Asheville Market for STRs

[Scott Deetlefs]

Hello BP community,

I am a newbie real estate investor and looking to get my first investment property. 

I stay about an hour out of Asheville and have been interested in this market for a little while now, while learning and growing my capital.

I was wondering if the Asheville STR market is doing well again since the catastrophic hurricane last year?

Looking to finally pull the trigger and get that first rental this year.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Derek Robinson]

Disclaimer* I don't have any STRs in Asheville currently.  But what I'm hearing from the meetups is that things are still incredibly slow since Helene.  Also, every month I hear of another handful of quality/long standing restaurants shutting down because they just couldn't wait any longer for the tourism to come back.  I haven't directly heard of any hotel vacancy numbers, but I can't imagine they are doing well either...I've been downtown on the weekends and am shocked at how dead it is compared to normal.

Even before Helene, I was hearing a lot of people having issues with their STRs. STRs have always done well here, but during Covid, everyone one rushed to the market to purchase STRs and nightly rates were incredible high and people were making a killing. Then the Covid burst slowed down and things got back to normal and people started struggling because they bought too high and were running their numbers based on an insanely lucrative snapshot in time. A lot of STR operators switched to MTR, but it seems to be more of a pivot to stop the bleeding and not their original plan.

Being the closest as possible to Asheville brings the highest income, but restrictions have made that difficult, even if you could get the numbers to pencil.  Some outskirt areas jumped on that band wagon and starting restricting as well.  The entire county even started putting rules into place, but I'm not sure where that all landed.

In terms of amenities, yes, you really have to go big here in my opinion.  Everyone used to just put a house up and it did well, then you needed hot tubs to compete.  Now I'm hearing about saunas and cold plunges.  Someone was asking the other day about a contractor to install things like mini golf.  I know some guys that do large houses with pools.  It's getting really expensive to compete these days.

Not trying to be a bummer, just telling you what I'm seeing.