AIR BNB in apartment building

[John Bucknum]

HI All, 

we purchased a distressed 11 unit apartment building in a small rural, college town in western PA in July. The place was just short of gutted.  we have 5 units up and running with 3 rented long term, and 3. more that should be up and running in the next month.  the apartments are all 1/1 with small galley kitchens.  we are trying to decide if we should try a short term rental with one or more of the apartments until we get more tenants. we figure we don't have much to lose.  They are small enough, the street up costs for furniture, tv, etc should be less than 5k. we are already paying for the utilities.  this would be our first trial of a short term rental.  I have a cleaning crew in place for turnovers and a trusted handy man. I should mention we are about an hour away from the property.

I have been researching the short term rental strategy for some time and plan to try and get a few in the downtown Pittsburgh area at some point, but I thought this may be a good introduction.

advice/suggestions?

thanks 

[Julie McCoy]

Hey @John Bucknum!  Sounds like you've got a good situation to do a trial run and learn the ropes with pretty low risk.  You can manage long-distance, no problem, when you have trusted local people to do the hands-on work (I'm 200-2000 miles from mine).  

@Ray Johnson and @Michael Greenberg have good advice about checking out the local competition and trying to get a feel for what you can expect re: occupancy, rate, etc.  Be careful with using AirDNA for analysis, though - the data can be useful, but the numbers are quite high in my experience, so take it with a shaker of salt.  A more accurate approach is to run a manual search for like properties in your area and see what their calendars look like.  Make sure you plug in a variety of dates to get a feel for prices over time; without dates AirBNB will just show you their base rate.

Good luck and let us know how it goes!