All Forum Posts by: Jake Miller

Hello everyone, looking for anyone who has had to run utilities in and around the Joshua Tree,CA region and what your costs ran for electrical? I've tried calling Edison and they were nice about getting me into contact with a planner from their office but no matter what she wouldn't give me numbers of estimates other than telling me it'll cost 2grand for an easement-permit fee to even come to numbers and that's about 4 to 5 months out.

I'm in contract with about 10acres out there and I really have no desire to commit if getting utilites hooked up is going to end up costing way more then I expect, I know from looking at the lot I have water on the road and I have electrical poles running all along the roads north,south and east of the property, so I'm really only thinking I'll need to run about 100ft of overhead cable, does anyone know what those costs typically run?

For the water I found a PDF from the Joshua basin water company that put the estimate around $5,800 if the water pipes are adjacent to the property, which they are. So that's reasonable and within my expected costs.

If you aren't looking to make any money right now you may be able to find some deals. If you're looking to buy and flip for a profit within 2 to 3 months... gl

Understandable, but I do make sure I only look at 6 month old comps, unless of course there simply isn't many comps being pulled up then I may adjust the days. This one however has been based on 6 months.

I think I may be a little bit skeptical of my agent, but that's also a tendency I have towards people in general till I feel like they've proven themselves.

I run a program called propelio which lets me search through the MLS like agents and then will even let me run comps through it as well.

So I have an Agent I've been working with to run comps for me, interesting thing is her comps frequently put the property 20-30k above my ARV's everytime, just like wholesalers I see out there who are trying to misslead people.

For example she recently sent me comps of a property that had an average ARV around 140k, the problem is every property on her list had nearly double the square footage, so these aren't even accurate comps at all.

I use a program that allows me to search the MLS and runs comps for me and I feel like I'm pretty thorough in keeping square footage within a couple hundred feet, bedrooms and baths nearly identical and factoring in certain amenities like pools,garages ect ect.

Do you feel like this Agent simply doesn't know what she's doing?

Propelio is pretty accurate, thankfully there are more and more programs like this coming out that lets investors who aren't agents scour the MLS and run comps.

As a vacation rental owner with the right property it's very easy to make 1000 a month of net income off of the home... very easy, once the property is going that is. The hard part is finding the right property and setting it up correctly.

airdna.co is one, I've ran analysis on my own area though and the numbers weren't very accurate, lets just say I would be retired If I was actually earning what they say people do in my area. The most accurate way to do it will be you, create an excel of a variety of different properties, from 2beds to 4beds etc etc, list pricing and location of these places, and any unique amenities then throughout the year go through their calendars and mark down their booked days.

You may be correct on the HIGH amount of unbooked days, if the place you're looking at is primarily just a summer retreat then it may be too early to tell what their occupancy is. But you're on the right track by not trusting their pricing as often people have their homes overpriced and don't get very many bookings because of it. Another way to get a good indication of demand is to look through their reviews as well, I would use both airbnb and homeaway/vrbo for this. If there are a lot of listings with a lot of reviews then you know the demand is pretty high in the area.

My bread and butter is through Homeaway and VRBO, however, my airbnb bookings have been steadily increasing and becoming more of a significant percentage of my bookings over the past couple of years.

No point in not using all the funnels, it's pretty much free to list on all the platforms now so you might as well do it.

Independent studies done on the two different monsters in the vacation rental sector have stated that people on HomeAway and VRBO tend to be more in their late thirties and with kids, tend to book their vacation times 4 to 6 months in advance, while airbnb stats have found they tend to be in their late to early thirties, sometimes with kids and tend to book their vacation times within a couple months of trip.

My personal experience is I tend to notice the airbnb people for some reason tend to expect you to be there and or are for lack of a better word a little more "needy". But that's just my experience.

This is something I encountered as problem, for back to backs my cleaning crews will sometimes take the extra sheets home instead of trying to wash them all. I've pondered getting multiple washers and or dryers for the unit or just one super unit that will speed it up for them.

I've been able to make their life easier by creating a checklist and color coordinating the sheets to each room, but a choke point usually ends up being the dryer and washer itself.

Based on a google search the average cost is around 1.50cents per wash and dry for a load of laundry including the detergent, going off the average bookings I have for just one of my vacation rentals I have around 65 bookings each year, with each turnover requiring around 4 loads of laundry to be washed that's $6.00 in just electric costs, not including the dryer. Now I've been able to cut costs by buying wholesale amounts of detergent usually come in 50lb buckets, which brings the cost per load significantly down per load. But going off the average of 6.00 per flip you have an annual cost of around $390.00 for a single vacation rental that is a 4bedroom unit, obviously someone with a smaller unit will need to scale down and larger units up. This also isn't factoring in the washes they may be doing during their stay as well, and wear and tear costs of the washer and dryer, but at that point I feel like there are much bigger numbers to focus on adjusting to get better returns for ones business.