Musings from Montana, hello there, that is luxury real estate broker and co-owner of Acquisto Real Estate, Shana Acquisto. And we’re joining you guys here live from Bozeman, Montana, at the KIPTON. And we have some different items to kind of discuss with you. So we’re going to go over some travel tips and that might help you out for this summer.
We’re going to go over vacation rental cars, so we’ll go over that. We’ll go over how to get a better room. If you don’t have the room you want how to get out of an elevator if you happen to be stuck in one. We’ll go over that and then get up early, kind of see everything and meet some locals, so we’ll kind of review each of those different items and more.
So here we are in Bozeman, Montana, and it’s gorgeous here. There’s a lot of amazing things. Local update would be that local real estate is up 30%. From six months ago, Six months. That is not that long ago.
No, it is not. So within that time frame, that’s a really healthy appreciation rate, maybe unsustainable going forward, but there’s a lot of anticipation. So Southwest Airlines has announced that they’re going to be coming here with super low rates from a lot of different cities. So you might have an opportunity to come here quite a bit cheaper than you were thinking in the past. And I would recommend it. We would love to bring all of you here at some point in time. A couple of you have been here and traveled with us, but I would love that.
All right. So Southwest Airlines, check that out. They will be coming here soon. It starts. I don’t know. It’s not really. Oh, I believe. Very good. And then we’re going to go over some rental car tips. OK, so rental cars are in short supply in general across the country. So inculpated a lot of the different car rental companies actually went ahead and sold off a lot of their fleet. Then they’re having chip shortages and component shortages to make new vehicles.
So they’re unable to buy new vehicles at the proper rate is ramping back up. So there’s there’s not enough rental cars across the country. So if you’re trying to rent a vehicle right from any one of these destinations, one tip that you can do, and it’s to be a pretty good one. I learned this from the rental car employee from an enterprise rental car employee that I kind of ran into. This is good enough. It is. So he said rent it for a shorter time frame and then just don’t return it.
And now. Hold on, you can call them, so do it for two days or whatever a day and then call them and say you need to extend your time. Yes, that’s what you need to do. Don’t just take the car.
Just take it. Just take it. So it’s because when you put, like, a five day time frame, right. Or a week that you’re going to be out, you need to reserve it the same day that you arrive. But if you book it for five days out there and be like, well, other people already have that car booked and taken out.
So what you have to do is pack up and say, I only need it for four days and see if that comes in. Then three days and two days and one day be like, I only need it for an hour. That’s all I need for one hour a day. Can I rent the car for one hour? So once you get the car, then it’s in your possession. Yes.
Something else to think about is if you have during the summer, you have clients flying in to see homes. They may not be able to rent a car. So it may be that you should prepare for having people in your car again. You know, we’ve got a long time without actually driving people around and meeting people and properties. So I would think about that and ask them, do you have car arrangements? If not, be prepared to pick them up and be the chauffeur.
All right. And if you run into a jam, please contact me. I have an extra vehicle. Her name is Pearl. It’s nice that you’re going to give her all the way. Anybody can borrow Pearl. It’s not a problem. And you can
Rely on Pearl and never return or it’s totally fine. Good luck. All right. So that’s a good rental car tip for you. Yes. And then get a good room. So that’s can be the second item here. So when you travel sometimes in the same class of room or same expense is there’s multiple different items. So the other day we checked in and we were in the room and we’re like, you know, this doesn’t really meet our standards. We need a larger room.
Key word is we set it. But I said Shana set it. So anyways, I called on the front desk and I’m like, hey, people, I need a larger I need a bigger room. My wife needs this. We’ve been here before and just stay here a lot and we fill our room is just a little too small and the wife needs a larger King-Size room. So chat in Now if you’ve ever felt that you needed just a little bit better room.
So you call down to the front desk and you’re like, oh yeah, we’re looking at the floor plan. That room is a little bit small. We’ll get you into a larger king size room. Same expense. Right. And we’ll we’ll have you move to that room right away. So we go ahead and do that. And the girl is very, very nice and is able to accomplish that with no problem at all for us. Then along the way, we’ll skip right to the end of the story where Shana decides that the next thing that she needs to do is to go get some ice.
It was late, I had my makeup off, ready for bed, and I like to have ice water, so I’d like to get some ice and did not have an ice machine. I walked all around our floor, did not have an ice machine. But I remember the floor we had ten minutes ago that we moved from had ice on the floor. So I got elevator all Over the floor. There was ice Got on the. So I got in the elevator to go down and get some ice, and it didn’t. It stopped, the elevator would go nowhere.
So fortunately, there were some really nice people in there, three people, two nurses and a doctor, and we became really close and good friends over the 45 minutes that we were stuck in the elevator. So it was quite interesting and what we learned is maybe you guys aren’t aware of this, but. The oldest man, the elevator repairman, is in high demand, so when we called Otis, which was the brand of the elevator to, hey, can you guys come help us out? Uh, sure. It’ll be about four hours.
We’re four hours away. OK, at this time, the someone a maintenance man from the captain was trying to pry the door open at the top everywhere. And he had been trying for about 15 minutes and no no success. So we then heard the Otis guy said, hey, you should probably call nine. We want to call the fire department. They have the ability to to open these doors.
So we call the fire department and the fire department. They immediately said, whatever you do, don’t try to pry the doors open because that may not work. We will not be able to get them open if someone is prying, has jammed it and tried to pry open. About that time, the maintenance man was like, oh, so fire department showed up in like five minutes and there were, I think, ten of them and they opened the doors and that was all good.
But I made some good friends along the way, so it was quite interesting. So I don’t know where we were going with the story, but just that you got stuck in an elevator for forty five minutes and the lady at the front desk called me and she’s like, hey, your wife wanted me to call you and tell you that she’s stuck in an elevator and she’s totally fine, but we’ll get her back to you relatively shortly.
I thought it was a joke. So he’s like, don’t be pranking me.
Yeah, I totally thought it was a prank because I called on and we were such divas needing a bigger room. And then I had another additional challenge. And anyways, we’re going to cut right to it. Apparently, we traveled to the table and it was really fun. There you go.
All right. We’re up early today, and it’s a good, good thing to get up early when you’re on vacation and explore when you’re in a different city. It’s amazing how many people you can meet and how many sites you can see. Right.
So the other day I was able to meet the Chinese.
Yeah, there’s a local sporting goods store, kind of like Dick’s Sporting Goods, but on a smaller scale, local.
And so he has their own shoe brand that they’ve been making for hiking and hunting and packing shoes for a long time. And he just returned back from Italy. And they have, I think, a dozen people full time making shoes for them in Italy that they sell all over the world. And he’s an importer of shoes. And it was a really good conversation. I was able to learn a lot of different things. And I don’t know, maybe we find out if Omkar’s father can make shoes, Italian leather shoes, so that we find out that for those bad boys
Up and meet the locals meet from anywhere from the maintenance man at the hotel. To someone you meet in an elevator, someone just standing in line somewhere at a restaurant, your waitress, you have to think about where you go out to dinner or out to eat when you’re on vacation, you’re probably not cooking.
You’re going to encounter someone who sees many, many people, right. They they are there and they hear about all the people traveling to and from and they’re a really good person to get to know.
So when we talk to our waitress, she was able to say that her family members were looking for some large ranches, like super noteworthy ones. And we were able to say some things. And she’s like, I need to get your number, because they’re, you know, the the in-laws are looking to buy a really huge ranch. And Sean is like, all right, we’ll take care of that. There you go. Here’s your contact information. So that worked out. And then the people in the elevator in return, they were
They actually invited us to dinner. And they are doctors. Right.
Someone’s a doctor, a pediatric doctor, and then her husband’s a nurse and her best friends. So if you want those as your clients, then go ahead and give Sean a call and chat. And right now, if you’d like to see if you could work those deals, maybe you can come out here yourself. Oh, guys. All righty. Very good. All right.
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