Condo rental pools (Condotels)

[Account Closed]

I was curious if anyone has purchased any condos that are held in a "condo pool". My understanding is you buy the condo, its yours, and you can elect to keep the condo in the rental pool for the property. So the property will essentially manage renting it out, cleaning, etc. I'm sure it's a hefty fee, but seems painless for someone like me who is out of town. Does anyone have experience with this? Do they leave enough meat on the bone to make it worthwhile?

[Ryan Moyer]

This is fun timing as I was just talking with a friend who purchased one of these a few days ago.

The HOA fee on his is steep ($355/mo on a $129,000 condo is almost as much as the mortgage) but it does include all utilities and the resort has a nice pool, pickleball courts, and a high end spa. It does reasonably well for him.

I'm not sure if this is how they all work but the advantage seems to be (and I'm not sure if this only works if you use their preferred property manager) that the resort shows up on hotel aggregator sites like hotels.com, expedia, etc.  Not only is that more eyeballs on the units but it seems it can bring in much higher prices as a $129 1br condo on Airbnb is a lot less appealing relative to the competition (which has plenty of 1br options in that range and many even cheaper) than it is for a $129 1br suite with a kitchen on a hotel aggregator next to high end hotels that are smaller and not any nicer but run $400/nt and up (and probably double that for anyone that narrows their search down to hotel suites instead of single rooms).

In fact just for fun I looked on Airbnb at people self managing their units on airbnb and the nightly prices in the same resort were listed from $13 (!!) to $62 per night and the calendars looked about the same as the units that were listed as part of the "hotel" on expedia for $129/nt and up.