All Forum Posts by: Peter R.

First thing, always, check the by-laws and rules of the local municipality, county and HOA if there is one. Can you legally do this? Some areas are owner-occupant STR only. Some prohibit it entirely.

Next, be sure you are willing to register with the Florida Department of Professional Regulation, the Florida Department of Revenue and understand the tax structure of the county where you want to buy.  You'll need to give Tallahassee and your County Seat their cut in addition to maintaining a professional license as a rental establishment.  

Once you understand all of that, then you have a great basis on which to evaluate property you come across.

I'm in the "Airbnb has this one figured out camp" with @Kevin Lefeuvre but I hadn't thought of the damage waiver concept @Valerie Rogers is doing, that's interesting!  I have only kept one security deposit out of the hundreds we've taken and refunded.  That's a good chunk of change to realize as a secondary revenue stream to offset wear and tear and any actual damage. 

I had a "guest" who used a fraudulent credit card to book and VRBOHomeaway was zero help.  It wasn't so much their fault that we didn't get paid but being openly hostile towards us, even with a police report in hand, was just a bit of salt in the wound.  Mostly I think this is due to the fact that VRBOHA Payments used to be some sort of quasi independent company or division, formerly known as Vacation Rent Payments.  What became of them I don't know but they still have issues when you call VRBOHA about transferring you around until you find the right division to handle inquiries about payments. 

I'd also put out there that as a new business, PayPal can be a nightmare as well.  Horror stories abound about frozen funds, rolling reserves, held deposits, etc.  Introducing PayPal as an intermediary step between VRBOHA and your bank just adds a second and somewhat ornery and unpredictable point of failure in my opinion. 

All that said, however, the credit card and merchant acceptance industry is very heavily cardholder-centric, they'll believe the cardholder nearly every time until it is proven that they actually owe the money in the case of any chargeback or dispute. This isn't unique to the STR payment industry, in other words.

If you must take credit cards outside of the platforms, and I do for repeat guests known to me, I use Stripe to process the card.  It appears on their statement as Stripe*MYRENTALNAME and is sent to my bank via ACH in a couple days.   Much better customer service than PayPal and competitive fees, usually.  They also support partial refunds so if you take a security deposit with the rental payment you can just refund the security portion.

Some of those rechargable flashlights that plug into wall outlets and turn on automatically if power is lost.  Guests don't have to stumble around looking for light.

Basic First Aid Kit and Fire Extinguisher.  And little stickers to put on the cabinets to indicate to guests where they are. 

The address of the STR displayed somewhere, saves guests digging through their phone when they want to order pizza.

Check-out checklist.  Empty trash, remove food, etc.

Hadn't thought about it from a lobbying perspective but you're right, that makes a ton of sense.  Remove the step (owners) between Airbnb and the City and you get accurate taxes paid on time with less hassle.   Much harder to vote out a revenue line item when the tax bill is paid in full for every stay, without question.

3pm/11am, exceptions allowed with ample notice and sometimes a fee.

Curious @Andrew Wong how are you defining crappy reservation requests?  Obvious red flags, not a fit for your booking criteria like too many guests?

But that's awful to hear that VRBO is doing that. 

@Kevin Lefeuvre I'm going to make another one of my predictions, VRBOHomeaway will fold in Payments (as opposed to the quasi-independent nature of it now) and add automatic Tax Services and justify it by moving everyone to the higher pay-per-booking flat % model at some point in the next year or so.  This is when owners will see some "fee relief" in the form of a reduced service fee in trade for that higher % of the booking off the top. 

Annual recurring revenue is great but I think the slice of the pie is too much to ignore them taking a larger portion of the payment instead. 

Don't get me wrong, VRBO's lack of a tax payment is quite annoying and I appreciate Airbnb doing it for me, but that only gets me so far when the % they take is higher.

With the news recently that VRBOHomeaway is joining Airbnb in limiting communications with guests, I got to thinking how I follow up with past guests.

Are you collecting contact information from the guests while on-property so that you can follow up with marketing at a later date?

Currently my repeat guest share of current year bookings is 14% but ideally I'd like that to be much higher. 

I've got a newsletter template that I send out occasionally with deals and specials but I'm not great at getting guests to give me their email while on-property, at least not beyond the primary guest who booked the stay. 

I'm thinking of putting a small placard somewhere that says something like "text your email to NNN for discounts and specials for your next stay" but I'm not sure that'll do anything.

Is anyone doing this well?  I'd love to learn!

Not quite clear on what you're asking @Jerry Condra do you mean what should you purchase the property for?  Or do you mean what should you rent the property for?

You may want to figure out your "operational burden" for lack of a better term.  i.e. what it would cost you to service any debt, keep the lights on, plan for replacement of furnishings/appliances, a reserve and generally have the property ready for a guest to walk in at any moment.

I tend to keep track of that expressed as a daily rate and above that I'm making money, below that, I'm not.

Whatever you get from the seller, require proof.  Otherwise they'll tell you the property rents 364 days a year only closing on Christmas.

I tend to agree with you @Kevin Lefeuvre but no TV channels is probably too far for my rentals.  I've had several reviews mention in jest where one spouse walked on the beach while the other spouse watched the NBA Finals, etc and loved every minute of it. 

In this particular amenity's case I've found a smart TV with Neflix, HBOGO, Amazon and Hulu plus a basic cable package generated no questions so far since I've been running these rentals.  If they want the premium stuff they can sign into a service, if not, basic cable!