All Forum Posts by: Jon Martin

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!

The general consensus is that 10% down loans no longer make sense in most situations because they add so many points that it depletes the purpose. If you are paying an additional 4-5 points, then you may as well get some equity for it and do a 15% down loan. These are Fannie Mae rules put in place in response to the flood of these loans for STR investors.

That said, DYOR and ask around. I've found that I often get options for lenders that go against what I hear from the "consensus", so don't take any single person's word for it. 

Did they say anything about Word Art? That trend needs to die already, as in 5 years ago. 

I would check the average lead time for your market. Most have come down significantly. If the average lead time is 3-4 weeks, then don't worry about what's 6-8+ weeks out, unless your trailing vacancy is poor. 

As of right now I am well booked about 10 weeks out, but yesterday I went through my calendar and dropped the price by $15-20 during the odd 2-3 nights windows between longer stays. If nobody books them I don't care, but it would be worthwhile if someone did. 

As for your listing, overall looks really nice and has great finishes. I would make a few tweeks: 

-Add more art to the walls that have color, preferably beachy colors. You have some nice pop with the cushions on your sofa and beds, so apply that concept elsewhere 

-Make sure your art work fits the theme of your area. The buffalo (or long horn cow?) prints look cool and would make sense in the Wyoming but I'm not seeing the connection to Myrtle Beach?

Otherwise, part of what you are experiencing now could simply be seasonality. Summer is over, so I'd expect it to be lean for a while. 

I could see Wilmington NC as a good fit in terms of COC numbers because of the modest entry point, outside of beach adjacent neighborhoods. Annapolis MD has a higher but still reasonable median as well and lots of business and government activity, so I could see vacancy being strong there as well. Both would probably work as MTR markets as well.

Otherwise I'm not sure how you can make the numbers work with the rest of the markets because the cost to entry and revenue required just to break even is high. 

Rent the whole house, however you could base the rate on the number of occupants. Have the price scale up above 6 or 8 people. You could always put a smart lock on 1 or 2 of the rooms and unlock them with larger bookings.