All Forum Posts by: Jon Martin

Because on the surface it looks cheaper. They want you to fall in love with the place and visualize yourself there, so that by the time you get hit with the final price you have FOMO if you back out. 

I did an ABNB search compared to a hotel for a Big Island trip and initially it looked cheaper than a hotel by several hundred dollars for 4 nights. Once all the fees were added, it was a wash. 

Agreed with all of the above. I will add that oftentimes the fixed costs with installing any kind of pool (fence, pump, permits, excavation etc) are so high that the marginal cost of a plunge pool vs something more standard is relatively small. Therefore, if you are already spending $30K all in for something not much bigger than a hot tub, why not spend another $10-20K for something that a family or group can enjoy and actually play in together? 

The above are made up numbers that will vary based on your market and local regulations but you get the idea. 

I wouldn't bother with condiments. Those jars/bottles can still get gross, and it ends up another item in a long list that you have to keep up with. For coffee I have 2.5 oz packets of ground coffee, sugar packets and creamer pods. Food wise I just do olive oil, spice rack, table salt, black peppercorns with grinder, baking soda & powder, and microwave popcorn. 

Think about the basic items you need to make a few meals that you wouldn't want to buy for a short stay because you would never finish them. I don't do large containers of flour or sugar because I know that someone will make a cake and wipe it out, leaving me with yet another item to worry about. Someone used a ton of creamer pods a few weeks ago and my only explanation was that they used it for Alfredo sauce or something. If they want it that bad they have to earn it!

You need some kind of point person. No way around it. If you can't fly out there yourself, maybe you have a younger cousin, niece/nephew or family friend's kid that can post up and take deliveries. By the time you have 1 STR running you should have a handyman or cleaner that you can trust, but in the early stages you have to put a lot of trust in a stranger if you can't do it yourself.

Optimize for assembly and consolidate your vendors/shipments as much as possible. That $50-100 nightstand will cost 2-3X+ more once you factor in the labor for someone to assemble it, multiplied by 2 for every bedroom. I cringe when I hear people talk about ordering stuff from Ikea and then complaining about how long it takes to assemble, plus that stuff is prone to break sooner on top of that. Look at the instruction manual- some of those things have 50-60+ hardware pieces. Plus you lose that time that could be spent getting the rest of the house put together. You can use Wayfair to filter for assembly- use it! With pre-assembled you could have all the furniture place in a single day. Cleaners should be able to wash dishes, make beds and other misc soft set up work. 

Another pro tip- right click on the photo in Chrome and do a reverse image search to see where the item comes from, it is usually way cheaper, and that's probably who Wayfair drop ships it from anyway. 

Quote from @Nathan M kiefer:

Could be. I had to clear my cookies to see the trophy but now it shows! Question is that I still don't see a way to filter for these homes? As of right now I can only filter by Guest Favorite, although that could certainly change. 

At the moment it is not clear how much it greases the algorithm, if at all, because when I zoomed in on the extent of my market's city limits and clicked the Top 15 listed only a third had the trophy, with 1 top 55 and 4 top 10%s.

I'm in the 5% club with 67 reviews at 4.99 and still buried many pages back until you filter for pets, then I pop up midway down page 1. I'll take it, I guess?  😂

Not sure how much of an impact this can realistically have. ABNB needs to book a lot more than their top 1-10% of properties to stay as profitable. Those properties are likely to book up fast, and probably do already, leaving the other 90% for the rest of the guests who don't plan ahead that much. 

Seems like a passive aggressive way to get owners to up their game and differentiate, similar to the categories. Or maybe it's to help highly optimized properties justify a higher ADR and therefore higher fees? Would be interesting to know how much of their revenue is do to a small percentage of high performers. 

Quote from @Tanner Lewis:

No DSCR loans do not look at your DTI at all. This means DSCR lenders would not look at your W2 income or the income of other properties in your portfolio.

 Sorry I meant property income . . .Don't they want to see at least a year if not 2?

Quote from @Jacob Sherman:

You are able to finance it via a DSCR loan . Lets connect and discuss some options

Can you do a DSCR without first having some income history?

Block off an early-to-mid week couple of days for the AC. Easy. 

For lawn care, I do every other Monday around mid day. Usually the guests are gone by then. Even if it's occupied, I always forget to warn the guest but they've never complained. Tuesday would be a good day for that as well. 

The nice thing about lawn care is that it isn't needed for several months of the year in most of the US. 

Good customer service and coverage. Pricey. Easy to get someone on the phone, which is a big one for me and something I am willing to pay a reasonable premium for. They do draw a hard line with cloth wiring, even if it is in good condition and not knob n' tube. 

I have a policy with Foremost on my 2nd STR and it is a lot more work to get someone on the phone but they are OK with cloth wiring, which is the reason I have them. It is also took me a solid hour+ on a 3 way call with the lender to get the Escrow figured out, and I still got Cancellation nastygrams in the mail afterwards. Overall I'm not happy with the customer experience with them.

That said- once I have the 2nd property up and running I will probably speak to a broker to see if I can get the rates down.