This week, we are highlighting Gerry Leco, founder of Your Florida Vacation Villa. After years of investing in long-term rentals, Gerry and his wife made the move into short-term rentals and now manage 11 standout vacation villas in Orlando, Florida.
Can you tell us a little bit about your history?
My wife and I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (GO STEELERS!) with our two (almost adult) children. We love music, restaurants and travel! My mother is from Luxembourg and still has family there, so we have travelled quite a bit throughout Europe as well as the USA, Canada and a bit of Central America. We rarely go to the same place twice, as there is so much to see in the world! We started to invest in real estate on the side in the late 90’s. We stumbled into vacation rentals around 2016, and it has been so much fun and rewarding that we made this our full-time business. STRs are all we do for a living now. My family directly owns nine villas, and I handle bookings for two other owners. It has its ups and downs, but we wouldn’t trade it for anything!
What is your background?
I have degree in Computer Science and my wife has a degree in Occupational Therapy, but both of us had have had many careers. I have worked as a general contractor, a software engineer, a managing partner and COO in a healthcare company and am now a real estate investor. My wife was an occupational therapist, a purchasing account manager and a bookkeeper. We are both very adventurous with our career moves! Now that we are a full-time STR business, I handle all the bookings, property remodels and customer service aspects. My wife handles the finances for our business.
Were you always in vacation rentals or property management?
We dabbled in real estate with long-term rentals for about 20 years before finding the STR market. We bought two-family homes in a very trendy area in Pittsburgh. We gutted them down to bare studs and remodeled them to high standards. This was a safe approach for collecting rent regularly and building equity, but the returns are lower on high-end rentals due to the costs in purchasing and remodels. We were struggling to get 5% returns while associates of mine who were in lower rent properties were getting 15% to 30% returns. Once we stumbled into STR properties, we quickly realized we could get the best of both worlds! Our STR properties are high-end properties, but with returns of 10% to 30%.
Are you from the geographical area where your properties are located?
We do not live in Florida, where all of our properties are located. When I was in healthcare, there was a convention that we attended every year that alternated between Orlando and Las Vegas. When it was in Orlando, they always had some Disney hotels available at convention rates, so I would take my family with me as I could expense some of the trip. One year (maybe around 2014), the convention did not offer any Disney hotels, so my wife had the idea to rent a vacation home instead. This was completely new to me, but we loved it! Staying on property at Disney can be magical, but we quickly decided that there are many benefits of a rental home that made the stay so much better.
First, we could at least eat breakfast at home, and that is one less meal to pay Disney prices for! We also had some dietary needs for our children that were easier to accommodate. Second, we loved being able to come home and drink wine and play cards after the kids were asleep in their own rooms. No more sitting quietly in a dark hotel room watching TV with the volume off! Third, and this is hard to believe, but if you had to take a bus back to your Disney hotel, we could be back at our STR and in the pool long before you would normally get back to your hotel (and the pool is open all night at our STR!). Finally, PRICE!!!
What do you love most about the vacation rental business?
There are several things about the STR business that I love. The first is that 99% of our guests are happy and pleasant! I’m sure being in the Disney market helps, because for many guests, their Disney trips are the trip of a lifetime. I am a people person, and I love interacting with my guests. I even help many guests plan their trips, as I have become so familiar with everything within a four-hour radius of our villas!
Second, I love the creativity involved in theming our villas. I have a local management company to handle maintenance and cleaning, but I do all the painting and decorating myself. Last, but certainly not least, I love the business! I prefer to work for myself, I love building equity for retirement, and I can run the whole business from my phone from anywhere in the world. When I am not in Florida, I work from home, and so does my wife, so we have gotten to spend so much time with our children as they have grown up.
What do you dislike the most about it?
The other 1% of guests!!! I was fortunate to work closely with sales teams when I was in healthcare, and that taught me a lot. Building rapport with guests is one of the most important things you can do. I have helped several other people get started in this business, and one thing I tell them is, if you build a good rapport with your guest, they are much more likely to give you a good review, even if you didn’t deserve it and much less likely to give you a bad review.
However, every once in a while, you run into a guest who simply cannot be pleased, no matter what you do! This is the most frustrating feeling because you know you have bent over backwards to please them, and they are still going to leave a bad review, and unless they violate some channel rules in that review, you are unlikely to get it taken down. I consider any review less than five stars to be a bad review. At this point, we have close to 1000 reviews across our properties in all channels, with about 93% being five stars, so it is much easier to survive a bad review, but personally, it hurts.
How do you use OwnerRez to manage your business?
OwnerRez is the most important piece of software we use to run our business. Sure, we could survive without it, but our workload would increase tenfold. We, of course, use OwnerRez as a channel manager, but to be honest, in our market, there are only two to three channels that matter. That is not a knock on channel management, but praise to OwnerRez for being the first channel manager to not charge separately for this feature. We use OwnerRez for all direct bookings, credit card processing, bookkeeping integration, communication management (templates are key), and owner management for the villas we don’t own. I don’t think there are many features in OwnerRez that we do not use to some degree!
What is the most useful feature OwnerRez offers?
Automation!!! The ability to automate so many tasks and activities is what makes OwnerRez so helpful. We use custom fields to differentiate items specific to properties and then use templates and triggers with these fields to cut down on the number of templates and triggers needed. The QuickBooks integration saved us about 80% of our accounting work once we took the time to set it up. Tags help us keep track of the status properties from booking to arrival. Reports help us pay taxes and report commissions to our owner customers.
There are so many things, I can’t list them! The OwnerRez team is great about constantly improving or updating things. As an example, I was having a bit of an argument with a certain channel about floor plans not being allowed as pictures. I didn’t want to exclude these from all channels, as many guests ask for them, and then just recently OwnerRez put out an update allowing pictures to be restricted from certain channels.
Gerry and his wife have done an excellent job creating a thriving STR business in Orlando, Florida. We look forward to seeing Your Florida Vacation Villa continue to grow and deliver amazing experiences for guests for years to come.