Like Natalie Palmer’s other 24,000 Instagram followers, Tatianna Taylor-Tait appreciated Natalie’s humorous, reality-filled posts on vacation rental hosting.
Tatianna is a host, coach, and interior designer in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Natalie’s posts often feature clips of herself dancing along to a music clip or lip syncing funny dialogue that drives home a poignant point – such as the importance of using professional photography in listings and the value of brevity in house rules.
READ MORE: Communicating vacation rental house rules effectively + templates
As an interior designer, Tatianna also was drawn to Natalie’s focus on STR design like the perils of furnishing your short-term rental with a cheap coffee table or how design affects the success of your rental.
Tatianna, whose designs also draw a large following on social media, decided to introduce herself via a direct message to Natalie.
The Cawthorne House tatiannataylor.com
“She was out there, talking about the nitty gritty of hosting, the real truths, and I loved that,” Tatianna said. “I saw the value that she was sharing, and I wanted to be friends.”
After Tatianna’s first DM to Natalie, they began writing back and forth.
“In this industry, it can get so lonely, so if you connect with someone and they’re on your level, or they feel the exact same way as you do, you really have got to hold onto that,” Tatianna said.
Natalie and Tatianna’s hosting stories
Beyond their shared interest in design and hosting, Tatianna and Natalie had other things in common. Both were STR coaches who started teaching others after getting into hosting.
They also started hosting without any intention of making a profession out of it. For Natalie, she wanted to generate income for her parents’ second home in Big Bear, California, which was sitting mostly empty.
“Originally, we were only going to do it for one winter season and just see what the numbers came out to be. But it was just crazy, right out of the gate. And so all of that money that we got in that one winter, we reinvested in a down payment on another property in Big Bear.”
“Neighbors just started approaching me like, ‘Hey, your place seems to be booked all the time. Would you be willing to manage mine?’ So everything kind of exploded from there.”
She and her husband now manage 10 properties, including one that they own and the two that belong to her parents.
Paying it forward through education and coaching
In April 2022, she started a podcast called No Vacancy, where she invites guests to talk about hosting, STR design, and investment.
Tatianna filled in as host for Episode 29 in fall 2022, when Natalie lost her voice. Instead of interviewing a guest, Tatianna shared her best STR styling tips.
She also appeared as a guest on Episode 42 of the podcast in February 2023 when she shared the story of how she got into hosting.
She started renting out her Vancouver apartment on Airbnb in 2015 when she went for a six-week trip to Europe to cope with the grief of losing her mother, a beloved dog, and her job all in the matter of a couple of months.
The money she earned not only covered her rent but also part of the expenses from her trip.
Since then, she has expanded her portfolio to 12 short-term rentals and helps other hosts build generational wealth with properties through her education programs.
Tatianna founded Thanks for Booking in August 2021. It started out as a one-on-one coaching business, but as her portfolio and demand for her design services grew, she transitioned her instruction into a course that students can complete at their own pace.
Natalie offers coaching through her social media sites and her website, Host with Natalie. She offers small group instruction as well as webinars.
Before ever meeting in person, Tatianna and Natalie worked on a joint online workshop, called Level Up Your Listing. That two-day workshop planted the seed for greater things to come.
Meeting in person at an STR conference
Then, in early 2022, Natalie saw that Tatianna had posted on social media that she was attending the STR Wealth Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, in June 2022.
“I was like, ‘What is this?’ I didn’t know there was an event for short-term rental hosts,” Natalie recalled. “And Tatianna was like, ‘You should come. There’s extra room at our place, if you want to crash with me.’”
After getting her husband’s consent to watch their two small children, Natalie booked her ticket to Nashville.
“Tatiana and I were buddies that whole week in Nashville and didn’t leave each other’s side,” Natalie said.
After attending several sessions, they started talking about planning their own conference, building off of the themes from the Level Up Your Listing workshop they had done together in February 2022.
“We were like, we could do a more girly version of this,” Natalie said. “We’re all into design, and hosts talk so much about design. We need to do something that’s more tapped into the creativity that hosts have.”
Level Up Your Listing Summit
After returning home and talking more about it over video calls, they decided to make it happen. They named the event the Level Up Your Listing Summit after the workshop they did together.
They wanted the conference to speak primarily to women, especially those who are passionate about hosting and want to channel their creativity into the hosting experience – regardless of how small or large they want their business to be.
“It’s about maintaining a life that you love and the financial freedom to do so,” Tatianna said, and that doesn’t necessarily mean continually growing your portfolio.
“We pitched the idea to different sponsors and people around us. We did a big survey to our audience, and everyone fell in love with it,” Tatianna said. “We really wanted to create something that was different and which would stand out, including design, creativity, and allowing women to feel safe in our industry and in our space so that they could speak up at a lot of these events that we go to.”
Nearly 200 women and eight men attended the first conference held in Scottsdale, Arizona, in February 2023.
The power of connection
Sessions covered interior design, remote hosting, networking, co-hosting, market analysis, taxes, and more. But Natalie and Tatianna also created an environment where women felt safe to speak out about their experiences as hosts, including topics like self-doubt and how social media can sometimes cause hosts to second guess how well they’re doing.
Afterward, one attendee wrote Natalie an email about how the summit had transformed her life. The woman’s husband had died within the week before the summit, so she wasn’t going to go. For some reason, she decided to go, and she attended the welcome party.
“It just became really hard, so she was sitting there by herself and didn’t feel like she was able to talk to people.” She was about to leave and opt out of the rest of the conference when Natalie came over to talk to her. “I just saw her sitting there alone. I had no idea what was going on,” Natalie said. “She wrote in the email that I made her feel so noticed and seen.”
That interaction prompted her to stay for the rest of the conference.
“She wrote that she left the summit with so many new friends and saying that she knew that her husband would be so proud of her for going, and now she was so motivated to go back home and launch another listing and take some of the money they had together and create a new experience for people,” Natalie said.
The next summit is scheduled for March 11-13, 2024, again in Scottsdale.
Natalie and Tatianna’s friendship and the relationships forged at the summit that they created together reiterates the importance of networking.
“Our friendship was another huge reason we wanted to create Level Up Your Listing Summit, because I would never have gone to that Nashville conference if it weren’t for Tatianna taking me under her wing and having a buddy to go through that with,” Natalie said. “I think seeing that made us feel like we want to create a space where other female hosts can also create friendships too, because we’ve seen how impactful that’s been for us.”
READ MORE: How advocacy led to popular short-term rental podcast Thanks for Visiting
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