Nicole Bansal

Hi, my name is Nicole Vel. I am a real estate investor and I also own a vacation rental property management company, or an Airbnb co-hosting business as some people call it. I own a few properties here in California where I live, and then also one all the way in Savannah, Georgia, which I manage out of state. My co-hosting business primarily manages properties here in Southern California.

When I had my son a couple years ago during my maternity leave, babies do a lot of nursing and sleeping, and everyone says sleep when the baby's sleeping, but that's not always the easiest thing to do. So I was listening to a lot of podcasts — there's only so much Netflix — and I started falling down the Bigger Pockets real estate rabbit hole, learning about how people are investing in real estate as a side hustle and then making it their main hustle.

Additionally, that year I thought having a kid I would start qualifying for child tax credits and some benefits, but my husband and I actually didn't qualify for anything. We ended up paying a lot more in taxes that year even though we had already paid through our general wages. So I decided I would start investing in real estate at that point as something to help us get financially free sooner, so that I could spend more time with my son as he gets older.

As my maternity leave deadline was coming up on me and I could feel that deadline getting shorter and shorter, I realized I didn't necessarily want to have a full-time job till I'm 65 years old and miss all that time with him. So I started investing in Airbnbs, and I realized I enjoyed it so much and I'm so good at it that I should manage them for other people — so I started a business actually managing them for others as well.

During the pandemic in 2020 we had moved from San Francisco down to San Diego, and I had rented that home out and still had a regular old homeowners insurance policy, which would not have covered me for diddly squat at the time. I actually did not know about Steadily or really about landlord insurance at all at that point. As I went down the path of listening to podcasts and doing a lot of self-directed learning and reading, I realized I needed proper landlord insurance — especially if I was going to do short-term rentals and Airbnbs. I'd actually heard Steadily's ads on the podcasts I listen to a few times, so I started digging into Steadily.

Honestly, the whole experience — Steadily made it so easy for me. As a millennial, I want to be able to just fill out a form really quickly and then have someone send me the information, and Steadily made that whole experience so flawlessly easy. From there I was hooked — every new property I get, I just reach out to Steadily.

With old-school insurance providers, when you would go online to fill out a form or get a quote, they would ask you all these questions about the property. Listen, I invest in real estate, I buy it, I generally know what I'm buying — but I don't necessarily know what's in the walls, or what kind of roof it has, or when it was last redone. They get so specific with the questions just to get you a quote. That was one thing I loved about Steadily: I could fill out a very simple form and then they would work on getting all that information for me, making the experience frictionless and really user-friendly.

The other piece I liked was that it felt like I was talking to one company instead of a brokerage with a bunch of different reps. With other providers, if I filled out an online form I'd get a call from someone random who was kind of associated with the insurance company but kind of wasn't — it didn't feel like the arm was talking to the hand.

Probably my favorite thing about Steadily is that it feels like such a more modern company. A lot of insurance companies don't think about the ways younger folks are sharing their homes. We actually had a property that we were living in but also Airbnb-ing — home sharing, where we had short-term folks staying there but we were also living in the home too. You would not believe how many insurance providers I talked to who would not cover a home like that. They'd say no, it's got to be A or B, it can't be both. I love Steadily's coverage in terms of thinking through modern scenarios like that.

I also have a property in Savannah that's not a true duplex but it's a home with a mother-in-law suite — again, a unique situation. The reason I really like Steadily is they've made my life easy when it comes to figuring out how to insure those unique situations. Instead of the answer being "no, we can't do that" or asking a million questions just to come back with a no, they work with you.

Trying to get into real estate at the beginning, there's such a learning curve and so many little boxes to check and things to keep track of. My recommendation would be to use Steadily, because they honestly made my life so much easier when it comes to getting insurance quotes and handling a lot of the nitty-gritty details. A lot of insurance providers would throw those details back at me and want a lot more information. My Steadily rep just gets it — whether I say I want to home-share a property, or that it's going to be a furnished midterm rental, no matter the strategy you pursue as a real estate investor, the team at Steadily is like, "Oh yeah, we've been there, we've done that — here's a quote for your particular situation."