Early Real Estate Investing Success as a Globe-Trotting Couple

Spencer Giles and Ashley Antidormi

Laurel: Spencer, actually, I assume they are in Niagara-on-the-Lake. They love travel, fitness and dogs. They've started investing in 2018 and you've expanded your portfolio to 18 units with a mix of short-term and long-term rentals. Congratulations to you two. They co-founded Travel Lots Property Management, a short-term rental management company, and it's grown to become one of the most popular short-term rental property management companies in the Niagara area.

Their goal is to become time and financially independent. We get that because like we said, you can always get more money, but you can't get more time. We get as much money in as you can, have all the time you want to do all the things you want to do. You want to travel the world and just like us, we love traveling. There you go, you love to travel. Let's go tell us how you work together. What do you do? How do you leverage each other?

Ashley: First off, I want to say, Gary, I love that you brought up the DiSC assessment. I have a psychology background. When I worked at my corporate job in HR, we used DiSC all the time. I've actually used it and done it for Spencer. That was a really big tool for helping us understand each other. We're very similar in a lot of ways in the sense that we have always had the same vision and the same goals. There would be things that he would do. I would never be able to quite wrap my head around.

The DiSC assessment was huge for us. Spencer is more the go getter. He's more money motivated, very driven. He loves looking into deals, running numbers, analyzing deals. He's the action taker. He's definitely a risk taker and definitely a take action. Now, ask questions later, kind of guy. He's the big picture dreamer in our relationship.

Spencer: We're predominantly heavy on the short-term rental side. We're actually in the compliments, my strengths and actress compliments, my weaknesses and she's a lot more detail oriented. She's a lot more organized. When we're looking at, let's say a new short-term vacation rental, I think of, okay, I can get this to 120K a year even though it's only projected to do 70 or 80. She's okay, let's step back and let's break down. How are we going to get there versus top line things? I know we can do that. She comes in and says, okay, let's plan and then let's execute. When it comes to that, it's super helpful.

From an investment approach, she's definitely a lot more conservative than I am, as she mentioned, I'm more of a risk taker. She's the one asking the detailed hard questions and there's times where you're looking at a deal like we're looking at a deal just down in Florida now on a vacation home. It's very easy to get emotionally attached to the property. It's beautiful. It's in a great location. She comes in and says, these numbers really make sense, 9% cash on cash return, really that good to own a property in Florida. Things like that, we ended up walking away from that deal and glad we did it because I know that we can go on to a new, bigger and better thing. Complimenting each other in that way, where it definitely helped for sure.

Ashley: What's funny is, he says that this is a strength in the moment he hates they asked so many questions.

Spencer: It definitely can be a pain in the side sometimes, but you appreciate it down the road once emotion wears off.

Ashley: We have purchased three different properties on site. I was definitely a combo of his high risk taking, whereas that scared me quite a bit to not be able to see the properties. One of them was a building before actually purchasing them. It took a lot of me asking a ton of questions and him really pushing in order to get those. And those are three of some of the best purchases we've made.

Spencer: Definitely, and connections are huge in any business, in any industry. We like to consider ourselves both fairly outgoing and the importance of meeting new people and building relationships and connections. Doing these speaking engagements and doing these networking events has been some of our favorite things.

Thanks again for having us on. However, we both have a tendency to love to talk. We even have like crazy little systems that we come up with or we tap each other under the leg through rambling too much, a really funny story. It was not too long ago. We were filming our episode on the everyday investor and we were standing for that one. Ashley missed the mark on the leg and I had to hold the face there for a fun time, but we got to come up with a new system, I think for that one. We just have quirky little things like that. That works for us. I know it's probably different for every couple out there, but yeah that's something that we've done. That's helped each other out.

Ashley: We can move on to how we work together. I guess again, similar to Gary and Darlene, we like to work on different floors of the house. If we're together, we find we just chat too much because we're both talking a lot. But we are working towards the same goals, both for our business and for our investments. We also agree on how we want to live our lives in the future.

Spencer: I know we're supposed to talk about how to not drive each other crazy, but as I'm sure all the couples can imagine, that's pretty tough to do, especially during these times at COVID and I still have my full-time corporate job. Running the business and looking at real estate on the outside and then getting together and talking about this. It can create some clashes but Ashley always tells me every day, how much of a pain in the rear end I can be, but we make it work. Like I said, we love to travel. We enjoy the fruits of our labor and I think that's what really helps us get through.

Ashley: We've actually found that taking our two dogs out for a walk each day without our phones has turned into little business meetings for us undistracted. We don't bring our phones. That's actually the time when we get our best ideas or work out the solutions to problems. We're both very kind of emotional fingers. There's times where we need to just separate, calm down and then come back together and think of logical solutions. It usually happens on these walks. We also do really well on not talking down to the other person. We respect each other's opinion. We may not always agree, but we definitely respect each other. I really feel like that's a key factor in how we've been able to make it work.

Laurel: Do you guys have special, like separate working areas in the end, in your home?
Spencer: Two-story house is key. We've got the office upstairs in the office downstairs, but that doesn't stop us from texting each other. If it's a really big conversation, I'll go upstairs or she'll come down. We definitely find that's very helpful because that's beside each other. The way my brain thinks in the gears going, I'll be interrupting, or every five minutes.

Laurel: We have two offices because we have no kids and we've got two bedrooms that turned into offices. Daniel emails me, drives me nuts. I get thousands of emails and he emails me just trying to say insane. He could walk 12, 50 feet. He emails me, so I get it. Any deal that went bad or they think you could have done better or something, Tim and Rey did that they really learned from?

Spencer: We haven't really had any regrets, like we're still fairly new, considering some of the seasoned veterans out there, like we've been doing for just under four years. All of the deals we've had have turned out great, but I will say we had to give one example of a very scary time. We had one property that we were closing on. We waived conditions. We thought everything was good to go, but it was in such a rough condition. The bank pulled out the last. We were stuck with, okay, we are now essentially liable. We didn't really know what was going on, but we knew that we were past the deadline on conditions.

We didn't have financing and we didn't have cash to put down. It was really scary at first, but we were scrambling probably for the last, for about a week and a half to try to find a different solution. We ended up going a private route because we knew the potential this thing had. We knew that once we got it up to par, the plan was to refinance it anyways. We knew once, it wasn't. Basically, condensed property. That was what it was, but it was our first one. It was scary and long story short, it is our best income producing property this day to this day.

I'm really happy that we did it and yeah, it's allowed us to free up time. Ashley left her corporate job last year. She's retired now and I'm going to be very soon given notice. I have three more months and then I'll be joining her in time.

Laurel: Thank you very much. You guys like always as an inspiration and hey, it's only onward and upward, right? It's even our mistakes we learn from and we just make better. Like we just get better. Thank you so much.