Market Research: How To?

[Levi Helms]

Hello BP! This is my first post ever. I have been a long time podcast listener, and I look forward to interacting with the BP community going forward. I will post a little bit about myself after my question. Of course, if this has already been answered, I apologize, please simply point me to the right direction. The fundamental question I'm trying to answer is: WHERE do people vacation and WHY? Subsequently, I want to ask, is this particular short term rental market saturated? Additionally, I cannot answer these questions on gut, because I plan on pitching my rental ideas to investors and I need hard data. It also makes me more comfortable. In order to answer these questions, I've come up with a few measures/ideas: -US bureau of economics travel and tourism satellites report the economic impact of tourism in their state. They report "visitor spending on lodging" among other data. Is this useful? Does it paint a good picture of the vacation market in that area? -number of attractions nearby -most traveled tourist destinations reported by TripAdvisor (or similar) I'm really stuck and not sure where to look next. Basically, how do I determine if a short term rental market is a good market? But, once I figure that out, how do I weed out the areas that are over saturated? (I don't know for sure but I imagine many regions of Florida are quite saturated?) Here are my ideas for rental supply research: -www.airdna.com reports supply side well, but not really the demand at all. -hotels nearby Any and all help is appreciated. Thanks so much! A little about me: I am from Grand Rapids, MI, but I currently work and reside in NYC. I just graduated from college and have zero real estate experience (statistics degree and I work at an investment bank) but I am looking to try my hand at short term rentals. Specifically, I want to purchase unique real estate for vacation rental use. I chose this because unique real estate usually rents at a premium, while the costs of owning/building unique real estate are comparable to traditional real estate. Example: tiny homes.* Tiny homes rent for about the same price as hotels in their area, but they cost around $100k (or less). Here is my general plan: purchase a lot of land, and build a very unique home on it. I do not want to purchase a house and then modify it to be unique, because the costs to make it unique at that point would eat up any earnings. I am looking for lots (I may ask a question in the future about finding lots). I plan on financing the project through a construction loan (hopefully the bank agrees). If not, I think finding private loans will not decrease my chances of success. I then plan to use Airbnb/vrbo as my primary platform for renting out the unit. Well I think that's everything. Obviously feel free to reach out if you have questions. I look forward to meeting the BP community 😄. *I do not want to invest in tiny homes, however, because I believe they are too much of a fad.