New Motel Leasehold Owners

Thanks Benny, and will do.  Motel in QLD.  Yes, have been reading on here for some time getting some good info that assisted in our venture.

Hi All, apologies for taking some time to get back to you!  Well, what a time we have had.  The purchase period was extremely drawn out, from the acceptance, to the due diligence, to the fine tuning of the legals before exchange of contracts, to the handover period, and finally a period of time where we have been doing it on our own!!

Well, where to start.  Once we arrived we were met with vendors keen to move on, and us obviously keen to learn.  Our keenness didn't seem to matter in the least to the vendor, they had seemingly moved on some period of time close to when the contract became unconditional.  Anyway, we pressed on, we took an approach of walking before we run.  We did skype interviews with employees the vendors had and made a decision to keep the longer serving ones rather than the most recent additions.  This meant that we were granted a 70% "credit" from the vendors for any long service/rec leave entitlements at date of handover.  We have already improved on the bottom line by doing the room stripping ourselves as opposed to leaving this to the staff.  Of the 8 staff that were on, we kept 4, and to be honest, we really haven't done a great deal of labour ourselves so shows that the vendor was a little slack at staff management.

I could type and type, but would probably bore the hell out of you, happy to answer any specific questions anyone may have.  Happy to recommend any of the accountants/solicitors/insurer/bank etc that we used who were all great.

Suffice to say, that despite the expected hiccups, we have been traveling pretty well with all things considered.  We are making a great living, seeing more of the kids, seeing more of each other, have reduced stress levels, and would NEVER consider our move to have been a poor one.

Hi Corey, been a while since I have logged on!

We have found occupancy rates have improved since we took over. Historically, the months of June through to the end of August had seen the motel occupancy rates drop to around the 53% mark. We had occupancy over 80% average for June and July has good forward bookings. We are fortunate in that our location is a halfway point, so we get a lot of walk-in bookings. We’ve also been using the features provided through trip advisor to generate more bookings. Moving toward mobile apps and getting them on board has assisted greatly. We have switched to a new reservation system too that integrates our channel manager directly with our reservation system so I don’t need to log into my channel manager to update availability and rates, it gets pulled live off my system. It also has an inbuilt revenue maximiser that we can use. Essentially it will increase your online rates when occupancy is over a certain percentage and can decrease them when you are looking for more bookings. We haven’t used this yet as we haven’t had any need, and quite honestly have enjoyed the 1 or 2 days that we have had where there have only been a few bookings!!

The biggest thing that we had to get worked out was who was going to do what role. I’ve taken the front office and cooking, my wife has charge of all of the cleaning staff, entering the figures into xero, and delivering the breakfasts.

It certainly is rewarding when you see the bank account, but we are certainly seeing the fact that you don’t get a lot of downtime. We generally follow this routine : 6am up and shower, 6:30am breakfast start to fire, 9am the cleaners arrive, check-outs happening during breakfast preps. Cleaning usually compete by 12pm. Rooms checked and ticked for approval for new guests. Guests start checking in from 1pm. Guests still checking in up to 8pm….Office locked up

8:30pm print transaction report from eftpos machine, do checks and balances against roll over report. Enter in breakfasts onto system, prepare breakfast trays, get breakfast order ready. Around 10pm, sit down for a bit of telly. We usually throw a meal down sometime between 6pm and 8pm! The days just disappear on you! On the upside, I spend the day around my kids on the weekends with them hindering our duties while trying to be of assistance :)

We have got a couple who have motel minded here with the previous owners for some years, they will be coming in next week so we can go for a short break with the kids. I’m going to make a point of ordering any obscure item on the breakfast menu and watch as the owners madly dash out to get the stuff as nobody has ordered it for some time so they haven’t got the stock :) It happened to us when we first took over until I had the time to do up a more friendly breakfast menu :)

Our planned renovations have had to go on hold – we had the work planned for the anticipated quiet months of June & July but the tourist trade has dictated that the quiet time was not to be.

We found that we picked up more corporate trade simply by purchasing a fresh coffee machine and getting in the travel cups. The reps love that they can drive out of here and not have to stop soon after to get a fresh coffee to have in the car while they drive to their next stop. We also offer the reps a packed lunch to go which they have taken to with gusto. Also the new reservation system can e-mail accounts so they no longer have to come into the office to settle the bill, we do the transaction as card not present and e-mail the receipt through. Word has spread on this and we have picked up some great new corporate trade.

We are certainly earning more than we had anticipated, more than we would ever have expected to earn in our previous lives as permanent employees. But you get what you put into it and it certainly is not a case of sitting back and letting the money role in, it is long days indeed!

Best of luck all!