All Forum Posts by: David Taylor

Good question! Is "Just because" a valid option? :D

More seriously - my wife and I first started talking about opening a boutique cabin rental business (multiple cabins on a single property) since we first started dating. This evolved (more recently) into STVR thoughts - as the initial investment should be much lower. The underlying dream is based on the fact that we both are both burnt out from making our employers very wealthy, and want to become self-employed and to achieve financial freedom. We don't want to rely on retirement age and the roller-coaster ride that is the 401k/stock market. We are in our mid-40's. While we definitely could see using our future properties as a vacation spot (for ourselves), the primary goal is to use them to generate as much income as possible. We are definitely looking at diversifying into LTRs as well, once we have a few STVRs under our belts. It seems like STVRs could be a solid means of establishing financial freedom within a couple of years, perhaps more quickly than other types of real estate investment (when funds are limited initially). Am I misinterpreting this concept? 

My current "plan" is to use a 10% down vacation home loan to purchase our first property, and get that functioning ASAP as a STVR for the bulk of the year. Then take all the profit and recycle that back into the down payment on a second property - possibly using asset-based lending. Rinse and repeat.

Good point. I didn't mention this in my initial post, but we also have a separate emergency fund already running for this startup, with about $10k saved so far. But we are prioritizing our down payment fund at this time. Thanks!

I figured, and I appreciate it.:) I'd love to get her insight on this. Really enjoying the latest podcast featuring her as a guest. Thanks!

As an aside, I just bought her to-be-released book... 

But I don't want to continue to "buy books" at the expense of taking action.

So, this isn't my first post here - but I think I jumped the gun in my previous posts. They were good questions, but I skipped the important bits.

Where/how do we begin?

My wife and I are both employed full time, and are able to squirrel away about $1500-$2000/month into a savings fund we have set up to use for our first STVR property purchase. We have about $15,000 saved up at this point and both have "Excellent" credit (785 for my wife, and over 800 for myself). We are gung-ho to start the process, but we honestly have no idea how much money we will need to begin. Which means we don't know how close we are to (or far from) our "goal". Obviously, there are several considerations: price of home, financing options/terms, "condition" of home, etc.. For our first STVR, we think we'd like to go with something a bit more "turnkey".

If you had $15k, and were first starting out, what would you do? Would you save up more money? I'm trying to avoid analysis paralysis here - but it just comes so damn naturally to me... :D I've done a bunch of reading/listening to podcasts since we got hooked on this concept - but the "entry point" has me stumped. 

Suggestions? Thanks!

Is this a thing? My wife and I are considering taking advantage of 10% down vacation home loan for our first STVR property. Is it possible to include renovation costs into this kind of loan, or would we be forced to take out a separate loan for renovations?

What did you do when you were first starting out? Thanks in advance!
This group has been a wonderful resource for us newbs. 

This is my thoughts as well - involve ourselves in an established market. One of our regions of interest has a few municipalities that have recently become “unfriendly” towards STVRs, and in one location (according to some locals) this is primarily due to the local politician also just happening to be a traditional hotel owner and operator. I just wonder what kind of power these municipalities have in affecting business that already operate in these locations. It would be good to know, barring illegal operations, that an established business is somewhat insulated from future political changes/vendettas. 

As my wife and I research options for our first short-term vacation rental property, we are looking very closely into local regulations in each of the markets/destinations we are interested in. 

What happens if you have an established short-term vacation rental business in an area, but then the local municipality decides it no longer wants to be AirBnB friendly, and enacts new regulations that could put you out of business? Has anyone here experienced this? Do local governments typically “grandfather” established businesses in, or do you simply risk losing your investment?

Thanks!

Hello and good morning. 
I’ve been lurking here for a while - trying to educate myself as much as possible - but this is my first post. 
A little background: my wife and I are both in our mid-40’s. My wife has worked as an administrative assistant for much of her adult life, and I’ve been working (for over 20 years) in ophthalmology (Retina specialty), as a technician and biomedical photographer. It sounds much fancier than it is. 
We spent the first several years of our relationship (and marriage) helping each other get out of debt. Besides a car loan, we’ve had no “revolving debt” for the past 3 years. We have wanted to get involved in vacation rental properties for several years now, but never truly took it seriously because of our previous debt difficulties.  We have been saving up for our next step (whatever it ends up being) and have around $20k at this point - adding around $1,500 each month. We are both disgusted with our jobs - and are tired of making someone else incredibly wealthy, while we toil away. We are currently living with my parents to allow us to maximize the amount we can save. 
Put simply, we don’t know exactly where to start. Since we are “rookies”, we don’t even know what we don’t know, or what questions we should be asking. 
We are setting up appointments with banks to determine what exactly will be (financially) expected of us when we are ready to move forward. Questions as simple as “what % down for a rental property?” are high on our list. Then we will contact real estate agents in the areas/regions we are interested in to dive deeper and (hopefully) get insider knowledge of local regulations/sentiments regarding short-term vacation rental properties, as well as using tools such as AirDNA.

My current plan (albeit, naive/ignorant?) is to use our savings (as a down payment) to invest in a single family home/cabin in one of the touristy areas within a few hours drive of our home. After some research, 50% occupancy seems very reasonable - with many places sitting around 75% or higher. We would use the profit from this first property to reinvest in another property, then continue to snowball this method into allowing us to quit our current jobs/work towards financial freedom. 
While I haven’t ruled out alternative financing options, at least for the short-term (due to our limited experience in the real estate market), it seems more appropriate to deal with traditional forms of financing. 
I know this was a long intro, but I’d love to hear critiques of my current approach - or challenges to this mindset. If you have any advice or resources, I’d greatly appreciate it. I’m certain this has been discussed on these forums before, but a quick search didn’t point to much recent activity. Questions involving “time frame“ - such as “how quickly can you typically use the profits from a rental property to invest in the next property?”, come to mind. 
Regardless, I’d love some feedback and/or pushback. Thank you for your insight and consideration!