Needed: Advice on purchase of first STR in Orlando area

[Melanie Martin del Campo]

I am in the market for my first short-term rental and I am looking in the Orlando Disney Area, specifically Championsgate, Windsor at Westside, and Storey Lake.  I have an agent with the Short Term Shop.  I am having trouble deciding on a strategy - am I better off buying a fully themed, ready-to-go eight-bedroom home and paying a large appraisal gap (which seems to come with the territory with the themed properties) or would I be better off buying one with little to no theming, hopefully a smaller appraisal gap (no guarantee) and theming it myself?  I know the more bedrooms the better, but I have seen some data to suggest that smaller fully themed homes can perform as well as larger, lightly themed homes.  Here is our situation:  we have been approved for a jumbo ten percent down vacation home loan up to 1.5 million and have a home equity line to draw upon for theming.  Our concerns are 1) how long will a property be offline to be fully themed (three bedrooms and a garage game room is our goal), 2) are contractors readily available there to do the work and are they being affected by the shortages?  At this point, it seems like we will be lucky to get any property at all because bidding is so competitive.  

[Shawn McCormick]

@Melanie Martin del Campo your agent/PM should be able to answer all of those questions. Are they not assisting you, seems like that is their niche. 

There isn't a direct answer to your question. It partly depends on when you buy and close. If you are looking to buy now and close in about 30 days..you will be wanting to just keep the cleaning and repairs to a minimum so you can capture spring break bookings. Since you won't have any reviews, your listing won't rank for some time, so you don't want to be postponing that any longer than needed. If you buy one fully themed, it is going to cost you upfront, but no real downtime to block off dates and lose revenue. There is such little inventory, you may not be able to choose themed or unthemed. I put an offer in this week in Championsgate and there were 17 other offers. So count on an appraisal gap, most listings are requiring no appraisal contingency. 

If you do get one that is not so themed, there are shortages in everything you need..labor, furniture etc. So if you block off dates from your calendar (have to do this far in advance), you run the risk of having no labor when the time comes, furniture comes in late or broken etc. So I would try to tackle one room at a time to hedge the risk of long down times and bad reviews. May is typically a slow month, so if you buy now, plan for anything big then. It may be better to get things you can now and store them so at least you know what you will be able to do and plan for the trades to get it done.

Hope this helps, good luck