All Forum Posts by: Karen Chenaille

@Brad S. I tried them first. No luck. CBiz was also a flop.  The owner has agreed to move forward but now we are negotiating rent.  

I am looking at a STR Arbitrage deal. The landlord is all on board, the place is super quaint..we were about to sign on the dotted line when we got held up with insurance concerns. The building has four LTRs, a hair salon, and the unit I want to use for STR. I have reached out to Proper and CBIZ...shot down by both. Does anyone know of an insurance company that would insure such an arrangement? FWIW, the landlord's existing insurer unofficially said they would cancel his entire policy if they found out he there was a STR operating there.

Any thoughts/ideas from the group would be so appreciated!

All the best,

Karen

Hey folks

I am looking at a STR Arbitrage deal. The landlord is all on board, the place is super quaint..we were about to sign on the dotted line when we got held up with insurance concerns. The building has four LTR, a hair salon, and the unit I want to use for STR. I have reached out to Proper and CBIZ...shot down by both. Does anyone know of an insurance company that would insure such an arrangement? FWIW, the landlord's existing insurer unofficially said they would cancel his entire policy if they found out he there was a STR operating there.

Any thoughts/ideas from the group would be so appreciated!

All the best,

Karen

I am trying to do this right now. I am running into problems with insurance. The landlord's insurance company has said they will drop him if they find out he is allowing a STR to be operated on the premises. We are having a heck of a time finding an insurance company who will allow for a mixed use situation where there is a STR, four LTR's and a commercial retail space in the same building.

@Kevin Lefeuvre  owner Rez is a platform manager for bookings that you would take off your own website. They also import calendars from other channels. I talked with them at length yesterday. It all looked promising until I realized they only integrate with the price labs dynamic pricing tool. Price labs doesn’t service all my areas so I would have to manually set the prices for the listings hosted on Owner Rez. Still mulling over that one. I am not looking to create a 2nd job out of managing listing pricing. My goal is massive passive income. :-). 

Happy Hump Day!

Karen

@Dan K. I have had horrible luck with platform managers. I jumped in with both feet on Oribirental and had the worst experience. Right now I am on H.A. and Air BnB. My next move is my own website I don’t trust Air BnB for a second after removing guest profile pics during booking and mysteriously canceling super host accounts. I found Owner Rez on the BP forums. I am meeting with them today in fact. 

Thanks for such starting such a great discussion thread. 

Karen

Hi!

Have you looked at automation tools?  I have 8 listings and work 50-60 hrs a week at a W-2 job. I use two automated pricing tools, Wheelhouse and Beyond Pricing. I need 2 to cover the geographic distribution of my units. The one tool that saves me countless hours is smart BnB. It’s a highly configurable comms tool. It manages all guest comms from inquiry to review. It costs me 70/mo. 

I use Properly to manage and schedule cleaners. 

Consider automating before hiring a VA.

Best of luck

Karen

@Luke Carl I am meeting with Avery in March. :-)

I can tell you which one not to use...Orbirental. Had the single worst experience ever with them. I lost over 2000 in revenue and had two of my listings start missing the basic requirements on Air BnB because of an integration bug with their software. They were unresponsive to emails and I could never get a person to answer their 800 number. 

Listen to the podcast Get Paid for your pad they interviewed a guy from Melbourne Australia who applied. His experience wasn't so great getting on boarded and the ROI remains to be seen.