Looking to you good STR'ers to give me a STR crash course lesson!

[JD Martin]

Good afternoon all!

Most of you might not recognize me because I don't hang out in this section much because, well, I've never had a short-term rental. My main area of experience is in long term buy & hold. 

So I'm about to take the plunge into a STR in Florida (Disney area); this will be essentially a second (winter) home that I hope to fill up in the times that I'm not using it, mostly March-December. I've read a ton of stuff here the last few days, and of course I have my experience with all my rentals, so I don't feel completely baffled by doing this, but I am sure I have a lot of lessons in front of me and I'm trying to make them as painless (and least expensive!) as possible.

To that end, I really could use a decent crash course in running a STR. Half of those I see doing STR do it themselves, virtually, while others swear by using PM. I don't really have a preference other than not wanting to create any extra aggravation for myself or the future guests that could be avoided by having good systems in place. Since I run my own PM for my rental property business, and I have virtual systems set up there, it seems to me that I *could* do this and bypass the PM setup, but there's a huge caveat to that in that my long-term properties are all close to me geographically; if something goes wrong, I can pop over there no problem. That's not going to happen in Orlando, and I don't want guests suffering needlessly because I've set this thing up wrong from the start. On the flip side, I don't mind paying for PM but I'd like this property to at least break even, if not make a few bucks (and hopefully appreciate), and I see info on here where posters are saying they pay anywhere from 20-50% of their gross to PM, which sounds crazy to me especially at the upper end.

So I'm looking forward to some feedback from those of you currently running STRs, both doing it yourself and those who are using PMs. And those who have STRs near Disney are especially valuable to me.

Thanks all!