All Forum Posts by: Gerald Pitts

Past performance does not guarantee future success.  It's easy to make money during a bull market and when this happens people often overinflate their sense of investing sophistication because they just made a ton of money.  However it takes no skill to make money when everyone around you is also making money. 

As you said, an untrained monkey could have made money in the last decade.  These are the types of people who tend to get wiped out because they think that life will always be this easy and never develop any actual knowledge of investing.

Short term is also becoming very saturated in many areas making it difficult to achieve decent occupancy rates unless you have a super premium property.  This can easily wipe someone out if they overpay for a property during the bull run hype, only to find out that so did everyone else and there is simply too much competition and rates don't support the mortgage payments.

I've always thought it was funny how much flack Airbnb took for this compared to other industries that do the same.  Has no one shopped for a rental car recently?  They're even worse.  They don't show the total price on the next page, they make you flip through 5 pages and a lengthy checkout process before they finally plop the true total on you after showing you a different number throughout the whole process and hope you don't notice.

As I understand it, this is an American thing.  It's common for upfront pricing in other countries.  And as I understand it, in Europe, Airbnb has already been doing upfront pricing for a while (I could have misheard that).

Can't say that I hate it if we move in that direction, and maybe Airbnb will spur a change in all the other things as well so we can start getting upfront pricing on everything else too.

I would consider liability and how the foot traffic would impact my life. Will his guests be hanging out at your dock, drinking beer, fishing, etc? Do they walk past your house and look in the windows?

It's a possibility, but I wouldn't bother unless it's going to produce a decent return of a few hundred a month.