Isaac French and Lakeside South, one of the seven tiny cabins.

Right: Corey O’Connell

• Isaac French built his “tiny hotel” — a short-term-rental listing of seven tiny houses — in 2021. 
• The business has brought in $860,000 in bookings since opening in January 2022.
• French shares how he grew direct bookings and the property’s social media to find early success.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Isaac French, the 25-year-old owner of Live Oak Lake in Waco, Texas. Insider has verified Live Oak Lake’s income, costs, and valuation with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity

At 25 years old, I’ve already worn several entrepreneurial hats. 

I’ve been an accountant, a bookkeeper, and an artist, and I’ve worked in my family’s construction business since I was young.

Last year, I built and opened a “tiny hotel” — a short-term-rental property made up of seven tiny houses — that made $860,000 in bookings.

The Lakeside South cabin.

Shelby Wilray

I came up with the idea in March 2021, when I was running a cloud-based accounting business in Waco, Texas, where I grew up and now live.

My experience in construction gave me the confidence to pursue it.

To build this ‘tiny house’ hotel, I bought 5 acres of land in Waco

I paid $138,000 in cash for the land, using nearly all my savings. I then got an appraisal for the construction costs of the project and applied for an 80% construction loan to cover the materials and labor. 

Live Oak Lake.

Isaac French

The bank wasn’t keen on loaning a 24-year-old that kind of money. I partnered with my dad, my two brothers, and my father-in-law, while remaining the majority shareholder. This gave the project more stability and liquidity.

The partnership also meant we could use part of a line of credit from my family’s construction business to get us over the finish line.

It took nine months to complete the build and cost $2.5 million. We opened Live Oak Lake to the public in January 2022. I knew that once we could prove the property’s income potential, it would be appraised at a much higher value and we’d be able to take out a higher mortgage. In mid-2022, four months after opening, the property was valued at $3.1 million.

We were able to do an 80% cash-out refinance on the property and received a $2.48 million loan. We used this to pay off the construction loan and line of credit.

In the first 12 months that Live Oak Lake has been open, we’ve brought in $860,000 in bookings and grown our Instagram to 70,000 followers. We’ve also received 457 five-star ratings.

Here are my tips for running a successful short-term-rental business. 

The Cedar Brook cabin.

Jon Kreye

Social-media marketing 

Drawing customers to our website and rental listings was the first challenge, and marketing played a big role. I started growing the Live Oak Lake Instagram presence when we opened, and now we have 70,000 followers. Instagram has also been our main funnel for direct bookings which have higher profit margins for us. 

Partnering with travel influencers via giveaways was an extremely effective way to grow our following. 

We’ve played around a little bit with paid advertising on Google and Facebook, but our biggest success has been the organic growth from consistently posting high-quality content.

It’s all about creating reels and photos that show off the space. I manage our social-media marketing because it’s something I’m passionate about. We work with freelance videographers and photographers to create the assets. 

The dock at the Water’s Edge Common is available for all the guests to use.

Corey O’Connell

Take advantage of direct bookings

One reason for our success is that around 60% of our bookings come directly from our Live Oak Lakes website. 

We make about 10% more profit through direct bookings because we can avoid booking-site fees. We pass on 5% of this to our guests, which makes it 5% cheaper for them to book through our site. There’s an incentive for them to book via the site, and we make a higher profit.

There are many perks to having direct bookings. There’s no data wall between the guests and the host like there is on booking sites like Airbnb. When guests book directly, we can ask for their email addresses and phone numbers, which means we can market back to them directly. This has a positive impact on return bookings. 

Kayaks are available for guests.

Stephen Miller

Invest in making your vacation rental an ‘experience’ that people will want to return to

We’ve put a lot of effort into the “experience” of staying at Live Oak Lake to make guests’ stays feel special. We want people to feel both lost in nature and part of a village community when staying with us.

We have hammocks, hot tubs, and a pond. We also offer kayaking and paddleboarding.

The cabins are spaced a couple of 100 yards apart from each other, so there’s privacy, but they are linked with string lights so the cabins don’t feel isolated.

The lights reflect on the pond at night, creating a charming vibe. 

If you create a product that’s cohesive, intentional, and thoughtful, then your guests will be your greatest mouthpieces. 

We’ve consistently heard guests say: “Oh, my goodness, we’re coming back, and we’re going to make our annual family reunion here,” or, “We’re going to bring all of our friends and rent two or three cabins.”

We’ve already hosted corporate retreats and family reunions. Now guests can rent the whole property, so we can host weddings. It’s been cool to be a part of their traditions and hear that feedback. 

It creates a very durable brand for us that makes me feel confident about the future.

David Rosenberg.

Rosenberg Research & Associates

• The S&P 500 could tumble 30% to around 2,900 points this year, David Rosenberg said.
• The Rosenberg Research chief said the US recession is only starting, and unemployment could surge.
• Rosenberg pointed to gold, bonds, and low-risk stocks as solid bets to weather the downturn.

Prepare for US stocks to plunge, unemployment to jump, and the economy to slump this year, David Rosenberg has warned.

Investors can weather the approaching storm by betting on gold, bonds, and tried-and-tested companies, he told MarketWatch in a recent interview. But they should avoid cryptocurrencies, the veteran economist and president of Rosenberg Research said.

A bleak outlook

“There’s nothing right now in my collection of metrics telling me that we’re anywhere close to a bottom,” Rosenberg said, noting that he believes a US recession is only just beginning.

“The stock market bottoms 70% of the way into a recession and 70% of the way into the easing cycle,” he continued, referring in the latter to when the Federal Reserve starts loosening its monetary policy to drive economic growth.

The US central bank is currently tightening its grip. It has hiked interest rates from almost zero to nearly 5% within the past year in response to historic inflation, and expects to lift them even higher in the coming months.

As a result, the benchmark S&P 500 index could nosedive this year by nearly 30% from its current level to around 2,900 points, Rosenberg said. He pointed to rising rates eroding the appeal of stocks relative to safer assets such as bonds and savings accounts. They also squeeze households’ finances and spark layoffs, he said, putting pressure on consumer spending and therefore corporate earnings — a key factor in stock valuations.

Rosenberg also suggested unemployment may surge from 3.4% in January — its lowest level in half a century — to over 4.6%. On the bright side, he expects the economic downturn to curb inflation, freeing the Fed to stop hiking rates and potentially begin cutting them later this year. That could boost stocks and galvanize an economic recovery in the second half of 2024, he said.

Navigating rough seas

Rosenberg detailed how investors can navigate the choppy waters ahead.

The former chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch touted gold as an effective hedge against the US dollar weakening when rates eventually come down. Gold has intrinsic value and is widely viewed as a haven asset, potentially making it more resilient to inflation and a market downturn.

However, Rosenberg ruled out bitcoin and other cryptos as sensible bets.

“Cryptocurrency has been exposed as being far too volatile to be part of any asset mix,” he said. “It’s fun to trade, but crypto is not an investment.”

Rosenberg noted that he’s bullish on long-dated bonds, which typically benefit from rising rates. He also touted companies that sell staples such as food and energy, which tend to fare better in a faltering economy. Moreover, he singled out Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet as high-quality growth stocks that could outperform in the next bull market.

Read more: A stock trader who returned 440% in 2022 explains the software program he built to automatically buy and sell risky penny stocks for optimal profits

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

Photo by Pedro Fiúza/NurPhoto via Getty Images

• Binance will suspend the transfer of US dollars on its exchanges from Wednesday, reports say.
• The exchange didn’t give a reason for the suspension, which won’t affect US-based customers.
• The announcement may have caused millions of dollar-pegged stablecoins to flow out of the exchange, per CNBC.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, will suspend US dollar transfers from Wednesday, and the move is reportedly fueling millions of dollars in outflows from the platform to rivals.

A company spokesperson told several outlets Monday, including CNBC and Bloomberg, that deposits and withdrawals of dollars would cease indefinitely, without giving a reason for the move. Transfers in other fiat currencies such as the euro were unaffected.

“We are temporarily suspending USD bank transfers as of February 8th,” the Binance spokesperson told CNBC. “Affected customers are being notified directly.”

The company told the publication “0.01% of our monthly active users leverage USD bank transfers” and added that “we are working hard to restart service as soon as possible.”

The spokesperson told Bloomberg that other methods of transferring crypto via credit card, Google Pay and Apple Pay, also remained unaffected.

In a tweet, Binance US, the US arm of the group, said it was unaffected by the restriction, indicating the suspension would only affect dollars held by non-US customers.

According to data provided to CNBC by Arkham Intelligence, the announcement caused millions of US-tied stablecoins like Tether and USD Coin to flow from Binance’s crypto wallet to rival exchanges.

“We’re still overwhelmingly net-positive on net deposits,” the spokesperson told CNBC in response to reports of outgoings. “Outflows always tick up when prices start to level off following a bullish market swing like we saw last week as some users take profits.”

Binance didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Associates are now “partners,” and everyone’s a “senior executive VP.” Why did regular-old job titles suddenly get so pompous-sounding?

iStock; George Marks, Sellwell, C.J. Burton/Getty images; Robyn Phelps/Insider

Way back in 1993, the Financial Times ran a column bemoaning the grandiose job titles that were popping up in the US and the UK. “Monetary inflation may be under control in Britain, but the same cannot be said for job titles,” wrote Adrian Furnham, a professor at University College London. “Nearly all Americans over the age of 23 seem to have the title ‘executive vice-president’ embossed on their business cards.”

But here’s the thing about inflation: It never ends. According to a new analysis of 2.4 million job postings by Datapeople, a provider of recruiting analytics, American job titles are even more grandiose today than they were back when Furnham was grousing about the state of corporate taxonomies. Since 2019, employers have tripled their use of the word “lead” in early-career tech jobs, upped their use of “principal” by 57%, and cut their use of the word “junior” by half. “It was shocking to me how dramatic it’s been,” says Maryam Jahanshahi, the head of R&D at Datapeople. “It’s rampant in lots of different types of jobs.” 

So what’s driving companies to hand out ever-fancier titles? There are four factors fueling the rampant title inflation:

1. Screwing employees out of overtime wages. Federal law requires employers to pay workers for their overtime hours — unless they’re classified as salaried managers. So companies are exploiting the loophole by giving important-sounding titles to low-wage workers. In a study published in January, researchers at Harvard and the University of Texas at Dallas found that some front-desk assistants are now “directors of first impressions,” while carpet cleaners have been transformed into “shampoo managers.” The savings add up: The study estimates that employers are using job titles to cheat employees out of $4 billion a year in overtime pay.
2. Recruiting and retaining professionals. In higher-paid jobs, employers are using title inflation to try to attract a higher caliber of candidates and keep employees from jumping ship. Compared with enticements like higher pay and better benefits, tacking an extra “senior” onto somebody’s job title is free. The practice has become especially common during the Great Resignation, which has made it tough for companies to hang on to employees. “Because the market is so tight,” says Michelle Reisdorf, a district director at the staffing firm Robert Half, “a lot of hiring managers are definitely being creative in every method they can to attract top talent.”
3. Making junior and midlevel staff seem more important to external clients. That’s why investment banks hand out the title of vice president to virtually everyone — to lend an air of authority to green-behind-the-ear bankers whose clients are typically much older. Goldman Sachs once disclosed that it employs nearly 12,000 vice presidents — a third of its entire workforce. Last year, the accounting firm EY gave its associate partners in the UK the title of “partner,” hoping it would help them win more business. (The new title didn’t come with a raise or a share in the firm’s profits.) I’ve even heard of some companies that keep a database of two titles for each employee: a normal one for internal purposes and an inflated one that sales reps — sorry, business-development managers — use in their calls to clients. A recent marketing study found the tactic works — even when it’s deployed by artificial intelligence. When a chatbot introduced itself as a “customer-service manager” rather than a “customer-service representative,” people rated it as more likable, trustworthy, and knowledgeable.
4. Satisfying the expectations of Gen Z. Over the years, as titles have grown more bloated, younger employees have come to expect fancy titles far earlier than previous generations did. They also expect to get promoted more frequently, which inflates titles even faster. When JobSage, an employer-review site, surveyed workers last year, 58% of Gen Z respondents said they expect to be promoted every 18 months, compared with 20% of baby boomers and 27% of Gen Xers. Gen Z workers also estimated that it takes a mere three to six years to become a vice president. Boomers, by contrast, said becoming a VP requires a decade or more of experience.

The title inflation has gotten so bad that companies are running out of lofty new words to bestow on their employees. Some are mashing together a bunch of old words, resulting in monstrosities like “senior executive vice president” — not to be confused with senior vice presidents and executive vice presidents. Others are trying to confer new authority to words that aren’t senior-sounding at all. At big tech companies, for example, staff engineers typically sit above senior engineers, and the highest-ranking engineers are called fellows — the title many companies use for interns.

But the biggest problem with title inflation isn’t confusion — it’s that puffed-up titles don’t actually attract better talent. In one analysis, Datapeople found that attaching the word “senior” to positions that are actually junior financial analysts results in 39% fewer qualified applicants. That’s because junior-level candidates see the fancy title and think they’re unqualified for the position, while senior-level applicants read the job description and realize they’re overqualified. “It makes for a very inefficient recruiting process,” Jahanshahi says. “People feel bait-and-switched.” Even worse, the deception leads to a 27% plunge in the number of female candidates, making it harder for companies to diversify their workforces.

There are dangers for employees as well. Instead of making you look impressive, having a bunch of grandiose titles on your résumé can actually lead to missed opportunities. “Sometimes these elevated titles might take you out of the running for a job,” says Reisdorf, the Robert Half executive. “Someone looks at your big fancy title and says, ‘Well, you’re overqualified,’ or ‘This job won’t satisfy you.'” 

Still, despite the downsides of title inflation, I think there are some redeeming qualities to the state of things today. I used to admire the egalitarian ethos at Bloomberg, where most of my fellow reporters and I were called reporters, regardless of our level of experience. But since joining Insider, I’ve come to appreciate the way its more transparent hierarchy, with six titles ranging from junior reporter to chief correspondent, offers writers a clearer and more equitable path for career advancement and pay bumps.

There are even advantages to the kind of creative titles we’ve come to ridicule. In one study, the renowned organizational psychologist Adam Grant found that giving employees the chance to craft their own titles led to less burnout. The titles adopted by employees at one organization seemed particularly absurd — “minister of dollars and sense” (COO), “goddess of greetings” (administrative assistant), and “magic messenger” (PR manager) — until you realized that they worked for the nonprofit Make-A-Wish Foundation, which fulfills the dreams of dying children. If including a whimsical title in their email signatures helps these employees cope with an emotionally challenging job, who are we to laugh?

It goes to show how our job titles aren’t just a summary of our day-to-day responsibilities or an indicator of our place in the org chart. They also shape our identities as human beings. It means something to us for the world to call us by a name that reflects how we see ourselves. But the goddess-of-greetings study contained one other important detail: The employees who gave themselves wacky job titles also kept their normal boring ones. It’s one thing to call someone a magic messenger at work. It’s another thing to post it as a job on ZipRecruiter.

“If you want to call someone a chief happiness officer internally, by all means,” Jahanshahi says. “But externally to the world, you’ve got to use industry-specific titles that match the seniority of the role. Otherwise no one’s going to find that job — unless someone on Twitter decides to make it a meme.”

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Aki Ito is a senior correspondent at Insider. 

Juliana Kaplan contributed reporting. 

Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) fell to a quarterly loss on Tuesday, as its giant Vision Fund investment unit remained in the red for a fourth straight quarter, sharpening focus on when markets will recover enough to allow it to list some assets.

The Vision Fund, which upended the world of technology with its big bets on startups, reported an investment loss of 730.36 billion yen ($5.52 billion) in the fiscal third quarter. At SoftBank itself, the net loss totalled 783.42 billion yen, compared with a 29.05 billion yen profit a year earlier.

The results could make investors even more keen to see an initial public offering (IPO) of British chip designer Arm, considered one of the sprawling conglomerate’s prize assets. SoftBank aims to list Arm by March 2024, Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto told a briefing following the release of the results.

Still, he sounded cautious about business overall.

“The situation remains tough,” he said.

The market turmoil since last year – and SoftBank’s results themselves – show how rising interest rates, deepening U.S.-China tensions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have worked to blunt investor appetite for riskier assets, casting a shadow over the Japanese group’s vast portfolio of startup investments.

Arm has made “good progress in terms of being IPO-ready,” Navneet Govil, the fund’s chief financial officer, told Reuters after the results, adding there were about 30 companies in the fund’s portfolio that are set to go public when markets are ready.

SoftBank said the Vision Fund unit had significantly curtailed new investments and was continuing to sell some older ones as part of “prudent defensive financial management” amid the challenging market environment.

Notably, founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son – who is synonymous with SoftBank – did not speak at the results presentation. He said in November he would not be making such appearances for the time being, to better focus on Arm’s growth.

The bulk of the loss at the Vision Fund unit came from a steep decline in the valuation of investments in unlisted companies. The unit had investments in 348 companies as of end-December, of which 311 are private firms.

Among listed portfolio companies, Indonesian ride hailing company Goto Gojek Tokopedia PT (GOTO.JK), South Korean e-commerce platform Coupang Inc (CPNG.N) and workspace provider WeWork Inc (WE.N) contributed to the loss.

Arm posted a 28% jump in quarterly net sales to $746 million, helped by higher royalty revenues of its high-end 5G smartphone chips.

It has more than 95% market share of the main communication chips used in mobile devices. Still, SoftBank warned the chip designer is also bracing for the impact of a broader tech industry slowdown.

“Some of Arm’s customers have indicated that inventory levels are very high across the value chain, which may result in their revenues declining for a short period until inventory levels are lower,” it said in a statement.

The net loss also marked a sharp turnaround from the 3 trillion yen profit SoftBank reported in the prior quarter, for July-September, when it was buoyed by the sale of some of its stake in China’s Alibaba Group Holding (9988.HK).

Son invested heavily in artificial intelligence and other high-tech startups through the Vision Fund in recent years, delivering both record profits and heady optimism about future valuations.

He has since been forced to cut back on investment activity and disappointed the market in November when the company did not announce further share buybacks. SoftBank did not unveil a fresh buyback scheme on Tuesday, either.

($1 = 132.2200 yen)

Overwhelmed rescuers struggled to save people trapped under the rubble as the death toll from a devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria rose past 5,000 on Tuesday, with despair mounting and the scale of the disaster hampering relief efforts.

The magnitude 7.8 quake – Turkey’s deadliest since 1999 – hit early on Monday, toppling thousands of buildings including many apartment blocks, wrecking hospitals, and leaving thousands of people injured or homeless in Turkish and Syrian cities.

In the Turkish city of Antakya near the Syrian border, where 10-storey buildings had crumbled onto the streets, Reuters journalists saw rescue work being conducted on one out of dozens of mounds of rubble.

The temperature was close to freezing as the rain came down and there was no electricity or fuel in the city.

Turkish authorities say some 13.5 million people were affected in an area spanning roughly 450 km from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east, and 300 km from Malatya in the north to Hatay in the south. In Syria, authorities have reported deaths as far south as Hama, some 100 km from the epicentre.

In Turkey, the death toll climbed to 3,419 people, Vice President Fuat Oktay said, adding that severe weather was making it difficult to bring aid to the regions.

In Syria, where the quake did further damage to infrastructure already devastated by 11 years of war, the death toll stands at just over 1,600, according to the government and a rescue service in the insurgent-held northwest.

Freezing winter weather hampered search efforts through the night. A woman’s voice was heard calling for help under a pile of rubble in the southern Turkish province of Hatay. Nearby, the body of a small child lay lifeless.

Weeping in the rain, a resident who gave his name as Deniz wrung his hands in despair.

“They’re making noises but nobody is coming,” he said. “We’re devastated, we’re devastated. My God … They’re calling out. They’re saying, ‘Save us’ but we can’t save them. How are we going to save them? There has been nobody since the morning.”

Families slept in cars lined up in the streets.

Ayla, standing by a pile of rubble where an eight-storey building once stood, said she had driven to Hatay from Gaziantep on Monday in search of her mother. Five or six rescuers from the Istanbul fire department were working in the ruins – a sandwich of concrete and glass.

“There have been no survivors yet. A street dog came and barked at a certain point for long, I feared it was for my mother. But it was someone else,” she said.

“I turned on the lights of the car to help the rescue team. They took out only two bodies so far, no survivors.”

Ankara declared a “level 4 alarm” that calls for international assistance, but not a state-of-emergency that would lead to mass mobilization of the military.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said 5,775 buildings had been destroyed in the quake, which had been followed by 285 aftershocks, and that 20,426 people had been injured.

The World Health Organization was especially concerned about areas of Turkey and Syria where no information had emerged since the quake struck, its chief said.

“It’s now a race against time,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Every minute, every hour that passes, the chances of finding survivors alive diminishes.”

In the Syrian city of Hama, Abdallah al Dahan said funerals of several families who perished were taking place on Tuesday.

“It’s a terrifying scene in every sense,” said Dahan, contacted by phone.

“In my whole life I haven’t seen anything like this, despite everything that has happened to us,” he added. Mosques had opened their doors to families whose homes were damaged.

The death toll in Syrian government-held areas rose to 812, the state news agency SANA reported.

In the rebel-held northwest, the death toll was more than 790 people, according to the Syrian civil defence, a rescue service known as the White Helmets and famous for digging people from the rubble of government air strikes.

“There are lot of efforts by our teams, but they are unable to respond to the catastrophe and the large number of collapsed buildings,” group head Raed al-Saleh said.

A top U.N. humanitarian official in Syria said fuel shortages and the harsh weather were creating obstacles to its response.

“The infrastructure is damaged, the roads that we used to use for humanitarian work are damaged, we have to be creative in how to get to the people,” U.N. resident coordinator El-Mostafa Benlamlih told Reuters from Damascus.

The earthquake was the biggest recorded worldwide by the U.S. Geological Survey since one in the remote South Atlantic in August 2021.

Poor internet connections and damaged roads between some of the worst-hit Turkish cities, homes to millions of people, hindered efforts to assess the impact and plan help.

With tight elections scheduled in just three months, President Tayyip Erdogan’s government faces a likely multi-billion-dollar reconstruction challenge just as he was ramping up his re-election campaign.

The economy, already strained by inflation at 58%, is expected to grow a bit less than previously expected this year, analysts say.

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