All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

Well it's cheaper than Airbnb's at least, but I've generally found vrbo WAY less willing to grant exceptions than Airbnb.

For instance if there's a double booking and I catch it relatively early, even if it was the fault of my PMS and not Airbnb's own fault, they're usually willing to waive all cancelation penalties (including any damage to the search algorithm) and cancel the booking on their end.

However on VRBO if there's a double booking, even if I catch it 5 minutes after it happened, and even if the fault was on VRBO's end (their website is glitchy as heck) they usually won't make any exception, and require me to cancel on my end and take the search penalty/premiere host penalty if the guest isn't willing to cancel on their end.

There are Facebook groups specific to established STR homes for sale with revenue history that have hundreds of thousands of members so there is clearly a market for this. There is an unlimited supply of people with lots of money that just want a plug and play rental property for tax purposes or appreciation or inflation protection, etc and don't have the time, care, or ability to source and underwrite properties on their own like most of us here do.

This is the same reason sites like roofstock and memphis invest, etc exist and do very well in the LTR space.

Or heck, people that pay wealth managers obscene amounts of money to buy a crappier version of an existing index with a higher expense ratio when they could just buy the index it tracks themselves.

Not only are those of us here that spend 10+ hours every week just underwriting properties not representative of all buyers in the STR space, we're likely the overwhelming minority.

 I'm assuming eventually once they have enough traffic to justify it they would start charging to list.

Reads like an advertisement, but it's a good looking website.  Of course the trick will be getting enough traffic on there in both directions to make it worthwhile for people to use.  Because programmatically it's something anyone can throw up with a wordpress template.

But if it had that traffic, I would use it.  Not sure if "startup" is a real term here or if this is just a couple bros throwing together a quick easy website.  But if "startup" is for real and there's a sales team out there traveling around to find inventory and convince people to put it on the site, could have a shot I suppose.

Unscrupulous management rife with mismanagement and fraud, complete with a totally bungled IPO leaving them stuck with going public via the super sleezy SPAC route.

Can't really draw conclusions on anything from this "company".  Just an executive cash grab with never a soul thought for the future or anything outside of short term executive payouts. 

I believe Pricelabs market dashboard will give you the rate of BOOKED dates as well, which can help with the issue of only seeing unbooked pricing when looking at Airbnb/VRBO directly.

The market is part of it, but even within the same market you'll see huge variation from host to host.

My experience has been that VRBO's algorithm is EXTREMELY momentum driven compared to Airbnb's.  When it's quiet, it's dead quiet.  But if you get it rolling, it gets ROLLING.

You can try committing to it.  Shut the other stuff down for a bit.  Or lower the prices lower on VRBO.  Anything to get a few VRBO listings rolling, then there's a decent chance they'll start pouring in.

I have a 9br in Champions Gate.

Electric runs $500-$800/mo depending on the month

Water $210/mo or so

Supplies are going to vary bigtime on whether you're supplying all supplies or just a "starter kit".  People expect all supplies in this market, and stocking a 9br house can get pricey for sure. 

Also note that towels disappear and get stained at an ALARMING rate in this market, compared to any other market I've been in.  Combination of lots of towels, kids, etc.  But they go fast.  So you've gotta choose between risking your reviews confronting guests over towels or just plan to replace them often.

Pricing software pushes to PMS, then PMS pushes to OTA.

Link pricelabs to hospitable and let hospitable push that through to Airbnb.

Same thing with Turno.

People will argue whether you need Hospitable if you only have 1 property, but if you are using it, then Pricelabs/Turno should both be hooked to it rather than the OTAs directly.

These days it's more about finding the right deal than the right market.  It's not like it was a few years ago where you can just waltz into a market with a $500k pre-approval and guarantee yourself $100k income.  Any market where you can do that nowadays likely has some major risk looming overhead regarding potential future regulations or something that is scaring investors away (which I hear people worrying about sometimes regarding the Poconos, where one of the houses you linked was).

What IS still possible is finding a specific deal that will meet those metrics, or CREATING a deal that will meet those metrics (through value-add, etc). This is more in line with typical/traditional real estate investing that likely brought most of us to BP in the first place. In real estate, it's not as easy as just pulling up the MLS, clicking a random link, and getting an awesome property that cash flows amazingly. Deals are out there, they just have to be found. STR was an exception to that for a while when it was unknown and considered risky, but now that it's a legit asset class like LTR SFH or Multifamily etc and the secret is out, it's much more in line with traditional real estate where it's more about the deal than the market.

All imo, of course.