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Episode 241 - Avery Carl, The Short Term Shop powered by eXp Realty
Time Stamp
(00:01:28) The Benefits of Using Short-Term Rentals
(00:07:32) Rock and Metal Enthusiast's Musical Journey
(00:11:40) Finding a Southern Balance in Nashville
(00:16:26) The Responsive Vacation House Experts
(00:21:09) Short-term Rental Success in Vacation Towns
(00:27:19) Creating Memorable Experiences with Short Term Rentals
(00:32:22) Cautious Sellers and Increased Competition in Real Estate
(00:36:44) Responsive Communication: Key to Agent Success
Transcript
00:00:00 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
But if you don't have the money to go buy the deals, you got to hustle and crush it and work hard and patience. Got to take your time. Slow down. I see all these new folks that are just, like, so shot out of a cannon. I got to have 14 doors tomorrow, and it's just not realistic.
00:00:20 - Bill Risser
You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast, and I'm your host, Bill Risser, executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with Rate, my Agent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 365 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend I had so much fun recording this episode. If you could see me right now, if I can beam, I'm beaming. I got to talk to Luke Carl. Luke is Avery Carl's husband partner in the short term shop. Powered brokered by EXP Realty, luke handles all the nuts and bolts of the business that the Short Term Shop has built. A fantastic background, much like Avery. Rock and roll all the way. So we're going to have a wonderful time in this conversation. Let's just get this thing started. Luke, welcome to the podcast.
00:01:28 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
My pleasure, man. My pleasure. Absolute honor to be here. Thank you for having me.
00:01:33 - Bill Risser
I'm really excited about this because it's very rare for me to interview the husband and the wife right on the podcast, especially literally. I think this is almost three years after I had my first conversation with Avery, and she was just doing some great things. Both of you were doing some great things at that time with the Short Term Shop. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about that, but first I like to find out about my guests. I like to go back in time. And I know that you and Avery lived in Brooklyn at one point, right in your lives. And I know that Avery's from Mississippi originally. I'm just guessing you're not. Did you grow up in New York?
00:02:08 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
No, I didn't, as a matter of fact. Blow your mind again. I'm from Nebraska, so we're both from states that nobody's ever heard of, but yeah, we both come from really small town. My town is actually smaller. I win on that one. She grew up in a college town, Mississippi State, Starkville, and I grew up not far from Omaha. Not too far. She makes jokes when I say I'm from a town of 1100 people, because I did grow up about 45 minutes to an hour from Omaha. So big city, but way out in the sticks in a cornfield. But, yeah, small town boy, for most purposes. And we both moved to the city. Yeah, I lived in New York for, man, a long time, like 1415 years.
00:02:48 - Bill Risser
Okay, so how old were you when you left Nebraska? I mean, did you go to high school there? You went all that, stayed there till.
00:02:53 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
That time, yeah, born and raised. My folks and my brother and most of my family still lives there, immediate family. And I moved when I was 20. I couldn't wait to get out. I said, I'm going to go move to the biggest city on the planet and take over the world. That's pretty much what I did, at least to my standards anyway. And I did go to college at University of Nebraska, Omaha for three years. That didn't go so well. And so I just basically I hopped in a van with a couple of guys I never met. And this is the early days. That's actually a pretty good story. I won't get into the weeds. But way back, this was like, MySpace hadn't even been created yet, and it was like right on the verge of that MySpace era. And there was a band from one town over Lincoln where the football team is, and I knew that they had moved to the big city, and I found their email address somehow. This was like email. I mean, this would have been like 1999, probably, and the creation of all that internet stuff. Email as I knew it. Anyway, and I shot him an email and he said, actually, we're coming through town. You can get in our van and go with us back to New York. And I said, Sign me up, let's go. Wow.
00:04:00 - Bill Risser
Now, look, it's no secret that you are a massive fan of rock, especially, we'll call it metal. But you're way too young. Like, right now, you're wearing an Iron Maiden shirt. I've seen the Motorhead, I've seen these other shirts that you're wearing. You're too young. So I want to hear from you. Who influenced you? There had to be somebody in your life that loved that music and played it when you were younger, or did you just discover it on your own?
00:04:23 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
No, 100%. Yeah, it was my dad.
00:04:25 - Bill Risser
Okay.
00:04:26 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Same with Avery. She's quite a bit younger than me. My gray hairs are coming out like crazy, but I'm technically too young for like an AC DC era. I was like eleven years old when Nirvana came out. And so right in that era was kind of my, heyday, that Grunge era, but I didn't really like it. It was okay, but my dad was blasting Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath and Zeppelin pretty often. He had a big record player, old school record, big giant speakers, and he was always playing his old records and it just rubbed off on me. He never really went to concerts or anything like that, but man, I got hooked. I got hooked at a real young age. I started playing music when I was really young. I think I was probably seven when I first started kind of getting a little bit more serious and started taking lessons and things. And I had my first drum set by the time I was eight years old and just took to it at an early age in the middle of a cornfield where there was nothing else to do, know, so the rest is history. And Avery, yes, she's quite a bit younger than I am. Same thing with her. Her dad was a major rocker, and he goes to rock shows with us. He's an awesome dude, too, and we were just raised right on good music.
00:05:38 - Bill Risser
So I'll make that really tough question for somebody who's as deep into the music as you are. If you had to pick one band, you only get one. That's hard to do.
00:05:50 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
It is hard to do, but that's a question. I've been in rock and roll radio for a long time, and that question comes up a lot. We'll talk about that, but for me, it'd be ACDC. If I had to pick one band, period, that was like, I guess, my favorite, because we can go on about this for hours. I don't know that my desert island or deserted island, however you want to say it band would be the same as necessarily my favorite band. That might be two different questions, but maybe not. But if I had to pick one band as my favorite of all time, I believe AC DC would be the top of the list. And we're taking the kids. We have a five and a three year old next week. There's a concert where they do Coachella in California, and it's a bunch, know, the really biggest rock bands ever that are still around, know, they're getting older, and AC DC is going to be there as well as Iron Maiden, who's on my shirt today, and Guns N'Roses Metallica. And this is a big event, and we are taking our five year old and our three year old because I can't imagine they're ever going to get the chance to see ACDC again. And so that is important to us at some point. My son just turned three. I do feel that he's got a pretty good chance to be the last person on the planet someday that can say he saw ACDC live.
00:07:05 - Bill Risser
That's great. Is Axel touring with Guns N'Roses again?
00:07:09 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Yeah, Axel's been back with the band. Well, it's the other way around, really. He's always had the know, Guns N'Roses was Axel with a different band for many, many years, but the band has been back together for four, five, six years now and touring full time with the original guys, except for the drummer, Steven Adler has not been in the band for two or three years.
00:07:32 - Bill Risser
So you played drums, you had to be in multiple bands. I mean, I can't imagine you weren't playing and playing music and doing covers of this kind of stuff. Is that what you were kind of driving towards?
00:07:43 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Yeah, I was. I started playing in bands when I was very young and my parents were driving me to nightclubs because I couldn't drive yet. And dropping me off and playing shows with, I'd say about 15 is where that started to get pretty serious, and 16 somewhere in that neighborhood. And I always had at least one band, even at that age, I usually had two. And I never really made a career out of it. There's not like any band that I could mention that you've ever heard of or anything, but it was a huge part of my life. And then eventually, just to move the story along, because, quite frankly, there's not anything interesting in the band section of my life. But I got into, when I moved to New York, of course, the playing bands. And I had again, at least one or two bands going at all times in the city. I started attending bar to make ends meet and then eventually ended up owning a little rock and roll bar in Manhattan when I was 25 years old. The lady I was working for owned several bars in the neighborhood and she was opening a new one and basically brought me in to run the show. I was a very young age, and that's where I learned how to run a business. I'm very grateful for her, even though it was a lot of work and definitely probably not the healthiest way to live your life, but that whole experience, especially so young, being a guy straight off the cornfield, literally, I learned how to run a business in New York City. A very successful I mean, it was teeny, tiny, little 600, 700 square foot bar. But rock and roll, it was rock and roll all the time. And that was a time and place in the world where you couldn't find that thing, that type of thing. There was very few places, even in that massive city of 12 million people, where you could even go hear a rock and roll song and get a cheap beer. So we kind of cornered that market in our neighborhood and it took off right away. And the bar was very popular. And then it eventually moved into the radio thing from there. Yeah.
00:09:36 - Bill Risser
So how long does it take for you to move on to I think you were on SiriusXM, right? You were part of Ozzy's Boneyard, which had to be a dream come true.
00:09:46 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Absolutely. 100%. I still am, actually. I did that after the bar. I got lucky and I fell into a couple of overnight shows on a channel on satellite radio and, well, lucky making $80 a show or whatever, but I worked my way up. And it's like that in any business. You got to sweep the floors before you can make a living. And very grateful for radio and satellite radio and my career. There and did that for many, many years. Worked my way up. Eventually got to the point where it was like a real job and I was in love with it. And I still do it. I gave up full time radio probably about three years ago, and I still do two shows on one show on Saturday and one show on Sunday and play old rock and roll records and just old school radio disc jockey, the guy talking between the songs, that kind of thing. Still love it. It's fun.
00:10:41 - Bill Risser
I would say three years ago is kind of when the short term shop took off, in my opinion, looking at some of the results. And so you probably went full time there. So we'll gently switch over. The first is I've got to get you and Avery connected. How did you meet? Because I know that you both have that rock background. I'm assuming that was part of it.
00:11:00 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Oh, yeah, we met at a rock and roll concert. I don't remember much of it, to be honest. And I ran into her again, like, a week later, and she was like, you're that guy from the concert? And I'm like, what? I didn't remember. So we ran into each other randomly twice in New York City. And it was just meant to be. We were, like, right on the edge of when everybody switched over to Tinder and all that. We actually met in real life and Rest is history, madly in love. And of course, now we've been together for quite some time and have two wonderful, just amazing, perfect children. But, yeah, we did meet at a rock and roll concert.
00:11:35 - Bill Risser
How do you go to Nashville? What was the move there? What was it for? Why?
00:11:40 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Yeah. Which leads to the real. So she's from the south, and I've been in New York for as long as I needed to do whatever I was doing there, and I mean a long time. And it was time I met the right girl. And she was from Mississippi, and I'm like, that's not a real place. And she took me there, and then she said, you know what? I want to move closer to my family. Family's important to me. And I agreed with her. I said, that's a good idea. And so we landed on Tennessee, Nashville. It was a good, happy medium between having a big city, but also in the south. And we did that for a number of years and then eventually moved further out into the woods. And now these days, we're in Florida, actually. But that's a whole nother story.
00:12:26 - Bill Risser
So Avery shared a story. I'd like to hear your version of it, of how you first got involved in investing, in owning another property, a rental property.
00:12:38 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Yeah. And my story is a little different than her story, even though this is the same story.
00:12:42 - Bill Risser
It happens that way.
00:12:44 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Do you remember which number she was on your podcast?
00:12:46 - Bill Risser
I can look it up. I'll look it up while you're going.
00:12:48 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Yeah, but just to refer back if anybody's interested because she is a driving force in real estate, obviously, and everybody loves her. But anyway, for me it was very simple. We moved from a place where I could never in a million years dream of affording real estate to a place where we could afford real estate. And that was it. And I grew up. My dad was a hammer swinger. He built the house he lives in and did contracting on the side. And his dad, my grandfather, was a contractor and my uncle, my dad's brother, and all these guys in the whole family were builders and contractors and mostly side gigs here and there. But some of them were doing it for a living and so it was always around. My dad taught me what hammer to buy and how to swing a hammer at a very early age and how to get my way around a house, which was a very important tool that I didn't even realize I was learning. We bought our first house there in Tennessee and we were both just extremely drawn to the experience and fell in love with it, which as many people do. And I actually thought I was going to. I ended up going to home inspector school. I knew that I was sucked into this house buying thing. I didn't know which part of it was going to be for me. So I just started to explore all avenues and I happened to dig the guy that did our inspection and I related to him coming from a blue collar family, et cetera. And I went to home inspector school and I quickly learned that wasn't going to do it for me. And it wasn't until years and years later that I realized that just the actual landlording was what I was meant to do. But at that time I did start to focus on that. It took me many years to realize that was my goal, my mission in life, my gift, if you will, because it is not easy and not everybody can do it. But we started to save money and educate ourselves at that point in time and that's when it all started. And I believe you heard the story about the first home we lived on. $25 a day each for it was 18 months. I think it actually took us 17. We were a month early to come up with our first down payment on a rental property. We had a goal of $100,000 house and we knew we needed what we thought we needed. 20% down. That's all we knew about real estate. And so we came up with 20 grand the hard way and we were commuting too. So that was $25 a day for my gas and that was man, it was a long drive to get to working back and food and a stop at the bar on the way or whatever, or at the end, I should say. We bootstrapped it. We worked our asses off and we set goals, and we made it happen. We ended up 18 months later buying our first rental property. And then shortly after that, we just got completely immersed in the I decided to make it my you know, I wanted it to be my career for me. I was just learning my trade. I need to know every single teeny tiny detail of this business if I'm going to succeed. And that's what I did. I first started with lending was my first obsession. I wanted to know everything about it anyway. Time goes by. We learned and learned and learned and read and read, and bigger pockets, of course, was a big thing for us at the time. And just found them I think I originally found them around episode 70 of their podcast or so and became obsessed with that. And they were doing a great thing over there. And then the books, of course, at that point, I had not read Richstad or even heard of it, and so that was presented to me and, of course, fell in love with that. And the rest is history.
00:16:26 - Bill Risser
Yeah. When you first got into the game, it was more long term kind of stuff, right. That's kind of what you were focused on. But the name of the group, the company, the Empire is the Short Term Shop. Yeah, because I think that's how I first met Avery was you guys kind of evolved into this. How do we get these properties to get them onto the sites? Right. And how do we manipulate or at least work with Airbnb or VRBO or all these other places? So when did that little transition come in your mind? And I know you still do both, and you still consult or help investors with whatever plan they want, but how did that short term stuff come about?
00:17:09 - Luke Carl - The Short Term Shop
Yeah. So for me and again, Avery's story is slightly different, but for me, it was we needed a new market, so we bought that house in Nashville, and then all of a sudden, Nashville like, you couldn't even go to the grocery store without seeing a famous person, and it just completely skyrocketed. So overnight, that house I don't want to say it doubled overnight, but it was pretty damn close, and I hated that. Yeah. You would think that as a guy. I was maybe 31, two, something like...
