Avery Carl

I wasn't aware of money. I was aware of success and the freedom of being able to do what you want to do. So there was nothing that I wanted more as a girl growing up in small town Mississippi than to get out.

Yeah. Yeah. And I also looked at who my role models were and nobody in my family has had a corporate job like that. My dad has his own business. Both my grandparents, both sets of my grandparents own their own businesses. And I'm like, oh, well, I've never, this example was not set for me.

Yes. So it was kind of like by accident, actually.

So when we moved from New York to Nashville, our real estate agent at the time was really trying to get us to buy in like the hipster part of Nashville that was appreciating really fast and telling us, oh, people are making $100,000 in appreciation in a year. And we were like, oh, no, thanks. We're moving from New York to Tennessee. We want to be out in the country. No more neighbors.

So we bought out in the country in White House, which is now no longer the country. Nashville has developed up there. But so we bought up there and didn't really think anything else about real estate. And then we got married and we saved up a very small amount of money. But to us at the time, it seemed big, $10,000. And I was real into Dave Ramsey at the time. And No debt, no debt, no debt.

Don't buy that anymore, do you? No, no. So I was like, well, we got to find something we can do with this $10,000. So we went to an Edward Jones office that was in the same building as my corporate building. And went in and talked to the lady and she told us we did not have enough money for her to bother with. And we were like, Oh great. We're, we're losers.

So we started thinking, yeah, well, thank goodness she did because otherwise we wouldn't be doing what we're doing. But, uh, we left with the wind let out of our sails and we're trying to figure out there's gotta be something we can do with this.

If you could, there was no deal structured. There were no, he bought the house. He bought, I was the girlfriend. Yeah.

Right. He did. And then once we got married, obviously that changed because we still lived in the house, but no, I was, it was his house.

Anyway. I have had an apartment building burn down in the last year and insurance did pay for it, but I didn't set that.

I think they probably should have because, you know, the other guy who I can't remember his name went to Ohio State and they knew everything about him because he transferred from there.

Uh, no, you know, I haven't, I only really think about it when people ask me why I bought real estate and it's because she told me we didn't have enough money. And I just thought, well, there's gotta be something we can do here. There's gotta be something we can do with this.

And no, I'm grateful. I'm happy she did that because I would have given her all that very little money that we had and it would be sitting in the stock market and we would have, yeah. Yeah. So I'm grateful to her for sending us away.

I think we went to the bar directly after that.

And we were like, man, what are we going to do? And then we, I don't know if he brought it up or I brought it up, but I was like, remember, I guess I'm going to tell the story like I brought it up. Remember Shelby, our agent? Always take credit. It's a better movie song.

No, that's not him.

Yeah, he's at home.

Yeah, I'll take credit. So it got brought up by one of us that, well, what about those houses that Shelby was talking about? We didn't even know it was called real estate investing at the time. And we said, what if we buy one of those? We put a tenant in it. So they're paying, you know, all the bills on that.

And then in the future sometime and we have kids that need to go to college, we can pay for their college out of that appreciation. It won't have to come out of our incomes and we'll be these real estate geniuses. And we went and bought a house on that premise. Luckily, that house cash flowed a thousand dollars a month over the mortgage, which is unheard of for a long term.

We did some loose research. Okay. We looked on Zillow to see how much houses rent for in that area. Figured out how much the mortgage would be, how much about we could get. And the rest was like prayer.

We had to paint it and it needed new carpet.

Yeah, we got really lucky on that one because it had one owner. They'd recently remodeled the kitchen, which is the most expensive thing to do. And their daughter was a new real estate agent and had listed it. And she listed it with no pictures. And we happened to be right down the street from it when it was listed. So we went and drove by and we're like, this looks really nice.

And we just offered on it before anybody else could see.

Thank you.

My dad is a chiropractor. My mom is a stay-at-home mom.

Uh, yeah, I think we've not a ton. Cause I don't know a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. I would say maybe like 25 grand, not a whole lot. Okay.

Yeah.

I want to say it was around four. We weren't at the, you know, it wasn't 2020 yet. Oh man.

better known as the good old days five years later so yeah so you bought it there your cash flow in a thousand bucks a month that was 2013 yes cash flow in a thousand bucks a month which coincidentally my dream job that doesn't pay anything because music business in nashville pays nothing there's always an intern who will do it for free and uh that was about what i was making after all the deductions on my paycheck yeah thank you music business class on wednesday thank you

And this house is making as much money while I sleep. And so then we were like, okay, we need more of these. How do we do that?

And- So only then did we start like listening to podcasts and stuff. I think really the only real estate podcast back then was bigger pockets and there was no, the coaching and all that wasn't huge yet. So we just kind of had to figure it out. And we said, okay, well, we've got a little bit of money. We got enough for like one down payment. What can we buy?

That's going to make us the most amount of money, the fastest so we can buy more faster. And we landed on short-term rentals, but we didn't want to do it in Nashville because Nashville was already like very anti short-term rental, but. We'd just been on vacation to the Smokies, which Gatlinburg area about four hours East. And we'd stayed in a cabin.

No, no, he's a, let's, your neck hurts, let's straighten you out kind of guy. Pretty straightforward.

Our friends had stayed in cabins and we're like, okay, well, all of these are basically Airbnbs. They're not being on Airbnb. They were on like big property management websites, but somebody owns these things and that should be us. So we went and bought one again. There were no rental gurus.

We saved and worked extra. So Luke, who was like live on the radio 12 hours a day, Ubered like people would recognize him from the radio when he would Uber. He has a very distinctive voice. So, you know, how humbling is that? Like you have this big public job and then somebody's like, oh, you're my Uber driver.

Yeah. Saved our money, bought the second one. And we thought we were going to have to get a property manager because, you know, it wasn't done at the time. There were no Airbnb gurus. There's nobody posting on Instagram every day about how to do it.

And the property management split back then and still in a lot of the big vacation rental markets like that was 40% of your gross because Airbnb was just kind of coming along. So they had a total monopoly on this. So we're like, no, no, we need that 40%. We got to buy some houses. So We figured out how to manage it ourselves remotely on Airbnb and just kind of figured that out over the next year.

Yeah. So he's on the state board in Mississippi and I've heard some of those stories of like chiropractors presenting themselves as like neurologists.

Took every penny we made on that and bought another one. And that ended up being five properties over the course of about a year and a half. During that time, I got my real estate license and it kind of segued me out of my job. I got my real estate license. I did not want to be a real estate agent.

Well, that was part of it. The other part of it was that my husband is a New Yorker and he can be abrasive. He's very direct. And he was embarrassing me in deals. And I was tired of apologizing to agents saying like, oh, he's not really mean. He's just a New Yorker.

Yeah. That's a little nuts. He sticks to backs.

Okay. It is so much easier to do today than back then. There are so many tools to make it easier. But back then, we found a cleaner and a handyman. And there were no Facebook groups to find these things back then. So we would sit at the gas station that was like... off the main parkway, headed out to where all the cabins are.

And we would wait to see a guy who had like a handyman sticker with his phone number on the side of his truck. And we'd take pictures of all of them or we'd stop them and ask them if they were handymen. And then we were able to kind of find cleaners that way because cleaners don't typically have advertising on the sides of their vehicles.

So we sat at the gas station where they sell biscuits and waited for people to come get breakfast and found our first two vendors that way. And we used Airbnb and Vrbo and I had to sit down at the beginning of every month and look at our calendar and all of our bookings and write an email to my cleaner and say these days.

And I had to watch like a hawk to see if we got a booking because then, and there was no automation. So I had to sit there and respond to every single message. And we did it now. So all of that is automated.

We did have electric locks. Okay. So But, you know, this was 2015. So it's 10 years ago and the industry was not what it is now.

Um, everything just kept working. So we just kept going. There wasn't a, Oh, we need this amount of properties or that amount of properties. Uh, once we got to five short terms and the cashflow was coming in pretty heavy, we started buying duplexes in Chattanooga because they were cheap. They're only like a hundred thousand bucks.

And you notice, don't really notice that 25,000 leaving the bank account as much. So we started, I think we got up to like 40 doors there and, um, have just kept kept buying on all three of our asset classes. So we buy vacation rentals, only vacation rentals. I want to make that distinction.

The whole like Airbnb thing of like, let me buy a whole street in Kansas City and turn it into Airbnbs because I can make more money than just long-term renting it. Vacation rentals.

She was, she was. And still to this day is like, if when we go home, she'll make two separate dinners and be like, well, I made this, but I also made this. So whatever you guys want, you can choose. She's like the ultimate, ultimate mom.

Yes. That's where you're buying. So we are always buying vacation rentals, always buying apartment buildings, always buying single-family long-terms, and we just kind of have all three of those rolling at all times. We've got about 250 doors now. Been slowing down on buying because, as you know, the real estate market has sucked the past couple years.

Have to do something. The entire market has stopped. It's bad. Yeah. Fewer homes sold in 2024 than the last 65 years, including, you know,

Yeah, I agree with that. I think for the residential investment side, I think maybe six will do it.

But yeah, I think you're right.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, and right now on the investment side, people need a 1031 exchange if they're going to sell. And so they don't want to sell, take a hit on their value because somebody doesn't want to pay a 7% interest rate and make their payment, not make the cash flow work. And then they have to turn around and become a buyer in a high interest rate environment that they don't really want to be anyway.

However, I will say that it is a really good time to buy right now because nobody's buying houses. You can get better deals because you don't have that competition.

I would say it's all been school of hard knocks from getting smashed around. Yeah. Because when we first started, there weren't YouTubers on short-term rentals. Now, we got smashed pretty hard on one multifamily this year. And it really wasn't... I learned not to buy cheap properties just because they're cheap. And a lot of those investment gurus out there will say, oh, you know...

here's a list of the top 10 best markets. And it's like Memphis, Indianapolis, all these places that, yeah, it's going to be cheap, but you're going to have to replace that HVAC that gets stolen.

So we had a situation where we've got other stuff in that market. It's in the Midwest and it's fine, but we had a bigger property than ours across the street that the guy just like, let it go to hell and ended up condemned by the city. There's squatters in there. There's crime, there's drug dealers. It's coming across the street to our neighborhood. property. Our tenants don't feel safe.

They're moving out. They're breaking windows in ours. And finally, we just were like, we're just going to sell this. And we had to sell it for like a little bit less than what we paid for it because the market turned.

But we also bought in a market that doesn't appreciate, which is why all those markets on those lists are typically very cheap because they're in markets that don't appreciate because they don't have a lot of people moving in. So I learned my lesson about not buying cheap stuff just because it's cheap.

Yeah, your number's going to come up at some point.

It was that one.

Yeah, it was that one.

I didn't realize it at the time. We just thought, well, it's not going to work here. Where's it going to work? And found the place that it worked. And we could get there quickly enough if we needed to. But the truth is, you don't really need to get there. I think everybody gets really hung up on that. They're like, what if there's an emergency? I'm like, what if there's an emergency?

Are you going to go in the midst of a fire and insert yourself and perhaps accidentally create liability? Yeah.

I'm not going to fix it. Exactly. So people have a hard time getting over that. But no, we were just like, okay, we can't get there here. So where can we get there? And we just did it.

Okay. So for my personal vacation rental investments, totally, I do not invest in different asset classes in the same towns. They're typically different types of markets. So for both my vacation rental investing and then with the short-term shop, we only work in true Regional drivable vacation destination. So we're not opening up in Nashville.

As a matter of fact, we had an office in Nashville and I shut it down because after two or three of our clients got in lawsuits with the city, because Nashville is not dependent on tourism. There's other industry there. So... They don't want it there. They have the hotels. They have, you know, everything.

Anyway, I focus on regional drivable vacation destinations that don't have a lot of hotel presence and that are dependent on tourism. So I own in the Smokies in Tennessee. So Pigeon Forge in Gatlinburg, Destin, Florida, 30A Florida and Cape Sandblast. All these areas don't have a lot of hotel presence and get. So I live on 30A. There's 10,000 of us that live there. on 30A full-time.

There are 10 million people that come to 30A every year and they all stay in vacation rentals. So if the vacation rentals went away, 30A would not exist. Nobody's business, everybody else that lives there full-time, small business owners, none of those would exist. You know, hospitality businesses, restaurants, things like that.

That's a really great question. So I do think that I am a successful human because of the way I was raised, because I got a lot of attention from both parents and my mom being around all the time. My dad was around all the time too, but he worked. And that's kind of a really big part of why I ended up being an entrepreneur because I did have the nine to five.

So I focus on areas where the economy is dependent on tourism so that there's a few exceptions to this like Breckenridge, but in most cases, They're very, very short-term rental friendly because they're so important to the local economy.

Yes.

2019, yeah.

Michael.

So it's just a risk that you have to be willing to take when you think about, and I do not have exact probabilities on this. I'm not a scientist or a mathematician, but when you think about the percent chance that your property is going to take a direct hit and be a total loss, it's actually decently small. Like is Florida going to get hit by a hurricane every year?

But is it going to necessarily be your part and how bad is it going to be? Like I was eight and a half months pregnant for hurricane Sally and we just, it was a category three. We sat there, it was like a long Mississippi thunderstorm for three days, and then it was over. And it sucked, it was a lot of water, but it's not always a Helene situation.

And the chances of you getting a direct hit and having a total loss are relatively small, but that's something you just have to be okay with if you're gonna buy in a beach market. Now, the thing that beach markets offer is high levels of tourism, especially in that market, expensive tourism. So if you're not okay with that, there's other places you can buy it.

Like Scottsdale does not have natural disasters. We've got an office there. Smokies, we have fires there too. Not as much as Southern California, but there's going to be something everywhere. I bought a duplex in Chattanooga. I got run over by a tornado like two weeks after I bought it. So there's always something.

Yeah.

90 bucks.

Yes, that one came out in 2021.

Yes.

Okay.

Bigger Pockets Asked Me To.

I thought I had my dream job doing marketing for the music business in Nashville. But I remember having a conversation with my friend. We were walking around a track on my lunch break one time. And I was like, man, this is not going to work for when we have kids. We just got married.

Yeah, he is. And it kind of... You know when you have clients and... You have three or four of them in a row ask you the same question. You're like, okay, what can I hand them when they come in the door or show them that's going to answer all these questions so I'm not answering the same question over and over again? I just... kind of wrote the book based on that.

Like, okay, we've got all these clients who ask all these questions. Let's answer all those questions in the book.

Yeah. So what we do, and it started just because I had my license and friends would say, you're making how much on that cabin in the Smokies? Help me buy one, teach me how to do it. And then it became bigger. And then all of a sudden I was the top agent in the MLS.

And then we opened up other markets because I had clients, again, more than one client coming to me and saying, hey, I want to buy something in Destin, Florida. Is there a you in Destin that you can send me to?

Yeah. So we just plugged other markets into the existing system that we have. And what we do is if you're going to buy a short-term rental with us, we send you to what we call Management Monday. And we teach you how to manage it. We do it while you're under contract.

We have it every Monday. It's like a two-hour thing. And it's Luke, my husband, because he has come up with all the systems and processes.

He's gotten a lot better.

Yeah.

Um, but so he manages all of our properties and so he teaches all of our clients how to manage. And so a lot of the big, well, okay, hang on a second.

And I was already thinking about, you know, the boss that I have is not somebody who's going to understand, oh, I need to stay home because my daughter got sick or and I would have to spend eight, I mean, probably closer to 12 hours a day away from our future kids if I kept that job. So even back then, I thought finding like a job where you could work remotely was the answer.

Yes, and on the group text with this contractor who's rebuilding our, I almost said condo, our apartment building that burned down, sometimes I'm like, damn, Luke was just a real dick to him, but he deserves it. He's not getting stuff done. I'm like, thank you for doing that.

Yeah, I learned too.

He is the enforcer.

Good job. It is.

Management Mondays.

You got to buy a ticket if you want to get on the ride.

But we did recently open a mentorship program for like, if people want to buy with us that we don't have an agent in that market, but they still want our help, then we've opened up a, like a year long mentorship program or people who are like really, really nervous buyers who don't want to wait for Management Monday, then they can pay to go into the mentorship program, which is much more comprehensive than Management Monday.

But we try to keep that super affordable so that we can teach everyone because that's the biggest question mark.

Yeah. I mean, the goal is we make you so successful with your first one. Maybe you come back and buy more with us in more markets.

New book is called Smarter Short-Term Rentals, How to Out-Host the Competition. Okay. Yeah. Previous one was more like a primer on how to choose a market, how to choose a property, and some light management. But this is more like the business running aspect of it.

So for me, it's more of like authority building. Like I got two books on this. I wrote the book on it. Yeah. Why would you go use another agent? Yeah.

Terrible.

So our website, theshorttermshop.com. On Instagram, probably the easiest place to find me. It's at the short-term shop. If, oh gosh, at the short-term shop, if you want to follow the brand or at the Avery Carl, if you want to follow me and YouTube slash the short-term shop. And if you want to buy the new book, you can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

Like you can walk into a Barnes and Noble and get it. Love that. Or you can pre-order it. It's not quite out yet. It comes out February 11th on biggerpockets.com slash smarterSTR.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

But the way, and we can talk about how I got into real estate investing later, but that's kind of the reason that it came about because I was looking for that flexibility. And now, you know, fast forward this 10, 11 years later, we've kind of crafted our lives to where our kids have a two-parent stay-at-home experience. Because I think that goes- I love that. Yeah.

I think we kind of operate, I call it the family business model. You know, it's not like I'm working my own job. He's working his own job. We both built this thing. We both had separate jobs that we eventually both quit to do this. And now, and I think it goes the other way too.

I think there's a whole generation of daddies out there right now who are like, oh wait, I want to lay down with, I want to lay down with our son all day while he's sick and let's watch, you know, they want to do the nurturing. It's not, not me.

Not my thing. My husband is like, oh, yeah, sweet. Let's watch Price is Right. They've never seen Price is Right. Oh, yeah.

I wasn't aware of money. I was aware of success and the freedom of being able to do what you want to do. So there was nothing that I wanted more as a girl growing up in small town Mississippi than to get out of small town Mississippi.

I wanted to get out of I wanted to go to a big city.

I desperately wanted to get out and athletics was my way out.

And I went to Texas on a soccer scholarship.

They didn't push us into it, although I will say my dad played college golf and then a little bit of professional after that. So there was definitely a – I think they wanted us to have something that we really cared about and worked hard at, and they didn't necessarily care what that was. But, you know, small-town Mississippi, there is only sports.

And women's soccer at the time was not super mainstream, so they didn't know anything about it. But they were very, like – At every single game, my mom drove me two hours. The closest club soccer team was in Jackson, which is two hours away. Oh, wow. So when I started getting really good and taking it really seriously, she drove me to practice two hours twice a week to do that.

So I think it does build grit, and I learned through that experience the value or the feeling of, oh, if I work harder, then I reap the benefits of that. So, you know, if I'm just can jump, I was a goalkeeper. So if I could just do a few more squats, I can jump a little bit higher. I might make a save that one more college would be interested in me and I can get out of here.

Because I didn't want to like leave small town Mississippi and end up in small town

A little bit of all of that. So I was on, I made the regional team that they pull the Olympic team from, but I never really got any further than that. And like halfway through college, it's like, it's pretty clear. There's not a major league to go to after. It's not like being a college football player and you have something to work towards.

And I started having some shoulder injuries, which I still have, I also, as a hobby, played guitar in high school and really into, was really into like punk rock and went to Warped Tour and all that. And so I also chose my college based on where I could play music and be in a band. Yeah. Love that.

Yes. It's very opposite. Yeah.

It only overlapped for about a year, and somehow tours ended up not being during school.

Well, I don't think that I was delusional about it. Like I wasn't planning to be the next Aerosmith or anything like that. But I was having a really good time and I graduated at the worst possible time to ever graduate and get a job for a soft major like communication that I was, which was spring of 2009. So there were no jobs, period.

And so I was bartending and I was like, well, you know, I guess I'll just... keep doing this music thing, have a good time until the job market swings back around. I'll go get my master's or something and do that. So I toured all over the US, Europe, Japan, had a really good time, like really great early twenties. And then went back to school and got the real job.

A little tiny one, nothing anybody's ever heard of.

Oh, so there's a lot in between there. Um, so I lived in Austin for a while. Then I moved to New York for a gig.

I was playing bass with a guy named Ivan Julian, which is a really deep cut. You're only going to know who that is. If you're like super into seventies, New York punk, he, he was in a band called Richard hell in the voidoids, which was kind of like one of the first big punk bands.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Um, and I was bartending. So three happy hours a week in Soho making 90 grand a year.

So it wasn't, it wasn't nothing too crazy. So I had a little Joan Jett mullet. All right, cool. Leather. I still wear a leather jacket everywhere, but I live in Florida. Leather jacket, skinny jeans, motorcycle boots. All right. Cut off Iron Maiden t-shirt.

No, no, no, nothing too crazy.

I loved it. I always loved, I still love going to new cities, but like New York is the center of the universe. It's so great. I love it so much. So I loved living there, met my husband there and we moved to Nashville just because we were tired of the city. It was right after Hurricane Sandy and we could not get out of the city to even get away from it. The subways were terrible.

flooded and we didn't have a car because you don't need one. So we're just like stuck. And it was fun. It was like party central for a minute because everything was closed. But then all the restaurants started running out of food and then the grocery store started running out of food. It got a little weird.

Yeah. So we decided to go to Nashville because he was and still is just on the weekends. Classic rock DJ on Sirius XM. Nice. And Nashville had an office for him. So we went on down to Nashville.

So we lived in north of Nashville in a suburb called White House. Okay.

Oh, Franklin.

I was doing marketing for a music rights company. So if you're a songwriter, you have to sign up with one of these companies so that you can get paid your royalties when your song gets played on the radio.

I had three different jobs in that field. Within about three years, I got put on a performance plan on two of them, which means you're about to get fired because I'm not a good employee.

Yeah. So kind of got into real estate investing during that time. Okay. And that kind of ended up being my exit.

Oh, yeah. I was so terrible.

Okay, growing up, I grew up in a small town in Mississippi called Starkville, Mississippi. The only notable thing. Mississippi State? Mississippi State University, yes. I was going to say, that's the only notable thing is a very crappy, sorry dad, SEC football team. I say that as my alma mater, Texas, just got really embarrassingly whooped by Ohio State.