All Forum Posts by: Jon Martin

 For sure @Rodney Sums . It wasn’t “free”unless you were expensing it. 

What’s even dumber is Expedia/hotels/Vrbo selling this as a cross platform win for customers, except the points can’t be cashed with lots of VRBO hosts. 

Depending on the layout it could be much less work than a traditional hotel/motel and managed in a similar way as an STR, just at a bigger scale. I've stayed in boutique hotels that were minimally staffed with keyless entry. Then you could lease the restaurant out to a local restauranteur.

That said I would still want to sub out the management. 

I noticed this with VRBO about a month back. Actually took 2-3 clicks to get to the final out the door price, and it was well over double the nightly rate all in. 

On a related note, Hotels dot com also gutted their "stay 10 nights, 1 night free" program, which was basically a 10% rebate/dividend. It was incredible if you traveled for work and had control over how you booked. Hot a few dozen free hotel nights for personal use over the years. Now you only get 2%. They spun is a win for the consumer, but when I tried to cash in the points it didn't even work on at least half of the places I tried to book . . . WTF?

Dumbest part is that I was looking forward to cancelling my hotels account, but not I can't because I have a VRBO owner account tied to the same email, so I would basically be deleting my VRBO listing in the process. Absurd. 

Agreed with the above. Gently mention and apologize the train and say that it is not normal, then highlight the specific nice things they said about your place.

It's kinda silly that Airbnb asks guests for an overall rating first, then gets sub category ratings that have no impact on the overall rating. It would make much more sense if they based your overall rating on the cumulative of the latter, but the don't, so it is what it is. 

That's for sure! I've had my eye on that area for a few years, mainly north topsail. I like that new development is geographically constrained, however Airdna is showing a lot of new supply. Maybe a lot of it has been casually owned for personal use for a long time and is now turning into new professionally managed supply? I will probably sideline myself for another season and see how the comps perform. 

I've spoken with lenders doing Fannie Mae loans and they can use local LTR rents as income without it affecting your DTI. However, not sure how that break down with a split use property like you are mentioning, at which point your income would likely be an important factor. Call around.

Hi @Michael Baum this was on AIRBNB. That is exactly what I had in mind, to charge them for the pet fee and use that to cover the bed skirt. 

Yes- they did not select "Pet" when they did the booking nor was there a message about it. At times I have waived pets when they forget to put it in their booking but they tell me they will bring one. 

What I'm more concerned about is the order of operations . . . $50 isn't worth a petty/punitive review. Will probably do what @Mark Miles suggested. 

Thanks all!

All of the backyard/fun stuff is great but IMO you will get the most measurable ROI from adding another bedroom. If you look at revenue breakdowns between 3 and 4 bedrooms the slope hockeysticks in most markets. It also opens up the option of getting more than one family in the same place, which can be hard to do comfortably in a 3/2 (depending on family size).

Plus it sounds like you would still have room for a game room, which is also a nice addition that will attract more bookings. 

Maybe there is some way to breathe some life into the kitchen without breaking the bank? You could easily replace the uppers or do floating shelves without messing with countertops and then paint the lowers. There's some decent LVP out there that will look fine in photos without costing too much. At the end of the day, if your place is in a beautiful location, clean and has lots of beds most will not care about the kitchen being a bit dated. 

Stay went well and the guest said she loved the place so I am expecting a good review. However my cleaner found a stain on a bed skirt that will probably not come out. Plus, turns out the guest brought a dog and while I am "pet friendly" I do charge $50 for it and she never paid this. 

What is the best way to go about this? If there was no damage I would let the dog slide but now I might have to replace the bed skirt. If I hit up the guest now I could see it leading to a poor review. 

Do I wait until after reviews are made? Is it best to go through ABNB customer service, or does that even make a difference because they can still leave a bad review anyway. 

Thanks in advance for any input!