Long before joining the short-term rental industry, Alexa Nota, co-founder and chief operating officer at Rent Responsibly, was a travel enthusiast.
“I love to travel and especially explore a place through the food and activities you can only experience there,” she said.
After getting her degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina, Alexa opened a boutique design, branding, and content agency for small businesses to give her the freedom to work from anywhere with interesting clients. A few years into that business, Alexa and her husband, Allen, then a personal trainer, also founded an online travel wellness magazine in which they wrote about staying healthy while traveling, the experience of living in a tiny home, and other adventures.
Discovering vacation rentals
“After a few years of the ups and downs of startups – both our own and my clients’ – I sought a few years of stability with a salaried position, and so I looked for opportunities in marketing or journalism in places I would vacation,” she said.
One of those places was Hatteras Island in the Outer Banks, a chain of barrier islands separating the Atlantic Ocean from the coast of mainland North Carolina. The area offers open-sea beaches, state parks, shipwreck diving sites, and artifacts from England’s first settlement in the New World.
“It was serendipitous that a property manager there was hiring for a marketing director, and it was in that role that I became enamored with the owner side of vacation rentals,” Alexa said. “It opened my eyes to a world that I previously thought was reserved for the wealthy, where families could have vacation homes in their own favorite places and be able to cover the homes’ expenses, keep them in the family for generations, and even help cover other life expenses, like retirement.”
Through exposure to many vacation rental owners, Alexa began to appreciate the many win-win benefits of vacation rentals.
Not only can middle-class families afford a vacation home by renting it out when they aren’t using it, but guests also benefit from these families opening their homes. Guests enjoy more cost-effective lodging and unique, local experiences in houses that would otherwise sit empty, she said. The win also extends to the local community which sees more tourism dollars going to local businesses and more local jobs serving vacation rental guests.
Advocating for the vacation rental industry
After Alexa left the property management company on Hatteras Island, she joined VRM Intel as vice president where she primarily covered STR regulations. It quickly became evident that without a local organization of hosts and managers, cities and towns could pass ill-informed and unsustainable regulatory schemes that unfairly punished conscientious, law-abiding vacation rental operators and ultimately didn’t solve community needs.
Through her coverage at VRM Intel, she also met David Krauss, the co-founder of NoiseAware, a company offering noise-monitoring solutions for property owners and managers. In 2019, the pair teamed up to produce what is now Rent Responsibly’s Humans of STRs series.
During that time, she also founded the Chapel Hill Short-Term Rental Alliance when the local hotel lobby petitioned the Town Council to ban short-term rentals. Though her regulatory coverage and experience in marketing helped significantly, she learned firsthand how difficult it is to launch and lead a grassroots organization.
Alexa and David both saw the need for a community-building and education platform to help groups like hers around the country and launched Rent Responsibly as a company in December 2019.
Finding win-win solutions for everyone
Today she is the COO, overseeing the staff and operations of their many moving pieces. The role leverages a combination of skills and knowledge from a winding career path that appears more happenstance than preplanned. “You can only connect the dots looking backward, right?” she said.
The team calls her their “conductor” because she keeps each train on its track, so to speak. Krauss refers to her as a “turbo-boosted human” for her feats in productivity and the “brilliant conductor of all things” at Rent Responsibly.
“She finds time where there isn’t any,” he said recently during one of the team’s online meetings.
For Alexa, the most exciting part of working at Rent Responsibly has been creating win-win situations, she said.
“I wholeheartedly believe there is a win-win solution to every challenge,” Alexa said. “In my day-to-day work, that’s often how to make an operational process more efficient and effective, but it also applies to bigger projects and accomplishments.”
For example, in the 2022 State of the STR Community study by Rent Responsibly and the College of Charleston, half of the research was qualitative interviews of local government staff to find out what their needs and challenges were when it came to managing short-term rentals in their jurisdictions. The findings from this part of the study boiled down to three key things: they want to work with the STR community, they seek collaboration and compliance, and they need help with the enforcement of regulations.
The second half of the study was a nationwide survey of more than 4,500 short-term rental owners and managers, and key results from that were: A good policy needs good enforcement, cities must better educate constituents on how/where to report complaints, and there is an opportunity to self-manage short-term rentals at the community level, including compliance and nuisance mitigation.
“Our initiatives now focus even more closely on bridging that opportunity gap, creating and identifying ways to work together and leverage what each party is good at for successful STR programs and the betterment of the entire community (win-win-win!),” Alexa said.
Creating a workplace for the whole person
She takes pride in the work culture that she and David have created, including creating jobs to fit people instead of the other way around.
“We will not hire for a position until we have found who we deem a ‘unicorn,’ someone who would take the role and our company to higher levels than we imagined and who would be a valuable culture add to our team,” she said. “We then tailor the role to leverage the person’s skills and passions not just for their personal success but also to be perfectly-fitting puzzle pieces with the rest of the team.”
She even recently created a “reverse job board”, a Dream Job form for people to confidentially submit what role would make them jump out of bed in the morning. If Rent Responsibly creates a similar opportunity, she’ll reach out directly to invite him or her to apply.
“This is one of the main reasons our team is as close-knit as it is: we care deeply about the whole person and the whole team as a family, and we’re collectively invested in each other’s success,” Alexa said. “This, in turn, helps us all get outside of our comfort zones and try new things as an agile and experimental startup. We’re always venturing into new territory and learning as we go, which we can do every day only because we venture together.”
In doing so, the team works incredibly hard, so Rent Responsibly also emphasizes wellness and work-life balance.
In addition to vacation time, employees get a paid day off on the first Friday of every month as well as three “Flex Weeks” a year in which no meetings are scheduled to allow the team to do professional development, catch up on housekeeping items, or more easily take time off.
The company also regularly holds wellness initiatives like the “Office Olympics: during the 2021 Summer Olympics and 2022 Winter Olympics. Each person is invited to create their own “Olympic event” in which they set a personal physical challenge that can be anything from stretching to marathons. Each person “competes” only against themselves. Each participant also picks a personal anthem that becomes part of an Olympics playlist. At the end, Dave and Alexa hold a closing ceremony and award custom gold medals and some sporty swag.
For the Winter Office Olympics, Alexa called her event the Decathlon of Different.
“I committed to trying 10 new ways to get active because my routines at the time were getting stale,” Alexa said. “I tried things I never thought I’d like and retried things I had done years before that didn’t work for me at the time.”
The Decathlon of Different is reflective of Alexa’s overall work style: a road of discovery, lifelong learning, and trying new methods until she finds a solution that works for everyone on her team – and in the short-term rental community.
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