Experience with vacation rentals in SW Florida

[Artur A.]

What is your opinion on buying vacation property and using a company that will do short-term management (for 20% + some fee)?

A single-family vacation home with a pool can cost 400k. Annual revenue ~35k

Has anyone had an experience with that?

Is it a headache comparing with long-term renting, considering paying high taxes (30-40%) and other issues?

[Alvin Taveras]

Hello @Artur A.

I work with investors who self-manage and others who pay the 20% management fees. Both can be good options. The difference is if you think managing a short-term rental is a future headache or something that you want to develop as a competitive advantage. 

I have a client who has bought multiple STR from me and has developed an entire system to manage these. As a family, they enjoy the learning process and have become pretty good at it. They recently became a "super host" and are looking to buy more. Another family I helped are full-time firefighters, who wanted to offset the cost of a vacation home. They would like to eventually self-manage but saw the benefits of working with a turnkey STR Property Manager. They are happy to pay the 20% to quickly set up the rental and more passively learning the industry. Both were purchased in Cape Coral, FL.

For Full service, I would recommend looking into TurnKey, for mostly marketing Evolve and for software many investors go with iGMS.