All Forum Posts by: Bobby Souza

I suggest implementing a PMS (Guesty - what we use, Hostfully, Hostaway, Lodgify). This will make your life a lot easier when it comes to handling day-to-day tasks like immediate inquiry follow-up communication, guest check-in and check-out communications, keeping your cleaners in-sync with the turnover schedule, integrate multiple OTAs to align on finances and availability. Whether you have one property or many, putting systems in place and automating will help you and your guests. 

Also, implement dynamic pricing with PriceLabs. 

Good luck, Steve!

Pricing strategy is a big one - dynamic pricing tools like pricelabs will help. 

As @Matthew Bowling mentioned, corporate travel is a worth exploring. 

Facebook ads and Facebook groups are a good idea as well. 

Have you heard of peerspace? It's another great way to allow people to rent out your space for a day to host events: business meetings, photoshoots, baby showers, etc.

As everyone mentioned above, you'll want to estimate potential gross income and total expenses. From a short-term rental perspective you're looking at one-time fees like furnishing & tech and then monthly expenses such as: mortgage, insurance, utilities, property tax, HOA if applicable, cable/internet, OTA fees, maintenance/capex, software subscriptions, supplies, cleaning fees.

Tools I use to analyze deals for short-term renting: Airdna, Rabbu, Pricelabs Market Dashboard. I suggest using at least two different tools/sources to get a good idea of the overall market (macro), the potential occupancy and average daily rates. Always use Airbnb to vet out the numbers by looking at comps: see pricing, cleaning fees and availability.

Hope this helps. Feel free to DM if you have any additional questions or want to dive into this further. 

Hey Serge,

Market Research:

1. Think about a market you've traveled to or know of others traveling to that is either a well-established vacation rental market or up-and-coming vacation destination. I suggest getting a copy of Avery Carl's book "Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth" which talks about different market types. 

2. Once you have a market, check regulations/ordinances to see if they have any for STRs in place - the best situation is if the market already has regulations in place but they still allow STRs. 

3. Use tools like airdna or rabbu to analyze the market at a macro-level. 

4. Start looking at properties for sale - make sure you understand your budget and financing strategy beforehand 

What is a minimum cap rate to shoot for? 

Like @Leslie Anne Morris mentioned, cash on cash % is a good metric to evaluate whether a property is worth pursuing. Your goals as an investor or STR operator will determine the criteria you'll use to evaluate deals. There used to be a rule of thumb that you shouldn't pursue deals less than 30% CoC...then, it moved down to nothing less than 20%...but you may be ok with 15% - all depends on your goals.

How much work does it take to manage a STR your own?

It's a good amount of work but the best advice I could give is to surround yourself with people in the STR space - whether it's through BiggerPockets, local meetups, Facebook groups, joining a mastermind. There's a lot of ups and downs in the process so having other likeminded, experienced people around you will help keep you on track and more importantly stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technology. The goal is to get your processes in place and automate as much as you can so finding others that have been there will dramatically speed up the process.

Good luck! 

Hey Jack, 

Happy to take a look and walk you through the numbers - aside from the property address there's other information needed that'll help in analyzing the deal (your goal for this property, how are you planning to finance, are you managing this yourself, etc.). Message me so I can get a bit more background.