All Forum Posts by: Waverly Rennie

Hi @Krystina L. I have several AirBnB properties in Dunedin and find that it's a mix of vacationers, people moving to the area for work or retiring, and people visiting aging parents. 

It's fairly good year round although May/June and Sept/October are relatively slower, it seems (only been doing this for two years.) Clearwater Beach might be more seasonal, but Clearwater and St. Pete would probably be fairly strong year-round (don't know them at all but I assume they have a similar market to Dunedin.) March is by far the peak month because of Spring Training in Clearwater and Dunedin.

Pinellas County has taken a don't ask don't tell approach to AirBnB, getting ABNB to collect the taxes and hand them over, thus so far there hasn't been much hassle. Officially Clearwater and most areas of Dunedin have a minimum 3 month lease but given the number of ABNB listings it's clear that people aren't necessarily respecting that. It all may come crashing down at any point but for now, STVR seems to work year round in this area.

Good luck, W

well, for our several STVRs, we just hide a key and tell people where to find it. In two years, we haven't had a problem! I guess I'm 1) an optimist and 2) a Luddite. We have a local property manager but she hasn't had to go let people in, and we've never had anyone take off with the key, or come back to use it again. 

Best of luck!

Public health consultant working all over in Africa, Asia and Latin America for the last 30 years, mostly living in Africa (Madagascar, Tanzania, Eritrea, Togo, Mali, etc. and a truly awful stretch in Somalia for UNICEF in 1993 - anybody see "Black Hawk Down"?) Although I have loved my career, and had years of relatively tax-free income while living overseas, I really wanted a change of interior brain decor. So now I am having a blast learning about REI and developing a STVR portfolio (which is lucrative but takes lots of work) to help replace my public health consulting income. Have ended up doing some development/new construction kinda by accident, and hope to do a few flips, but plan to end up with a more hands-off approach so we can do more traveling as we are in our late fifties/sixties. Plus I want to buy some of @Mindy Jensen's quilting supplies.

great thread, so interesting to see where people's lives have lead them!

@Jose Duque, I don't have much anything different to say except as @Brandon Brown said it boils down to people's attitude towards risk and reward. My family has been fairly nervous about my investing, which has been going very well, just as they were extremely nervous about my spending 30 years working in Africa, which worked out very well, too. You can't live your life by others' rules and expectations.

What's right for you isn't right for everyone and vice versa. If your numbers work, go for it. And if you made a bad deal, it's not the end of the world. You only have to be right 51% of the time. 

One thing I really get out of BP is the sense of - oh, ok, others have made mistakes too, I should just expect it, and suck it up, rather than seeing it as a fatal mistake and throwing up my hands and going back to watching kitten videos (Brandon Turner always calls it "watching Dancing with the Stars" but I don't have a TV......)

best of luck!

This might not be your best choice but I had my tub and tile surround reglazed for $300, has held up through 9 months of more than weekly cleaning (it's in a short term vacation rental) so I am pretty happy with it! Best of luck

Hi there- I scraped a house in Florida at the cost of about 6k, now going to rebuild a medium level 1k sqft house using metal SIPs- which ended up costing a little more than anticipated since the planning department wasn't familiar with them and wanted additional structural drawings which we had to pay an engineer to do. We will probably end up paying around $145/sqft from the ground up. I hear about  cheaper prices per sqft but haven't met anyone who has done it.

Let us know how it goes.

Best of luck!

I do vacation rentals in Florida, so I have gone with a pale blue-green-gray color called Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams- it's fairly neutral but quite calming. I guess if I were doing regular unfurnished rentals, I might go with a gray as people are recommending- more trendy than beige now. Good luck!

@Brian Garrett This is a good question and has brought up lots of interesting responses from people who know a whole lot more than I do. I've only bought 5 properties (3 sfrs and 2 duplexes), and my first and third were courthouse auctions, and the second one, my very best deal, was an REO. The bank had bought it at auction, and they then sold it, after several tries, lowering the price slightly each time, through Homesearch.com

Our county's courthouse auctions are actually done online, and it's incredibly helpful to go online and see what happened with each property. Usually the bank's max bid is hidden before the auction, but you can go in and see what happened afterwards- at what price did the bank drop out. Sometimes the bank's max bid is posted well ahead of time, or just before the auction, and their max bid is clearly more than the house is worth, so no investor will bid on it, they will just wait for the bank to try to sell the house on the market through FNMA or other mechanisms. 

In my area, because the market is super hot, the Fannie Mae properties aren't really very good deals, but sometimes there's an REO that shows up that is a bargain. In any case, I am still trying to figure it out, but I definitely think REOs are a great option. Good luck!

@Laura L. has the right idea, and I am planning something similar, although I may spend a little more than 10k on the boat....

And I think I would climb Kilimanjaro again- I did it about six months ago but I had pneumonia on the way up and wasn't loving summit day. That trip only cost about $2500 (I was already in Tanzania) so I still have some more of my imaginary 25k left- guess I'll add biking (with our camping gear) across Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea on Eurovelo route 6. We went from Amsterdam to Sweden last summer on our tandem, camping some of the time, but the rest of the time in hotels was expensive. Maybe I need an imaginary 30k, not 25k...

Great thread- fun to remember why we are doing this real estate game!

@Valerie Rogers great suggestion on those Coastal Breezes soaps etc- they are much better priced than the ones I got! thanks for the link. I agree, i probably use 4 times as many soaps and twice as many shampoos as any other thing. The lemongrass stuff sounds lovely.

Good luck and thanks again for the links!