All Forum Posts by: Jonathan H.

@Jake Sklanka

With the way that I do it I'm getting 95% occupancy and ease with the COVID challenge, but then, I also tackle them head-on.  I only allow long-term through Airbnb and I pay out of pocket for 2x / week housecleaning in the commons that's super extensive, and I screen everyone ( nothing on instant book ).   

The ease will depend on your skillset, team, and context of course, but I basically can look at houses on Zillow and predict with pretty solid accuracy whether there is a margin.   I would be happy to look at some specific addresses you have in mind and share my thoughts in context of those specific places if you want. 

Key Variables in the Market I have discovered:

- A solid team required for handling all things on the ground is needed 

- Stay away from HOA's, or if there is one, read the CCNRS explicitly, and/or call them. If your good to go on local regulations but the HOA has an issue with it, it's not worth the trouble.

Also of Note, I currently am operating in Talent, OR, El Cerrito, CA, and Boulder, CO... so if you only have 1 property but its within 1-2 hrs of one of these locations, please let me know! 

Hi! I manage properties by furnishing and then renting out the rooms one by one to people on a monthly basis, which, when done well, earns me a generous ROI. As means for profit share, I handle property management, property maintenance and the actual cost of property maintenance related tasks that are commonly associated with normal wear and tear and typical the landlords responsibility. This provides you, as a real estate investor, an average of 10% to 15% higher ROI, because you don't need to pay another property manager, pay for maintenence, or shoulder the costs of vacancy between tenants. Instead, I handle these things and pay for vacancy.

I want to consolidate these efforts, so I am looking for a real estate investor to partner with who can regularly provide me new rentals in the same county if possible.  Or at a minimum, someone who has at least 3 houses in their portfolio, ideally closer to 10+.   I can afford to take on about 1 house every 3 months at current scale, but could arrange a custom agreement to be able to start with 5-6 houses off the bat. 

Do you own 10+ homes and are you already paying a property manager to manage them?  Let me replace them!  Just send me the area your investments are located in and how many houses you have, and ill evaluate the market out there. 

I use Airbnb for long term renters 30 days min as well as automation software to screen guests,  handle logistics, handle funds and insure every transaction and guest to the tune of 2 seperate 1 million dollar policies.  For a large project I would be happy to also add in a commercial umbrella policy.   So the area must not have an active ban on Airbnb to function. 

Ideal locations in order of priority:

South Oregon

Any of Oregon

North CA

San. Diego

Denver, CO

Boulder CO

Any of CO

Portland

South Washington

Austin TX 
Yosemite, CA

Nevada City, CA

Bay Area, CA

But open to considering and evaluating any location, so just send me the location of your real estate investments and I'll reply after a quick market evaluation. 

** 2 year track record, never taken a loss, never been late on rent, 750 credit score, 8k/m income, references available. 

Do you have other partnership ideas?  Send em over!  I am an expert at this and if alternative approaches enable more scaling of my business for mutual gain I am more than receptive to the ideas. 

Thank you so much for the creative thinking on my inquiry!!  I will definitely reach out, would love to connect!  I have raised the question with several buyers, but have no idea how to present the deal, so the conversation flatlines pretty quickly.  I have been hoping one of them would know how the nuts and bolts work, and why it might be in their interest!

I might be inclined to share a little secret here... if your STR is currently in a Covid Zone: consider trying this:

• - Convert all listings to a 1 month minimum, by the room

• - Add all appropriate features to suit this
• - Mark the price up to 2-3x the typical rent, including everything
• - Sit back knowing that at 50% occupancy your roughly breaking even
• - Watch as your life gets really, really simple... as you have to work less and less every day, allow your net to drop to about 50% for a while, knowing that you are reducing the risk of Covid spreading in your business, and knowing that you are creating a safe space for those people who were planning to travel, but just want to chill while humanity finds a cure for this thing. 

If your market is anything like either of mine, you will thank me later.  Im honestly never going back, even after covid. I love it. 

Ok.. just one more perk which literally makes it worth its weight in gold... 

Lol... this is classic, and iGms can claim this too.  Ever tried to open airbnb to respond to a message and found yourself waiting 5-7 seconds for the thing to load? 

Notice that happening every time you try to respond to a guest?

That ever get on your nerves?   I think it should, if you know you dont have to deal with it. 

Im a software engineer, building apps for a living.. so when I saw that I instantly started looking for a workaround, a solution, software that was simply built better. 

iGms was the first working solution I found.  SmartBnb had it too.  Instant messaging, not having to wait to respond to a message ever again. 

Frankly, any service wanting a % of your hard earned money ( similar to a % of your business if you think about it ), by letting you use their app, had better be a ridiculously bad *** software, in my opinion.   That the only tool that I found that added that much genuine value was SmartBnb, and they dont want a cut of my business.  Just a nominal fee, literally.   

I feel deep conviction that anyone trying to scale anything STR, needs to get really familiar with that software. I had a friend offer to have me set it up for him and manage it for 20% of his income, after I described in detail what it was doing... but I didn't jump on the deal.

If timing were right, sure... but the role would have put me as point of contact and sole responsible party for a 20% share of the ROI, and I would rather partner with an investor with 20 houses and manage them, and pay all the repair and wear and tear costs for them, in exchange for running them all at a 2k/door net gain... simple win win which would be income more aligned with the level of responsibility required.

Yes! I tried out experientially with 15 individual rooms listed as well as whole house booking options listed between 2 houses about 9-10 different systems.  

YourPorter got a 6/10 in my experience in terms of value, ease of use and features. 

SmartBnb is the only tool that got a 10/10, and it was a fraction of the cost of most of the others. 

Guesty takes the rein as the lowest ranking software:  Like used car salesemen promising to sell you a porche at top dollar thats worth every penny, delivering a 78 winnebago, and skipping town till they get called out. 

Wrote a thorough review which inspired guesty to refund the 1k+ 'onboarding fee', and they had to beg me to take my money back and remove the review, then they tried to take a % of all my future sales that had ever been listed on their platform... had to repeat the process, got that money back, and never removed the purely honest but devastating review on them.

Then I found smart BNB, automated nearly 90% of my communications, including upcharges for pets and early checkins... just about everything... their software is a dream for STRs.   Its such a shame there are so many fake 'evaluation sites' out there not giving them the props they deserve, because it took me quite some time to find them due to that. 

Im also looking in the same area, following. 

Hey there!  Couple thoughts from my experience.   These are my personal strong opinions:

iGms is garbage compared to SmartBnb.  Nothing comes close. 

Try it out, you will never want to go back, at best guess.  I didn't. 

Everyone doing anything with STRs needs to use SmartBnb and scrap all the rest of the software, I literally tried almost all of them.  SmartBnb blows the competition out of the water and at a fraction of the cost of most of the other options. 

Tried pricing tools, none added enough value to warrant their commission.  I would recommend cutting them out most likely unless, for your market, you know for sure they are earning their weight. 

For my STRs, all were converted to long term due to Covid, and they are booked almost solid.  Its high market time right now, all are doing well with low risk by the room long term non customer facing highly screened, instant book turned off bookings. 

Thats the hot angle in the moment.  Listen, adapt, and provide more value then the rest, and you can thrive right now.