’re like damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So it became such a big problem and I had some people working on it, but it was always agony, like to find the right person to make sure they got it out on time, that I didn’t catch a fine, that I didn’t piss off neighbors and it was just kind of like this complicated problem from something that we all kind of disregard. And it affected the, you know, affected the surroundings too because, you know, I don’t know if people have been to New York lately, but just seeing trash on the sidewalk, that kind of stuff just puts you in a bad mood. So if you want to go on vacation and you want to see maybe not the beach, but like you want to be somewhere you want to feel like you’re like relaxed and enjoying yourself, the last thing you want to see is piles of trash smelling like dead fish and dead bodies. Wherever you’re walking, it doesn’t matter if the place is gorgeous, if you smell that or see that it throws you off, it messes up your attitude. So I look at that and I was like, “You know what, this is a problem that I want to sink my teeth into” and never thought I would be the person to do this, but apparently, God saw a different and put a bunch of things in my lap and said, “You’re the guy” and you know, here I am. But I created this app called Trash matter because, you know, short-term rental hosts, small businesses, cleaning companies, you know, restaurants even or just people that have a party in their home, like we just had Memorial Day weekend and people are like, “who’s gonna pick up my trash” and it’s like, we don’t know right now because, you know, the city might take off. And you know, if you live in a place that gets hot or just you don’t have a lot of room and you just did a big cookout and you got all this food in the trash, you’re going to attract the rats, the fleas, the dogs, the cats, the raccoons, the bears, wherever you’re at or if you got to put it in a hot garage, it’s gonna stink up your garage. So there’s just people out there to just like, “I don’t want that I don’t want to be waiting for five days for this” and that’s what we’re there for. And it became the beginning of something, but right now that’s what it is. We’re like Uber for trash, we get rid of 2 to 10 bags quickly or under the amount that a normal junk person would pay attention to like, when you call those guys out, it’s usually over 100 bucks to just show up and it’s two guys in a truck and you don’t need all that. You got to three bags, you’re like, “Well, I just don’t have time to take it to the dump myself”, well, that’s what we’re for. We were there for that in between kind of a little bit too much for you, but not enough for the other guys and you don’t want to spend, you know, $100, you want to spend 50 or whatever. So like that, that’s where we live.

Delia:

Can you tell us a little bit more about how does the app works? How does the person who wants the trash taken out contact this person who is going to come and take trash out? How much are the prices for it? And stuff like that.

Jason Centeno:

So right now, we’re still on the app store now. But trashmitter.com, you could go and download in your Google or iPhone. We’re only available right now in Philadelphia, but people can start to sign up and when they do, we’ll start to make a list of where we’re being asked for. So ideally, we’re going to, you know, spread out, you know, Tampa, Miami and Dallas, like there’s places we already kind of know we’re going to be headed. But right now we’re just in Philadelphia vicinity, trying to work out the kinks. So we’re still kind of fundraising and still fixing it, but it works like Uber like you would go on, you put in your address, you know, your credit card, everything that, you know, to set up your account, put in your address and you’ll be basically, you can say “I got three bags, I need to get rid of”, you put in three, like you just pick three and then you take a picture of it so that we know like where it is. So ideally, we tell people, “hey, just put it wherever your address is to make it easy, right in front” and then when we’re up and running, ideally, we want to be kind of like dominos half an hour or less, but we don’t have enough people yet, so it’s more like a couple hours. But you know, you will press the button and then the sign goes out, the trip goes out to potential drivers and as we fill that up with you know, like Lyft and Uber drivers, anybody that just wants to do this as a side gig because the cool thing about Airbnb type trash really is like most of it is not nasty trash. It’s kind of like junk food wrappers and pizza boxes and stuff like that. So people are like, “Oh, my car’s gonna get nasty”, it’s like, nah you can put something in the trunk or a tarp even and this does really not that bad, but of course, that’s right now, so who knows what they’re going to do in the future. So you know, basically, you call it and then we send somebody they come, they pick it up, they take a picture to verify that they took it and then it’s gone. Like we take it to a local dump, a passing by truck, eventually, we want to be tied into all the other Junkers and even the city systems, where our people could kind of just see one close by and throw it off there and then they would share the cost. So you know, you don’t have to drive far, you could literally just be in a one or two square mile radius and never have to leave that because there’s always some place to put it. That’s kind of where we’re going with it. And eventually, it’ll just be waste management across the world is just crowdsource that way. And then we can start working on litter. I mean, the future of this thing is we’re trying to make an app or a game where like Pokemon, kids pick up litter and pick it up and they would get cryptocurrency for it or rewards for every piece of trash or glass or mask or whatever they pick up, they will get reward points that we would eventually turn into crypto, you can go on a store and put you know, buy stuff with it. That’s where we’re going with this because I didn’t want to look at this as a simple solution just for Airbnb hosts. When I think of things I want to be bigger than that. I want it to be useful for everybody. So I went in with the thought of like “How can I make Airbnb hosts life better?” I went into thinking, “how can I make the whole world a better place?” And then that’s kind of where this all came from. So this is just the beginning of it though.

Delia:

That’s a great idea! And are you going to continue like in the future working with Airbnb hosts and these type of people you’re covering on now?

Jason Centeno:

I mean, yeah, they’re always going to be my people. In fact, I run multiple Airbnb host groups because I can advise, it’s not like, you know, I don’t want to be the guru cake person that’s out there selling education because to me, it’s kind of a zero sum game, you know, for me to keep up on that stuff and be day to day activities. There’s people better at it than I am, right? But I still want to give value. So what I do is I just create really welcoming places where people get actual information, you know, we try to give them all sorts of like, right now, I’m creating a resource manual for Airbnb hosts, like, what are all the things you can do? Well, you know, there’s property management systems, there’s cleaning apps, there’s all these things and it’s like, well, I can just put them all in one little place and download it and now you’re in my ecosystem and then all I care about is this. Whenever you have a trash disposal, you call me first, I’ll give you everything else for free. And that’s kind of like my MO and it’s been working. I mean, that’s how I’m growing. So.

Delia:

Yes, that’s great! I mean, it’s also good that people can get access to the groups, but education when it comes to this, I think it’s more valuable when it comes from people who wants to give it for free, who wants to teach you like from their heart for you to grow, right?

Jason Centeno:

Yeah, I mean and again, also because if you pay thousands of dollars for something, but you feel like there’s a missing link because everybody’s different, like, you cannot give everybody 100% of the information because each market is different. Everybody’s situation is different. I mean, just in our group alone, it’s like, “are you a co-host? Are you arbitraging? Are you an owner? What’s the zoning? You know, what’s this? What’s that? It’s like, there’s so many variables that are, I got six kids, I don’t have time to be kids’ father to a million more people. It’s just like, I’ll do the best I can and I hope you got to be able to fill in the blanks on your own. But the problem is that the Guru’s to me, so in one package, and that’s what you buy. But there’s no such thing, you know, you just have to keep educating yourself, educating yourself. So why pretend that I’m the expert or the full answer to everything, I’ll give you as much as I can give you and that’s it and that’s all I promise and I feel like, for me, that works. Other people, I’m not gonna knock anybody else, there’s some guys out there that I learned from that were great, you know, I can start rattling off names, but I know they’re about their business. I just could not do what they do as consistently as they do it. So I choose to do it this other way because that’s what suits me better.

Delia:

Yes, fully understand and appreciate what you do. So you told me previously that you are currently investing in an Airbnb competitor called Workbnb, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about this and why did you decide to invest in them?

Jason Centeno:

So Workbnb, I love the model because it’s basically a b2b business instead of a b2c business, meaning all the scammers, all the people that are coming on Airbnb now that are learning how to play the system will be avoided because you’re simply dealing with an employer and their employees are being placed in these places, that person has a lot of incentive to be well behaved because I don’t know about you, but if my employee goes and has a party at a place that I put him in and wreck something and cost me thousand of dollars, that boy is getting fired, right? So like, it just keeps people more honest, you know, people get paid, hosts get paid up front, you can’t just like Airbnb be started in 10 minutes, there’s a barrier of entry, there’s some training you got to take, which I also love. So it keeps out the casual hosts, right? And it deals only with professional, it’s a professional platform and it caters, like I said, to a niche and the niche is infrastructure workers, as specifically with me and Yeves, the founder, we’re like really trying to be the housing sort of plug for tech companies because we both have tech companies, he has that tech company, I have my tech company and we’re trying to like create a little infrastructure of tech companies where we become the people that they go to when they want to place their people in different cities, while they’re trying to expand their operations, since we understand both sides of that, that’s kind of who we want to appeal to. So I invested in them simply because I was like, it answers the problem, I’m sick of the way Airbnb has been treating hosts and making things worse instead of better and the culture that they’ve created around, you know, around guests, now it’s just bottom of the barrel and they don’t seem to care about it or do too much about it. So this is why I back the competitor because I was like, I would just rather deal with that type of customer on a smaller scale and know that I’m not going to have the rug pulled out of me if something pops up, you know, businesses work together better, like if you’re not a tenant, but like if you’re a business and your landlord is a business, you’re gonna have a different conversation on negotiations and what will be a tenant versus a landlord because that’s not business to business that’s, you know, lease or lease, I like that because if there is a problem like another COVID, you can work that out with the business a lot better than you could work it out with an individual because all they want to be like, “Ah, I’m hurt, everything’s bad”, like they forget that the rest of the world is also hurt. So they don’t try to get a mutual sort of mutual solution together. I also like that about Workbnb, so I back them.

Delia:

Yes, that’s great. Thank you for telling us about it, it’s going to be great value for the hosts that my are looking to, you know, invest or work in same kind of platform you’re currently investing in. So thank you so much for that. Yeah, that’d be it for today. Thanks a lot for your time and for all the knowledge you shared with us today!

Jason Centeno:

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.