All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

Here's a thread with good discussion about this from a few months ago: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

 Airbnb and VRBO both report cleaning fees you charge as revenue so you still have to add the cleaning fees paid as a deduction on your taxes.

IE $1000 booking with $250 cleaning fee is reported by Airbnb/VRBO as $1250 revenue, so you then have to list the $250 paid to the cleaner as a deduction.

Yes certainly tax deductible.

To get a total on VRBO go to Reservation Manager -> Financial Reporting.  Then filter by the dates and click download to get an excel file.  The field for fees I believe is labeled "Deductions" in the report.

 HOAs can still ban them there though, right?

 OP is talking about tax advantages of depreciation and counting it against ordinary income, not about income tax on the rental income itself.

I am not a CPA, but I think most CPAs will advise you that claiming material participation when you have a PM is going to be an uphill battle, if not impossible.

According to my CPA, most investors that want to take advantage of cost segregations self-manage just for the first year so they can claim material participation, and then hire a PM and switch to passive income starting with year 2.  Then rinse and repeat on a new home the following year, and so on.

TD Bank did mine for a property in Florida.  It took forever and they are just god-awful to work with, but eventually it got done and I don't know of anyone else that offers them.  Note this was a couple months ago so not sure if they still offer them (Penfed had just stopped offering them on investment properties at the time).

Like some of the others have said, theming is key here right now.  At current home prices and rates you are going to have a really hard time cash flowing with just a "nice" house that is well furnishes.  There are tens of thousands of those and the only way to compete with each other on those is a pricing race to the bottom.

Theming is key to set yourself apart.  Even that is more difficult to do these days.  Gone are the days where throwing up a wall mural and adding a pool/ping pong table to the garage would count as "theming".  It needs to be serious theming now.  Slides, LED lights, full-on commercial arcades or theaters.  Even that won't set you apart like it once did, but at least then you'll be competing with a few hundred homes instead of a tens of thousands, and it will bring cash flow back into the equation as a realistic possibility.

I own and manage several in the area and can give some specific figures on data from the recent few months if you want to compare that to what you're calculating out for your mortgage payment and expenses.

FWIW on the noise, when you have a big set of like 10 pickleball courts that everyone is playing on it's very loud.  But with just one it's not that bad.  We've stayed in 4 or 5 homes with pickleball courts and noise never seemed like much of an issue.

I would assume the OP would have airport pickup as an option for the car. That's how the person I mentioned above in Orlando does it. The person flies into Orlando, picks up their car at the airport, and uses it to drive to their STR, then drops it back at the airport when they're done.