Serviced Accommodation refers to a type of accommodation that is fully furnished and available for both long-term and short-term lets. Serviced accommodations often provide more amenities than a traditional rental property, are usually more spacious than hotel rooms, with a higher focus on hospitality. This week's guest on WealthTalk is Dave Goodfellow – founder of Ikonic Training Academy. Dave discusses the serviced accommodation strategy and how you can start generating great returns!
Serviced Accommodation refers to a type of accommodation that is fully furnished and available for both long-term and short-term lets – like you might expect from platforms such as airbnb. Due to the higher turnover of tenants, the cash flow that can be generated is often considerably higher than you would be able to achieve from a typical buy to let property
Serviced accommodation is not one of the easiest property strategies, being much more focused on hospitality with lots of operational aspects. However, with the right education and guidance, the business can be systemised and many of the tasks outsourced – giving you back more of your time
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
>> Connect with Dave Goodfellow [LinkedIn]
>> 5 Ways To Use Serviced Accommodation To Start Or Grow Your Property Business [Guide]
>> Join the WealthBuilders Academy
>> REGISTER HERE FOR FREE RESOURCES ACCESS
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Unknown Speaker 0:01
The purpose of wealth talk is to educate, inform and hopefully entertain you on the subject of building your wealth. Wealth builders recommends you should always take independent financial tax or legal advice before making any decisions around your finances.
Unknown Speaker 0:19
Well, welcome to episode 142 of wealth talk. My name is Christian Rodwell, the membership director for wealth builders. And I'm joined today by our founder, Mr. Kevin Whalen. Hello, Kevin.
Unknown Speaker 0:29
Hi, Chris. Good to be with you again. And we got an very interesting subject today still on the property theme banjee. Is it really?
Unknown Speaker 0:37
Well, that's right, as we'll hear today, from our guest, Dave Goodfellow, who's the founder of iconic Training Academy. And yes, it is a property strategy. It's serviced accommodation, which we'll be talking about today. But as you'll hear from Dave, that it's much more focused on hospitality. And there's lots of operational aspects that go with service accommodation. Not one of the easiest property strategies, but certainly can be systemized and outsourced eventually. But that does take some time.
Unknown Speaker 1:05
Yeah, I think the interesting thing for me is, different types of property yield different types of outcomes from different types of input. So you want to decide what it is you want to do. And I think this, to me, in reality feels more like a business. But why don't we listen to Dave? Hear what you have to say. And we can do discuss it later. So is it a property strategy? Or is it a business strategy? Or is it a bit about?
Unknown Speaker 1:33
And you know, Dave, well, because Dave's a regular on clubhouse, the kind of audio listening in social media platform, and I know you've joined him a few times on there as well, Kevin?
Unknown Speaker 1:45
Well, Dave is a very good guy. I mean, he's, he's highly committed to adding value and run to a clubhouse room every morning. What a commitment, right? Every single morning, from half seven to half, eight. He's on there giving value bringing in guests, occasionally, well, in all sorts of good people from all sorts of different backgrounds, but usually around the property theme. Because that's, you know, his area of expertise. And some great guests on there. And some people that definitely you would want to listen into and tune in. And just like a podcast, you can listen to it when you want, you know, you can, although it's live, you can jump in and might sometimes listen to that in the morning when I'm walking a dog, for example, and just listen in to what's going on. And sometimes Dave invites me to speak and I try not to do that I'm genuinely in listening mode. But occasionally we'll have a plan of attack. And they'll ask me to talk about something very specific. So a very, very nice man, very committed to helping an audience and an outstanding gentlemen what he does.
Unknown Speaker 2:50
Okay, let's head on over to our conversation today with Dave. Good fellow. Dave, welcome to wealth talk today.
Unknown Speaker 2:57
Thank you very much for having me. Very well, really, really, looking looking forward to
Unknown Speaker 3:02
it looking forward to me, too. And we're going to be talking about the strategy of serviced accommodation today. And why you believe that that's a great strategy that can help people to build more wealth. But before we do that, Dave, I know you've got a long background in property. So why don't we start from where it all began for you?
Unknown Speaker 3:19
Okay, right. Yeah, let's go back to the start then. So I've been in oxy for about 11 years now. And I was I was an Operations Director for a home improvements company while I started in property. So it was kind of like a side hustle for me. And while I was an Operations Director, my background was kind of project managing conservatory contracts and stuff like that. So I built up a nice pot of cash. And I thought to myself, I'm gonna go out there, I'm going to purchase some property, and I'm going to add some value to it and sell it. And what I know it's called I was flips for I didn't know it was called that back then. So I did that for a number of years with my project management experience, bringing in builders and all that sort of stuff. And yeah, I did that for a number of years. So a nice little cash pot, and then purchased properties and had a small buy to let portfolio in the initial years, got to the point where I got annoyed with anti landlord legislation and all that sort of stuff. And decided that I wanted to move on from that particular strategy. So that's kind of like a real whistlestop tour of where I come from. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 4:37
and I don't know if you're familiar with wealth dynamics, it's one of the entrepreneurial assessments out there Dave but you know, we often Kevin and myself talk about you know, really got to know yourself right? Some people are really creative, others just love connecting with people, others love all the details and the contracts and the numbers, you know, where do you kind of fit on that spectrum would you say,
Unknown Speaker 4:54
right, so I use something slightly different than the wealth dynamics I use something called the contribution compact is not just a slightly different thing. Yeah, it's a great tool. It gives you the energy that you are, and I'm very much an entrepreneurial spirit, you know, I'm in the, you know, want to go out there and tell the world what's going on and create some very creative in terms of that side of things. So from a wealth dynamics perspective, entrepreneurial, you know, thinker, big thinker, want to build starship enterprises and go to the moon, that type of thing. My business partner is the opposite. Which is, which is good. Yeah, keep keeps me back a little bit. And we did the Well, before we got together as well, which was the reason why we kind of went forward.
Unknown Speaker 5:41
So it's no surprise then that you decided to set up your own company, Dave. And that, of course, is iconic. So tell us when did that occur? And was there a particular you know, you mentioned there sort of you wanting to get out of the legislation? And what was it that spurred you to say, Okay, let's set up this company.
Unknown Speaker 5:56
Yeah, great question. So for people listening is iconic with a K. So I K, O Nic, if you're looking for it, and typing it into Google. But the reason why I got into kind of serviced accommodation and setting up my business iconic, and there was a couple of reasons. One was I was getting, I was getting really annoyed with the anti landlord legislation. And the not I had the I had a lady and one of my properties in Chester is a three bedroom townhouse. Lovely property, she was great for about two, three years, two years. And the last year of being there, couldn't get any money, but couldn't get out of the property. And when I managed to actually get out the property had enough. So I wanted to go into something else that didn't have tenants in there had more control over my existing property. Along with that, I was looking to build cash flow to get out of my existing role. Because I was working away a lot, I was going away on a Sunday evening, coming back on a Friday evening, and spending two days looking like a zombie. Because I was working so many hours, and then getting up on a Sunday and going right, I'm ready to go going back down to wherever I was working. So getting myself into a position where I was generating really good cash flow from my existing properties. And not having the those those ties on me through the anti landlord legislation that was coming in was, was the key factor for me, opening up iconic serviced accommodation limited. And then November 2018, was when I was able to get the tenant out and start that business.
Unknown Speaker 7:40
Right? And did you set any goals at that time, you know, did you have a vision of kind of where you wanted to take iconic,
Unknown Speaker 7:49
and not as much as what I do now. So I'm very much vision related, and my work on my values, and I call it the four pillars of my life that I work on. But back then I was kind of like, I need to get a certain amount of income by a certain date. So I just put a stake in the ground, my birthday, which was October 6 2019, when I was going to be out of work while I stay out of work. And I was going to leave work and hammer notice. And so I started building a business to create the cash flow to replace my existing funds from my from my work. And I needed to get to a certain amount of properties to be able to do that. And I did that in a much quicker time than what I planned out. So I plan to, you know, leave in the October 2019. I actually ended up getting the sack for my job in March 2019. Because I built this business in the background, and I wasn't happy working where I was this particular CEO that I was working for. And I told them that they weren't very good at their job. And then the next day, I got booted out of the company after being there for 15 years. So there you go. Yeah. But I always thought I was on a path. I was happy with that. And it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
Unknown Speaker 9:13
Well, good job. Good job, you've already started making the you know, the move. So I guess before we sort of dive into, you know, the nuances of the strategy of service accommodation for anyone listening who maybe just hasn't come across this before, you know, in simple terms, what is SA
Unknown Speaker 9:30
great, great question so serviced accommodation has been able to take a property, charge it out by the night instead of the month and use it for a number of different people to come and visit the area. So it's kind of like a hospitality industry if you like. So you take a property charge out by the night rather than by the month. Make your uplift over the nightly period, right and make more cash flow. From from that, you will have a property that gives it like a like a home from home and it will have like hotel amenities in there as well. So you will service that property, you'll clean it once a week, you will change over the linens, you'll provide them with amenities like shower gels, and that sort of stuff. And that is essentially serviced accommodation. So it's like a hotel without all the operational aggro.
Unknown Speaker 10:26
So site like Airbnb, typically, we might think,
Unknown Speaker 10:30
exactly that. Thank you for pointing that out. Maybe it said, and
Unknown Speaker 10:34
how much of a difference did Airbnb or has Airbnb made, you know, when it launched and the subsequent years?
Unknown Speaker 10:43
Yeah, so Airbnb, and another one. Another well known one is booking.com. They, they they're a great tool, they essentially become your marketing partner, for your business, if you like. They are, you know, they're a huge part of our business. They're not a they're not everything. And we try and create what we call direct bookings on a regular basis, because Airbnb, if you go back to the pandemic, they closed, so we didn't have anything come in through them, or booking.com, there was a period of time where they just completely closed off. But they are a huge marketing partner for you. We use we call it our foot in the door with our customers. They'll get people in your property for you.
Unknown Speaker 11:24
Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned they're obviously doing COVID. You know, some people got hit hard. Right. And they may have been, you know, stepped away from service accommodation, thinking it's too risky. You know, what would you say to those people now? How can you protect yourself from something like that happening again?
Unknown Speaker 11:39
Oh, another great question. So look back in March 2020, wasn't it when the pandemic hit, and Boris Johnson came on and was like, you know, we're gonna stop all travel for business and leisure. Well, that was our that was our whole business. Now. There was a number of people at that stage who just put their hands up and left the market. And just handed keys back to landlords stop using their own properties for doing serviced accommodation and turn them back into beta. Let's, we didn't do that we took an opposite view, we did exactly what everybody the opposite of what everybody else was doing at the time. And we managed to grow our business through the pandemic. So month on month, we grow grew our revenue, we grew our how many properties that we had, and we managed to just take a different approach than other people. So we were looking at well, let's think about how we can fill up properties. We went to the NHS, we used the NHS, used our property sorry for to put their doctors are not in we also went to all the key workers. So we were looking at angles of how we could fill out properties that weren't come in through Airbnb and booking.com. Normally, we managed to, we managed to, you know, write the storm and strive and survive all the way through it.
Unknown Speaker 13:03
Yeah, yeah. entrepreneurial thinking now, as you say, you kind of do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Right? Exactly that. Okay. So you know, great news that obviously you came through that you're able to as well to help many people, right, who were in need of it, as you say, NHS and contractors, just to keep things more
Unknown Speaker 13:21
hotels closed? Yeah. Hotels closed down, right. They didn't have anywhere to stay. So the, you know, people that were staying in hotels, they got kicked out, you know, your travel Lodge is your premier Inns of the world, they were all closed. So where do people where we'll be, we're going to go and stay. So they came and stayed with with us.
Unknown Speaker 13:38
So who would you say service commendation suits? Is it a beginner strategy? People who've already got experience? Can anybody do this?
Unknown Speaker 13:46
serviced? Accommodation is not the easiest strategy, right? So people that want a passive income or they want a you hear that you hear that in property all the time, oh, come on, get a pass. It doesn't really work like that. serviced, accommodation is more, I would say more like a hospitality business rather than a property business. If I can say that. There's more moving parts to it. You're running, you know, Guest Services and you've got changeovers and lending companies and cleaning companies that are coming in on a daily basis, your properties and you need to have a systemized approach to building out your business. So if you're looking to get into serviced accommodation, definitely you need to get educated on it and understand the operational responsibilities because there's lots of them that people just don't understand. It's not just about the revenue, we call it the sai expert. People get into serviced accommodation, they just think of the cash flow and the money that's on the top but there's all these operational responsibilities underneath that people don't even think about. So you can get into service accommodation to create cash flow. quickly by doing sort of like rent to rent strategies and stuff like that, then you could if you pass it on to a managing agent, then it can be quite hands off service, but you still got to get the property, you know, set it up, get it to a, to a standard, where it's ready to then pass it on to the management company. But I would say it's probably the most hands on strategy, if you're going to take it through its full cycle. That makes sense.
Unknown Speaker 15:29
Yeah. And you mentioned rent to rent there. So again, if that's a term that's new to people, that's where you can control an asset. You don't need to own it.
Unknown Speaker 15:36
You're using other people, other people's properties, essentially. So property is it's not about owning property, it's about control of the property, right? So if you're in a position where you can control somebody else's property, or what we call other people's property, and rent it on a monthly basis, and then turn it into service accommodation and sell it by the night, you can make the uplift by the night, and that's where you make your money.
Unknown Speaker 16:03
Yeah, it's a win, always looking for the win win, of course. So both sides, you know, benefiting there. And okay, so I know you've created the service accommodation roadmap, Dave. So someone listening now might think, wow, there's a lot of work there, right? I'm going to be a busy person. And I think the key is obviously, learning how to build the right team around you. So maybe let's dive into the roadmap and just kind of walk us through that and the different stages that someone might need to think about.
Unknown Speaker 16:33
Yeah, okay. So yeah. So the best accommodation roadmap was something that we created a couple of years ago to help individuals understand how to build out a serviced accommodation business from scratch all the way up to scaling to a six, seven figure business. Now, we kind of have been had been through this process and made a lot of mistakes along the way as the day. And we we broke our, our journey down into bite sized chunks. So first of all, we've got find your SA area. So how do you find it the right location? How do you understand from a numbers point of view that that particular area is going to work, you know, the locate, there's locations within locations that work as locations within locations that don't work. So we've built a package out for that, then when you've got your your area, you then need to sell yourself to landlords and letting agents if you're doing rent to rents, for example, or rent to serviced accommodation, there's a particular way in going to a landlord and given them the understanding of how it works because it's alien to the to a lot of landlords and letting agents because it's something different to have an elevator, right. Then once you've got your property on board, we've got the next stage, which is setting up your essay. And then you've got to you know, setting it up in the correct way. So it looks appealing to potential pert bat bat people that are going to come and stay with you, making sure it's compliant. And then we've got launch, launching your essay. So launching it to the market getting on Airbnb, booking.com, and on your own direct booking website, using your right channel manager, all that sort of stuff. And then we've got things that help you scale your business to the next level. So we've got a thing called Office in your pocket where we can, you can run your business from around nine applications on your phone, from anywhere in the world, as long as you've got Wi Fi or 4g signal. And then last but not least, once you've got all that set up, and you are in a position where you can start scaling further, you want to bring people in your Power team. We've got a course called VA power, which helps you structure recruits and make virtual assistants very successful in your business. So that's kind of how our roadmap works.
Unknown Speaker 18:57
Yeah, no, no, we'd love a roadmap here. So yeah, it's really good to to hear that. And, you know, I'm interested really Dave as well, you know, alongside doing service accommodation for yourself is how you've built an evolve the business because I know that you're very visible online, you have a really popular clubhouse room, you have podcasts that you co host with some other professionals, you know, you're on Instagram. So you know, how has that evolved over the last few years, David? And why do you think so important to build that brand online as well.
Unknown Speaker 19:29
So building your building, your online brand is really, really important, right? And a great friend of mine, Emmanuel ZICO. He uses a phrase called know like and trust. Now, the more you can put yourself out there, the more people see you online, the more people can relate with you resonate with you, the more your personal brand and your business brand is going to go into to evolve, right? So it's very much all of the stuff that we do online is all about the node by contrast and getting people to be in a position where they will come to us They've seen what we've done already. And they can come with us and either, you know, stay at our properties, work with us in terms of, you know, investment or come and learn with us in terms of our learning capacity through our iconic train in the cabin.
Unknown Speaker 20:15
Yeah. And you're based up in Chester, and you're actually in your academy there now. So you do a combination of online training and live training and Masterminds as well.
Unknown Speaker 20:26
Yeah, so we've got multiple sort of angles that we look at this, because everybody learns in different ways, right. And some people have got time to come up to a mastermind, but do a one to one on a regular basis. And some people just haven't got that. So what we've done with our essay roadmap is we've broken that down into a number of different courses. With all the essay roadmap, stages that I've just talked through, they're all online, so we've broken them down into bite sized chunks. We've also got masterminds where we do one to many masterminds, we'll do that we could online via zoom, we also have a couple of days a month where we have a starts a scale up mastermind. For beginners, we've got a Next Level Mastermind, we've got an a one to one program as well. So there's plenty of stuff on our website, if anybody's interested in that. We'll look at it.
Unknown Speaker 21:17
Yeah. And I guess people come to Dave who've kind of dip their toe in the water, perhaps with doing si and and maybe it hasn't quite gone to plan. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making when they're trying to do this strategy?
Unknown Speaker 21:29
So not making data lead decisions? Okay, so at the beginning of your property, so your essay journey, you have to make data lead decisions on your properties. And what do I mean by that, excuse me. So I get a lot of people come into me with a property where they've set it up, they've put it on the market, they're paying a rent for it on a rent, and they're not getting any bookings. Now, there can be a number of reasons for that. It can be you know, it's not been set up correctly on the OTAs, or on their direct booking website. And it's just not appealing to people, we call it a shop shop from or the area just might not work. Now, if you haven't done the data, lead decision making at the beginning of that, by analyzing the deal, and making sure that you've got the right numbers in in the area and the demands there in the area, then doesn't matter what you do, that property may just not work. So I get quite a lot of that. And I've got I get quite a lot of people come in from larger trading companies that don't do the detailed analysis, which is really important. And that's one of the one of our kind of differentiators, everything that we do is very detailed for our for our clients.
Unknown Speaker 22:39
So I guess in summary, then Dave, you know, for someone wanting a good cash flow strategy, and as you said, it's, you know, as much about a business as it is about property here, then service accommodation can really help, you know, fuel that.
Unknown Speaker 22:53
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a relatively low entry level as well. So, again, we the sort of beginning stages of serviced accommodation during the rent to serviced accommodation strategy, the entry points relatively low. So if you're going out and purchasing a property for 100,000, you've got to put a 25 grand deposit. If you're taking a rent to serviced accommodation option that the entry points so much lower, but the cash flow can be more if not, sorry, can be the same, if not a lot more than what you would get on a normal beitler. So smaller, it's a small investment in and you get a large cash flow out of the back of it, as long as you've done the data lead decisions, and you've made the right decisions on the location.
Unknown Speaker 23:41
Yeah. Great. So Dave, we've talked about all the places that you're visible online, if someone wants to follow you and hear more of the great, great words that you've got to share. Where can they go?
Unknown Speaker 23:54
Yeah, there's, well, there's two main places really, the first one is a clubhouse. So we run we talk property on clubhouse property coffee meet is on every single morning from 730 till 830. And we have a raft of fantastic people on on that platform, or property investors. And we discuss multiple things over over the week. And the second one is the iconic, iconic with the K ik ONAC. Property community on Facebook, we put a lot of free content in there a lot of stuff about our journey. So they're the two best places to kind of connect with us.
Unknown Speaker 24:33
Excellent. And I think we're going to provide a download as well to accompany this episode as well. So we'll pop a link to that in the show notes. Happy to do so. Dave, thanks so much for being a great guest today on wealth two. Thank you. Okay, interesting conversation there with Dave and we will dive into some of those lessons in a second Kevin. Let's first head on over to Trustpilot and I've got a review that's come in literally a minute ago, from Mr. Fernando, who says, having been introduced to this podcast, I just need to say that I am finding it extremely useful. Congratulations. It does seem to make the seemingly impossible possible. And it has greatly motivated me to go from being financially insecure, to progress to security, independence, and then on to abundance.
Unknown Speaker 25:24
That's a lovely review, isn't it? And I happen to know that this Mr. Fernando, actually, isn't it interesting that he's a doctor, right? And doctors, when they become consultants, they kind of lose the doctor title. It's weird, isn't it? You think you'd want to hang on to that, but he's a surgeon, a very high repute surgeon. And what was interesting to me, and I reached out to Mr. Fernando, because I saw a meme that was a sort of a BBC program made reference on his LinkedIn. So I was check people out just to see who they are. And and what was curious about it, right was his father, who was also a transplant surgeon, and himself had both operated in different generations on the same woman. And I watched it on BBC iPlayer, just to see, wow, I was fascinated by it. And then when I got to call him, and just said, you know, I watched your he was so grateful such a humble man with such intelligence and such huge value brings to the world. I've got to say how completely awed I was with his skill, but also with his humility. And, you know, one of the top people in the country, just saying there, that we've inspired him to move his own wealth, from insecurity, which means you can be well paid, but you can still be trading time for money, right? Doesn't matter how intelligent you are, to move in from a place of that sort of trading time for money to building assets, so very much hoping we can help this gentleman on his journey. And obviously, he's got a lot to say, and a lot to show. And a lot to be proud of as well. Both him and his, and his dad.
Unknown Speaker 27:09
Yeah. And I also lovely story, and we have a lot of medics and doctors, GPS in the community, don't we? Dentists, so yeah, all industries. And it's nice now that we're able to connect them together. And they almost kind of creating their own little buddy groups and helping each other to build income outside of the day job. And a little bit like Dave, I suppose he talked about how he'd started building recurring income from property alongside his job. So when he did lose his job, it wasn't a disaster. And obviously, then gave him more time to focus on building the business.
Unknown Speaker 27:41
And that's a piece that I say a lot. But But I think needs repeating. Because it's such a huge leverage point, that if you can take the little steps as our guest last week, Harriet talked about baby steps, even if you can take the little steps to move you towards financial security, that kind of locked down lifestyle enough to cover your main expenses, then you can either if you get sick, you can live with it, you can voluntarily move on or, or change from a full time job to a part time job, you can change your life, which gives you more time. And the greatest form of leverage is obviously time because you can create the strategy that Dave eloquently speaks are by controlling property don't even have to have a lot of money, you don't have to own the property, because you can secure the property as he said, through what's known as rent to rent, where you rent the property from somebody else, and then rent it out to a different audience. And in his case, it's Well, you saw he went through a pivot there from leisure, and hospitality through to NHS another link back there to doctors and, and into contractors. So there's a whole different array of potential tenant types. And all you've got to do is spend the time to research where that demand is, is it near a hospital? Is it nearer an Amazon warehouse? Is it near wind farms being built in naughty, you know, what is it where there's a demand for people who want to stay in nice places without the huge expense of staying in hotel and the impractical nature of staying in hotel for a long period, with no kitchens with no real leisure time, you're stuck in a room and that's not a great place unless you're on holiday? So and people are working, so it's not the same? So I think it's a great strategy. But you have to regard it though, I think, as a business, because you've got to get those moving parts. It's not a set and forget, as people often think about something I buy to let. And there's no strategy that's really truly passive. And Dave mentions that because you always have to get involved at some level and in service accommodation. It's much more about understanding it not delegating it but to understand it well enough to know how to bring systemization into play. And then once you've systemized it, then you can get out of the way, then it can be more passive. Because you understand what needs to be done. Often people systemize things, or try to too quickly before they understand what needs to be done. They don't systemize it well, log jams and problems appear, and then they have to step back in again. And then they say, this is the wrong strategy, it may not be the wrong strategy you just didn't execute well.