All Forum Posts by: Jeremy Baker

Aloha Tommy,

As @Mark Waite mentioned above, South Maui is a great area for vacation rentals.  We own two VRs in the South Maui area and have had great success and are in the process of adding more.  Most of your condo complexes here are zoned to allow short term rentals so there are many options to choose from.  

As @Loren Clive mentioned, the permit process for a non-zoned property is a pain in the ***.  We've looked at a few houses w/ ohanas and could get the numbers to work, but the permit process really makes it difficult and adds a lot more risk to your investment.  So for at least the fist 6 months you can not rent your property short term nor can you even market your property during that time.  There are legal ways to go through the process if the property is already permitted and possibly market and rent your property from day one, but again, this is just too much risk for our taste which is why we've continued to look at condos that are already zoned to allow STRs.

Please feel free to message me if you have any questions as I'll be happy to help out and share our experiences with you.

We use Wave Accounting (Waveapps) to track expenses and income for our vacation rentals.  It's easy to use and cloud based to we have access to it just about anywhere on any device.  The great thing is it's free!  I like it and it's easy to update and produce monthly reports to use for our monthly taxes and end of year taxes.  

However, as others have stated, it doesn't need to be complicated and can be as simple as using a spreadsheet as long as you update it regularly.

I disagree with the statement regarding "VRBO's dead."  We've been using it since 2012 and it has been great for us.  There are many reasons we use VRBO, yet there are several "VRBO vs AirBnb" threads that will cover this and some of those I've commented on, so I won't go into those details.  

We ask most of our guests why they chose us and why did they decide to use VRBO.  For our area (Maui), most of the VRs are listed on VRBO and this was one of the main reasons our guests chose to book through VRBO.  So the exposure we can get from VRBO/Homeaway is far better than any other listing site.  

Now that the dust has settled on those VRBO guest service fees, by far most of our guests do not mind the fee since VRBO provides them with certain guarantees.  We've only had a couple of guests complain about it and ask to book off of VRBO's site to avoid that fee.  However, after we explain to them why we choose to book and take payments only through VRBO and just about all of them end up booking and paying through VRBO.  The few that didn't, we did not accept their booking requests and it probably turned out to be a good thing.  

VRBO has made some changes over the past year and even as recent as a couple months ago, that as an owner I really like which includes a better user interface, calendar tools, market information, ranking metrics, etc...  Not saying VRBO is perfect, but for our goals, our market and our expectations, VRBO has worked the best for us.  

Sorry, didn't intend to make this post sound like a VRBO commercial, but this is my honest opinion based on our experiences with VRBO, AirBnB, Tripadvisor, Expedia, etc...

I didn't see anyone mention this, but also keep in mind of any tax implications when letting friends/ family use your condo for free or charge them less than market rate.  As far as I know, these days count against your personal use days and you are allowed 14 days of personal use or 10% of the time the property is rented.

Hi @Curtis H. please feel free to send me a private message and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have about investing in the Kihei area!  

@Scott Myers, it's not easy since home prices have gotten quite high there, however, I look through daily listings and run numbers on at least 10 properties each week even if I know that it may not work out.  This way I can stay on top of the numbers game and get a good idea of any variations in the market.  I do have some great local contacts on Maui  (real estate agent, property manager, lender, housekeeper, etc...)  I'd be happy to share them along with any other info you may like.  Just PM me with any questions and I'll be happy to answer them! 

We visit there each year (which is a huge perk of owning vacation rentals there!) for 17-21 days.  Some say using your properties is a bad thing since you are not going to be generating any rental income while you visit, but it's also not thousands of dollars leaving my pocket for hotel expenses.

@Amy Nakos and @James Carlson it's funny as my wife and I have done the total opposite!  We keep trying to invest in either long term or short term rentals here in the Denver metro, but every time we think about it, we find a great condo on Maui and invest there.  With the short term laws and home prices here, the numbers never come out near as good as our investments on Maui. 

Aloha @Christian Cramer, I'll be on island 5/28 - 6/18, so if there's a meetup happening while I'm there I'll certainly attend.  I suggest Maui Brewing in Kihei as the location!

@Steven C. Suarez  No, we're not invested in TX.  We have vacation rentals in Maui.  There are several BP members that are invested in TX and the South Padre area, so hopefully you get some feedback from them.