Airbnb vacation rental - how do i know if its a good investment?

[Benjamin Zwiebel]

Hello all,

I have been reading the books and listening to the podcast for a few months and they all say that now is the time to get involved in the forums so here I am.

Okay, so here is my question. I am looking at doing my 1st deal and for this property I want to use it as an Airbnb/booking.com/VRBO vacation rental. Here is the problem I have... now the Airbnb calculator on the site does not appear to work, so I am using the rental income calculator because, to my mind, the principals are very similar. The problem is, I am having a very hard time attempting to guess on vacancy. When I run the numbers at 40% vacancy it looks like a bad investment, at 30% a decent investment and at 20% a great investment.

Does anyone have any advice on determining viability of the investment in the short term rental market? Thank you in advance.