Buying an STR in big bear CA, missed the train or never too late?

[Jason Shyn]

Hello, my wife and I have been reading through some old forum posts about buying a rental property in big bear CA. We have been focused on a 3bed 2bath in the moonridge area.

A decent place with not much to do before renting it out will run us about $650k. We are looking to put 10% down. The place will either have a hot tub or we will put one in. We live in LA (2 hours away) so we would need a cleaning service but would like to manage it ourselves. We are confident in our marketing ability and small maintenance's. At this price we are looking at (what we can estimate) monthly costs of about $3200 (mortgage, electric, gas, PMI, taxes/insurance).

Our concern is that renting it out will not bring in enough throughout the year to cover the 40k cost to own and operate it. It seems like the housing prices are just too high to see a profit confidently. We are also concerned about post covid revenue, will the popularity of big bear decline once travel becomes more common again. We are looking to make a profit on this property and at the very least break even.

We did sign up on airdna and it claims to see pretty good revenue even at the 50th percentile, but this site seems to have a lot of hand wavy information. We did get a few rental reports from houses we were interested in and we can't see the whole story on these reports (personal use, blackout dates, ect...) but they don't seem to make enough after BBL taxes and cleaning fees to cover what would be our monthly costs.

Does anyone have any helpful information on this type of scenario? Anything we have overlooked/underlooked? Maybe a 2bed 2bath for around 425k is more reasonable? We would love to pull the trigger on some of these nice 650k places but are worried we may be biting off more than we can chew.

Thanks for any help