Kristen Doppelt
President and Founder of Cozy in KC
Licensed Real Estate Agent in Kansas and Missouri
When I started college at Wichita State I was only using my job as leasing agent as a means to get discounted rent and pay the bills. Little did I know that leasing apartments would lead to a very challenging and rewarding 20 year career in the industry.
During the first part of my career I worked for a few large property management companies as a Regional Property Manager. My portfolios ranged in size but my largest was about 3,000 units across a 9 state territory... really it was just too much to manage and I realized very quickly that I could not manage to the level that I wanted to with such a large portfolio.
In 2017 I decided to take a break from the apartment industry and took a job as the Vice President of a local property management company that primarily focused on single family homes. We worked with smaller investors and I truly enjoyed the more one on one approach and working with investors who were just like me.
After a year of running the company I began to see cracks in the long term rental strategy and thought that there had to be a better way to invest in real estate. Owners were constantly unhappy with the cash flow that their properties produced, and maintenance expenses were through the roof. These obstacles were going to be tough to overcome as rents and labor costs were at all time highs. I decided that the only way to surpass the current rent threshold in the market was to rent the property by the night, which would essentially double my cash flow. This strategy was not yet proven in the Kansas City market, but I was doing a lot of traveling to similar cities and staying in vacation rentals, so why not KC?
In 2018 I decided to take a risk and purchased my first vacation rental property. Over a year and a half later after experiencing higher cash flow and lower maintenance expenses, I decided that other investors, like myself, needed this option. I wanted other investors to experience the same benefits, by providing them the option to rent their property as a vacation rental over the traditional long term rental option, and still receive top level property management.
Licensed Real Estate Agent in Kansas and Missouri