Before any of this, Jordan sold light bulbs to people who didn’t want them. He worked night shifts in a cold-storage chicken warehouse, did time in a call centre, and never lasted more than three months in a retail job.
He got a 97.95 ATAR and enrolled in biomedical science because it was the safe path. He dropped out after a year. He and Terence tried crypto, dropshipping and Amazon FBA, and none of it worked. At 19, he lost $15,000 on crypto overnight.
“It wasn’t really about the money. It was that I’d been chasing quick money with no skills and no direction.”
Then he found a video about Airbnb arbitrage in America and rang Terence that night. “What if we tried this in Melbourne?” Terence was in. They spent two or three weeks in a co-working space dialling agents back to back, and signed their first lease about three weeks in, with $15,000 each.
They got a lot wrong. They overspent on furniture by thousands, burned three weeks of rent on the fit-out, had a faulty washing machine flood the apartment, and set the prices wrong. It was still booked within an hour of going live.
“The guest paid us $625. We took home $521... and that was only for two nights. Our weekly rent for the place was $480.”
It hasn’t all been smooth. At about five properties, they took a guest off the platform who seemed a bit dodgy but was paying decent money. He set off the sprinklers and flooded the apartment, the units next door and below, and the building’s gym. They sat on five properties for five months, unsure it was worth it. Then they tightened how they screen guests and check ID, and started signing leases again.
Stanley Ma, Terence’s best friend, joined them at three or four properties. Friends of friends started asking for help, and in August 2024 they took on their first two students. In October 2024 Jordan started posting videos, and then people he’d never met started asking too.
Today there’s an operations manager, a warehouse, an in-house cleaning team and an errand runner, so the founders are hands-off the day-to-day. Jordan spends his time running most of the live coaching calls and posting portfolio tours and listing reviews most weeks.
