Mid-term rental pricing

[Ryan Daulton]

I am new to investing and am about to purchase my first rental.

How do I determine the median rent for MTRs in my zipcode?  All the BP calculators I've seen are based on LTRs.  What I've searched so far for MTR pricing: FF, Airbnb, AirDna.  Also, does anybody else get http error 404 when using FF?

[Nick Zupec]

Quote from @Ryan Daulton:

Wow, FF is working for me now too!  Another idea I had was to ask area property managers how much they think the going rate is for MTRs.  The FF rates in my zipcode are higher than I expected and their quality is less than what I'm bringing online!  How could I determine how much demand there is?

Determining demand can be tricky too if you don't already have an MTR in that market. If you know a good PM that does MTRs, that's a great route to go. Take them to coffee and pick their brain. We haven't found many PMs in our area that do much with MTRs (they are all either LTR or STR focused). We didn't have any idea if there was demand in our market so we started with one property just to see how it would go and it booked in 2 days. We added a 2nd one and both were solidly booked so we added 2 more haha. We are in a small market so we were very surprised to consistently fill 4 and now we are looking to do 4 more.

That may not be the best strategy given the cost of getting an MTR set up, so here is another approach. Look on Furnished Finder at your market 8 or 9 months in advance. I wouldn't expect much to be booked yet that far out. Find a few properties that are your closest competition (similar size, location, finishes). Then reset your search to 2 weeks out and see how many of them are still available. If they are all booked, there should be plenty of demand for you. If most of them are available, I would be a little more concerned. You could do the same thing with 30+ day stays on Airbnb. While it is variable, most of our booking requests come around 4 weeks in advance.