All Forum Posts by: Wilson Vanhook

I'd keep searching until you find that golden opportunity at 15-20% COC from cash flow alone. Then let appreciation and principle pay down come into play to get you up to 30% or so.

Most people here on BP will push for self management, myself included. Tough to make sense of deals in today’s market, especially with a property manager.

Avoid urban cities and target vacation destinations/national parks.

A lot of successful people are keeping their hot markets on the down low.

I would focus on an area that has demand and has a good outlook for continuing to increase demand, and then try to find good deals in that market and trying to create something very unique.

Remove the couple of blurry photos from the listing. Add photo descriptions. Have chat gpt refactor your listing description - use bullet points for most of the information as it’ll be easier to read.

Priecelabs offers training videos, watch a bunch and dial in your pricing strategy. They also have technical reps that will do a 1-on-1 call to help with your pricing settings.

On Airbnb, add length of stay pricing discounts to guests for 3, 4, 5, 7, and 30 nights. Tier up the discount the longer guests book with you. On VRBO, apply weekly and monthly discounts.

If you integrate directly with Airbnb and don’t use a PMS you’re behind the game. Gotta get you a good PMS to manage effectively.

10%

I haven’t heard great things about Guesty for Pros, and I wasn’t impressed when I did a demo with them either.

I use Hostaway now however and highly recommend them. Customer service is super easy to get in contact with. Their system is great and will definitely be good to use as you scale up. Their income reports are great.

Really easy to export constant changes to Airbnb, VRBO, direct site. Booking .com is easy to export to initially, but after the initial export updates must be made to the listing manually (updates to the listing other than pricing updates that is). For ourselves, we don’t care about that channel anyways so doesn’t matter to us.

A few weeks ago we exported all of our listings to Google vacations. It took literally a few clicks and we were done. Within a few weeks we got about 5 bookings. Plus, Google Vacations directs customers to your direct booking site to complete bookings. So you get extra exposure to your site, and you get to set all your own policies.

This is great info and you guys are killing it! It is definitely super important now more than ever in popular vacation rental markets to truly differentiate yourself from others. I have a prominent presence in Broken Bow, OK’s market and I’m noticing that so many cabins are offering the EXACT same amenities with very little differentiation. And then the owners wonder why they aren’t renting well.

You mad?

Self manage and keep your dollars. You can hire a good cleaner and then automate all the day to day operations. You can automate cleaning notifications to your cleaners and automate most guest messaging as well. I use Hostaway to do most of my automation.