All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

It's not that they're not able to connect, it's just that it creates distrust when the guest unchecks the checkbox to opt out of marketing, but still has to put their name/email in to connect.  StayFi should provide the option for the user to bypass putting in that info if they opt out of marketing.

If they opt out of marketing there's no reason to still require them to enter their info since we're not collecting it at that point anyway.  But then the user gets suspicious that they unchecked the box but still get an error that they HAVE to provide that info in order to connect, and thinks we're still collecting it even though they opted out.

I use it in my 3900 sqft house w/ no extender and so far so good.  The house is two stories so everything pretty compact.  They recommended the extender but I tried it without it first and it's been fine.

Good product.  I just wish they'd listen to my advice of allowing the option of not requiring the guest to enter their info when they opt out of marketing.  Gotten a few complaints and one bad review because of it, but captured a lot of emails.

 All I'm saying is you can't directly compare $3k/yr on a vacation home to $3k/yr on a timeshare.  Because it's really $3k/yr + losing reasonable access to $250k cash on a vacation home vs. $3k/yr + full access to $250k to do whatever you want with.

I'm not saying the latter is better, I'm just saying it often gets left out of these comparisons.  It's a huge difference.

Good as a consumer, but I do think this will have a larger effect than people are anticipating, even for folks not hiding erroneous fees.

The reality is the total price on Airbnb/VRBO/etc comes out much higher than the nightly rate, typically.  Even if you're not making up silly fees, just having the service fee, a reasonable cleaning fee, and of course taxes can really add up.  And I think people DO get sucked into spending a bit more filtering by nightly rate, looking through a bunch of places, narrowing it down to a few they like, and then clicking through and seeing a higher than anticipated total.  But then at that point they've already kind of fallen in love with the places, and with the quality of place they've been looking at the last hour, and don't want to go back and start over and start looking at cheaper places more in line with their true budget, now that they've flipped through the more expensive stuff for the last hour and started to picture themselves there.

Honestly, the same thing happens to me when I'm traveling.  I get a number in my head like okay this one is $2500 and this one is $2600 and this one is $2500 which one do I like better?  Then I click through and realize whoops these are actually more like $3500/$3600/$3500 in total prices but now I'm pretty set on those places, even if my original intent was to be more in the $2500-$3000 range, and if it had shown total price up front, I'd not have looked at those places in the first place and gotten to a point where I felt inclined to spend extra on them.

I've always thought it was funny how much flack Airbnb took for this compared to other industries that do the same.  Has no one shopped for a rental car recently?  They're even worse.  They don't show the total price on the next page, they make you flip through 5 pages and a lengthy checkout process before they finally plop the true total on you after showing you a different number throughout the whole process and hope you don't notice.

As I understand it, this is an American thing.  It's common for upfront pricing in other countries.  And as I understand it, in Europe, Airbnb has already been doing upfront pricing for a while (I could have misheard that).

Can't say that I hate it if we move in that direction, and maybe Airbnb will spur a change in all the other things as well so we can start getting upfront pricing on everything else too.

 Of course you have to consider that in the OP's hypothetical deal you're locking up $250k+ in cash that you can't invest elsewhere.  At current rates even just sticking it in a completely liquid money market account would net $10k a year which would buy a pretty sweet vacation.

OpEx may be a little high, but he's including a lot in that number whereas most people break it out into separate line items that add up to a similar amount.  He's including utilities, supplies, repairs, capex, etc.

So maybe a little high, but whoever said $3k is out of their friggin mind.  I've had months with higher than $3k Opex on a single property.  Heck, my bed bugs + broken fridge week I had a single week with more than $3k Opex, lol.

The reality is that, as STR has gotten popular and become another investment staple, there are people buying now for lots of reasons beyond cash flow, which makes it harder to cash flow.

A lot of people are buying as an inflation hedge, for appreciation, for debt paydown, for tax advantages, for their own use, etc. Heck I've heard quite a few people counting the mortgage paydown and tax advantages as part of a hybrid "cashflow" to justify it. And as others have mentioned, some are buying with cash and eliminating the mortgage, which lowers their CoC return but increases their cap rate.

Those of us that got in early enough to rake in $7500 bucks a month on a property not even accounting for the debt paydown, may have higher standards, but there are plenty of people just getting in that find a "free" monthly payment while the guests pay down the rent as worth it.  Remember, for like 5 years there was a popular HGTV show called "vacation rentals for free" where the entire goal was to be net zero every month and cover your mortgage/expenses, and people ate it up.

There's a big gap in what cash flow investors investors want and what sellers want right now.  Homes get listed at a price where gross revenue is 10% of the asking price.  But savvy investors want a place where gross revenue is a minimum of 15% of the purchase price.  But there are plenty of people willing to buy, for the reasons listed above, for a price where gross revenue is 10%.  

That makes it harder for the cash flow investors, though many are still able to work around that, most notably by outperforming the revenue predictions (or prior revenue numbers) either via better management or via some kind of value add to the property.

It's still doable, just more difficult.  It's not as easy as going on realtor.com and picking any random place in the Smokies now.  You've got to find the right property or the right deal in order to cashflow, because you're going to be competing with a slew of buyers that don't really care that much about cashflow.

Like you said, CoC numbers are great in this current market. If you're confident in your annual projections then it seems like a no brainer. Just comes down to how confident in those you are. Remember, if they're based off the trailing 12 months they may underperform that next year. Now is the time to be underwriting conservatively.

Where the heck do these people live that they keep getting stuck at home due to weather?  We've had 40" of snow here this week and flights are still taking off like normal.

In these instances I usually take it case by case.  We did let a guest cancel at our Orlando property because of Hurricane Ian even though Airbnb explicitly lists Florida hurricanes as expected events that the host is responsible for. 

Another guest wanted to cancel Thanksgiving and we did the "we'll refund you if we re-book" thing and that did end up re-booking, albeit at a lower rate, so we refunded them minus the difference in cost of the lower priced stay.  But that was on a holiday with a 30 day cancelation.  With 5 days already that's a super flexible cancelation policy (even if Airbnb calls it "moderate") and I doubt you'd re-book that close.

But yea, my confusion still remains what the heck these guests are doing that they're regularly unable to travel for an entire 3-day span.  I'd be skeptical of how truthful they're being with that.

I'm not a CPA nor can I offer any advice here, but out of curiosity how would the IRS know what type of loan you have on your mortgage, and why would they care?