Quote from @Luis Maza: Hi all, returning to the game this year and would like to pick your brain a bit, we started working with a wholesaler that will send us properties here and there with the "wholesale" price, but every time we check the properties and add the numbers, the margins are, well, I am not sure, too low perhaps, maybe we are getting to picky, but this is my dilemma for example...Today we got a property, wholesale price 300K, rehab about 50-60K, ARV is about 440k, but with the cost of hard money, we have about 100k cash, hard money interest at 11%, keeping the property for 90 days while we finish the rehab, closing costs,  commissions, we ended with 30k profit before taxes, while it sounds appealing, adding up all expenses and cost we ended up expending 50K on rehab(labor/materials) and about 50-60K with cost of the loan, interest, commissions, etc, everyone makes money, happy with that, but it seems that we are working to produce a 100k for everyone else, while we make 20-30k if everything goes well...In my opinion, we are not really getting "wholesale" price, it seems that we either buying to expensive, rehabs are much more than we would like to spend and the cost of borrowing that money is too high...We came up with thoughts as: lets fund it ourselves with money from a close friend/partner that we will bring in, and that would save us 10-15k here and there, but still, is that the norm now?

Everyone is looking for a market predictor tool for MTRs and so far no one has produced one.

There are some really great podcasts that talk about different things, and there are actually quite a few vendors that produce content (podcasts, blogs, webinars, etc) that can educate you a ton.

To make it simple I make 10% as a mgmt fee of properties that produce about $800k a year in income.

It was fully renovated when I bought it.I added value by adding income-producing rooms.What was the outcome?

There are likely at least subtle differences between those proposals.In terms of good and bad experiences, you won't find an insurance company that doesn't produce happy and unhappy customers.  

Ive done A/B testing to see if going through my mortgage broker, or going directly to the bank would produce a better result.

Which markets (Cities, States, Counties) are producing the highest cash flow while keeping purchase prices under 100K?

The latter two are just a little erratic to me, meaning they produce projections further away (above or below) from what I see in my clients' own vacation rentals.Not sure I can give you a great breakdown.

Those people overlooking what it means to “materially participate”Here’s the Material Participation Criteria:Spend more than 500 hours on the short-term rental businessDo substantially everything for the STR businessSpend more than 100 hours on the activity and no one other individual spends more time than you doSignificant participation activity for more than 100 hours, and your combined activity in all significant participation activities exceeds 500 hoursParticipating in the business for five of the 10 previous taxable yearsPersonal service activity (non income-producing) for three of the previous taxable yearsRegular, continuous, provable participation in the business for more than 100 hoursA Cautionary Tale: The Story of JacksonLet's take a moment to learn from the mistakes of others.