All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

Our cleaner sends invoices at the end of the month for all of the month's cleans, and we pay them via ACH (used to do Zelle until we got big enough that we started getting hit by Zelle transaction limits).

This works great for the properties we own.  

It does create a small accounting headache for the properties we manage for clients since then our payment date is usually in the following month (IE we pay the invoice for July cleans in August).  We usually bill our owner's via cash rather than accrual (IE our July owners statement for an owner has their July revenue minus expenses paid in July) but the owners get confused when the cleans don't line up to the stays, so had to train our bookkeeper to include the July cleans on the July statement even though that invoice was paid in August, which is different than how all the non-cleaner invoices are handled.

If they don't want to renew with you, or want to write a new policy in order for you to be able to stay, can't they just choose not to renew on their end the same way we can on ours?  What's the point of the tricks?

 Same for Florida.

I am not a realtor but this is a much healthier relationship.  I have a few realtors that recommend me regularly and they would not take a referral bonus even if I offered one.  They have made it clear to me that they refer to me because they are comfortable/confident that I will take good care of the client which reflects better back on them, keeping their reputation strong and earning them real estate referrals from the client if they end up happy with the whole experience (which is much more valuable to them than a few hundred bucks from me).

People beat around the bush a lot and won't give it to you straight.

The simple answer is no.  You are not going to cash flow unless you are extremely good at off-platform marketing.  And probably not anywhere close to it.

The area is saturated and expenses are high. Insurance and taxes are both high, on top of your high rate, your mortgage will be large. The HOA is not cheap. And general expenses are extremely high in this area compared to most markets. You've got builder grade houses full of rambuncious kids with tired parents. Things get dinged up. The roof leaks. The fridge stops cooling. The spa breaks constantly from overuse.

Maintenance and expenses are just high here relative to most markets.  We own in multiple markets and our expenses here are easily triple to quadruple what they are in some other markets.  It's just part of the territory.

Bookings-wise a 4-6 bedroom home is not large here.  It's on the smaller end of average.  You're competing with tens of thousands of homes in that size range, and most of them have the resorts etc.  The location at Windsor is your major advantage, but it's a large neighborhood (so still lots of competition in that bucket), and to really take advantage of that you have to be good at off-platform marketing because the majority of Airbnb guests are searching thinking that all of the resort neighborhoods are similarly close to Disney, as they're not savvy enough to know that the others are on I-4 and take much longer in real-time.

The days of being able to buy a random turn key STR in a crowded market and throw it on Airbnb and cash flow are long over. Higher rates, increased home prices, higher expenses, and extreme saturation have changed that. And of course it was always going to be temporary as people rushed in to grab it once the secret got out. That is true in most STR markets, but especially here where you're competing with tens of thousands of rentals fighting price wars.

Disney is a great market if you want a place near Disney primarily for vacation use and want some renters to supplement your mortgage.  It's also a great market if your goals are more old-school long term real estate because it's probably one of the safest markets (there is near zero regulation risk in communities like Windsor and near zero chance of tourism moving out of the area like some other trendy markets going around right now that people will forget about in 10 years).

But if you're a cash-flow focused investor and that's primarily what you care about, you're better off looking elsewhere (and really it's as much about the deal as the market these days) unless you're willing to spend $100k+ on theming.  And even in the latter scenario, that's still a very crowded market nowadays.

I manage in the area and the number of people that come in with completely disporportionate expectations to reality is staggering when they can so easily spend 5 minutes looking on Airbnb and see thousands of available properties on Airbnb that are WAY better than the one they're buying that are listed for sub $200/nt and still not booked.  Realtors are feeling the squeeze after getting a taste of the good life coming out of covid when everyone was buying everything because everything would cash flow, and desperate to hang on to that life there are a lot of buyers being misled into bad investments, if actual cash flow is a primary goal of their investment.

When I did my early high level due diligence it looked to me like they weren't issuing any new permits, but I would love to be wrong on that.

I do know, having just stayed there in an airbnb, that even for existing permits the rules are extremely strict.  I'm guessing the city is extremely punitive to rule violations because most of the places we looked at had rules about not being outside after 10pm.  Not just "be quiet when outside after 10pm".  Literally "you can't be outside in the pool area after 10pm".  I'm guessing that's because too many people didn't follow through on the "keep quiet after 10pm" rule and they ended up with fines etc.

I manage 25 properties in the area.  Here's the reality.  Everyone here is being nice to you instead of telling you what you really need to hear.  I'm not saying any of this to be mean, but you need to hear it.

You say you have a great, themed property.  By national standards?  Sure, you have that.  By Disney standards.  You don't.  I'm sorry, that property is not themed.  By 2019 standards, it's light theming.  By 2024 standards, it's not even close to being considered themed.

Same thing for the game room.  Pic #25 is not a game room.  That's a garage with a pool table and a ping pong table.  In other markets, that would qualify as a game room.  In Orlando, you need $15,000 worth of arcade games and some cool custom lighting to be middle of the pack.  A pool table in the garage isn't even enough to be bottom of the pack.

I don't intend any offense by any of this.  It's just the reality of this insane market where they build INSANE houses by the thousands.  Your property may have been a 70th percentile property in 2019, but now it's a 20th percentile property.  And 20th percentile in a collection of properties that has doubled in size.

It sucks.  I get it.  My property (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/52612233) was a 95th percentile property in 2019.  Now it's a 70th percentile property.  I could charge $600/nt in 2019.  Now I've added amenities, I work 5x as hard on pricing, and 10x as hard on marketing, and I can charge half as much and still bring in a lower occupancy.  But it's just the reality of this market where everyone has one-upped everyone else so many times that the standard of a high end listing is insane.

4.74 is not a great review score by Airbnb standards.

Small changes like photos or changing the title just aren't going to move the needle.  If you could pick up this house and drop it in a normal market you could charge 5x as much.  But the bar is so high here.  If you were shopping and this house and a thousand others like it are available for basically the same price, is there anything that could be written in the title of your place that would cause you to choose it over that one?

I know you don't want to hear it but your options are really to either stay in the mosh pit of regular houses and fight the pricing wars to the bottom, or invest $100k into the house to price higher.  But as you can see from the linked house (and a quick Airbnb search), it's not like you're just naming whatever price you want even if you do that.

Becoming more popular and less special every day, but there is a timeline where it will work for sure.

For us it varies by market but in our primary market 15% plus a small monthly fee to help cover software costs etc if it's a lower gross property.

That's full service, host doesn't have to worry about anything and can forget the property even exists if they want to.

We do have tiered services where it's 10% (w/ no or lower monthly fee) if the owner wants us to only do one side of it (either manage bookings but not guests/cleanings/maintenance, or vice versa).

25-30% used to be more normal but that's legacy pricing now, for a couple of reasons.

1) Of course margins are much thinner for owners now that revenue has generally come down across the board from the peak, while home prices and interest rates have risen alongside that.

2) Probably even more important, a simple supply/demand equation, particular to the case of increased supply.  Simply put, there are a lot more co-hosts/managers like myself and yourself who got started self-managing their own properties around covid and are now afraid or unwilling to buy new properties at current prices/rates, but want to use their knowledge/experience to keep increasing income in the space.  So if owner's shop around at all, they're going to find plenty willing to do it cheaper.  We even see some charging 10-12% in one of our markets now.

That's not to say 25-30% isn't possible anymore, but it most likely would have to come via a referral where the owner isn't shopping around at all.

 I manage 20+ units in Kissimmee/Davenport.

The area is simply overbuilt for STR which has pushed prices way down and made returns much tighter. Demand remains strong but even on peak dates with every park full the parks can't pack in enough people to fill up all the houses.

Both Universal and Disney are expanding (Universal sooner) so that will drive up demand even more, but the problem is there is endless land out there so supply will always have a chance to catch up if developers get wind of new demand.

That's why, at least for my own purchases, I'm focusing on areas with limited buildability where supply can't just scale in lock-step with demand for eternity.  Broken Bow is another major market I would never consider for this reason, having just visited there.  Even if demand increases any advantage to the side of demand will only ever be short lived, as there is endless cheap land out there for supply to quickly catch up and surpass that demand.