Getting paid to live at the beach...

[Clint Harris]

So I'm writing this post with a sincere feeling of gratitude for this Bigger Pockets community. I started investing in properties 10 years ago, bought a duplex and house hacked when I was in my early 20s, then went on to buy single family homes, I didn't know what I was doing, but I successfully BRRRR'd 2 of them. At one point my wife and I had 9 properties, but honestly, it was a headache. These properties showed great cashflow, but marginal if any appreciation in the long haul (I never invest for appreciation, but its a nice fringe benefit). The question that just kept lingering is how do I put more velocity to my money and get to the point where I feel like my portfolio is working for me, and I'm not working for my properties. Well, I'll fast forward a few years, I'm in surgical sales, took a promotion, and we moved to Wilmington NC (beach town) to take over the territory. We fell in love with a small island town called Carolina Beach about 20 minutes from downtown, and daydreamed about one day buying a beach house. In the one year time period it took us to relocate and start building a new territory, my wife started telling me about this website and podcast where people talk about their pockets??? Honestly it went in one ear and out the other. As we were talking over a property one day, as we often do, she had a really spot on analysis that kind of stopped me in my tracks. When I asked her to explain, Bigger Pockets came up again. So for the last year, or a little more, I dove into the podcasts, and listened to almost all of them, some 3-4 times each. My education has grown exponentially, and it's funny to look back on all of my previous mistakes and just watch how I floundered around in the investment world for the past decade. Dont get me wrong, we had a couple of home runs, an 85k profit flip, good buy and hold properties, etc, but I could have done things better. So I say all that to say this. Base upon what we learned from BP, probably starting with episode 229, instead of buying a beach house, we bought 2! We dove into researching the AIRBNB world, bought local data from AirDNA.co, a data scraping company that provides accurate local comps, and started shopping. We found an upstairs/downstairs 6/4 total duplex 2 blocks from the beach, and made an offer the day it went on the market. We bought the property for 370k, and spent 20k on renovations and staging. Here's our listing

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/29462386?location=Carolina%20Beach%2C%20NC%2C%20United%20States&toddlers=0&adults=6&guests=1&check_in=2019-03-20&check_out=2019-03-22&s=Yk5Em1pF

We moved into the upstairs 3/2 unit with our 2 bulldogs, and started putting the downstairs unit together. We found out through AIRDNA that the occupancy on our island drops from 95-100% in the summer down to 19% in the winter, but that for the top performing properties, they had much higher occupancy year round.  Basically, people still come to the beach, there are just less of them, and they can be picky, so only the top staged properties with the best photos and location are being booked.  We chose all of our furnishings based upon what reviewed the best, specifically focussed on mattresses, high speed internet, flat screens, little amenities, anything that had a proven track record of getting high reviews.  We went live, on November 10th, our first booking was Nov 16th, and we made $1250 between then and the end of the month.  December we did $2200, which is almost our mortgage, January we made money on top of our mortgage, February we are booked for 21 days, and March is full, we just opened April, and booked the first 2 weeks at $285 a weeknight and $315 a weekend (Right now we’re at $115 weekdays and $135 weekends).  We’ll make over $1000 in Feb and March on top of our mortgage, insurance, utilities.  Based upon comp data, April-September, we should be bringing in 8-9k gross per month. We have a cleaning company that we use, a lockbox, automated messages to guests, and so far have all 5 star reviews.  The long and short of it is that besides not having a house payment, electric or water bill, taxes or insurance payments for our home, we’re getting paid to live 2 blocks from the beach.  Locally, word has kind of gotten out, we’ve been approached about cohosting other properties, we just locked up a tri-plex starting in March, and we’re in the process of selling one of our long term rental properties in Columbia SC in order to buy a quadplex here.  As a result of our success, my wife recently quit her job in medical sales and went full-time into real estate.  The velocity of these investments is drawing attention, and its created a natural referral pattern for her.  Everyone wants a beach house and wants someone else to pay for it!  Anyway, without getting too much into the weeds, I just wanted to post and say Thank you.  This community, the intelligent discussion, the advice, its something that is changing people’s lives, ours included, and that needs to be acknowledged.  Thanks to everyone that is as excited about changing their future as we are.  Secondly, I know a lot of people are skeptical, but I just want to say, as a one-time critic and skeptic, Short-term rentals WORK, and besides unreal cashflow, you also are building equity in the pay-down, plus most successful properties are in locations that will appreciate over time.  Anyway, again, just wanted to express our gratitude to everyone involved in creating this community.  Anyone looking to change their trajectory in life, put some thought into getting paid to live at the beach!

[Jill F.]

Oh I love Carolina Beach! We use to keep our boat at Federal Point Yacht Club so I've spent some time there. It is really one of the last "old school" beach resorts left around. It still feels like a sixties resort. You're in a time warp. I would love to own property there. And Britts Doughnuts! Yuuuummmmm!!!!