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Hi, my name is Jon Ballard. I’ve been renting out vacation homes since 2015, starting with one home and expanding to over forty units. By day I am a husband, father and the CEO of a digital marketing agency I founded in 2004.
The marketing business has been very good for me. It allowed me to be in a position to buy my first short-term rental. My first rental was an existing 4-bedroom vacation home on a nice clear water lake in Northern Wisconsin. The current previous owner was an older gentleman that had been renting out the home by primary word of mouth and managing the entire operation on spreadsheets. I was honestly a little skeptical about his rental numbers but I figured that if I couldn’t rent the lake home I had just purchased I could at least go enjoy a nice vacation there once in a while.
Back in 2015, I knew next to nothing about the short-term rental business and had never even stayed in an Airbnb or VRBO rental but I put my marketing brain to work and started to market this rental using multiple digital platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. The first year gross rent jumped to close to 40% from the previous owners numbers, coming in at a little over $100,000 in gross rent. Just like that, I was hooked on the short-term rental industry. When the home next door came up for sale I purchased that one too and I was off and running.
Over the last seven years I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work in the short-term rental business. It is my hope that whether you're buying your first short-term rental or your goal is to open a management company, my experience can help you be successful without making a lot of the costly mistakes that I did. I wrote my first and only book (So far) to help others that are new to the industry maximize their profits and avoid a lot of the mistakes I made starting out. My book is packed full of useful information on how to run a successful vacation rental. I hope you like it and find the success I have in this industry.
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