All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

This is really great info, thanks for sharing.

One thing to note on the last few sentences.  You mentioned that in a bad year you break even so the downside is limited.  But if you bought 3 years ago surely your mortgage is MUCH lower than someone buying now, so that would change things pretty majorly in terms of risk for a current buyer I would think.

I was surprised to hear that this winter has been bad.  People not going skiing because of too much snow sounds crazy!  Out here in Utah we've had the same historic year and every ski resort has been packed to the gills more than ever before because all that snow has made it more desirable, not less, and everyone is equipped to deal w/ the snow.

 No you still book the place however you would book the place.  You (as the owner) pay Xplorie some fee to be able to offer these to your guests.  You could also buy them yourself as a guest, this is basically just the host buying it and giving it to you, but they get a little better rate because they're buying a lot.

It's market dependent, but often many of the offers aren't as good as they sound.  IE "free ticket to Dollywood!" is actually often something like "get one ticket to Dollywood free when you buy 4+ tickets to Dollywood".

We had it once for our stay in Destin as a guest, and we didn't even end up using any of them because they almost always required spending a bunch of money on something we weren't otherwise going to do just to get the one or two free tickets added on.

Are you sure you didn't just forget to update the wifi info you were passing on to the guest somewhere?

I had the same issue at first.  Turned out I had updated the wifi info I was giving to the guest in the guestbook, but in the past I'd put the old non-stayfi network into Airbnb in the Wifi section and forgotten about it, and guests were grabbing the wifi info there and ending up on the old router network.

What you're describing with the guests creating a wifi hotspot instead of everyone signing in individually seems like a lot of work to avoid the 5 seconds it would take them to just put in a fake email address, so I doubt that's what's happening.  Even if it is, I can't imagine that will be a typical occurrence going forward.

But long and short of it, no I don't think there's any way to restrict someone from doing that in the Stayfi settings.

The confusion is just a semantics thing.  The "manager" here just handles everything after guest check-in, while the host creates the listings, does pricing, pre check-in communication, etc.  Basically the opposite of Evolve.

They are common in Orlando, and they do call them "property managers" here even though it's a little different than a traditional "they handle everything" PM.

The difference between this and purely management is that he's also sourcing the deal and bringing all the pre-purchase knowledge.

I've seen quite a few people on this forum and elsewhere do these deals at 50/50 split.  That seems crazy to me to give that much up as the person with the cash but apparently there are investors that are willing to do it.

People have spent the last 10 years getting bailed out of their financial decisions by insanely doveish fed policy, and they've become too accustomed to it.

I truly believe the fed learned its lesson in the fallout from backing off rate hikes too quickly in early 2019 and are not going to make the same mistake twice.  I think they're going to keep their foot on the gas for way longer than people are expecting this time.  And the only reason the consensus thought they'd be done by now is because they've gotten too used to unlimited stimulus that is not sustainable.

FWIW Hostaway doesn't.

Hostaway seems interesting as potentially something with the power of Ownerrez but without the challenging interface and complexity.  The problem is it's by far the most expensive PMS while simultaneously being by far the least transparent as to what its capabilities and limitations are.

With Ownerrez, you can look through their entire documentation library before signing up.  You can see how it works with each OTA, what limitations API has with each particular OTA, what it can and can't do, exactly, how difficult each of them are to set up, etc.

I did the Hostaway call and they wouldn't really expand on any of this.  It was just salesman saying "we're a premiere partner with xxxx", etc.  Well, most of those OTAs have a bunch of premiere partners and still have plenty of limitations on what exactly can be controlled via API and whatnot, so that's not really saying a lot.

Doubly worrisome is that there are almost no hands on reviews of Hostaway, and any time the name comes up on BP or Facebook groups there are suddenly a dozen new "users" whose first and only post ever is to talk about how great Hostaway is, without providing any details.  Which is quite sketchy.

There's a certification for this?