You cannot walk down the street, sit in a bar, talk to parents at a playground, attend a ice cream social, help pull a car out of a ditch without hearing how their parent, older aunt/uncle etc worked for Kodak.

Appreciation is icing on the cake for all long-held real estate, but your STR should be producing returns for you right away. 

I never counted on this and if it happens, then it is only icing on the cake.

I would suggest that when you run your numbers, the property works as a regular rental and the short-term rental is just another strategy or the icing on the cake. 

It probably only rented 65% of the time in the winter (Ice Carnival time was always booked); however, the real issue was spring time when skiing wasn't good, but boating/mountain biking/golfing/hiking was still too snowy and muddy. 

It was a sloppy closing as I've said, but this is the icing on the cake!

@Joe Villeneuve now I’m going to add the icing on our strategy......Through networking we have a large resource of individuals that loan private money to us, so we NEVER use our own cash to fund down payment or gap money.

If you invest early and often you can easily achieve that hockey stick graph for your investment balance.

Now you've made your whole FLOOR an ice-filled glass relative to the outdoors, and you're depending on essentially using a fan that blows enough to dry it out each night when the RH dips to keep from rotting out your subfloors.Why don't we, instead, understand that the outside needs to stay outside and the inside inside and install a proper thermal and vapor barrier....somewhere? 

If you are near me, I'll give a demo ride... after you pay for lunch at Crazy Fire in Raleigh;)  5 years and 4 Tesla's you could never get me to buy an ICE vehicle again.