Josh Lawlor: Rent Your Home For MORE Than A Short Term Rental
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE ON:
NOTE: Click here to access Josh's course he discusses in this show
Having done flips, single-family rentals, multi-family rentals and short-term rentals, Josh Lawlor has experienced a lot of real estate investing opportunities. He was looking for some additional opportunities and ways to be able to complement his rentals. Josh eventually learned about an opportunity to be able to rent our your home, or rental property, for film shootings. In many cases, these are small businesses, print materials, or even larger companies like Amazon, Zillow, and Lululemon (all of which Josh has rented his properties to for film shoots).
Because of this opportunity, he's been able to rent out his home for more than $600/hr and made $50,000 in his first 6 months of doing it. Josh has now launched a training course to be able to show others how to do the same. Unlike other real estate investments, this doesn't require a down payment, underwriting, or financing because you're using properties you already have. You don't have to vacate your home, and can be more profitable than short-term rentals. Find out more from Josh about this amazing opportunity to complement the property you already own and earn a lot more money!
In this episode hosted by Mike Swenson, we discussed:
- How Josh started his real estate journey with a long-term live-and-flip
- Making cash flow through investing in multifamily and single-family homes
- How Josh and his wife got motivated to get back the money they had to pay for their kids' tuition when they moved out during their property's tear-down & rebuild
- How Josh made $50,000 in the first six months by renting out his home for film shoots
- How film shoot rental helps you to maximize the value of your own home
- How Josh learned the right thing the hard way and put it all in the training course to teach others
- The things you need to consider in doing film shoot rentals on your properties
NOTE: Click here to access Josh's course he discusses in this show
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro To Josh's Career
1:51 - Josh's Background Prior To Doing Rentals For Film Shoots
7:17 - The Struggle And Motivation During The Tear-Down Rebuild
13:03 - Myths And Misconceptions About Film Shoots For Rental Homes
21:13 - The Augusta Rule
22:09 - Film Shoot Rental Vs Traditional Real Estate Pricing
25:50 - How The Film Shoot And Your Own Home Is Complimentary
27:59 - The Mistakes That Josh Learned From During His First Film Shoot Rentals
30:31 - Listing Platform
34:46 - The Standard Lead Time
35:33 - How To Find Josh
NOTE: Click here to access Josh's course he discusses in this show
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Minnesota Real Estate
Read the full transcript here:
Mike Swenson
Welcome to The REL Freedom Podcast where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some REL freedom together.
Mike Swenson
All right, welcome, everybody to another episode of The REL Freedom Show where we talk about different ways to build time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. What I really love doing is telling different stories, string unique perspectives, unique ideas of maybe things that you've never thought about. And when I found out about Josh, who's going to be our guest today, I was super curious. And so I think it's a concept that people certainly don't know about. But if you're out there listening, it might be something for you to think about, especially ways for people to kind of get started. I know for a lot of people, when they want to invest in real estate, it's like, well, I don't have you know, 50,000 $100,000 to pour into a property, I want to find a way to bring some income coming in. And Josh, absolutely, we'd be a good fit to do this. So today's guest, Josh Lawler talks about renting your home for film shoots as a strategy here for building income in real estate. And so there's so many ideas, probably beliefs that you have out there about what you could or couldn't do. And probably 99% of the people think, well, it's not for me, and Josh is really here to debunk that myth. So Josh teaches a course, which is now live about how to do this, and it's gonna be a lot of what we talk about. So welcome to the show, Josh Lawler. We're so excited
Josh Lawlor
to have you great excited, excited to be here. Thanks again for having me.
Mike Swenson
So Josh, why don't you just talk a little bit about your background, what you've been doing prior to getting into this kind of how you stumbled into doing rentals for film shoots for your properties, and we'll just go from there.
Josh Lawlor
Sure. Sounds good. So I'm gonna I'm gonna step back a little bit first, because, you know, I think probably, like most of your listeners, I had never heard of renting your home for film shoots and dabbled in other areas of real estate. So, you know, if I just kind of if we go back a bit, you know, I worked, I worked a corporate job. And, you know, like many people was looking for how do I how do I create passive income obviously, stumbled into real estate read the classic Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And, you know, my real estate journey really starts with a, what I call a longterm live in flip. So taking it way back to about 2009. My wife and I bought a house, it was one of the classic, you know, ugliest house on on the block. Kitchen was a time capsule to about 1984. And we had a plan to we knew we can do the work right away. But we wanted to renovate, remodel, fix it up and then then ultimately sell. So we did that over a few years. And that enabled us, we created some equity with that, with that work. And that enabled us to sort of dip our toes into what I call traditional, single family home real estate investing. So I'm, I'm based in the Northeast. But you know, I doing research at the time, you know, several years back didn't seem like the best, the best market, I thought there were better markets out there to invest in and I think like a lot of first time real estate investors, I was bit nervous about making a mistake. So I went the turnkey route. So found a turnkey operator. And I invested in a handful of lower cost single family properties in the Atlanta region, and the Jacksonville and one in Jacksonville, Florida. And so, you know, had a property manager in place are able to kind of manage the property manager remotely. And that's how we got our start. And, you know, of course, you know, two months after we purchased, you know, got a call from the property manager, hey, tenant didn't pay the rent, you know, and of course, I initially kind of freaked out and said, I made a mistake, but fast forward. And, you know, the appreciation and those in those markets has just been you say we kind of got lucky right place, right time. And again, we've taken advantage of cash out refi guys a couple times over the years still still hang on to for for single family homes down there. But you know, the cash flow was never you quickly realise with single family homes, your cash flowing a couple $100 a month, few $100 A month after your mortgage after your repairs, that's great. And then, you know, there's a there's a big repair at the end of the year and it kind of wipes out all of your all of your gains. So, you know, it was interesting, I got into it focusing on cash flow, but it's really been the appreciation that's yielded the greatest kind of in terms of you know, wealth creation for us. You know, I've also, in addition to those single family homes, we've also invested in some small multifamily. So two to two to four unit apartment buildings, I would call these squarely in the C class, again, kind of a real estate experiment, probably wouldn't do it again. But, you know, again, I think it's important to, you know, you got to, you got to take action, you gotta, you got to try things. So despite, you know, problems that we've had, again, these are in New York state, so a different region of the country, we do have, again, property managers in place. And, you know, we're making, we're making cash flow, but again, not not really the kind of like, Hey, I'm going to quit my job, kind of kind of cash flow. So, you know, swing, so we've got a number of units, right, between single family homes and small multifamily apartments. And, you know, and we're, we've got property managers in place, it's making them but it's not, it's not necessarily moving the needle tremendously. You know, and so, I think I remember I told you, we did sort of that long term, we started with this long term, live and flip. So this is back in 2018, we ended up selling the renovated and added primary residence did alright, on that. And we figured, you know, what, we had a relatively smooth experience, let's do it again. And so we found a place in actually in our neighbourhoods only just a few blocks away, and it was a older home needed a lot of work, but the lot size was larger than kind of the average size, and we knew we could we could go bigger. And so we embarked on a new on a new project. And we took our plans to the town. And well, let me back up a little bit. So this the structure that we bought, it was a little bit closer to the street than kind of newer houses, right. So we talked to several architects, and we talked specifically about the setbacks, right. And the every architect, we taught local architect that we talked to said, yeah, the setbacks exceed the current zoning. But as long as you don't make it worse, you'll be fine. Right? Of course, we take we take our plans to the town, town says, Nope, can't do this. The setbacks are not in line with current zoning. And so we had a decision to make, do we, you know, what do we want to do here? Do we want to just renovate without without, you know, creating the addition, that's not really going to work for our kind of the business model. Or we do a tear down rebuild. And so we ultimately decided to do a tear down rebuild. So of course, we had to find other kind of live somewhere at Rent temporarily during the during the rebuild, and, and there's a reason why I'm bringing in this detail to this story. So we find a rental. It happens to be just outside of the school district lines where my children go to school, public school. And so we were renting temporarily. And then we got a letter a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, from our local school district saying it's come to our attention that you are no longer residing in the in the district. You know, please schedule a meeting immediately, very, very kind of threatening letter. And it turned out that I mean, I thought this is just we'll explain the situation, we're temporarily displaced because we had to do a teardown instead of a you know, instead of a renovation. But but they they held firm. And basically, I view it as almost like a, you know, a school Shakedown, because they say, Well, you got two choices, you can either pay us quote unquote, tuition, and your kids can stay in their school, or they'll have to, you know, temporarily, they'll have to go the be pushed out of the school district go to their local school for the next six months, or however long it takes to finish your project. And then they can come back. And so pretty, pretty crazy. But my wife and I went back and forth. And we're, you know what? Kids, we don't want to pull them away from their friends. So we ended up we said, we bit the bullet and we said, Fine, we will pay this tuition. Kind of, we love our kids, we're not gonna we're not going to disrupt their lives too much. Yeah. And we did that. And but then, of course, towards the end of our projects, you know, COVID COVID happens and residential construction in my state just gets shut down. So the project drags on. In the end, we ended up having to pay 10s of 1000s of dollars to the to the school to the public school for tuition, before we moved back into the court moved back into the house and I bring this up because we were motivated to figure out a way to say, Okay, we've just like tossed out, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars. What's, uh, let's figure out a way how do we kind of get that back somehow. And this is where we started to embark on film shoot. rental. So when we moved back into this new house we had just built. And someone actually mentioned it, I think, because there wasn't a lot of we were sort of still in the process of moving in pretty open. And someone said, Oh, it'd be good. You know, someone in the industry says, Oh, this might be an interesting house for film shoots. I said, oh, never really heard of it, but looked into it and said, You know what, why not. So that's kind of how that sort of the quick sort of backstory of my real estate journey and kind of how we first started to get into film shoots,
Mike Swenson
for a lot of people, your journey makes sense, because what I really want to encourage people that haven't started investing or thinking about investing is, it's a little bit of this windy road, you know, we see people that have this sophisticated plan, and they've got everything figured out, or at least what seems like they got figured out, what you don't realise is it takes these little turns and, and it's because you dipped your toe in the water over here that it led to doing this thing over there. And then it led to this other thing, where you may not have just woke up and said, film, shoot rentals, let's do it, unless you've kind of played around with some of the other areas of real estate investing in some of the other concepts. And so I think for people, what I like to tell them is just get started with something so that that path can get started. Because if you just stand in the starting blocks, you're not going to be able to get to the finish line. And and it's not necessarily I think some people, you know, think it's 100 yard dash, where I just I see the lane lines, and I just run straight ahead, it's probably more like a cross country trail, where you're going up some hills around some hills and trail back, and you're going around. And that's how you get to that path. And so I think what's really cool is your path is you've dipped your toe in a different a couple different areas to get to where you're at, and then you eventually narrow in focus on what am I excited about what really moves the needle for me, and this may be your thing, your final end game, or maybe you stumble across something else, or this opens up a door to something else, you know, but people are so afraid to get started, that they just all they analyse all the theory, and then they don't get out of those starting blocks.
Josh Lawlor
And that's actually a good segue, I'll just add to add a comment on the kind of getting started. I think real estate in general is just it's very forgiving. So you know, I remember one of the single family homes that I bought, obviously, we didn't didn't have a huge budget coming from the Northeast, the cost of living is a little bit higher, are able to arbitrage a little bit there kind of investing in the in the southeast, started about seven, seven or so years ago. But, you know, I remember my underwriter my lender for one of the homes is kind of looking at the appraisal and looking at the pictures. And she said Joshy Are you sure you want to invest in this home? You know? And I said, Yeah, let's move forward. And of course, it's you know, since then more more than more than doubled in value, right? From an appreciation standpoint. But, but yeah, to come back to come back to film shoots. So you know, like I said, we had just kind of been on what I say I call it extorted by the school district. And we're looking for a way to kind of kind of get get some of that back. And, you know, I think you mentioned early in the intro that we're going to we're going to debunk some of the myths. So I think, you know, when I talk to people, there are a lot of misconceptions about renting your home for film shoots. So when we say film shoots, what probably comes to mind is kind of big feature films, movies, weeks long, you know, productions, that's really not what we're talking about. We're that's not the that's not the approach that I teach. When I say film shoots I'm really talking about typically one day, you know, non feature film, but might be video shoots for a, you know, online company that's looking to refresh their web content, right. So we're talking, you know, one day, commercial shoots, photo shoots. It could be anything from a, you know, a startup that's launching a new site to maybe a retail company that has a new product line that they want to want to refresh. You know, we've had in our house, we've had a lot of brands that you probably recognise, right, some bigger, bigger brands, like, you know, Amazon Lululemon Zillow, but also a bunch of, you know, smaller places that you've probably never heard of that are that are new, you know, a startup that was making a new breakfast cereal, right. Did you know Did a commercial in our house? And so that's the first kind of clarification, I think when we're talking about film shoots. I think another myth that and misconception that people think about is people think, Oh, well, I'm not anywhere near Hollywood, right? Like I have to be near La in this industry. And that's kind of probably like, the second most common misconception, because if you think about it, there are small businesses everywhere across the country, and not even just in the even outside of the United States as well. So there's always companies that are looking at that need to develop content. Everyone has a website, everyone's on social media. So you know, you have to constantly create content, and if you're professional, you're going to get it perfect. rationally done. So I think there's just been an explosion of the need for content and that content has to be filmed somewhere. People may be wondering, well, you know, why isn't it just done in studios? And I've actually asked this question myself to different crews that come to our house. And many of the crews will say, you know, what, there's something about an actual house that you can't fake in a in a studio, just the the angles, the windows, the light. And so there's a need for this everywhere across the country, and people people will travel, the other thing to keep in mind is, you know, people may be worried, oh, I don't live near a, I don't live near a big city, or, you know, I'm in a rural area, well, a lot of it really comes down to where the owner of where the client is based. So we've had shoots where crews were flown in across the country, because the client lived like 45 minutes from us, and he didn't want to travel. So you know, the cruise travel. And we've seen vice versa, we've had instances where, you know, we had one shoot where the client ultimate client was based in the Pacific Northwest. And they flew into us because they were working with a crew that was based in Brooklyn, which is about an hour, an hour and a half from from where we live. So, you know, geography doesn't doesn't matter. And I would say that's the other. The other big myth I think about it is, you know, people think, Well, my home is, I have a normal house, I have a normal apartment, my home isn't, you know, it's not fancy enough for shoots. And I've got a couple couple stories that I think really illustrate why there is no right home for film shoots. So when, early on in our film shoot rental journey, we fielded an inquiry from a company that matches that provides a platform for parents to search for care for their children. So think babysitters, nannies, etc. So it kind of kind of traditional, so they came for a scouting visit, right? That's where you know, a producer, and maybe a couple of members of the crew will come for like an hour, check out your place, look at the lighting, maybe do some planning of scenes. So they watched through and they said, Okay, well, you know, let us come back to you, we'll give you a call. A couple of days later, the producer called me and said, Josh, you know, loved your house, it was great. But we're really looking for something that's, you know, a little more lived in looks like a house that's got little kids in it, my my kids are a little bit older. And so, you know, essentially, because our house was new, it didn't fit the requirements for the shoot. So I think, you know, an important point for people to understand is that every shoot has different requirements. So, you know, are there shoots that want, you know, a huge mansion by the, by the ocean somewhere? Sure. But more commonly shoots that are creating content to sell something to normal people are looking for a normal house. Okay. So I think that's kind of a key point. Let's see. What else in terms of debunking myths, I think that, you know, the other thing too, to think about is people might think that, oh, you know, I need to leave my house, like, you know, if I'm similar to Airbnb, but you know, I actually personally teach and I recommend is that people actually stay in their, in their house the entire time. So you don't need to leave your house. Like, you're, you're already in your asset. Right. So we talked about, you know, kind of having to sort of save up or, you know, you're worried about, you know, kind of putting a big down payment. This is, I think, you know, we collectively we underutilised our homes, right? So, yeah, I think just, that's a big benefit that I think for other people, right? Like you can get started immediately. There's none of this, like, Oh, I'm gonna I remember when I was first starting out, investing, the underwriting process for a loan on a single family house took like, you know, four months, right, and then you have your house, you can get started right away, there's no additional downpayment that's required. So, yeah, those are just, you know, a few of the, I don't know, I think it's important to kind of clarify, you know, some of the myths.
Mike Swenson
Well, yeah, and I think about, you know, I'm I'm doing podcast appearances. And people are asking me about investing in real estate in probably every single podcast I've been on. They say, Mike, what are some tips that you have for how people can get started? You know, this is it like, that's what I tell people is, yeah, you may not have a pile of money. To get started. I always kind of encourage people partner with somebody tried to start small, but just get in the game. But something like this is a great opportunity. And I think, number one, what I would challenge people to do is don't dismiss the idea until you take time to check it out. Because yeah, like you said, a lot of people, those are naturally the things that come in is not the right location, not the right house, why couldn't I do it? And maybe just flip it and start with, if I were to do it, how could I get started? And the worst thing that happens is nothing comes of it. But wouldn't you like to try that? The best thing that happens? Is this become something substantial for you? And it unlocks some some new opportunities that maybe you didn't know are possible. And I think yeah, as people are struggling to try to figure out how to get into real estate, investing or generating income through real estate, yeah, this is this is about as low cost as it gets. So why not take some time and try it out and test the waters versus just letting the the myths and all these reasons in your head just automatically dismiss it?
Josh Lawlor
And I think it's worth you know, people at this point are probably wondering, okay, you know, how much how much can I make? Right? It's a kind of a reasonable, reasonable question. So and I think you, you mentioned early on in the intro, you said, Well, who knows if this was be, you know, for me, if this is sort of where I land in terms of real estate, I view this as very complementary to any any other number of real estate, this is an opport. This is a way that I view as accelerating my real estate investing because of the additional income. I mean, we we made about $50,000, in the first six months of doing this, and let me be clear, we're not renting our home every day, and it's probably worth stepping back. So you know, we rent the home that we live in. Okay. So, you know, one of the advantages, and some of your listeners may be aware, it may have heard of the Augusta rule. Right, this is the now I'm not a tax professional. But but you know, I will say that. So the Augusta rule basically says that the history was the the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. years ago, the locals would have lobbied for a tax exemption, so they could rent out their house for a couple of weeks during the masters and make money without without paying taxes. So the rule stuck, it applies everywhere. So you can rent your home for up to 14 days, tax free. Now, obviously, you want to talk to your tax professional to kind of understand the nuances there. But I use that as a rule of thumb, and we price our home accordingly. So that we don't exceed 14 days, I like the idea of renting my home for film shoots and not paying taxes. It's one of the reasons why many people get into real estate I think so. So let's talk about pricing. Obviously, different parts of the country are going to Command different different prices. But let me just give an example of kind of how film shoot rental pricing compares to other traditional real estate because I've got experience in kind of a number of different real estate areas as well. So think about the traditional, the traditional long term rental, a house that might rent for 1500 a month, right? Your typical thinking like a typical three bedroom, two bath in a sort of mid tier price part of the country might rent for $1,500 a month, find that same house on Airbnb, maybe it rents for $200 a night, right so you know, with the right occupancy, maybe on Airbnb, you're gonna get you know, a couple of 1000 a month on that, right if over your rent, renting it for 1010 nights a month, say film shoot rentals are interesting because you're you're renting by the hour on the on the platforms that I recommend. And so you know, in the following that same example, a house that rents for about 1500 a month on a long term, 12 month lease, could probably rent for about 300 an hour. Now, I will say that my So personally, we start at 600 an hour, but but again, I'm in a high cost part of the country. So but even with that example of a $300 an hour base rate, and the typical shoot day is probably about 10 to 12 hours, okay, so, you know, at a at a 10 hour day $3,000. Right, before any add on and cleaning fees and things like that, that I that I teach. So, you know, again, that's that's tax free, if you if you kind of do it right and limit your shoot days to 14 days a year. Now, I will say that is the what else called the base rate. So the approach that I teach in the course is to institute tiered pricing. So you're going to charge you can charge different rates depending on the size of the shoot. So when we talk about the size of the shoot, I'm primarily talking about the number of people. So a small shoot might be, you know, no more than 10 people, right, that would be a base rate. And typically you're going to increase your base rate by about $100 With each new pricing tier. So that that house example that we talked about, at that starts at 300 for you know, one to 10 people, I would recommend 400 an hour for up to 20 people and 500 an hour for up to 30 people. You know, we the most we made for a one day shoot, which I couldn't believe was just over $11,000 for a one day shoot because it was a it was a bit larger. Right so we had about 35 to 40 people. It was a it was a full day and And they actually went overtime. So and I will teach you to charge time and a half for overtime. So you know, if you think about that, so over, you know, over $11,000, that's tax free. So that's like the equivalent of like, 15,000 pre tax, so you can kind of start to see, you know, how this could work by not even by doing, you know, one shoot a month, right is kind of the cadence that we're doing it works for our family. So yeah,
Mike Swenson
you know, just round clean numbers here. 300 bucks an hour, 10 hours in a day. And that 14 days, like you talked about, that's $42,000 per year, that's going to be tough to cashflow 40 tack a year on a long x ray. Yeah. Right. And so yeah, a long term rental isn't gonna isn't gonna give you $42,000 a year
Josh Lawlor
in cash flow. And that's the kind of thing and then you can you can obviously leverage that right to the to invest in additional additional real estate build, build equity, etc. And even I think it's worth touching on. Again, this is something that I hadn't really considered until I was having a conversation with someone who does, who's pretty into short term rentals. So the interesting thing, and we talked about how I view film shoot rentals as a very complementary strategy to other real estate strategies. And so if you are a short term rental investor, I know that other than maybe the luxury short term rental market, it's been hit pretty hard, right? And regulations are changing constantly. But one of the nice things about jumpsuit rentals, if you're a short term investor is think about your short term bookings, right? It's mostly over the weekends, long weekends, before the weekends, film, short rentals take place during during the week, right. So this is you can put your your not only your primary home, but your, you know, short term rental property up for film shoots as well. And it really is a compliment in terms of, you know, filling in some of the vacancies when you're not renting on a you know, a Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays right. So, you know, another just another great opportunity there.
Mike Swenson
Now, this is this is phenomenal. And like you said, I think complimentary is is a great word to use here that you can find ways to maximise the value of your asset, like you had mentioned earlier. Real Estate, you know, in our own home, we don't always maximise that value, this is a way to squeeze a little bit more juice out of that orange, you can take the money that you earn from something like this sets tax free, go plough it into something else, you could accelerate your mortgage payment with that money, you could save it up, go invest in a different type of property, you have your main property, you have a short term rental, the short term rental now you start to do this a little bit. So yeah, I think complimentary is a great word to use where you can be creative here, and start to figure out ways to build that snowball. I tell people, you know, it's kind of like pushing a snowball down the hill, it's really hard to get it started. But once it starts to go, it's going to build momentum. And this might be a great entry point for somebody looking to kind of start that snowball.
Josh Lawlor
Yeah, and we've had at this point, you know, we've had repeat, you know, Pete crews that have come back, you know, more than once and had a good experience, it works for them. I think it's also worth just touching, though, on, you know, we've kind of touched on a lot of the other benefits. And I'm obviously a big, big supporter of and I think this is this is great, you know, for my family and for anyone really, but you know, it's not like everything, right? You know, you have to sort of be careful and do it right, there are there are pitfalls that you could you could encounter if you're not doing things right. I mean, you need to, I think some of the key things, you know, you need to be able to screen potential guests appropriately, right, know how to you want to get professional crews. So, you know, we kind of learned I've learned a lot the hard way, right? And I've kind of put all these lessons into the into the course and so just giving examples when we first started out you know, first of all, we had no idea what to price what to price our house at so we priced it at like about half of what we're pricing that now totally underpriced it so of course immediately as soon as we put put the listing app started to get increased started coming in, hey, you know, is it free, you know, free this date. And we were getting a lot of inquiries from people who only wanted the space for one or two hours, right? And so, you know, some advice I give to the listeners a shoot it typically takes about an hour just to set up and about an hour just to load out and clean up. So you know, obviously everyone's situation is different. But you know, if you're thinking about doing this, I would not recommend you know, renting for one hour or two hours especially if you're looking to optimise that Augusta rule in the in the 14 days you want to get full shoot days and by doing that, you know you'll you'll get more professional crews as well. So you know, I learned early on we did we did a music video right and you know these guys, I mean I love music as much as anybody but these guys showed up, you know three hours late and then of course wanted to, you know, kind of didn't want the clock to start you know until they got there. I'm so then ended up staying late. So I learned pretty quickly how to screen for professional crews, there are things that you can do. So what I do is, we have, you know, minimum number of hours, right, so that screens out a lot of a lot of people, you also, like I said, we've also raised our rates, we've kind of calibrated and found a rate that works for us in terms of getting getting us so that we have one or two shoots a month, so that we kind of can just stay stay right at that 14 day, we don't like to, we don't like to exceed that. So, you know, you need to know, kind of which platforms to use. There, there are all kinds of properties search, and there are all kinds of platforms out there. But you know, you want platforms that are going to a, you know, attract the right, the right guests allow you the flexibility to have pricing transparency, right. So, you know, we've wasted a lot of time in the past dealing with location scouts. So when I first started, I thought, Oh, I have to use, you know, the traditional location scout, but what I found in my experience is that location, scouts really will sometimes, you know, they just have to show a client a certain number of homes. And so they kind of use your home as like, oh, look, I found a buyer, even though they know that they've got another one that they're that they're using. And I've also run into cases where had spent time on the phone talking about a potential shoot with the location scout, only to find out that the budget is you know, half of what we charge, right. And so you want it you want the right listing platform that enables pricing transparency, so you're not wasting your time, you can, you know, define the shoots, I think there's another important point that we didn't talk about before, this idea of people may be worried it's like, I don't want 50 People in my house? Well, you can you can define exactly the size of the shoots that you feel comfortable with, you can define. When you feel comfortable with your shoes, do you want to only do it on weekdays or between certain hours, you can define all that you have that flexibility. So, you know, again, there's, it's it's a great opportunity, but you want to make sure you do it right. You don't want to, you know, your local town, there's local regulations that you need to be aware of, and you need to understand how to work with the town. You know, you need to understand insurance considerations and legal, contractual considerations. None of this is insurmountable, right? I mean, we've learned and I'll give this little tip to the listeners, in terms of, you know, agreements. So I always recommend going through a listing platform, because you'll have greater greater recourse so early in our film shoot journey, we had a very small shoot, it was only like six or seven people for like an organic pet food startup or something like this. And it should have been very, very smooth. But for whatever reason, and our town and in our town, our town requires film permits, sometimes do sometimes don't. But for whatever reason, our town rejected the permit for these guys, it was the only time that's ever happened. Because towns usually, you know, like to do this, it takes money from permit fees, etc. So my theory is that these guys were just kind of jerks. You know how difficult to work with and that and the town administrator just said, You know what, I don't have to I don't have to approve this. So they rejected it. And because we hadn't gone through a platform, they came after they they sent their legal this marketing agency sent their legal team after us and said, Well, we've lost money because we couldn't do the shoot. In the end, luckily, we kind of talked them down, it was only between like 500 and $1,000 that we had to pay them. But I bring this up not to not to scare people. But just to say that you can't just jump in, you should kind of do it do it right. And kind of know, there are considerations and things that you should know. And again, I've learned these lessons the hard way. And that's why I've kind of packaged it all up into a course to get people started on the right path and kind of do it the right way from the start. So yeah, well, I
Mike Swenson
think it balances you know, it's balancing risk reward. I was on a podcast today. And they're asking, well, what's the risks of investing in real estate? Yeah, there's risks out there. But there's also reward? I mean, do you want to make $11,000 in a day? Yeah. Would you have? Do you have to go through a couple of lumps and bumps of, you know, paying out that to be able to get to the spot where you make 11,000 in a day? Would you still be okay with that? Yeah, you know, and so I'm a huge fan of, you know, I talk about investing in yourself and investing in your education, this is a great opportunity to invest in that opportunity to create a stream of wealth. One other question, I just was curious on how much lead time is it on these bookings from when you get booked to when they actually show up?
Josh Lawlor
Yeah, that's a good that's a good question. What I found in this industry, is that not a tonne of lead time. So these are I would say anywhere from, you know, the norm might be like, three weeks for or weeks out to sometimes we'll get a shoot and someone will look for, hey, you know, they're looking for a location for the next week, one week out typically, because maybe their location fell through at the last minute. And they're looking for. So that's, that's typically so anywhere from one week for the you know, when they're kind of in a in the need to find a place to the more typical three to three to four weeks out, it seems to be the standard lead time. And I
Mike Swenson
know there's so much more information that we can cover that you obviously have in your course. So how can folks learn more about this? And then how can they get a hold of you? Yeah, so
Josh Lawlor
I can just be reached at Josh at film shoot rentals.com. And I think, you know, we talked about maybe kind of get a link on your on your site and put it in the show notes so people can find the course and you know, learn a little bit more about this.
Mike Swenson
Awesome. Well, thanks, Josh. I mean, I wish we'd probably could do another episode just going deeper on all this stuff. Yeah. But there it also is the value of your course and the the knowledge that you've gained. But for people out there like this is this is a great opportunity to start and don't discount where you're at, you know, don't put those own limiting beliefs in your head. I think there's some good opportunity here and learn what Josh has learned, and provide a complimentary tool in your arsenal to be able to build wealth, bring in some additional income. So definitely check out Josh and learn more about the course. So thank you so much for coming on.
