Guest screening in STR

[Paul S.]

Hi all,

My family is purchasing a lake house as a vacation home, and I wanted to get your collective advice regarding whether and how to screen tenants. By way of background, my wife and I are working professionals and our intention is for this to be a place we can go a few times per month to go fishing, tubing with kids, etc. We are also going to rent it out to help defray costs (hopefully cover PITI, or most of it). In short, we obviously want to make as much money as we can, but our livelihoods aren't dependent upon maximizing cash flow at the expense of all other factors.

The house is in a quiet, laid back neighborhood, and I would like to maintain a good relationship with the neighbors. The property includes a 2/1 main house and a 1/1 guest house with an excellent lake view. I would like to target multi-family guests, as opposed to the partiers.

My question is, what are the tradeoffs in screening each guest versus using the instabook feature? If you set minimum age requirements, does that help in a significant way? I’m wondering where the sweet spot is between screening and revenue.

Thanks,

Paul