All Forum Posts by: Anthony Pinto

@Alanna Schroeder Thanks for the offer and I will definitely get in touch as questions arise! 

@Account Closed Congrats on the deal! I just started a partnership with two others for a Triplex in my area. We had an LLC set up to legally bind our partnership and in the OA detailed cashflow and equity splits, cashing out, refinance options, exit strategies, etc. Its beneficial for a number of reasons: if you find someone who has done this before, you have experience; you are now accountable to other people; more minds can come together to solve problems as they arise; bring little to no money to the table. It sounds like you are trying to do the exact same thing as me. I can go into more detail if you want to DM me.

Good luck!

Thank you all for your advice. As we start getting guests and reviews, we will take our lessons learned and turn them into the best guest experience we can. And we will definitely have to reevaluate our cleaning fee.

@Charles Kao I never thought about using Airbnb as a stepping stone to find homebuyers. That's a great deal! We've had a number of our guests so far PCSing to the area or moving here for temporary orders. How do you broach that subject with your Airbnb guests? Since we have a separate apartment for our Airbnb, we never have to interact with the guests and introducing ourselves seems a little strange, in my opinion.

We have tried to make our place as homey as possible but I'm sure there is always something that can be improved, which should come with time and feedback from guests. That's a good way to look ay complaints though: as opportunities to improve and be better hosts.

For cleaning fees, we have a pretty small fee right now ($10) and my concern is that $10 is not going to cover cleaning the apartment after a 2-3 week stay. Do you have any suggestions on cleaning fees? My gut tells me we should have it variable based on a longer stay but $10 just doesn't seem like a lot in general.

@Richard Santi Our fear is that will have little physical oversight of a management company from across the world. But we have sometime to trial run some companies now. Do you have any recommendations for property management companies? 

@Charles Kao We are doing the cleaning and scheduling ourselves right now but we are going to do a trial run on a couple cleaners in the area while we are still local. If the scheduling is automatic, I see no need to pay a company to manage that for us. We are having our city inspection within the next month to register our place but there are maybe 15 other AirBnbs in my immediate area, so I'm not too concerned with having an issue with the city. Worst comes to worst, we can long term rent out that unit like the rest of the units in the quad.

@Zachary Zinn, I bought a triplex in Portsmouth, VA recently using the exact method you're discussing. It can be done! I had two partners come to the table with the full down payment and we split the cashflow and equity. It was a pretty good deal and I brought very little (relatively) money to the table. If you want to discuss more of the details, DM me.

@Richard Santi We are right in the middle between a large shipyard and a hospital so we were toying with the idea of doing exclusively traveling nurses or traveling shipyard workers. We just wanted to get our feet wet with this first listing and see how much time and effort it will cost us. Like I said above, with us moving, we'll need to find a short term rental manager that can take over a majority of the control of the Air Bnb.

@Charles Kao I'll look into all those options. Do you self-manage or use a short term property manager? I am leaving the area within the next year and want to work out some of the logistics of remote Airbnb.

@Charles Kao Thanks for the comments! I've never heard of VRBO, what is that? We were planning on sticking to the Airbnb calendar and transferring the dates to our personal calendars. But if there are programs that automatically do that, then that sounds like a better option.