1st of the Month Bonus Episode: Having a Ball with Ginger & Hunter Harrelson of Beachball Properties

Speaker 1: 0:00

We'll start the show in just a minute, but first a word from our premier brand sponsor, casago.

Speaker 2: 0:06

Casago's founder, steve Schwab, has been quoted as saying you can only be a local in one place. This simple yet profound statement is the basis of Casago's franchise model, which allows locally owned vacation rental management companies the ability to compete at a national level by leveraging the system, software and support to buying power of a much larger organization as a Casago franchisee you have the freedom to run your business with the support of a community of like-minded professionals, while leveraging the economies of scale and buying power to increase profitability and reduce operating costs. Visit casagocom forward slash franchise for more information.

Speaker 3: 0:43

Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. With more than 35 years combined industry experience, alex Hussner and Annie Holcomb have teamed up to connect the dots between inspiration and opportunity, seeking to find the one story, idea, strategy or decision that led to their guest's big aha moment. Join them as they highlight the real stories behind the people and brands that have built vacation rentals into the $100 billion industry. It is today and now it's time to get real and have some fun with your hosts, alex and Annie.

Speaker 1: 1:21

Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex.

Speaker 4: 1:24

And I'm Annie.

Speaker 1: 1:26

And we're joined today with Hunter and Ginger Harrelson of Beachball Properties, the owners and also the current 2022 reigning champions of the VRMA Property Manager of the Year. Hunter and Ginger, welcome to the show, Thank you Happy to be here, so are you guys in the same building.

Speaker 4: 1:46

I mean you're not together. Usually people get together to record. You had to be in separate offices.

Speaker 5: 1:52

So we're in separate offices. If you can imagine, ginger's office is right across the hall from me, believe it or not. When we renovated this office, actually they put special insulation between our walls because I'm such a loud talker on speakerphone to give. Ginger a little bit of sanity. So yeah, we're between two offices. We thought about getting together, but we both have a real flair. I mean I like to have the awards and the trinkets and Ginger's got her pretty boutique look, so it gives everybody our vibe.

Speaker 4: 2:20

Okay, but that doesn't mean you don't play well with others, though right, you're absolutely not a good player.

Speaker 5: 2:24

We play very well with each other.

Speaker 1: 2:27

I had the honor of getting to see your office a few weeks ago when I was in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach for a market visit, and I will say one thing that I absolutely loved about your office was that not only do you two have separate themes, but pretty much everybody in your office has their own very unique way of decorating. I thought that was a really kind of cool way of showing everyone style and let everybody have a little bit of personality.

Speaker 6: 2:50

Yeah, we wanted our employees to be able to have a touch of themselves in their office. So when we did the renovations we said y'all pick out whatever you want, if you want an accent wall or if you want to put a certain light fixture in. As long as it's within reason, we got it. So it was a fun project.

Speaker 5: 3:09

I love that Very cool.

Speaker 4: 3:12

The one thing you guys give us a little bit of background about and how you met and then how Beach Park Property came to be, and I believe I always said the PG version is what we're supposed to hear here.

Speaker 5: 3:24

There are many people out there in the world or in the vacation world, but in the vacation world specifically, that have heard the how the ginger I meet. So in college I had purchased a Jaeger Meister machine. So any of the listeners remember the three upside down Jaeger machine, the cold tap machine. It was a nice conversation starter. So one night I was out with some friends and met Ginger through those friends and they told her about this Jaeger machine and was trying to convince her to go to my house and have a Jaeger party. Now, as a wise woman she is, she decided I'm going to bring all the girls with me. This is going to be a safe space we're going to have all the team here and go from there. So the next day she's planning up this party, she's trying to wrangle up the girls to come and she gets a text message from another girl in sorority. This text message said hey, I heard there's a Jaeger party. And Ginger's like, oh yeah, absolutely, do you want to call? And the girl was like, yes, the guy's name Hunter. And she said, yeah, do you know him? And she said yeah, you know, I kind of got a thing for it and we're kind of dating and I really appreciate if you'd stay away from it. So Ginger called me out on it, you know, asked me, I tried to explain that I did not have these same feelings for this individual that they felt, but Ginger, at her spec for a sorority sister, decided to back off the party, the all. At that moment in time I deleted Ginger's number. If you are watching this on on the YouTube or wherever you all posted YouTube, or if you've ever met Ginger, you can see she is absolutely gorgeous and way out of my league and I felt probably just stepped off in a landmine. So a couple of weeks go by, we're at another graduation party from a girl from my hometown. You know I'm in there and I see Ginger again and the other girl that kind of has the hots for me and there's kind of this kind of cut the kitchen, you know in the room.

Speaker 6: 5:21

And this is the president of the sorority. It's not just like any girl.

Speaker 1: 5:26

So you didn't want to run the wrong way.

Speaker 4: 5:29

Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 1: 5:31

And.

Speaker 5: 5:31

Ginger was on. Ginger was the social chair, so they sat on it together. So, yes, there was a little more meat on the bone than just a couple of girls in the sorority fighting over a hunk like me. But so I walked out of my vehicle. You know, a good college party, you got to hide your, your, your adult beverages out in the core. Everybody will steal out of your cooler. So then, walking back, ginger approached me and says how do you have a hurt from you? While I said well, you know, I have a hurt from you either. And she gives me this line about how the fall works both ways. And y'all this is the line of the century, this is the cell of the century Not even realize I was doing it. But I said well, you know what, sweetheart, I deleted your number a couple of weeks ago and she goes well, now this is what is 2009. So if you go over to the iPhone was only a couple of years old at the time yeah, format your iPhone, it would just do numbers and your phone would disappear. So it was a logical thing to say back then. Yeah, ginger says well, I reformatted my iPhone the other day and updated it a little so I never see it and I show it in my shoulder, said I will walk doll. Yeah, I didn't think I was ever going to hear from her again. I thought it was just her just trying to mess with me, just, you know, playing girl games. Sure enough, a couple of days later I got a text message from a random number. It happened to be Ginger and she said this will be the last scene she ever get this number. And I said we know, let's forget the Yeager, let's forget everything, let's start. It's just going to a real date. And I took her out to the nicest restaurant in Mobile and we've been together ever since.

Speaker 1: 6:56

Wow.

Speaker 6: 6:58

And we still have that Yeager machine now. So we recently got our head of maintenance. This is actually pretty funny. We recently got our head of maintenance to like repair it and fix it up, and we were talking about we have a pool and an outside bar and I was like we need to put it up there. I do not think I could ever drink Yeager again, but I could put fireball in it or some other fixer, but like Yeager used to be the thing, like it used to be, like fireball is now and Hunter would go to stands and buy. Like haste, is there sugar free Red Bull? And like Yeager bombs were yeah, yeah. And even after we got together we were like. So I was still in college and we're still kind of doing the Thursday night going out before the bars. So we would go to Hunter's house and have Yeager parties before we would get you know, ride down. Calgary in the bars, so anyway.

Speaker 1: 7:45

Somebody recently corrected me on that, but I said the same thing. I was like you know. People used to drink Yeager all the time. They said, Alex, people still drink it, you just don't.

Speaker 6: 7:54

Right.

Speaker 3: 7:54

That's exactly true, it's still around.

Speaker 1: 7:56

It's still a big thing, but yeah, I don't know those days.

Speaker 4: 8:00

Yeah, yeager's that Yeager's the one thing Everybody has, that one that's like you'll know you thought you were going to die. You know, like that's one right there. So so you guys met and you went to law school. So totally different paths, Hunter. You went to find like you were in finance. How in the world did you meet back to start a vacation rental company?

Speaker 6: 8:23

Well, I told Hunter. I said, hey, I'm moving to Oxford, mississippi. I got into Ole Miss Law School and I decided I'm going to go and he was like well, you're not going without me. So we moved together and he bought a house and like works for New York Y for a short stint and I graduated law school and after that we were like, hey, we're going to move back to Mobile because I had done some law internships over summers in Mobile and I went to high school down here. So I had like kind of connections in Mobile where I thought I would be able to secure a legal job pretty easily, which was the case. I clerked for a judge for a year and then I worked with an insurance defense firm for several years. But into that tenure of the insurance defense firm, hunter had been working as a financial advisor for a bank and basically just kind of got tired of doing that. And there was an opportunity to purchase a very small book of business that was a vacation rental company down in Gold Shores. We had some family friends that knew about this opportunity and told us about it and we were like, okay, we'll do it. Hunter, like my income will cover us both. Again, I was working at a pretty big oil firm, so It'll be fine. Not even six months after we decided to do that, my little firm came to me and did not renew my contract. There was another attorney that was working at the firm who had had triplets, triplet children, and she had been off and maternity leave for a while. They never really thought she would come back and she didn't. Anyway, there wasn't enough room for both of us, enough work for both of us. After that we decided Mobile really isn't working through this business. It's about an hour away from Goldshore's and it's just too much. Something comes up in the middle of the night. We're kind of scrambling. We cashed out our corporate 401ks. We sold our house, we sold our boat, we were about to sell my car. We did not. We took all that money and we said we're just going to go for it. We can't fail right now. Hunter's parents were nice enough. They have a condo down here to allow us to stay there while we got our lives together, because truly it was a matter of getting our lives together. It was kind of like that grassroots marketing, that guerrilla marketing. We didn't have a marketing budget. I was like what can we do for free? Every day? We can post on Facebook. We can order 50 stickers with beach balls on them. There's a bunch of famous bars down here. The floorbam is one of them that encourage like stickering and riding on the walls. We can go do this stuff. We can go to every chamber event and meet everyone in our local area so at least everyone locally knows who we are. That's just kind of how it started. We had a great partnership in the beginning with the war, which we did with trade. It was a wine festival, never forget it. They came to us and they were like, can you be the people's choice of word sponsor? I'm like, well, what is sponsorship entail? I think they said like $2,500 and I was like, oh, we don't have $2,500. What do we have? We have a condo Hunter's parents that we were living in, mind you that we can give to one of the chefs that's going to be competing in this wine food festival. I can't even remember where we stayed that weekend, but we got all of our stuff out and like, literally, that's how determined we were. We were the people's choice of word sponsor that year and it was a lot of like scrappy stuff in the beginning for sure.

Speaker 1: 11:52

That's really cool too, and I think obviously your rise to fame has been different than a lot of companies, but you're doing it the right way. I think making a name for yourself locally is super important. Obviously, your guests aren't from the local area, but just gaining that respect within the community is going to breed just good business. As you expand out and start getting the guests to come to you also, you guys have still stayed, I think, very active in the Chamber of Commerce and in other organizations. Tell us a little bit about your involvement in the community.

Speaker 5: 12:27

That was the big thing. Like you were talking about the Chamber, we just knew. I knew from living in other areas, living in Oxford, living in my hometown of Selma, that the Chamber was important and working those connections. That kind of Alex believed in what you were saying. We didn't have a working budget so we told everybody locally we at least everybody locally knew somebody about health.

Speaker 1: 12:46

Exactly.

Speaker 5: 12:49

They talked about each ball and we felt like we were screaming into a mess. For a couple of years there we kept pacing and kept pacing after here. As far as local involvement, I'm a board member of the Chamber. Just from working, going to events, I helped develop the DIPLMAP program down here. A lot of people in a lot of chambers have ambassadors. We're down here because we've always been a retirement community. The ambassadors were over Tyres. The theory was these Tyres don't have much else to do. We'll get them to ribbon cuttings, we'll get them to after hours and they'll make the pictures look like all these people are there by the time Jen and I moved here. There's been this. If you want to call it a youth movement, maybe a 30s movement, if that's the youth movement. A lot of people in their 30s are moving here and want to start a family. I changed to. The Chamber president was like look, we need a younger, aggressive type group. We helped develop that out, which kind of bolstered me to show that I had the type of leadership skills to serve on the board. Served on the board. My first year was actually in 2020. They ended up not counting that year. They plundered it. Next year it looks like I might be on the executive team. Next year I ended up serving on the Chamber board six or seven years total. It's a three-year stamp. Ginger is the president of the Ginger Women's Club. I'm in the Kiwanis Club. I'll let Ginger hit on this one. The biggest one is we were the chairs last year. I'll keep my trophies around, but we were the chairs for the. American Heart Association. Ginger, tell them what we did for American Heart.

Speaker 6: 14:20

We raised, so naturally, there's only been two balls that have ever raised over $300,000 for the American Heart Association. It was ours and then the year before us down here, nick and Eva Wilmont also raised, but I think the total ended up being $314,000 for the American Heart Association.

Speaker 1: 14:40

That's incredible, yeah, it was a one-night event.

Speaker 6: 14:44

We were fortunate enough to hold it at Coastal, which is a new restaurant that's opened on the beach. Down here, the same owners own the FloraBama and they just have this huge, beautiful open-air restaurant bar venue right on the beach and the main part of Orange Beach. It was kind of like the kickoff for that event space, as well as Art of Art, but it was a really fun night and it was so fun and just raising that much money and seeing everyone in our community come out. Pretty much everybody was there. It was a night to be remembered. It felt like a second wedding reception almost.

Speaker 1: 15:25

I'll never imagine. I remember seeing the pictures from that night and they were fantastic. You guys do well. You look great and you're helping people and bringing people on vacations, so got to feel pretty good at the end of the day Absolutely.

Speaker 5: 15:37

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Tell us a little bit about growing the business, though, because I think that's also the really unique part of your story that you haven't been doing this all that long, but you have a lot of properties, mostly condos, there. Tell us about how you started growing and gaining inventory.

Speaker 5: 15:56

I played off a general story about the gruel of marketing. We had no vacation, really experience. How do you go into somebody's house and explain to them you're going to take care of their asset? That was where I used the financial advisor asset manager.

Speaker 1: 16:10

I used the construction company knowledge.

Speaker 5: 16:13

The legal knowledge always used to say well to this thing. It's the same. The ace of spades up my sleeve is gingerbread in a hen house attorney. We have a hen house legal. We always scattered out there. If you have a legal issue with your property you can always call her first and she'll give you whatever advice or tell you to refer to you. We're just going to use that professionalism to get out in front of people. I like this story. The first client we ever sold. They sent in a message. I think I tried to message them on Facebook. Do you hear anything back from them? I thought it was Lil's calls the owner. She ended up calling me. She asked us to cover their property. We're sitting down. You don't know those big banana leaf fans that are kind of like a trendy thing in coastal towns, or big or ugly. They're one of those banana leaf fans. I want to say the wife looks over, ginger says ginger. What do you think of that fan? And I'm sitting there like oh, what do you say? I mean, this is a coin flip. Do you tell you hate it, do you?

Speaker 6: 17:12

love it. What do you think?

Speaker 5: 17:14

I just kind of sat back like hi, baby, this is all you. And ginger goes. Honestly, I hate it. It clicks. This is ugly, it's tacky, yeah, I get it out here. The wife stops what she's doing. She points at her husband, goes. I tried to do that thing. It was terrible.

Speaker 6: 17:26

We're getting rid of it.

Speaker 1: 17:28

Oh no, Signed it. They had three other property managers.

Speaker 5: 17:31

You just go oh, it's fine, leave it, it'll be OK. And she needed somebody to do the thing and ginger did it, and there's still our classes.

Speaker 4: 17:40

They hang out there.

Speaker 5: 17:41

They come in for snow bird season every year. Their man's walk was constant. We played spades with them. We just have a big old time, but it was just. It was moments like that, just going in and sitting in people's sitting in people's living rooms and just selling them on us. Obviously that salesmanship has changed. Now that's a lot more inside sales on the phone, but that's what we've got there and do, and then other things we would do. We just tried to look at the general market and not be what's everybody been doing for the past 20 years down here? Obviously, that's not working. They're not growing their hemorrhaging properties, or it may be. So one thing, gender saw listing agents like a remax and killer Williams and we're real, so they would go to Facebook lives and walk through their properties. No, vacation managers down here were doing that. So I guess what we started doing, we started going live and we'd take our little baby, larry at the time, and we would have her real old, my help while I was sitting there walking around talking and showing all people just talking about the baby, or we bring our dogs out to the beach and just we played on anything, everything that was going to pull people's heartstrings and made them want to see more, and we put ourselves out there and that's the biggest thing is like you see the commercials of the guy that selling for, like my board down here, my dealership, oh yeah. You see that man in public, you're like oh my God, he's famous for all that man's doing is buying advertising.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Putting himself out there. Yeah, right, yeah.

Speaker 5: 19:02

But we did the same thing. So like we literally. We were in a restaurant one time and I heard a lady go there's the beach ball baby.

Speaker 2: 19:08

Yeah, that was when I was like that's the moment.

Speaker 5: 19:11

So it was just being aggressive, putting ourselves out there and again, just social, social, social. Again Y'all've seen us at at Verma and everything, and we are just we put ourselves out there ginger peacocks with our outfits on me. That's our thing, I would say you do too, Hunter.

Speaker 1: 19:26

I wouldn't say that you guys both do.

Speaker 6: 19:28

Oh, I love it. I think it's about like being authentic too, cause, like we have our baby with us because we didn't have her in and daycare at the time, like it wasn't like a publicity stunt, it was like, well, we're going to try to save money and if I can bring her to the office, I mean up until they get to about nine months, we're pretty good. But then they start grabbing stuff, but anyway we're really living that you know, like we were going to properties with an infant, like that was our lives. So it was just, you know, about like getting on and creating that content. And I tell people that are like just starting them, like create some content. Any content is better than no content. And I think people get obsessed or scared to like get in front of a camera or post something and I would like some of the stuff I did, you know, five years ago and I like I had no idea what I was doing then, like this crap is all cool. I can't believe I posted that, but then at the time it didn't really matter, right? No-transcript.

Speaker 1: 20:26

Yeah, it's spot on. I just had this very similar conversation with somebody earlier. That that's all it's about. I mean, it's not rocket science, but I mean to become well-known in an industry or you know, as you're growing your personal brand. You guys have, I think, your own personal brands, but also a couple brand, which is kind of a different perspective. But it's putting yourself out there, it's pressing play, it's hitting record and just showing up and being authentic, and I think it makes complete sense while you guys have risen to the top the way that you have. So it's been fun to see.

Speaker 4: 21:01

Yeah, I have a question for you guys. So I was in Property Minas with, who are at Panama City Beach, so very familiar with Gulf Shores, competitives, that you know, always paying attention, and when I joined Expedia I took over. After about a couple of months I took over Gulf Shores and what was really interesting at the time was I said you need to put Gulf Shores into my market. And they were like it's not, like there's nothing really over there, and I was like no, there's literally like 16,000 rental units, like in that market. And I remember the VP of Market Management at the time going there's 6,000. I said no, 16,000. And he's like, wait a minute, say that again and, like everybody in the room because we're on the speakerphone yelled 16,000. And he was like oh my gosh, like he had no idea. So I took over the market and I go in there and then my first time going in I had not been there but maybe one time where I happened to be Pensacola and just drove over and visited, so totally blown away. But there were just a couple of staple players in the market. There was the Wyndham Kaiser, there was the Robinson, there was Young's. There was a couple of big players in the market. So you guys came in. I kind of slowly creeped up on them, I think without them, I would say I mean, I think in our big story almost yeah Well. I think definitely for you know for, but I would say for those people they didn't. It was quiet, they didn't know what was happening. At least from my perspective, just knowing the market, I don't think anybody like recognized that you guys were building and massing this kind of you know business. So one awesome because, like, that market is a tough market. But one thing that I love about Alabama is that they are so proud of that beach. I mean, that is their beach, they own it. It's not like in Florida. Well, we have miles and miles of beach and you can choose to go anywhere and, like, everybody sticks their flag in the sand and this is our destination and don't come over here. I mean, alabama is very proud of their beaches and they should be, but it also makes it competitive because it is such a small area. So I'm thinking like you guys got into this, you just said you didn't really have the budget, you didn't know really what you were doing, so you were just trying everything like were you scared that you were going to fail against these big guys, or was it just like that you didn't even pay attention to who?

Speaker 6: 23:08

they were Like someone asked me that, or asked both of us that, I don't know years ago, and like we looked at each other, it's like we didn't even, we didn't even think about it because we cannot fail Like we didn't. Hunter's family is from Selma and Selma, alabama, and his dad is a very successful industrial construction company up there. So like the alternative was like this works and we get to live at the beach and raise our family down here, or we got to tuck tail and move back to Selma. Like, and I was like we just got to make it work, like I don't know, it just didn't even. We were just wanting to be different, and you know some of those grandfather names that you mentioned. You know we came up with the completely different kinds of beach wall properties, not Harrelson properties or it's on a name.

Speaker 4: 23:51

Yeah, it's on a family. He like it.

Speaker 6: 23:54

That symbolized, like for me when I closed my and they got a beach ball. When we were thinking about the name, we had like a vision board and we had all these sticky notes up there because we actually rebranded the company that we bought to beach wall properties and I was like I just think of kids on the beach playing with a beach ball. It's like what do you sell? You're trying to sell family vacations, right? Yes, so it was unique, but it also conveyed our messaging. So I just I don't know. We just wanted to be different. We wanted to have no one down here had a slogan like come have a ball of the beach. No one was like doing the whole brand thing and it just it seemed, looking back, we should have been scared because we didn't know what we didn't know.

Speaker 4: 24:39

but we weren't at the time.

Speaker 5: 24:44

And for that, fear is what keeps people out. But I literally yesterday was meeting with a company and they joked that they said property management companies down here are like weeds.

Speaker 3: 24:53

They pop up, they annoy you a little bit and then those dine disappear and then every now they were.

Speaker 5: 24:57

One grows into a tree and he said my friend, you're a tree.

Speaker 4: 25:00

He said you know, we we we we, we yeah, he's like we.

Speaker 5: 25:03

We, we see, we saw you. You were a little bit of a bush and I was like you were a tree, and that's what we're having this meeting today. But I give you an example. There's one brand that's no longer in business anymore. They sold out to the, to the, to the the the team. But, they literally one year. When Verbo pushed Insta book in 2017, late 26, early 26, we merely jumped on it, adopted it. It was because I was like we didn't have enough resource to vet all these emails coming in. Let's just, let's just. We got to roll the dice on what we got, right. Well, this legacy brand was so upset by the Insta book and by what we were doing they decided to pull all of their inventory off of VRBO, because they felt your book direct strategy was so strong that they they were down that year 25% in rentals. They didn't realize that, even though I think they said in their board meetings only 16% of rentals were from Verbo, they didn't realize how many people were going to Verbo or going to. Airbnb.

Speaker 4: 26:06

Yeah.

Speaker 5: 26:07

Actually that was really before and finding out the name of the property and they were riffing it.

Speaker 4: 26:11

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 26:11

The billboard of yeah, Absolutely.

Speaker 5: 26:14

Yeah, and again, they're not in business anymore, but they literally, like they were campaigning, they were sending out flyers to prospective owners that we are not on VRBO.

Speaker 6: 26:24

I remember the flyer that's say no to VRBO.

Speaker 1: 26:29

Oh, and then probably trying to say that to the owners. Like you know, don't do it. Yeah, Less with us.

Speaker 6: 26:35

And I just remember seeing that flyer and being like I mean I'm not an expert in the subject matter yet. I mean now I am, but like back then I was like I'm not an expert. But this seems really like everything that seems like in my intuition, because for me as a consumer I guess a millennial was what I am I want to be able to go on a website and not have to call someone, be able to just do it instantly. Like I don't want to email back and forth about pricing and all this questions, like I want it convenient. So that's, I think that's you know. Another thing that made us different it's putting ourselves in the consumer's position and seeing, like, what would I want if I was booking a vacation, or what would I want if I was in the position of a homeowner?

Speaker 5: 27:19

We did it. We made another huge mistake, ladies. So I mean, this is well documented, is out there in the stratosphere, but our commission rate down here is 18%. The traditional rate when we first moved down here was 20 to 22. So our thought was we'll come in at 18, people will take it, they'll take a chance on us. Well, guess what? We've reset the market. Now everybody, if they're going up against us, they try to put under 18%. One of those big names that you mentioned earlier. Annie, actually last November moved all every single owner in their portfolio to 18%.

Speaker 4: 27:58

I'm familiar with that move.

Speaker 5: 28:01

And we got laid about. We're like you just cut 15% of your over-dend profitability. Like how are you going to start cutting people? And there's a lot of Skodal butt about that.

Speaker 1: 28:14

You know, you guys started it. It's the race to the bottom, I mean. I know, we definitely see that in our market here. I mean, we've got some of the big players that they'll come in and they'll say they just do 0% commission for the first year and really it hurts the market when people continuously are jabbing down, down, down, but when 18% is still pretty good, I've seen some markets where it's like the going rate is 10%, 8%, 10% because it's just been cut down so much.

Speaker 5: 28:42

And some of that's marketing too. Like we've got a couple of competitors in town that they run that 10%. Well, all they're doing for 10% is using their PMS and running marketing. If they get a leaky faucet, they're calling a sub, the sub's going out there and they're building the owner directly.

Speaker 4: 29:01

The cleaning can build directly.

Speaker 5: 29:03

Everything's being build directly. Every time that needed it, somebody darkens the door. They're being charged for it. So in the long run they're really not coming out that much better. They just think they're saving money because that or it goes back to the and this is a tangent we were talking about. But you know, love that neighbor. Every owner's neighbor is booked 20% more and has made so much more money than what they made, and I'm always like well, what was your neighbor charging? Well, I don't know. Well, what dates were they booked specifically?

Speaker 1: 29:29

Well, I don't know how long has your neighbor owned that property.

Speaker 5: 29:33

I've had sub-tabers down in the areas that have owned the property for 20 years and they're still charging rates from 10, 15 years ago. So you know, yeah, they're booked like 100% but they're not charging any money out of it.

Speaker 4: 29:45

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing that. It's amazing the tall tale that will be told between owners. I always marveled at that when we would in Pennwall City Beach would say, if so, you'd go to like your homeowner's meetings every year, we had like 11 main or 11 condos at one point that we managed. So it was like every weekend with a different homeowner's meeting in the fall and there was always one person there. Well, bob has been 100% occupied. Well, like it was off the market because he was renovating it. So Bob didn't have 100% occupancy yet. It blocked 100% of the time. But they just take these things and it becomes this like unicorn of business that doesn't, absolutely doesn't exist, and I think that's just in any market. But I think you guys, that you guys have done, you guys have done exactly what people need to do is like, if you don't know, just get out there and just try until you can invent yourself and find yourself and and being in a market like Goldshort, I think you know you were up against a lot of legacy legacy folks. They had been there for a long time. I mean, let's face it, one of the biggest ones owned half the property in their, in their southeast you know the southern part of the state, so it was probably very overwhelming. But I think when you don't know what you don't know, everything seems like a win, or you? know, it seems like a learning. It's a learning tool, and so you've done a great job. And I heard about you guys the first time, actually from Travis, from the 100 collection. He started like he's like well, you're down in the panhandle. You've probably heard of them, Don't you know him? And I was like I don't, like I feel like I need to. And he just kept talking and talking and talking about you guys, I feel like for six months before Burma, and he said, oh, one of the people that I know is won this award, but I can't tell you who it is. And when he said it he'd been talking so much about you guys. I feel like he was hinting that it was you. So when I saw you one, I was like, oh, I've got to go meet these people.

Speaker 1: 31:38

Travis and Rebecca. They were like you guys. Is publicist.

Speaker 4: 31:41

It gets me I got the same thing.

Speaker 1: 31:42

Rebecca's like you've got to meet Hunter and Ginger, like they're great. I'm like, okay, where are they? She's like I don't know. So I was like I'll tell you something.

Speaker 5: 31:50

So yeah, that's an interesting story too. So yeah, prior to this past year, prior to the award, we were under the radar. We were down here in Orange Beach, gold Shores, doing our thing Because, again, with the legacy market, I mean we're at 270-ish properties and growing, but like when Brett Robinson has 1600 and Vecasa's got 2000, you still feel small Like you just feel like you're just a wheel in this cog down here. So we've never really seen the big morgue. We'd gone to Streamline Summit. We did go to Streamline Summit and again, that's not as big, as you know, vermin. Well, at Streamline Summit it was actually Rebecca that came over to us and said do you know Travis? Now, that question now, a year later, is laughable, because I shouldn't be like, yeah, everybody knows Travis, but instead I was like, nah, just Travis, because again, we were under a rock. We were late. We were late all the way around.

Speaker 1: 32:46

I didn't know. I earned the last year or so.

Speaker 5: 32:48

And she's like you really need to meet this guy. So we get on the call and, in Travis's fashion, he's sitting there and he's asking us questions and he's looking around and you know Travis can be animated and whatnot. And then, looking at Jinger going like what is this?

Speaker 4: 33:03

What are we talking to this guy?

Speaker 5: 33:11

And finally he's like yeah, yeah, rebecca, you're right.

Speaker 3: 33:13

Y'all are in, y'all are in.

Speaker 6: 33:14

Y'all are in we're like what, what do? We want to browse Like what is that? Are we in a club?

Speaker 3: 33:19

Like right.

Speaker 4: 33:20

Exactly, exactly, you want it. You want the big major award. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5: 33:25

So he explains everything about the 100th population. So I told Jinger like yeah, I like this, I like this concept, let's get involved. And then it was like a couple of months or so after that we found out we were going to win the awards and we called him to tell him about it and you got to think what a confirmation for him that's going to be. Like you know, you're interviewing somebody blindly in another state. Yeah they're selling either good interviewers I'd say we're good at that and then oh wait, lo and behold, they're going to win this. And this is something I can stamp on the first year of the collection. I mean it just it all kind of played in and I'll never forget. I'm going to be indebted to that man, or we're indebted to that man forever. We met at Vegas for the first time at Caesars. He took his arm, put his arms around Jinger and I, like y'all said, he was our publicist that entire weekend. He was like if you met these two, they're rock stars and he didn't have to do any of that, like that was just this Travis, that's who he is, I mean, and we'd talk about the 100th collection later. But that whole deal is just a cool vibe and from that we won the award and then everybody kind of got to know us and now it's like what would you say, jinger? Once a week somebody's calling you, asking for advice, or what software do you use, or what are you doing here and there, and it's fulfilling.

Speaker 1: 34:38

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 34:39

Travis definitely never met a stranger. I think that's the great thing about him is, if you don't know somebody, he certainly knows somebody to get you to that somebody. So it's good to have him in your arsenal of friends. So you guys, when this award, what did that do? How did it change the trajectory of you in the business? And it sounds like again 200 to your point, like you were under a rock, but obviously you weren't. But you're now out. Everybody knows who you are. You can't hide anymore. You've taken that role pretty serious. It seems like you've gotten pretty active and you're a vocal part of the industry, and one of the things that Alex and I have talked to a lot of people about is that having new blood and having new people on panels and participate in some of these events is so important to keep the business moving forward and iterate on things that worked 20 years ago. Some of them worked, some of them don't, some of them just need to be updated, and so having you guys involved and having you as new faces, new voices, is really exciting. But what do you think that award did for you to get you out there and get you more active and visible?

Speaker 6: 35:42

I mean, I think the award itself, the publicity that we did for the award and winning it has done I can't even put into words what it's done for our business. And like the mayor of our city called us while we were in the airport, we were with CJ Stamina's wife, I'll never forget it we were in the Delta, one of the American Express, lout, is waiting for our flight to go back to Pensacola, to get back over to Orange Beach, and the mayor called and he was like I just I heard that you'll win a national slash international award. Congratulations. We want to do an award presentation for Golan. I'm thinking, okay, whatever, we're going to go to a city council meeting. I had previously worked for the city of Orange Beach as an assistant city attorney for the first like year or two while we were getting started part time. So I knew the mayor but I was thinking, you know, this award ceremony wouldn't really be that big of a deal. Well, he actually presented an award on behalf of the city at a town hall meeting in the new performing arts center and they're like it was an auditory impactful people. It's this big, huge flag and it was just. It was a really cool moment. The award ceremony was broadcast live on all the city official channels, on Facebook and all of that, so a lot of people saw that. But you know, I think you know part of it was us saying, okay, we've won this great thing. Like, how are we going to publicize it? Right, because they didn't actually have a badge for the award. And like we reached out to everyone. We're like, hey, can we create a badge that we can put like on our email levels, on our website? Is that okay? And like they said, well, yeah, can you create something and send it to us for approval? I said, yes, we'll do that. So my stop and my director of marketing, we worked on a badge and they approved it. And so now we're back on, you know, every single email we send out, every single homeowner acquisition mail, piece, inventory it's on there. It's our trust icon now. So, yeah, we were happy to receive the award and obviously it was a great honor and we were very humbled and, yeah, I think us pushing that too has really helped. And speaking of like it being the same faces, it's funny because I think Alex and I were talking about this. The first panel that I was asked to speak on was at Burma and Brooke, with Venturi, asked and I'm like looking down the row and I'm seeing all these guys look a whole lot like Hunter where their beard gone and it broke up there, and there's the guys with the beards and then there's me.

Speaker 5: 38:13

I was DJ Ryan Dame Kravitz.

Speaker 6: 38:17

Matt Horat.

Speaker 5: 38:18

Yeah, yeah, matt Horat, I mean, yeah, it was just this all guys panel. And in this smoking blonde in a pink roper in the middle of it.

Speaker 4: 38:26

I was gonna say she was definitely pink, love it.

Speaker 6: 38:29

Yeah, I think that's important too. You know, like I came from the legal world and, sure, as a defense, I was a litigator, I was in court all the time and like same thing there, like it would be a whole courtroom full of men, the judge was a man, the attorney for men, and I can't tell you how many like depositions I set in. Or I actually got an elevator one time and I was meeting a client for the first time and they said I read the paralegal. I was like now I'm your attorney. Oh, nice to have you, wow, but you know, and I had to mention that this is the real women of vacation rentals.

Speaker 1: 39:01

But for sure, for sure.

Speaker 6: 39:04

Now women to be involved and I think that Hunter gets a little miff sometimes when Brooke and these same people keep asking me to be on a panel and he doesn't necessarily get asked all the time. But I'm like they need faces, they want somebody that looks different and he definitely knows like the numbers and the revenue management way better than I do. I'm kind of legal marketing, pr, hr. That's kind of my wheelhouse. I don't deal with like rates and all the hard math. I don't. I'm girl math, I don't do anything. But you have like I would say, a harder role in our company, but it is important that everyone get their time.

Speaker 1: 39:45

Yeah, well, I think you guys balance each other out and compliment each other very well. So, yeah, I think it works well. And, connor, you know this, you've learned this over the many years of marriage now, and your job is to let her shine, right.

Speaker 5: 40:01

So definitely doing that Happy life.

Speaker 4: 40:03

Happy life.

Speaker 5: 40:04

Happy life. Yeah, I support her. She just she's a little myth. We don't talk about myth. She's myth because I'm a little. Two panels at Burma this year.

Speaker 4: 40:10

She's a little girl. Well, I'm not on any ginger, so we can like hang out together, okay.

Speaker 1: 40:17

Let's talk a little bit about what's going on in the business right now and what are the biggest challenges that you guys have that you're currently facing.

Speaker 5: 40:24

Well, for us personally, it's getting this Durham laundry facility across the finish line. We're about 90% complete with the facility. I went by there yesterday. We've got most of the sheet rocks up. Painting will happen this weekend. Equipment is supposed to be delivered in a couple of weeks. It's just been the job that went in the end. We started this journey in May of 22, thinking we were going to buy another company and we decided to just build it from the ground up. And construction delays, financing, you name it everything that could delay happened. We were able to finally get all of housekeeping moved in-house. Right now we're running out of a couple of storage units and survived that. Once we can get in that building, it'll be great as far as the same old things we run into every year. Earlier on we were talking about this. You've got to keep making a flyer from competitors going out there. You're almost having to re-recreate your own owners and explain to them what you're doing to keep them in-house, and then also juggling the new people that are coming in. That's my challenge, and I'm sure Genders got a whole different look to that.

Speaker 6: 41:34

I'll say when we first started, people were always rooting for the little guy, the under dollar. They're like oh, I want to go with Beach Ball because they're boutique. We actually used to call ourselves, and labor ourselves, boutique everywhere. When you get to 270 properties, you can't look yourself in the mirror and say I'm a boutique business anymore. You can have boutique service and we're a local service and we hire locally and all of that. I can't market ourselves as boutique anymore. I feel like that's come with its own set of challenges. Now it's like oh, you're one of the big guys I guess I kind of am, but I don't have 1,300 units.

Speaker 1: 42:11

Yeah, whatever X does.

Speaker 6: 42:13

I'm somewhere in between not being a 50 property manager and a 1,000 mega property manager. Finding the way to continue to market that where people are still rooting for you and still think, oh, this is the local brand and you're not just some big guys that don't care about you anymore, has been a little bit challenging for us.

Speaker 4: 42:34

I think women's use stay authentic, though you guys are both very charming in your own. Your personalities are very different, but they're complimentary and you said it, ginger, in the beginning. Just being authentic is what got you here. You keep that. That's what builds the business that stays the longest. People are going to gravitate to that. I don't think you. Whether you have 500 or 2,000, as long as you guys stay authentic and true to yourselves, people are going to gravitate to you and want to work with you. I agree.

Speaker 5: 43:02

Thank you, annie. Well, to piggyback on what Ginger was saying, again, I'm a board member of the Chamber, we're a Chamber champion, we're a top 1%er. Every event you come in there's a beach ball signed somewhere at the event. But we've noticed one of our if you call them competitor, but a small peer type company has been getting a lot of love from the Chamber lately and they've been following the beach ball playbook and we're almost a little miffed that they've been getting all this extra love. I said something to the press and I said showing them election. He said Hunter, do you really need any more help? That, literally, was his thought process. He's like you're here Like you've climbed the melon. You're looking around like you really need help, like they need help more than you do it. I looked at it I was like I get it. I said but you know, mcdonald's still runs ads every day because you got to remind everybody. And what happens if there's a company that you bought a product from or something that you've used and you don't see an ad for them or don't hear about them for a year or?

Speaker 1: 43:59

two. Oh yeah, you forget about it. Are they still in business? Are they still in business? Are they still in business?

Speaker 5: 44:03

Yeah, so you still want to stay relevant. You still want to stay upright. You don't want to be thought of as the go-to person. Even then, I guess you've got to share some love as a chamber person. But just understand why we still feel this way. Well, we're always going to press. We're always going to put ourselves out there, right?

Speaker 6: 44:20

I think that's something that people overlook. It's not just about achieving 200 plus properties. It's about you get there and you have to maintain your level of success and you have to be able to care for those properties work on those properties, do all the things that you did when you were a 20 property, a 50 property, a 100 property management company. And that desire and the amount of work that it requires, just day after day after day. I mean, don't get me wrong, we're fortunate, we're blessed, we have a great team, but you can't just say, oh, I'm done with it. It's a consistency thing. You have to show up every day, whether that be on your phone or answering emails or whatever it's to do. You just have to be on and y'all know that.

Speaker 1: 45:03

Yeah, and I think I'm sure, as you guys were building the business, initially there's the urge to just take any condo or any property that comes your way, because you've got to have that proof of concept to get the ones that you really want. But then, as you start to get to a certain point, it's like, okay, now it's a good position to be in, that now it can be more picky about which properties you bring onto your program. And then on the other side you can start determining are there some that we just don't want to have on the program anymore because they don't fit into our mix? Is that? Do you guys? Are you in that boat at all? Now we're kind of reevaluating, or did you reevaluate?

Speaker 4: 45:37

It's not that it's ginger, ginger we feel that way.

Speaker 6: 45:40

It's pretty hard we are. So this is the first year that we've like sat down and like done the whole. Here's the spreadsheet and here are the properties we do not feel are performing to the number that we've set is our minimum right. And so we actually let go of eight clients the other day and like all of them were like what did we do wrong? And it's hard to explain to someone who's trusted you and give an opportunity to your business. It's not, you know, it's not necessarily anything you did wrong. It's just that your property is not performing to the level that we need it to perform to make sense for our business of the size it is now right. But I get on these like ask to speak on these panels and you know this question always comes up like what's you know, what properties are you going after? And always tell whoever's listening. I'm like we took every, anything and everything, like they were across the street condos that had carpet, that were, you know, not any quite friendly places that now we would not have in our portfolio, but like you have to do that. And yeah, it's shame to do that when you're first starting out, right. But yeah, we're at that point now and it's been it's hard to say no to business, right? Like I remember Tullen Hunter, the first or second year of business was like I can't imagine ever turning down a property like ah yeah we'll figure out something for it.

Speaker 4: 46:59

We had a good lessons, though, yeah.

Speaker 6: 47:02

And I'll mention his name Brian here is a great guy and yeah, and he's, he's a great operator, but he was sending us business and I looked at Hunter. I was like I just can't believe anybody was just like fire a client.

Speaker 4: 47:14

And yeah, we are like years, until you have to fire a client.

Speaker 1: 47:17

Yeah.

Speaker 6: 47:17

I get it now, brian, you listen to them.

Speaker 5: 47:20

Well, and what got super all I guess. I guess is awesome To make. Take some of the sting out of us dropping those eight properties. The next day we had a prospect, come in, they've been Tory. Six bedrooms, seven bath house, that alone will do more than those eight properties combined.

Speaker 1: 47:36

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Speaker 5: 47:39

It's the leveling up. And that's another thing that you know, jinder and I we debate back and forth is the number of properties right? Mm-hmm, for example, and he probably I won't use that number, but you got CJ over in Blue Ridge, see, jay's like 180 to 190 properties. We're at 270. We do about the same amount of revenue.

Speaker 1: 47:59

They think yeah.

Speaker 5: 47:59

So to me it's about revenue, but like we like to say 270 or 500 or a thousand, but like, yeah, they need to be a thousand producers out of a thousand. You know?

Speaker 1: 48:08

non-producer yeah, I mean you're in a market similar to where Annie is, similar to where I am. It is a volume game. I mean we don't have, you know, these markets. Condo markets are not filled with properties. That are just huge, huge high end. So to make a good business you've got to have a lot of the you know the condos that rent and that's in that kind of like mid to upper level tier. But sometimes that includes budget and budget can be nice. I mean some you can have really nice budget friendly condos that are well taken care of, that they aren't huge income producers but they're providing a great vacation to somebody and if you're taking care of it, then there's a lot of pride in that.

Speaker 5: 48:47

Yeah, I told my owner release. There's a property for everybody.

Speaker 4: 48:51

Exactly, Absolutely.

Speaker 5: 48:52

And she's like are you sure about this? I was like there's a property for everybody.

Speaker 4: 48:55

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5: 48:58

But I've been approached on multiple occasions by other investor type people around town and, yeah, y'all may get a kick on this. People are like, well, why don't you create like a sub company of Beach ball, like a secondary company? So anything you wouldn't take anything that is a qualified for Beach ball, send it to that sub company. And what I took on the line, that's Sam's finding good. But the issue is still the same. It's the operations that it takes, it's the maintenance, it's the housekeeping, it's the marketing, it's the late night reviews, and those properties that we don't want are going to tend to have more maintenance issues. They're going to have more calls which means you've got to have that support system for it that I have built out over here. So it's kind of like a can't double dip on and I'll. I get so many headscratchers on that. I've heard of certain individuals, alex that went from taking all the scraps to being one of the largest property managers in the country. So you know, sometimes that can happen as well.

Speaker 1: 49:52

So, right, right, yeah, that's very true, very true. Well, guys, it's been a whole new pleasure having you on the show. I know we've wanted to have you on for quite a while now and excited to see you at VRMA in just a couple of weeks here, but if anybody wants to get in touch and learn more about you guys, your services, or just hear more about your success story because I'm sure it's very inspiring to many of our listeners what's the best way for them to reach out?

Speaker 5: 50:18

So our email addresses are very easy it's hunter or gender. At beachballpropertiescom, we tell everybody check out our website beachballpropertiescom. Our social media is like none other. Our TikTok or Twitter, now general Twitter or X, I should say X. Facebook, instagram. Check all these out. We actually went viral on TikTok one time, so that was pretty cool. But, yeah, check out our socials. Our socials are the best way. And then check out what's happening Orange Beach and what's happening Gulf Shores Any one of those things you find. You're gonna find what hunter and gender are doing.

Speaker 1: 50:53

That's awesome, that's awesome. Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I, you can go to alexandannipodcastcom. And until next time, thanks for tuning in everybody.