What do you offer for TV in your STR?

Question

Answer

I have a 40" or so HDTV in the living rooms, half are mounted on the wall and half are on a tv stand with drawers. Half have a Blu-Ray player that is capable of streaming (Netflix, Hulu, etc) and I leave several pornos* in the aforementioned drawers. The other half have a Roku device. Bedrooms have an old style tv. Cable tv is about 120 channels.*99% of my renters are guys doing temporary work at a refinery. Welders, fitters, boilermakers and such.

Answer

@Rachel Kokosenski -To maximize short term rental income, we put new flat screen televisions in every bedroom and in the main common areas of each home. Normally cable TV is installed. We also put PlayStation units or Xbox units in the kids' bedrooms and DVD players in the common areas. We have found the more fun you can build into a home the better.Good luck - Keith

Answer

I have LARGE (55”-65”) in the living room and I generally move whatever used to be in the living room to the bedroom as the properties come furnished in my market. I have one of the TCLs in question and just last night a guest messaged me and said the Netflix screen is “broken” they sent me a pic and half the screen is fuzzy. I contacted TCL, their website was very easy and even let me upload a pic. We’ll see what they say about the problem as this TV is less than 6 months old I hate to say it but it’s looking like you get what you pay for. I’ll keep you updated. I have had good luck the 65” Sharp Aquos from Walmart I have 2 of those.

Answer

I tried Amazon Firestick and ran into quite a few issues with my the “not so technical people” having trouble accessing content. I switched over to Cox cable that everyone seems to be used to for now. No complaints since I switched. I don’t like Cable TV and don’t even have it in my own house. I use streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime. But as if now, cable TV still seems to be the most accepted TV medium out there for most people. Maybe in 5-10 years that will be different. Hopefully so, since I own a lot of Netflix stock lol. But for now, I suck it up and pay the stinking cable bill each month so I don’t have phone calls or complaints. :-)

Answer

I have TCL Roku TVs in all three of my rentals - dead simple SmartTV interface, good picture, and dirt cheap. I provide Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Go (which I get for "free" as a promo with my cell phone provider). I also provide basic cable or satellite as appropriate. I'd like to just do streaming services, EXCEPT - one house is so rural the internet is basically DSL, so streaming can't be counted on. Thus, DirecTV. The others, internet is good, but the cable didn't cost much when packaged with internet and a landline (all houses have sketchy cell service), and I want to provide access to live events like sports. I'm a football junkie so I understand the frustration of not being able to get The Game.I've only had one pair of guests who had a hard time figuring out the Roku TV, and they were very good-natured about being behind the times.I have DVD players in 2 out of 3 houses. The first house, I didn't have satellite for awhile, so wanted to give them DVDs. I since decided that was a pain because I don't want to feel responsible for giving them a well-rounded DVD collection (there's no RedBox or other video rental near that house). The second house only has a DVD player because it was there when I bought it; I don't provide DVDs there because there IS a RedBox close by. The third house came with a DVD player but it was so ancient I tossed it.

Answer

I have a 2 bedroom, 1 bath house STR. I have one TV in the living room hooked up to the Roku Express Plus. It has Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video. There are no TV's in the bedrooms. I was going to put a TV atleast in one bedroom; however, I've had no complaints at all so I just stuck with the one TV in the living room.

Answer

@Rachel Kokosenski Go the streaming route. It's becoming the norm for vacation rentals. Ditch the cable and just keep high-speed internet. Emphasis on high speed...rentals with slow internet speed always disappoint guests.

Answer

@JJ King & @Matt K. -- You have convinced me to go with a Netflix / Sling combo for my new STR (with two TVs). I am a satisfied Sling user myself and between my own apartment and two STRs, I only have 4 TVs. I'm thinking I can try just using my own account. If I have to add a second, just for the STRs, that's fine.

Answer

We also use the TCL Roku TV's in our apartments. They are decent cheap TVs. We use Netflix and SlingTV and it works out to have a few subscriptions shared among all of our apartments. You can have up to 4 simultaneous streams with SlingTV, so we have that same account logged into 6 or so apartments and have never had an issue with all guests streaming at once. The TVs also are able to download a bunch of other streaming apps like Youtube and all of the cable channel apps that people can log into. It is a much better setup that when we used to have cable. Much cheaper and actually more simple. People used to always have issues with turning the cable box on.

Answer

Keep your HDTV out of harms way. A lot of my tenants are eff ups, yet they make quite a bit of money each week. They travel with all their belongings in a big plastic storage container. When they ingress and egress a house, they hit the HDTV with the storage container and break the screen.