All Forum Posts by: Shmuel Gertel

Hi,

I am looking for seller financed multi family or Self Storage. Here is what I am looking for in particular:

1. Max of 24 units if Multi-Family,

2. Less than 4.5 hours drive time from DC/Baltimore region,

3. Seller Financing of at least 20%.

If you have anything that meets these criteria that is not already being posted on Crexi.com, please DM me.

Thanks,

Sam

I bought an STR late last summer with a partner and have been running it successfully through AirBnB and VRBO since mid-Oct. We bring in about 10k a month. Lending markets have been all over the place, I put a short term loan on it when we bought it for 658k (purchase was 700k, appraisal was 940k - 70% LTV). We did some work on it, etc. Looking for something to get us through the next year to 18 months. Once we have 2 years of financials, we can access more traditional funding sources. Any lender suggestions?

My last guests had multiple smokers and had 9 more guests than they paid for. They tried to smooth it over by doing a clean up job. But now we are demanding serious extra money for the smoke cleanup and the extra guests. I actually was going to kick them out at the time, and per Andrew, in retrospect, probably should have.

Yes, I am on both, but I find that VRBO gets virtually no traction oddly...

Michael,

Are you saying I should charge them a 500-1000 refundable deposit through AirBNB?

Thanks,

Shmuel

Hi all,

I was curious if people could advise on the following:

1. I am finding that when guests list the number of people that will be staying at my STR, that they very frequently undercount the number of people that actually show up - sometimes by as much as 10 guests!?!, and
2. Additionally, there are certain guests that I suspect from jump street will be breaking rules of the house (whether smoking inside the house, having too many guests, or breaking other house rules), and invariably my suspicions are validated.

I would love to be able to charge these people a reimbursable fee ahead of time, or have a credit card on file so that I could avoid the ridiculous of hassle of having to deal with AirBNB, whose customer service is horrible. Any advice on how to deal with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all for responding. Very useful...

Hello all,

I am just curious whether other people on this site are finding that their STR bookings are down, and if so, approximately how much. This article https://www.inman.com/2022/10/... discusses the slowdown and I personally am seeing much less interest from when I opened my STR in September to the current demand, and I am not sure if (a) Airbnb/VRBO are playing with their algorithm trying to pump up new properties at the expense of properties that have been around for a bit, (b) the winter is simply slower than the fall (which would seem odd to me since we are in full blown holiday season), or (c) whether the article is spot on and STRs are too flooded. Or perhaps it is a combo of all three?

Would love to hear comments. 

Thanks,

Sam

Thank you all who replied. Very informative!

Hi all,

I am just curious whether people's strategy with regards to posting their STRs is to focus solely on Airbnb, or to "spread the net" to all of the main websites like VRBO, Bookings.com, Tripadvisor, Agoda, Expedia, TUI Villas, TravelStaytion, HomeToGo and Plum Guide. If you use the latter approach, is there a way to have your calendar be locked in and coordinated on all of these sites, so that if "Family A" books on VRBO, it would block the calendar for Airbnb,etc. for "Family B"?

Thank you,

Shmuel