All Forum Posts by: Brian Barch

in many of the mountain markets, you have to have size, I’d say the ability to sleep 14+ to do 100k. 

Ironically, In my market, I almost think you’d have a better shot of doing $200k for a $1M cabin than you would $100k for a $500k home if that makes any sense. 

I do about $55k on a $320k cabin and I’m super happy with that.

I also think if you bought land and built the right kind of home (container, treehouse, etc) you might be able to achieve this. 

Just 1. Open to having more, for our family we like any STR's to hold dual appeal as our personal vacation rental and a profitable investment. We have money to invest when the next opportunity comes along, we are trying to let some of the industry shake out happen first.

Learnings:
1) Finding a place with level seasonality (Southern Appalachians) was a good play for us.  We never really have a month under 60% occupancy, and thus don't have to worry about weathering monthly storms.  I underestimated the value of this

2) A good cleaner makes the most difference from an operations stand point.  Find someone with a pride of ownership.  This likely WON'T be someone off a platform like Turno, but someone local to the area

3) Just get started!  You'll learn so much along the way that you can take into future investments.  You will NEVER get a sure bet, so at some point you need a little bit of faith

4) Understand what amenities over-index in your area.  That might be a pool, hot tub, game room, etc.

5) Pricing is near everything.  I can't tell you how many under-performing places I find that are only under-performing because the host got lazy on knowing the pricing for their market.  I'm talking people to don't differentiate between weekdays/weekends, people who refuse to go below $200/night when the whole calendar is empty, etc.

N GA mountains.

Oct and Nov are 90% booked. Dec probably only 40% right now. Just wrapping up first year but seems more robust than last?

 What are the details? Purchase price, how much you owe, fair market value, how negative is the cash flow? 

Certainly there is an emotional component here, but this is basically a math problem we can solve for to determine the best outcome

You can explore non local companies, like keybee or awning.com to name 2 such a ones that charge less. 

But note they use an out sourced low cost country to handle half the work. Not saying it’s bad or wrong, just something to note

Agree with the other reply, BR is becoming a more mature market, in that the table stakes are higher than they used to be. Hot tub is considered necessary. From what I’m seeing, large, high end cabins are doing very well

I think the novelty of it would do better as an STR assuming your area of Atlanta allows STRs.

I’d use awning.com to start to estimate revenue potential, and compare to Zillow for LTR rents. Neither is perfect, but it’s a start

I think your focus is in the wrong place.

Work on down payment funding, analyzing properties and markets, etc

I only pay attention to the total when booking, and typically when I stay at an Airbnb it’s on vacation to a cool destination where the experience is so much better than a hotel (which also has a plethora of fees), and so $300/night to stay Oceanside is worth it.

what I do know is that a lot of municipalities have increased their taxes on STRs as a part of their regulations.

Our fee is $160 and we have about 70 stays a year. To be fair, we have higher than average occupancy for our market, close to 80% year round.

I’d probably start with market avg occupancy (60%?) and assume a 3 night average stay.

again, this will vary greatly by market and house size