Film Shoot Rentals: A Unique Path to Revenue with Josh Lawlor

Jeff Kikel: 00:00:00

Hello, Freedom Nation. It's Jeff here once again, and I am super excited today to have Josh Lawlor on. Now Josh started off his career in business, and then eventually started to transition into real estate. And a few years ago, he came up with an idea that he's going to share with us on the show he actually rents his home out in other places as film sites. And it was such an interesting concept. When I first heard about this, I had to have him on the show to share. It is one of the neatest concepts and is one of the places that you can turn a dead asset your home into an active asset that is generating cash flow. So make sure Stay tuned for the show. We will be right back in a second.

FN Intro/Outro: 00:00:53

Welcome to the Freedom Nation podcast with Jeff Kikko. On this show, Jeff shares his expertise in financial and retirement planning from a different perspective. Planning for Your Freedom Day, which is the first day that you wake up and have enough income or assets and do not have to go to work that day. Learn how to calculate what you need, how to generate income sources, and listen to interviews from others who've done it themselves. Get ready to experience your own Freedom Day.

Jeff Kikel: 00:01:27

Hello, Freedom Nation. It's Jeff here once again. And I am super excited today because we are going to have a conversation about movie house rentals. And Josh will clarify all this. But Josh Lawlor is on today. And he's had a lot of experience starting off in the beginning world working for somebody else but transitioning into the real estate world. So Josh, welcome to the show, my friend.

Josh Lawlor: 00:01:54

Great. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Jeff Kikel: 00:01:55

I am super excited to have you on we had a quick conversation before this. And you guys are going to absolutely love what he's doing turning what would normally be a dead asset into something that is generating revenue. So Josh, why don't we kick it off. Tell us your story. How did you get to the point where you're at today?

Josh Lawlor: 00:02:14

Sure. Yeah. So we have to back up a little bit. I didn't jump right into film shoot rentals. I think like a lot of people working in a corporate job was looking for another way right a different alternative. And of course read all the read all the books read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right, the same game catalyst that it is for most people, but it took a while I think maybe some people it took me a while to take action as well. If I think back, my initial foray into real estate was what I'll call a long term living flip. So my wife and I bought a single family suburban home, it was the classic ugliest house on the block. Okay, kitchen was a time capsule to 1984. And we knew that there was an opportunity, it was a good neighborhood. And we knew that we could fix it up and ideally create some equity. So we ended up doing a pretty major gut renovation, addition, created some nice equity timing. Again, I can't take credit for being super strategic. It was just when we had a second child and we needed more space. But it happened to be right after the financial crisis. So we're able to buy at a low. So we have a rising real estate market tailwinds behind us, in addition to creating value with renovation, created a lot of equity, did a cash out cash out refinance and home equity line of credit and that enabled us to have a downpayment to start dabbling in long distance single family rentals, that's I'm in the northeast and looking around realized that the market, there were better markets elsewhere in the country. And we ended up investing in some turnkey, just dipping our toes in turnkey single family rentals in the southeast. So in the Atlanta market in the jack cattle market. This is probably about seven years ago or so. And initially, I was very focused on cash flow running the numbers. Okay, this'll cash flow couple 100 bucks a month. And of course, I'd see the cash flow and then we'd have Oh needs a roof repairs, wipe out all of our gains for the entire year. I said, Okay, this isn't really working out as I originally planned. But you look back at what's happened in the real estate market over the past seven years. And the appreciation on the east, we ultimately picked up about four single family rentals. And the appreciation was just phenomenal. Right? And so again, took advantage of that, to cash it out a couple times, actually, well, interest rates were low. And that gave us again, some capital to work with and we were looking around and we said you know what, we've been through a kind of a renovation on our primary residence in the past it was went relatively smoothly create a lot of equity. Let's do it again. So we actually found another fixer upper in our area plan to do the same thing. And this is 2018. And the structure that we identified was actually it was an older structure a little bit close to the street. So by current setback rules and zoning, it wouldn't have met the standards but every architect would Mark, like five architects, every architect, we talk to you said, as long as you don't make it worse, just follow that line, you'll be fine. Famous last words. So we got our plans were with an addition and renovation. We presented it to our local planning board. And they said, Yep, can't do this. You exceed the setbacks with the existing structure. And so he looked around and he said, Okay, Plan B, and move it guys. Well, exactly. That was our decision, though it was either renovate the existing structure, which wasn't really our business plan, or tear down rebuild. So we ended up doing a tear down rebuild, which was not the plan, which didn't surprisingly, didn't add as much additional cost as we would have expected. But it because it was a much it was an infrastructure, but it did add a lot of additional regulatory requirements like environmental reviews, and now we had to deal with a lot more water mitigation issues and things like that. But one of the nice side benefits that we did learn from this, when you do a tear down and we had never done a tear down before is you can, if you have a local fire department, they're very interested in using a structure that's going to be torn down for training purposes. And if you get an official appraisal on the structure, you can actually take a nice tax benefit because you can donate your structure house that is going to be torn down to the fire department doing a good thing for your community, right helping your local fire department do a training exercise. And you can take a pretty nice tax benefit for the value of the home that you're you're knocking down. That was a nice tip that our architect told us about just often you should talk to your local fire department, they may be interested in this. So we ended up doing a tear down rebuild got into the new house. And this is really when this is how we now land on film shoots because we were in this new house we and there wasn't a lot in it. We hadn't really settled in yet. There was a lot of space. And we were talking to someone and somehow it came up in conversation. He said, Oh, some people rent their homes for film shoots. So maybe you want to I think we were maybe complaining about the cost of the renovations. We went over budget things like this. And so he said, Okay, that's interesting. Let's look into this. And that's how the real estate journey that takes us from single family rentals along the way we picked up some small multifamily is as well, two to two to four units. Now I'm just really most excited about film shoot rentals, Team primary home.

Jeff Kikel: 00:07:16

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that. How does that process work?

Josh Lawlor: 00:07:21

Yeah, good question. I think it's probably worth Jeff just first stepping back and dispelling some myths or misconceptions that people have around film shoots. And you even said in the intro, right, you talked about movies. And so when people hear film shoots, they think feature film, huge set special effects. But when we're talking about film shoots, it's a catch all phrase for and this is the approach that I teach my courses. Well, one day commercial production, so we're talking either video productions, still photo shoots, etc. And we're not really talking about entertainment feature films, we're talking about companies that need content. If you think about it, every company out there has got a website that needs refreshing every company needs social media presence and doing commercials. And the types of guests or paying clients that we have are really run anywhere from the companies that you probably heard of, right. Like we've had Amazon and Lululemon and Zillow, calm and do shoots in our house, to pad musicians shooting a music video to retailers who specialize in clothes for babies and toddlers, and they're refreshing their line and they need a new season, they want to shoot in all of their new lines of products, right. And so it really runs the gamut of if you think of any business that is selling something, right, they need content. And so they're looking for a location to shoot their content. So that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about film shoots. And I think it's important to point out that you may also be thinking about, okay, I don't live near La, or I don't live near a big city. So that's another common misconception. So geographically, again, tied into what I just said. Businesses are everywhere across the country. And we've had and typically the client, like the owner of a company, or the main representative wants to be on site to watch the shoot, they typically choose a location that's convenient to them. So you can imagine there are small businesses all across the country therefore there's a need for film shoots all across the country, and iPad crews will travel the client the business themselves will travel at different times I've experienced both location is really not a deal breaker when it comes to film shoots. It's really open across the country. I think the other big myth that people have is I live in a normal house right? This isn't going to work. I don't have that nice ocean estate mansion. I think it's important for people to know that all productions have unique requirements are their production requirements that say we need to shoot at out into the Hamptons ocean front, sure, but most of the time a shoots looking for something very specific and they're not even necessarily Looking for your entire house, they may be just looking for a living room or a master bathroom with a certain look. And if we have time, I'll just share a couple of stories I think that illustrate this point nicely. So when we were first starting our film shoot rental journey, we fielded an inquiry from an online platform that connects parents to caretakers. So parents looking for babysitters, and nannies and they can search. And so this company was just doing a refresh of their website, that's a pretty typical shoot. They came by to do a scouting visit, where they the director, the producer, come by with a couple of people from the crew, check out the place, look at the lighting, maybe plant some scenes, they said, Okay, we'll give you a call on a couple of days, or we're looking at some other locations. They call me up. I said, Josh, we loved your house. But because we want a look that's going to make it look like little kids live in the house. And my daughters are a little bit older. And they said, Yeah, we're basically looking for something that looks a little more cluttered, a little more wear and tear a little more lived in. And so essentially, you know, they didn't want like messy enough. They didn't want the new house. Yeah, exactly. They want us like a more just very normal looking house. Right. But I think that's important to know. And just last story on this, we about let's see about a year into doing film shoots. Unfortunately, we had this plumbing disaster, we had a water filter under our kitchen sink that exploded overnight, flooded our entire first floor. We ended up having to demo everything. So I'm talking about that the wood floors, the cabinets, the countertops. And of course, during the three or four months it was going to take to repair. I'm fielding film shoot inquiries, and I'm responding and saying, geez, I'm really sorry, but we're had this issue, we will be back in business and give me a call in three or four months if you're still interested. But we had one inquiry that happened to be a startup that built a utility monitoring device. Okay, so these are kind of this something that like, attaches to your electrical, your gas, we need water shares. Exactly, exactly. And so these guys were actually excited. And they said, Oh, that's okay. And can we shoot in your like, under construction area to show people what happens if you're not using this device? So they came they did a shoot in our basement? And yeah, so it really any kind of home is like any kind of home is okay for film shoots anywhere is okay for film shoot. So hopefully that helps to clarify a little bit. That's awesome. What we're talking about,

Jeff Kikel: 00:12:13

yeah. Do you have to have the place decorated in a special way? Or do they typically come in? All right, we need to move all this stuff around, or they bring their own artwork or whatever?

Josh Lawlor: 00:12:23

That's a good question. And it really runs the gamut. So they go from shoots that they barely bring anything they make do with what you have. Like I always joke that our plants have made cameos and a lot of shoots and our kitchen where it's Oh, can we borrow? Can we borrow this to bigger shoots that will bring, they'll bring a ton of props, and they'll tear down your furniture and what I mean to take apart a bed or something and replace it with whatever they have. But then put everything back at the end of the day as if nothing ever happens. No, you don't need. That's why I always say every shoot is different. So there's no sense in trying to create a home that will be appealing. Because you don't know what the requirements are. We've had inquiries from a roofing company that wanted to shoot our roof didn't even care about the inside, too. But we had a well known vodka company that wanted to do a tailgating scene in our driveway again, like outdoor spaces. So yeah, it really runs again. Love it.

Jeff Kikel: 00:13:19

Love it. How do you get started? What's the first steps really on how you get started doing something like this?

Josh Lawlor: 00:13:25

Yeah, so I think my recommendation and that's actually the beauty of we didn't even touch on kind of the benefits. But one of the beauties of film shoot rentals is you can get started right away, though, unlike other and I mentioned I've been involved in other real estate niches and traditional real estate requires a down payment. If you're getting financing requires underwriting, you have to search for a property. These things all take time filmstrip rentals, you're already in your asset, right? You're living in your asset. Yeah. So really the only thing that I recommend, and this is again, from even from a cost outlay standpoint, the only additional cost is I recommend professional photos. Okay, look, if you're a great photographer, you've got a great camera, by all means go for it. But in most cases, I recommend hiring a professional photographer to take real estate photos. And then once you have your photos, what you want to do is you want to list your home on one of the listing platforms, you can search, there's a ton of different listing platforms out there and they're growing as this becomes film, shoot rentals are still very little known, but they're becoming more popular. And so there are platforms that are popping up that where you can list your home right on. And there are a few things too. I'm not going to go through all the platforms. But I think there are a few things that people need to look for in a platform that will recommend. First of all, you want to make sure that a platform that you find covers your location. So not all platforms are universal, and some are very specific to certain regions. I recommend finding a platform where it's free to list I've certainly tried pay platforms, but I found that they weren't any better than the free ones. So I recommend just free platforms. You want to find a platform that has pricing transparency. What I mean by that you want to be able to list your rate. And we haven't even really talked about the benefits on profitability standpoint, but maybe get to that. Yeah, I

Jeff Kikel: 00:15:09

figured we'd get to that. But yeah, yeah. So

Josh Lawlor: 00:15:11

this this may be where we talk about that, again, as someone who has and still participates in more traditional real estate for anyone familiar with say short term rentals, you know that the same property and you're familiar with this right with your mid term rental. So you look at the properties that you own, that you use from instrumentals, you probably look at what's my monthly rent on all term, traditional 12 month lease, versus a mid term lease versus a short term rental lease, you're much more profitable, right? Film shoot rentals, you're actually renting by the hour. So you're putting up a price by the hour. And when you do that, just the economics of it, you're charging much higher rates. So just give an example I happen to live in a higher cost part of the country. Obviously, real estate is location specific depends on where you are. I'm in the Northeast outside of a large city. And we rent, our base rate is $600 an hour. Okay. And one of the things I teach is the traditional political professional shoot all it's typically an all day shoot. So we're talking 1010 to 12 hours, typically, and you can screen for that as well, I can. When we first started, we definitely we underpriced and we didn't send.

Jeff Kikel: 00:16:22

Yeah. And we're not expecting these. Yeah, I don't want people running in for an hour. And then that's it. And

Josh Lawlor: 00:16:26

that's exactly what we first started. We didn't have any minimum set, we didn't have any kind of rules. And we were getting all kinds of inquiries for people who said, Yeah, I just need it for an hour, I need to do it for an hour and a half. This is what we want to do. And definitely a red flag, guys, I don't recommend that. And you also you're not optimizing most shoots take at least an hour to set up and another hour to go back and put everything back. Exactly. Yeah. Again, in my example. So if 600 An hour times if it's a 12 hour, 12 hour day, right, which is typically of several younger bucks or so yeah, yeah, multiply it. And look, I think I want to be clear, I don't do this every day live in my house. And there's got to be a balance. But what I like is I like taking advantage of and many of our listeners probably heard of the Augusta rule in real estate. In real estate, there's a rule kind of a history, it's called the Augusta rule, because the history is a mass of people living in Augusta, Georgia during the Masters golf tournament wanted to rent their homes to people come in to see the tournament, and they didn't want to pay wanted to get an exemption from having to pay taxes on that rental income lobby, Congress and it passed. And as a result, everyone today, at least in the US, you can rent a property for up to 14 days, again, not a tax advisor, consult your tax advisor for your unique situation. But yeah, and not pay taxes. So I actually my wife, and I've calibrated our pricing such that we don't exceed 14 days per year, we try to come in like just a 14 days per year. That's like one a month, right? Maybe some most shoots are one day, some days some shoots are like two days. And if you're making 100 grand out of those 14 days, that's without paying taxes, that's like 150, Grand Pre tax Sure, can be quite profitable. And back to the how do you get started, you want to find a listing platform that allows you to price and the more pricing granularity, the better. So you can price not just your hourly base rate. But can you have tiered pricing what I mean by tiered pricing. So let's say your base rate is 500 bucks an hour for a smaller shoot of say, one to 10 people. And then can you tear, can you price it so that if you have 11 to 20, people say you're gonna you're going to boost that up to 600. Right? So this will allow you to optimize your profitability for your shoots. And different platforms have different levels of flexibility there in terms of what you can what you can list. So yeah, that's how you want to get started. Just take some pictures, get your home up on the platforms. And then the third point I mentioned is just you want to be aware of local regulation, right? Yeah, it's always important that I always recommend that anyone considering this, you always want to be aboveboard, find out most municipalities have some sort of film policy, you can talk to you just go online to your local municipality site and kind of search for film policy or give them a call. Most have some sort of film policy and some sort of film permit policy. Don't be afraid of this. Every professional production is totally used to working with the town's Yeah, and whatever permit fees they have to pay. They're used to it and if they make up plus, it's kind of a red flag, and I would recommend not working with those people.

Jeff Kikel: 00:19:34

That's awesome. What a cool business to be in and it's 14 days a year is not a major intrusion on your life. And you can do more

Josh Lawlor: 00:19:42

And Yeah, and look, I've got paint patches. Okay, exactly. It's just up to you in terms of how far you want to push it. And the other thing that I wanted to do we haven't really talked about is we were talking about this mostly from the perspective of your own your primary home, but if you're if you're a short term rental investor, this is a great compliment to put your short term properties up on professional rentals as well. Because if you think about most of your Airbnb bees that are traditionally booked up on the weekends, long, long weekend, Friday to Monday, probably don't have as many bookings on, say Tuesday to Thursday, but film shoot rentals are their businesses during the day. They happen during the week. So it's a way to optimize the value of your property as well

Jeff Kikel: 00:20:24

Well, and level out some of that craziness that you can see in the short term swings where you hit summer and everything's great. And then you get into winter. And it's if you're not in an area where there's a lot of winter sports or whatever. You're up a creek at that point.

Josh Lawlor: 00:20:39

Yeah, exactly. And I will say, I know there's been a lot of in many locations that has been changing short term rental regulations as well. A lot of municipalities we're hearing about that are limiting or outright banning their short term rental changing their policy, film, shoot rentals are different people aren't staying overnight. It's just part of the day. And like I said, most towns do have established film policies, and those are in place to really make sure that everything people stay safe, that there's not too much disruption, you're not going to have explosions going off, right? Yeah, no, I think it's a great thing for people

Jeff Kikel: 00:21:11

freaking brilliant. I love it. What a cool way of doing it. Once again, if you're a Rich Dad, Poor Dad person, you realize that your house is not an asset. But you can turn it into an asset in this case and use it to generate a revenue stream.

Josh Lawlor: 00:21:24

Yeah, and it's just people it's there's so little competition, right? People don't know about this very easy, low cost, low risk way to get into it. And like I said, if you're looking to build any kind of whatever you're looking to build, whether it's another real estate, this is a very quick way to get that downpayment. Our first six months, I think we made about 50 grand in first month, and this was not we're not doing shoots every day, this is again, shoot a month or so.

Jeff Kikel: 00:21:49

Yeah. And that's that could be a downpayment in certain parts of the country, right? For traditional rentals or can be a man it could be a part of business. Yeah, exactly. Use it to turn your asset your asset into a completely mortgage free asset at that point. Yeah. Yeah. Great idea. I just absolutely love it. Cool. Let's let's transition to the Fast Five questions here. Sure, sure. All right. So you wake up in the morning, business is totally gone. You have 500 bucks in your pocket and laptop computer, a place to live, and food and clothing. What are you going to do first?

Josh Lawlor: 00:22:24

Look, I think this question is set up perfectly for film shoot rentals, take 200 Take two, take 200 bucks, hire a professional photographer, post the pictures on your laptop and you've got your home and start renting for film shoots.

Jeff Kikel: 00:22:35

Yeah. And take your wife out to dinner with the other 250. There you go. Cool. All right. So next one, what's the biggest business mistake you've ever made?

Josh Lawlor: 00:22:45

Yeah, so I think the first thing that comes to mind is I mentioned earlier in the show that the house I'm living in now was going to be a renovation, but we ended up having to do a teardown rebuild, we don't have family in the area where we live to stay with. So we had to find a rental during the construction. And it was hard to find a rental that just not a lot of rental stock or the landlords wanted multi year leases, or for whatever reason just wasn't right. So we ended up having to just look a little bit further afield, and we ended up renting a place that was convenient, but officially just outside of our school district by about 100 yards. We didn't think anything of it, we didn't think it'd be a big deal, hey, we're just out of the house while we're doing a construction that we're gonna move back in, been in the neighborhood for 15 years. But we got as a result, we I'll never forget, we got a few weeks before Thanksgiving, we got a very stern letter from the school district saying it's come to our attention that you're no longer living within the district boundaries, and therefore you're illegally sending your children to the local public school, you got to come in for a meeting. So we looked at it was was will straighten this out. It's a misunderstanding. They held firm base, and basically gave us an ultimatum. They said you've got either your kids have two weeks left in school, before we just pick them out. Or you can pay to wish quote unquote tuition if you'd like to S and your kids can stay in a local school district. So it was like a school district Shakedown. And they ended up extorting us for 10s of 1000s of dollars. So the construction was going on. So that was the biggest mistake of not realizing that that could even happen. So yeah, that was a hard lesson where the boundaries are that Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. Which makes me laugh because you're still paying property taxes. Oh, yeah.

Jeff Kikel: 00:24:29

The lot are tearing down but absolutely. Doesn't count. Because Absolutely,

Josh Lawlor: 00:24:33

Absolutely. Yep. Oh, god. I

Jeff Kikel: 00:24:36

Love school district seven stuff. Yep. What's a good book that you'd recommend for our audience? Yeah,

Josh Lawlor: 00:24:43

I actually got a copy right here. It's called the book on advanced tax strategies by Amanda Hahn. I know people don't always get excited about taxes, but maybe if you're a real estate investor you're interested in So Amanda Han is actually my CPA. I've actually I was lucky enough she agreed to participate in the course. where I teach film shoot rentals. So I do an interview with her where we deep dive into all of the tax nuances of film shoot rentals. I think certainly, if you're a real estate investor, check out Amanda's book. But even if you're not an entrepreneur, but you're thinking about real estate that you can, there's so much to learn and just packed with, even if you think you know something about taxes, I think it's just you start to look at the world in a different way, you start to see opportunities, and it's just, I think it behooves everyone to be smart and understand tax strategy.

Jeff Kikel: 00:25:30

I love it. Absolutely. Love it. Cool. What is a tool that you use in your business every day?

Josh Lawlor: 00:25:36

Yeah, I think that goes traditional. Maybe it's outdated at this point. But I actually do use Evernote. So Evernote is I love that app. It's I don't I probably don't even use it to its fullest extent. I just constantly putting notes in there and it goes back years. It's just everything's in one spot. It's easily searchable, all ideas, I love it, love Evernote.

Jeff Kikel: 00:25:56

We are brothers from another mother, my friend because it is my baby. It's what I it's what I run my life on. And I don't even use it to its full extent it can do so many more things. But just even you're reading something on the internet, you can quickly click a thing that puts it into your Evernote so that you can go back and do it later. So yeah, great idea. Okay, last question. What is your definition of freedom?

Josh Lawlor: 00:26:17

Yeah, I think freedom is probably like most people, it's all about time, right? spending your time the way you want to spend it with whom you want to spend it not being tied down to anyone else's schedule.

Jeff Kikel: 00:26:27

I love it. Absolutely. Cool. What if somebody wants to get a hold of you? I know you teach a course on this. What's the best way?

Josh Lawlor: 00:26:35

Yeah, people can always just email me directly Josh at film, shoot rentals.com. Or check out the site film shoot rentals.com where they can learn more about the course. And if anyone's interested in learning how to get started, I put together this pretty step by step course to really walk people through going from Hey, I don't know anything about film shoots to just get started and start earning money from your home.

Jeff Kikel: 00:26:56

Beautiful. Alright, Josh, thank you so much, my friend. This was a very informative, probably the most innovative real thing I've had on the show in a long time. This has been fun. I really appreciate you sharing it. Yep, yep. My pleasure. Thanks, Jeff. All right, my friend. Have a good day. And folks, as always, we do these shows for you. So make sure if you like this, hit that like button, share it with somebody that might benefit from it as well. And if you have the chance, make sure you subscribe to the channel if you not if you aren't already. We do these shows every Tuesday and Thursday. So we will put those out. But we have been putting out a ton especially on YouTube lately because we're anticipating the Freedom Day book which will be coming out very soon. So make sure that you do that. We will see you guys back here the very next time.