Our family vacation condo that doubles as a nightly rental

[Brody Fausett]

Investment Info:

buy & hold investment in Brian Head.

Purchase price: $38,000

Cash invested: $45,000

Condo in ski town that we bought, fixed up, and now use it an escape for our family along with renting it out as a vacation rental. We average about $1,400 a month after expenses.

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

I have always been obsessed with owning a cabin. A condo in the mountains seemed like a less risky first step. Lower purchase price and mush less maintenance.

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

This place had been listed on the market for over 5 years. It was originally listed at $150k. I reached out to my realtor and told him to write an offer up for $35k. He thought I was crazy and almost didn't write the offer because he was afraid to offend them. We settled at a purchase price of $38k.

How did you finance this deal?

We bought this one with all cash. We were not sure if this was going to have a hard time renting out or not and didn't want to chance it. Know what I know now I would have leveraged more money on this one.

How did you add value to the deal?

We remodeled this entire place. The nice thing about a condo investment is that there is not a lot of square footage and so renovation costs are much cheaper. Our largest value add was framing in two queen over queen bunkbeds into the wall! This has allowed us to sleep way more ppl and has gotten us some awesome reviews and increased our bookings. My father in law also does log work on the side and he was able to add some "mountain feel" with some custom log work!

What was the outcome?

We stayed occupied about 90% of the time which is perfect because we still like to get up there to snowboard and escape the business of life.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

Running a nightly rental investment property has posed a lot of new challenges in itself. A lot of which we have been able to navigate through so that we don't repeat any of the same mistakes. We quickly realized the importance of 5 star reviews!