All Forum Posts by: Ryan Detzel

I just went through this process for my first STR and besides what everyone is saying remember these others expenses.

Rental site fee: Every platform charges a fee, AirBNB is 3% while VRBO is close to 8%. If you're renting your place for $20k/year that's $600-$1600 year in extra expenses.

Cap ex: You'll want to save some to replace furniture or fix stuff when it breaks.

Consumables: Soap, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, etc.

One of the best things we did was calculate out various scenarios. Basically, if we were only able to rent it for x weeks a year how much would we potentially lose vs if we rented it maxed out how much could we make. We have 11 of such scenarios ranging between those two extremes of which four would make us negative cash flow. Knowing this helped us understand our potential loses/gains before making the purchase.

It's a summer condo complex. There are 250 units in the complex but only maybe 10% rent.

It's probably different based on the market you're in but where I'm going to be renting all 250 units are basically the same minus furnishings and marketing. From what I've seen there is a lot of room for improvement so we're going to focus on just making the best possible place in the complex and hope that we'll get return visitors because of that. With that said, I have started tracking occupancy and rates for all "competitors" in the complex (16 other units). I'm not sure how or if I'll use this data yet but I will have it if I need it. I'm hoping (fingers crossed) that the unit will book up quick and I won't need to bother to see what the competition is doing but time will tell. I'm curious if others track local competition, data points like availability, rates, amenities, etc?

Yes! That's what we're hoping. My wife has a vision of super comfortable beds, which we've read elsewhere too and it's hard to accomplish that if you're requiring people to bring their own sheets and make their beds. :-) We're also hoping it's these small things that people notice and make them come back to us vs one of the other dozen units in the complex.

Yeah, there is an attic and a locked closest, so we could store them right in the house. 

We're hoping we could get the cleaners to take them and clean them but we could always go up every two weeks (hour away) and swap them to do them at our house too. This is going to be a learning process for sure.

Probably just the owner giving an option. It's the only one I've seen even giving the option, most just say no linens. I'm guessing it's an inconvenience charge?

Wow, so I just went through "comps". 2 provide linens, 4 say bring your own, 2 don't say anything about it. I also noticed two of the places say to bring your own soap and paper products. I don't think it will be hard to stand out from the crowd I just hope we also don't get grouped in with them. I also noticed if you rent through the association pool that they say guests are to provide their own linens, so this is probably why most work this way by default.

I 100% agree. I think the complex we're in a lot of the rentals are owners who are just renting a few weeks a year to make money or fill it when they can't be there and because of this they don't have extra sheets they want guests using. There is no official cleaning crew so if you provide linens you're responsible for cleaning and swapping which would be difficult and time consuming for the cleaners. We're currently thinking that we'll provide a months worth of linens to the cleaners and they just swap, that way they don't have to do laundry but guests get linens provided for their stay. 

That's what I thought, I'm amazed that nobody does it (in this complex), or if they do they charge an extra $100/week for it. We did notice that a lot of places on Homeaway (or similar sites) don't include them but pretty much every AirBnB listing includes them. Different expectations? 

I was just under the assumption (like a hotel) that we would provide the linens but I spoke with some local owners this weekend and every place in the complex requires the guest to bring their own. This would make the process (turnover) much easier/faster but I feel you then loose that experience. What are you thoughts on this? The property will be a summer vacation rental, mostly rented by the week.