All Forum Posts by: Nick Zupec

Determining demand can be tricky too if you don't already have an MTR in that market. If you know a good PM that does MTRs, that's a great route to go. Take them to coffee and pick their brain. We haven't found many PMs in our area that do much with MTRs (they are all either LTR or STR focused). We didn't have any idea if there was demand in our market so we started with one property just to see how it would go and it booked in 2 days. We added a 2nd one and both were solidly booked so we added 2 more haha. We are in a small market so we were very surprised to consistently fill 4 and now we are looking to do 4 more.

That may not be the best strategy given the cost of getting an MTR set up, so here is another approach. Look on Furnished Finder at your market 8 or 9 months in advance. I wouldn't expect much to be booked yet that far out. Find a few properties that are your closest competition (similar size, location, finishes). Then reset your search to 2 weeks out and see how many of them are still available. If they are all booked, there should be plenty of demand for you. If most of them are available, I would be a little more concerned. You could do the same thing with 30+ day stays on Airbnb. While it is variable, most of our booking requests come around 4 weeks in advance.

Hi Ryan. Because MTR is a unique hybrid somewhere between LTR and STR, I haven't found an easy way to get a rent estimate. I usually pretend that I am a traveler or renter searching in that market. I will look through all of the major platforms (Furnished Finder, Airbnb, Zillow, etc.) and see how much furnished MTR units are going for. I'll track studio, 1BR, 2BR, etc. as well as location and how nice they are finished. This may also fluctuate by season in some markets. Then you can see where your property would fall in relation to the comps (or if you are bringing a property online, you can see what you have to do to get to the higher range of the comps). Its kind of like doing a comparative market analysis. And I just checked and Furnished Finder is working for me at https://www.furnishedfinder.com/

We use Furnished Finder, Airbnb, Zillow, and Apartments.com. We get a decent number of bookings coming from all of them. We also have our own website with some SEO setup and we get people that find our website through a Google search and reach out direct too. We like to cast a wide net and get as many leads into the funnel as possible.

Hi Jarrod. We have an 8-unit apartment building that has 4 furnished MTR units in it. We originally listed on apartments.com because of the other 4 unfurnished units, but decided to put the furnished units on there too since it didn't cost us anything extra. We've been surprised at that number of leads that have come in for our furnished units too. They do tend to be more locals, but not exclusively. We've had 2 units rented long-term at our MTR rate which seems like a homerun to us because we have no vacancy, cleanings, turns, etc. Those tenants haven't been any more problematic than tenants from any other platform. We've also had a number of people relocating to the area reach out and say that they would prefer a furnished unit while they looked for a more permanent housing solution (often purchasing a home). 

We have a hospital nearby and some of the physicians work 7-on 7-off and live a few hours away. We've had some of them take units for longer periods and just stay there the 7 days that they're in town. They've been the best tenants because they are only there half the time and even then, they work all day and just sleep there. I've talked to the physicians about why they used apartments.com to find us and most of them have never heard of Furnished Finder because they aren't travelers and they didn't look at Airbnb because they thought it would be too expensive and they didn't want a different place each time they came. 

If you can do it for no or low cost, might as well. Its always good to bring as many leads into the funnel as possible, and then just maintain your usual criteria when screening. We don't list who we are looking for on any platform though. I agree that is walking a very fine line with Fair Housing Laws. We make our application criteria clear and those that meet them are usually quality tenants. My other disclosure is that I don't use any of our platforms to do the screening. We have our own internal application that we use regardless of the platform that the lead comes from. Hope some of this helps and good luck!

Hi Guadalupe. We have a completely different process for Airbnb vs other sources of MTR tenants. We don't do applications, security deposits, background checks, etc. for Airbnb guests. When they book through Airbnb, you have some protection/insurance through Airbnb to protect you if things go wrong (although I know many people have had issues when that actually happens). So no, we wouldn't do a background check on the traveler or the spouse because they should both be covered through Airbnb. If they book outside of Airbnb though (Furnished Finder, Zillow, direct booking, etc.) we would.

I agree with Melissa and Jamie. We like to include a docking station that is connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. That way someone can plug their laptop into the docking station and have a fully functioning 2 screen work station. We don't usually include a printer, but we do include locations of local places to print documents in our digital guest book. 

We also get very fast internet speeds and always put a power strip under the desk that also has USB outlets. This setup will usually be sufficient for guests that will be working from your property.

Welcome Roger! I agree with both of the comments so far regarding HELOCs. My wife and I were in a similar situation last fall with a lot of equity in our primary residence and needing a down payment for our next investment property. We got a HELOC on our primary residence and used that to fund the down payment on our investment property. The benefits were:

1. We kept our 2.75% interest rate and didn't significantly increase our monthly mortgage payment on our primary

2. We are only paying interest on the amount of equity that we actually use.

3. The interest rate is variable so if rates start going down, our interest payments will also decrease. We also got a 0.99% interest rate lock for the first year.

This was a significant value add property though so we plan to refinance it in the next year to pay off the HELOC. If you aren't doing a value add, you would need to see how long it would take for the cashflow to pay down the HELOC. Full disclaimer that with a variable interest rate, HELOCs could also keep going up. That can be a problematic situation if you don't have a shorter-term horizon for paying it off. Good luck!

For our single family home LTRs, the tenants are responsible for lawncare. For our MTRs, we always hire a service. The service that we use generally comes on the same day each week so I do ask the tenant to pick up after their pets before the lawn service comes. I've never checked to see if they do it, but the lawn company has never complained. I also put something in the lease that all pet waste needs to be cleaned up from the yard at move-out or there will be a $100 fee assessed.

You already touched on my first thought which was using short-term stays to fill the gaps. We can't do STRs in my properties because of regulations either so we generally won't allow guests to book if it is going to create a large vacancy gap. We can usually get someone else (often last minute) looking for a place sooner. I would rather drop my price a little to decrease the vacancy period.

At the MTR Summit last weekend, there was a presentation by the CEO of PriceLabs showing some pretty cool functionality in this area. They have a tool for optimizing pricing strategies for MTR stays. You can watch a 1 hour webinar on it on their website for free. I don't use PriceLabs currently, but I might consider it. They allow you to build in rules like: for a stay of 30 or more days, I'm ok with a 5 day vacancy period max... for a 10 day vacancy period, I need a stay of at least 60 days, etc. 

Lastly, I always increase my vacancy assumptions for MTRs. I set aside 5% of my rent in a vacancy fund for LTRs and 10% for MTRs. I usually don't actually get to 10% vacancy, but it helps me to not feel stretched when you do get those longer gaps. Hope this helps and good luck!

I'm a little late to this thread... but I screen my MTR tenants just like LTR tenants too. I have a subscription to Adobe Acrobat which is only $13/month and lets you create really nice fillable PDFs that are easy to use and can be signed electronically. I email these to potential tenants and 90% of them fill them out electronically and email them back. 10% still print it and fill it out with a pen and scan it to send back and that is fine too. The last page is the authorization to do the credit and background check. I'm generally less concerned about the traveling health professionals, but I still like to make sure they meet all of our criteria. This also protects us from fair housing or discrimination claims because we have the same standard process that we use for everyone.