All Forum Posts by: Alex S.

I've been tracking house prices during the pandemic and they grew a lot for single-family residence houses while city condos lost around 20% and stay on market 30+ days. It's probably will be harder to rent it out now.

Is it a good time to invest in a condo? Thoughts? 

Thanks for sharing your experiences with STR and words of encouragement! I like the BP community, glad I discovered it :)

Thank you guys for your opinions and useful data points to consider, I'm updating my cash flow estimate accordingly. Let me summarize what I hear to make sure I got it correctly:

• - STR has higher property management rates (25-30%) unlike 10-12% for LTR
• - Local policies are more dynamic for STR and what is allowed now, can be banned in the future (I saw that happening in HI when considering buying a real-estate there), should have a backup plan
• - STR require more management time thus if managed personally, should expect more involvement
• - Look at Florida and Carolina (NC?) for best oceanfront house dals for STR (I actually research OBX and cash flow there works the best, although it's an opposite coast for me so less lucrative for the first real-estate investment)
• - Take into account the need for good management/cleaning services as for STR it's critical to keep the property up to standard in between rentals

Also, I have an additional question on the CapEx for STR vs LTR, does anyone here have some experience to share? Should I allocate a bigger CapEx for STR? How big is the %?

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@Bryan Balducki, you asked about my long-term goal, I have a few: 

1. 1. Diversify my current investment portfolio which is mostly domestic stocks right now, the real-estate investment seems to be more stable and cooperative in case of good deals and leverage usage.
2. 2. Aquire a vacation house to use like 5% of the time but still have it as an asset generating positive cash flow and not as a liability
3. 3. Try our real estate as an investment in general, I'm new in this area, but after research and a few months of learning, I can see how it can work

I'm starting out and already collected cash and some knowledge needed for my real estate investment deal. I'm thinking about the investment into an oceanfront single residence vacation house for short-term rentals with Airbnb/VRBO to have the ability to be in the house from time to time with my family, most likely when there is no occupancy. For that reason, I want to limit the property to short-term rentals only.

With occupancy and rates provided by a local property management company in the area, I'm looking at, even with 50% occupancy the math works fine providing positive cash-flow, taking into account all the expenses (I used knowledge from the book where I learned about Bigger Pockets and this BP calculator). The math doesn't work for long-term rentals though for the same property.

After initial research, my search was severely limited by city zoning prohibiting short-term rentals in many oceanfront areas but there are still some options left.

I'm looking for opinions of skilled investors here about short-term rentals with Airbnb/VRBO. Does it worth it in the case described above?