Avery: Hey guys, welcome back to the short-term show. A lot of y’all have been asking questions about hotel investing, and I don’t invest in hotels, so I don’t have those answers, but I also have the same questions as you. So I’m really excited today to have Diya. She invests in boutique hotels and does some rehabs and things like that, but she started with just regular single-family short-term rentals and then moved into hotels. I think a lot of you are going to get a lot of value out of this, including me, because this is a new one for me too, and I’m really interested in it. So, I’ll go ahead and have Diya introduce herself.

Diya: How’s it going, Diya? Good. Hi everyone, from Austin. I miss Austin so much. I’m actually ranch shopping, not for short-term rentals, just for personal, but I would like for it to be STR-able so that it can put in its own expenses. But anyway, it’s got nothing to do with anything in the Hill Country. I miss Austin so much. I’m jealous that you’re there. Yeah, I’m here actually, strangely, to set up my parents’ house for short-term mental purposes, so I’m rarely here, but I’m here right now in my hometown.

Avery: I roped your parents in! Yes, I have. Well, hopefully, this will be their first one, so they’re a little bit nervous. I did the same thing with my parents. My mom is running my parents’ one, and she’s really, really, really high-strung and a nervous person, so it was a little difficult at first, but she’s actually doing great. She has better reviews than we do, so she’s doing a good job.

Avery: That’s awesome, that’s awesome. Okay, cool. So let’s get right into it. So Diya, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into it first. Let’s start with just how you got into real estate investing, and then we’ll move into the hotel stuff.

Diya: Yeah, so I practiced as a litigation attorney, and before I got into real estate, I practiced law for five years with international firms, first in New York City. Then I moved back to Austin, basically intending to get started in the real CMS team, and so I basically was practicing law. I was working these really long hours, and I love my colleagues, but I just looked around and saw that even though folks were staying at these really nice apartments, they just weren’t really able to enjoy the fruits of their labor because they were so busy working. I’ve grown up traveling a lot with my parents, even though we didn’t have a lot of money at the time, and so I wasn’t really able to travel at all with my newly attorney mental status.

In fact, I felt really guilty even taking Christmas off. So I just looked into the financial independence movement, and I discovered that I really wanted to get started with real estate investing versus other types of investing. So I decided Austin was a natural fit.