All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

I think returns there are better than most Beach markets. But that comes at the expense of being on an ever shifting barrier island. There are homes there that used to be 100 yards from the water and are now swallowed by the sea, so it's important to do your due diligence on the risk of certain areas of the constantly changing Beach. 

 No, Safely/Waivo are on a per booking basis, and would be purchased by the property manager.

Waivo I believe offers ONLY damage protection and is no help with liability.  Safely offers damage protection and (for an additional cost) liability as well, the covers ONLY the booking the policy was purchased for.  

With Safely you would pay, for instance, $70 per booking and Safely would cover you for damage and liability (again, check with them directly on this, I am not associated with the company so I can't say for sure they do liability!) for that booking.  They then set it up so each booking is automatically charged $70 so each booking is covered.

If you're getting lots of bookings it's likely far more expensive than traditional liability insurance for your LLC that is paid on an annual basis. But again, the problem is finding someone to write liability insurance for an STR property manager right now.

Unfortunately this is an extremely difficult area right now. There were only a handful of nationwide insurance companies willing to rate liability insurance on STR management, and almost none (none?) will do it anymore.

Definitely be careful, as most nationwide brokers will incorrectly rate you for traditional property management insurance, which almost always applies to LTRs and specifically excludes STRs in the fine print.  I would say 9 out of every 10 I talked to didn't realize this and were happy to sign me up for a policy that wouldn't cover what I very explicitly described to them.  The other 1 out of 10 understood, told me there were no options, and then went on a rant about how most insurance brokers don't really know what they're doing and just care about making the sale.

In most cases you have to find a small local company/agent for this kind of coverage.  But in many cases they will just ending up routing you back through a broker which brings you back to the above scenario, so you've really gotta pick and choose well.

Keep in mind that if you do find one, there will be things you need to do on your end such as specific signage, obtaining certificate of insurance from any vendors you work with (cleaners, handyman, pool guy), etc.

Safely I believe also includes liability as an option in addition to their usual damage protection at an extra cost, though in that case you're paying on a per booking basis rather than a yearly fee, and it's likely going to be quite a bit more expensive.  The advantage to this is you don't have to worry about your vendors keeping up with their licensing/insurance as much as Safely doesn't care about that.

Customizations -> Seasonal & Minimum Prices -> Custom Seasonal Profile

Then you just enter a date range and fill out the fields for min/max/base prices, and it will overwrite the amount you put in those fields globally for any date ranges you include in the seasonal profile.

From the perspective of the STR market, it is like most markets right now. The high end properties are doing well, the average places are struggling. Maybe even moreso than most places, just because there are SO MANY average places here if you're not standing out then you're competing with 30,000 rentals on pricing.

As far as Disney itself, the solution is simple, dropping prices, which I think they'll do after this next earnings report (depends on when the earnings report covers, as April was still packed at Disney).

They just have to re-adjust their pricing approach as travel normalizes a bit with the covid boom wearing off.  The Covid boom was INSANE here, with them doubling ticket prices and on-site hotel prices, starting to charge for things that used to be free (fast pass/genie), etc.  And after that there was STILL so much demand that they had to implement the reservations system because the biggest problem was that even at the jacked up prices, the parks were still overcrowded.

They literally couldn't charge enough money to keep the crowds down.

That is finally starting to return to normal.  They're already ditching the reservation system, and they'll likely start rolling back pricing some too in order to once again find that magic number in the middle to maximize revenue.

Appreciate you sharing actual numbers, that's awesome!

What would these cabins sell for on the open market today?  Just doing some browsing on Zillow, for instance, that first property as a 4br cabin with a view would be $1M or above, no?  Possibly upwards of $1.5M compared to some of the comps currently listed (though not sure if those ones are actually selling).

Of course $117k gross looks a lot different on a $525k mortgage at 3% than it does on a $1M-$1.5M mortgage at 7%.

Anecdotally, I've found VRBO to be very momentum driven.  I have similar properties in a similar area to each other and some get tons of bookings on VRBO and others have never had one.  Once a property picks up a few and it goes well, it tends to stick for a while.

 I think they're saying 43k of net profit before factoring in the mortgage, which will then put them well into the red.

 Budget is $750k cash or $750k in home price.

Disney is a year-round market.  May and September are the slowest months but they're still not slow by most season's offseason standards.

But you're going to want to have some cash for theming here with things the way they are, unless you're buying very close to the parks.

 I don't know if this is still accurate, but I believe AirDNA uses trailing 12 months, while Rabbu uses forward looking 90 days.

That's why AirDNA generally returns much higher results than Rabbu right now.  AirDNA still capturing a bit of inflated 2022 numbers while Rabbu's numbers get hurt by the much shorter than usual lead time currently since their data is forward looking.

That also explains why in 2021 it was the opposite and Rabbu was estimating high (since everyone was all booked up for 2021) while AirDNA was still pulling pre-covid numbers since it looks backwards.