All Forum Posts by: Collin Hays

Agree with Jon.

With a short-term rental, you are effectively running a hotel, and there are risks with that class of business that are very different than a long-term rental. In addition to $1 million liability, I would recommend that you buy a personal umbrella policy that extends to the rental. Umbrella is very inexpensive insurance.

I had a cabin that Dolly Parton's brother finished out the loft on. It burned to the ground. So much for that marketing opportunity.

 This discussion is certainly heating up!   haha

The thing about the electric fireplace is, yeah, they look pretty cool, but there's a fair amount of technology and moving parts in these things - think video game with a heater - that can go kaput on you. Then what?  Certainly no one is going to repair it for you.  Pull it out and put another in? 

And what about the remote for the thing?  Remote gets lost, no fire.

There's some benefits, but I'm leaning toward gas logs and the timer switch.  

We don't use Airbnb because of this monkey business. It seems like they have a newer and better "jerk the host around" policy every couple of days.

You get what you tolerate.

I'm old school and like a real wood-burning fire.  But I am looking at doing a renovation and it could cost as much as $10K more to put in a fireplace.  There's some really fancy electric ones now that even crackle and pop like a real fire.  Is this an acceptable substitute, or are electric fireplaces considered hopelessly faux and cheesy?

Rapid depreciation is great, but as John mentioned, depreciation expenses are recaptured when you sell the house. It's a tax deferment. Pay me now, pay me later. Sure, you can then play the deferment game again by potentially doing a 1031 exchange, but there can be a lot of compromising in all of that.  

A few months ago, I spoke with an investor who said "I need to buy a $1.4 million cabin to complete my 1031, and I need to do so by X date."  I pointed her to a lovely cabin that was a little over $1 million, and she didn't even hesitate in saying "Too cheap...I've got to spend more, and quickly."   Lunacy.

Invest to make money and pay your taxes.

Happy to chime in here and address your questions.  But I am confused as to your main purpose for buying.  You are doing it as a tax write off?  Can you go into more detail with your math on that?  You can only "write off" expenses, interest, depreciation, and taxes.  Such deductions are only deductions from your income - they are not a tax credit.  This is often misunderstood.

Investing in anything primarily for the tax deduction is a huge mistake - tail wagging the dog.  You want to invest in something that might make some money.  If a maximum tax deduction is your primary objective, find something that is vastly overpriced and will lose money from now on.  Sure, you are losing money, but you will get a bit of help on your taxes, instead of paying taxes on a profitable investment.

The Property Manager earned those reservations, so they should be compensated for them. If you don't want that, then simply start fresh on your own, and allow the Property Manager to relocate those reservations to properties they manage. That is fair.  

This works both ways:  We recently added a client who self-managed, and we are allowing them to keep the reservations that they earned without a management fee.  They earned the reservations; we did not.  It wouldn't be fair for me to impose a management fee on those reservations.  

nope. This question gets asked about once a month.