All Forum Posts by: Leigh Ann Smith

@John D., with using a flat sheet on the bottom, wouldn't it come loose while the guest is sleeping?  It sounds like that could be really uncomfortable.

Don't forget the college "arms race" as a contributor to the exorbitant tuitions.  College A expands their stadium, so college B does the same.  Ditto for fitness centers, dorms, and all manner of recreational facilities.  When students tour campuses, they want to go to the one with all the best stuff.

Also, all colleges aren't unaffordable.  Community colleges along with 2nd and 3rd tier state universities are pretty reasonable, but if a kid can get someone to loan him enough money to go to the big fancy school, he'll choose that most every time.

@Andy Plattner, you probably know this and I misunderstood your post, but that local sales tax includes the state tax.  The Texas sales tax rate is 6.25%, then you add whatever your municipality is.  Actually, when you file it online, they do the calculation for you.  You'll just put in the info for where the sale was made (location of the rental) and the amount, and they'll tell you what you owe.  

After our first month of rental, I've realized that I owe $5/night of sales tax, so I'm planning to increase our nightly rate to cover it.  

I sure wish AirBnB would handle this for us.  I know that when I look at a hotel rate online, I don't think about the sales tax, just the rate that I see.  I'm sure most AirBnB guests think the same way.  They just expect that tax will be added.  When we add it in to our nightly rate though, it makes us seems comparatively more expensive.

We have recently acquired a vacation rental.  It's located on our choose & cut Christmas tree farm, and we're looking into the possibility of hosting events there, too.  We're running it all as a sole proprietorship, and things are getting complicated.  Also, during our Christmas tree selling season last year, we had 40+ employees and I was running payroll for them myself in the most inefficient way imaginable.

So, I need to talk to a CPA about our business structure (keep it all together? split it up?  can I keep using schedule F [Farm Profit & Loss] even though only some of the business activities are technically farming?).  I also need a plan for payroll.

I think that picking a CPA with Google or Yelp might not be the best idea.  Are there keywords I should be using to identify the kind of professional I need?  Should he/she be someone local or does it matter?  Thanks for any insights you can provide!

@Neil Henderson, I 100% agree about the photos!  My husband was wanting to just get it listed already, and I was dragging my feet because I didn't have all the decor items yet, and I wanted to get those in and get the professional pics.  So, we compromised.  We went ahead and listed it, but we aren't marketing the listing until we get those photos done.  There are no AirBnB photographers available in my area, unfortunately.  I'm away from home on grandma duty for a couple of weeks, so that's on the agenda for when I return!

@Mindy Jensen, great suggestions!  I do plan to market the listing.  The house is not perfect yet, so I've been holding off doing that until I have it looking like I want it.  :-)  Our Christmas tree farm has over 2,000 Facebook likes, so I'll do an ad targeted to those people and to their friends.  Also, I've located some Tiny House Facebook pages that have 100,000+ likes.  I plan to contact them with info about our house and see if they'll feature it.  And who knows, maybe even one of the HGTV shows?

Those ideas all target people who might be entranced with the idea of tiny houses, but I like your suggestions for more bread & butter kinds of guests.  I'll let you know if I get any good info!

Hi @Shay Reynolds, I understand your vision, but I think that city ordinances regulating house size are going to be a big barrier in the places that these folks want to live.  Have you looked into that?

My husband has a day job, and we also own and operate a choose & cut Christmas tree farm. He takes care of the trees and property in the evenings and on weekends. I do the office management. For about a year we were trying super-hard to get into SFR's, but every offer we made had other offers in competition, and we just felt that the prices were too high, and the numbers didn't work for us.

We watched the TV shows about tiny houses, and we thought they were cool. We talked about several ways to use tiny houses to achieve our real estate goals, but it was all talk until my husband saw a tiny house on wheels on Craigslist. Some guys built it who live just a few miles from us. So, we bought it for $30K. We then spent many months getting water, electric, and a septic system installed, as well as running a gravel road out to the tiny house site at our pond.

This site is less than 100 yds from our home, and we don't want long-term renters living there. So, we've decided to go with AirBnB. We spent about $20K for all of the infrastructure, and went ahead and set up RV hookups for 3 houses. I haven't totaled the numbers yet, but we probably spent about $4,000 for a mini-split a/c, appliances, mattress, bedding, kitchen stuff, decor, etc. We're all in at about $54K, and if we can rent it for $75/night, 7 nights per month ($525/month), our cash ROI should be just over 7%. That $525/month is the lowest number that gives us what we would consider to be a reasonable return. If we get more nights than that, and/or enough bookings to justify adding another tiny house, the total returns will be better.

We live in the country, outside of city limits, so we don't have any problem with ordinances restricting tiny houses. The flip side of that is that there isn't anything to do out here, and it's certainly not a vacation destination.

Our first reservation came in today for 4 nights from a guy who is working on a job nearby. I think this type of guest might be our primary market. I won't post the link here because I'm not sure of the rules on that, but if you google: Airbnb "tiny house on the christmas tree farm" , it will come up.  I decided that getting our first booking qualifies for posting a success story!

I haven't used Fiverr, but I would think that if you were really pleased with their work, you'd pay them more than that.  Is that the idea, or not?

Ours is not the same situation as yours, but we did purchase a Pioneer mini-split system for our 144 sq. ft. tiny house.  It works great.  Very quiet, and it's keeping up with our Texas heat.  Since it doesn't get bitterly cold here, I expect the heat to work fine for us.  It did cost us $1,000 to get it installed.  :-/

http://www.amazon.com/Air-Conditioner-WYS012GMFI17RL-Ductless-Mini-Split/dp/B01DVW6G42/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464711748&sr=8-1&keywords=pioneer+split+air+conditioner