All Forum Posts by: Derek Robinson

Disclaimer* I don't have any STRs in Asheville currently.  But what I'm hearing from the meetups is that things are still incredibly slow since Helene.  Also, every month I hear of another handful of quality/long standing restaurants shutting down because they just couldn't wait any longer for the tourism to come back.  I haven't directly heard of any hotel vacancy numbers, but I can't imagine they are doing well either...I've been downtown on the weekends and am shocked at how dead it is compared to normal.

Even before Helene, I was hearing a lot of people having issues with their STRs. STRs have always done well here, but during Covid, everyone one rushed to the market to purchase STRs and nightly rates were incredible high and people were making a killing. Then the Covid burst slowed down and things got back to normal and people started struggling because they bought too high and were running their numbers based on an insanely lucrative snapshot in time. A lot of STR operators switched to MTR, but it seems to be more of a pivot to stop the bleeding and not their original plan.

Being the closest as possible to Asheville brings the highest income, but restrictions have made that difficult, even if you could get the numbers to pencil.  Some outskirt areas jumped on that band wagon and starting restricting as well.  The entire county even started putting rules into place, but I'm not sure where that all landed.

In terms of amenities, yes, you really have to go big here in my opinion.  Everyone used to just put a house up and it did well, then you needed hot tubs to compete.  Now I'm hearing about saunas and cold plunges.  Someone was asking the other day about a contractor to install things like mini golf.  I know some guys that do large houses with pools.  It's getting really expensive to compete these days.

Not trying to be a bummer, just telling you what I'm seeing.

Hello all!  Does anyone know Steeve Raymond.  His company is Selective Real Estate and he does construction and flipping.  He works mostly in Chicago, Illinois.  

As stated, I was pivoting to mobile home parks, so I sold and put the profits into that.  I don't remember specific numbers, but I bought them for 28k to 45k cash, rented for $450 to $550, and sold for around $55k each. Had them for around 3 years.

My main point was I had good management in place, tenants only had to come up with around 10% of the total rent, never had any issues with tenants, and they appreciated.  I believe you can do well with these properties if you know what you are doing.

I used to own 3 Section 8 rentals in the Spartanburg, SC area.  The areas were not the best, but I had professional management and never had any trouble.  Two of them came with Section 8 tenants when I purchased them.  My plan was to increase rents to get the tenants to leave, do a lite rehab, and re-rent.  Well the rent increase was mostly paid by the government so the tenants never left.  I think they only had to pay $50/month while the government covered $500-$600.  We rarely had maintenance requests, tenants paid on time, and the annual inspections showed average wear and tear.  I pivoted at the time to mobile home parks and sold all three at a profit.  So, made money monthly and sold at a profit.  Super hands off with a great manager.  Tenants were mostly young adults with multiple kids.  One thing I did spend a lot of time on was driving the neighborhoods before I purchased.  You could drive down one block with run down houses, people hanging out in the yard during the day, dogs chained up in the front yard, etc.  Then the next block over would have clean houses, sense of ownership, etc.

Congratulations! It's hard to find a cash flowing rental in this area, but paying all cash certainly helps!

@Daniel Radchishin, perfect timing! We have a meetup tonight.  Details below.  Also, if you send me your email, I can invite you to the Slack Channel.

Hey @Brandon Obrien, what's your email?  I'll also add you to our Slack Channel, a great way to connect to people outside of the monthly meetups

@Mitch Davidson, thanks for connecting Brett, I haven't been at my computer much this week.

Hey @Sara Timko! Yes, these are still going on.  Send me your email and I can send you dates and also invited you to the Slack channel.