The Hustler's Digest StaffJoshua Hanif is the founder of OurHaus; a full-service property management company based out of Toronto with operations that extend through Europe, Bali, NY, Miami, Calgary, and Toronto.
As a property management company, Ourhaus takes new approaches to traditional real estate investing and accelerates their investors’ returns through short term rentals.
They also partner with real estate investors and manage their properties on over 200+ vacation rental platforms amongst many other things like design, customer service communications, cleaning, and accounting.
In an interview with Joshua a couple of weeks ago, he shared some insightful tips such as how he overcame obstacles and how he gained the right inspiration to create his brand.
What’s the Source of inspiration behind the creation of OurHaus?
What inspired me to create OurHaus is my love for hosting memorable experiences and traveling. Luckily the more I traveled and experienced the world as a tourist, the more it improved our offerings as a management company.
These intangibles gave our guests a memorable home to create new memories which improved our bottom line and made our investors happy as well. Not only did we go from providing beautiful accommodations but we took it a step further and became a full concierge service for our guests to ensure that their trip to whatever respective city we operate in was like no other.
Between restaurant reservations, event recommendations, and nightlife concierge services, we opened up our offering to help our guests have a true local & authentic experience of the city as the locals would.
We knew we were selling the experience more than the accommodation and enhanced that offering which landed us Superhost status on Airbnb’s platform and Prefered status across the much larger platforms such as Booking.com & Expedia.
What Problems Does Your Firm Plan To Solve?
The problems Ourhaus aims to solve as a property management company fall into two categories. The first addresses the problem of investors and the second category of problem they’re looking to solve addresses the customers.
For anyone that’s invested in real estate before I’m sure they can understand the pain that comes with nightmare tenants and covering vacancies. We eliminate that hassle for our investors. We’ve had investors that have had tenants miss out on payments for months and others that have gone months without finding the right tenant and having their property sit vacant.
With our service, we eliminated that worry because with our expertise, knowledge, and inside connections with the vacation rental platforms, we were able to optimize our efforts and provide consistent occupancy thus increasing revenues and maximizing profits.
For example one of our clients came to us because he just purchased a $1.3million dollar two-family home in downtown Toronto and it had been sitting empty on the market for 4 months until he connected with us. Our interior design team stepped in to spice up the home, we optimized his listing and played with the algorithms to get the listing onto the first page of Airbnb and within 36hour we received 15k in reservations.
In 30 days we received 62k in reservations which more than covered our client’s entire mortgage for the year. The mortgage on the home was $55,200 for the year. Working with us relieved him from the headache of filling his vacancies and dealing with nightmare tenants because we handle all of that and all of our guests pay before arriving so our clients can be safe and assured that their payments will be received.
On the guest’s side – we are redesigning the entire experience for them. I’ve stayed in vacation rental homes where the host was exceptional, I’ve stayed in vacation homes where the host was extremely terrible and everything in-between.
We operate at a level of consistency that would meet the highest level that our guests would find. From comforting touches like welcoming cards, chocolates, complimentary snacks, and entire-stay concierge services our model is to offer a hospitality service as expected at the Ritz Carlton but within our vacation rental homes.
These above and beyond strategies don’t go unnoticed by our guests and we see it in our reviews/feedback and from the increase of repeat customers that we’re fortunate to have.
What Obstacles Did You Face When You Started Your Business?
The obstacles that I faced when starting my business were visa restrictions in the U.S as well as building the right team.
Client acquisition was never an issue for us because with our historical data, performance, customer service, and ease of service we were able to scale rather quickly.
It was once we scaled that having the right individuals would be key to maintaining the success rate that we had established. After about a year our team grew to eight. We had two full-time customer service reps, an accountant, an interior designer, myself who implemented systems and business development, and the entire cleaning staff.
What’s your take on the media and entrepreneurship?
I think it’s great. Now more than ever entrepreneurship is becoming more and more popular so individuals are taking the leap of faith into starting businesses that they’re passionate about.
Not only does this aid into the happiness of the individual but it’s also aiding in innovation. People are thinking bigger, shooting for the stars and after looking up to the moguls that we see in the media, it’s evident that anything is possible.
Without that belief there would be no Elon Musk’s, Steve Jobs’s, Brian Cheskey’s, etc. so it’s great to see the media highlighting these success stories of entrepreneurship changing the world.
