All Forum Posts by: Kristin Zajac

Hi Jerry - I think you are at the scale where my model of renting to one group at a time won't work, so you have to decide if you want to run a motel with employees or some sort of STR with individual room/floor/wing rentals. Although I will say that I was not able to get an insurance policy from either STR insurers or hotel insurers when I was considering a model when guests under separate reservations would encounter each other in common areas. You could try though! Best of luck!

Hey Dan! I own a 13 room ski lodge in Vermont that was previously run as a hotel and I now run as an STR. When I bought it I considered renting the rooms individually, but I didn't want to deal with 13 different guests at a time. I rent the entire place to large groups, one at a time, and it's going fantastic. People love being able to rent the whole place out and it's pretty easy to manage. It's lodge-style (you can see a link to my listing on my BP profile), so it's a single building that has a great room, game room, I added a kitchen, etc. and it basically functions as a huge house. I get that your situation is different: I have thought about buying a motel like what you are looking at, and what I would do in that circumstance would probably be to (zoning permitting, etc.) put on an addition that includes a large common living room and a kitchen/dining space, and again rent to 1 large group at a time. I am doing about 2X the revenue that the previous owner did as a 13 room lodge, as 1 large STR, so I strongly recommend going that way if at all possible! And of course, if the numbers make sense in your market. :)

Happy to chat with you to share more learnings if you'd like!

Hey Jack! I own a 5 bedroom house and a 13 room ski lodge in Killington, VT that are STRs - feel free to shoot me a private message if you'd like to find a time to chat numbers. Happy to share what I've learned!

Hi all - I am in the process of applying for my first commercial loan for a property that was a bed and breakfast but I will be turning into a short-term rental (Airbnb/VRBO). After reviewing my application information, my loan officer said things look good but wants to visit the property to see the layout of the building and how I will rent it (it divides into a couple of different units). This will be an hour and a half drive each way for her, and when I asked what questions or concerns the viewing is going to address, she said she just wants to see it.

For those of you who have been through this process before, do you have a sense of what she is trying to get at? Is this really an interview of my potential as an Airbnb owner/operator (I don't have prior experience)? I don't mind showing her the building at all, but I feel like there is something I'm missing and would love your input so I can be prepared.

Thank you!

Thanks for posting, I did this same thing as well and vow to never hesitate again! I'm seeing a promising property this week and will have my checkbook ready to make an offer immediately after the showing. 

Good luck on your next deal! 

@Nicole G Bauer Great, thanks! :)

Hi @Nicole G Bauer, @Tarino Russell & @Justin Puetz! I just finished my last meeting with my Q1 MasterMind Group and am interested in continuing with a group like yours! I am fully committed to meeting weekly and love the MasterMind agenda including the hot seat. Thanks to my initial group and the 90 Days of Intention Journal, I'm set to close on my first investment property which will be a short-term rental in the ski town of Killington, VT. I'm excited to set my Q2 goals!

Sundays at 5pm CST works for me and Zoom sounds great. Let me know if I may answer any other questions! 

I tried paying for Mashvisor and I found that there was a lot of missing and/or incorrect data for properties in my target area. I also did not find the usability to be that good, and when I spoke with a salesperson my confidence in the product did not increase. 

I have been using AirDNA and find the data and usability to be excellent. And I've had a local investor in my area confirm that the estimates are very close for his properties. I recommend AirDNA! 

@Greg Junge Love your strategy and the terms sound fantastic! The triple net piece is super appealing and I haven't heard of it being used in SFRs before. A couple of questions:

• How did you come to a rent $$$, given the other terms of the deal? How close to market rent is the tenant paying?
• How did you find a tenant who wanted to run an AirBNB business?

Thanks!

Hi Ben! I'm just getting into vacation rentals and I've been looking at some of the data sources like AirDNA as well. Their Rentalizer tool: https://www.airdna.co/rentalizer is interesting but is still in beta. The other 2 sites that do something similar are Everbooked and Mashvisor. The only one I have paid for is Mashvisor, and I do not recommend it. I am planning to pay for the AirDNA data for the market I'm targeting to try it out.

For all of these sites, there are a couple of major caveats in how they pull their data and run their analyses on potential short-term rent. Here's what I've learned (if anyone has different or additional information, I'd love to hear more!)

1. They only look at Airbnb, none of the other short-term rental sites like VBRO/Homeaway, TripAdvisor/FlipKey, or Booking.com
2. They are scraping this data from the Airbnb website, meaning they do not have actual booking data. So, they are making some guesses based on what is available on a calendar one day and not available the next. They don’t actually know if the listing was booked, or if the host blocked the dates. They also don’t know if a discounted rate was given.
3. They have some issues with occupancy rate accuracy in a place with a lot of seasonality. For example, I am looking to buy a vacation rental on a ski mountain, and they are estimating 45% occupancy. In ski season, it would be much higher, and then it might be zero in April/May. Annual average is more likely ~18%.

Hope this helps!