When most people think of short-term rentals, they think of vacation destinations such as mountain or beach towns, often bringing them out of state.

Mountain and destination locations will be much higher on your nightly rate, but seasonality is quite extreme.

Plus would ideally love to have STRs in multiple areas that I enjoy visiting or could provide a vacation destination for friends, family, co-workers, employees, etc.  

I do both - I have a few LTRs down here as well as an STR in Destin.

These projects are pivotal because they will give people destinations on the Beltline to travel to.

The Mid-Michigan market is mostly all long-term rentals and flips but I would love to get into a destination spot, short-term rental investment (Beach house, condo, etc). 

Keep in mind though that even in down times, people need a break and although they may not take those long road trips or book flights, they may still be willing to take a staycation and the Joshua Tree area is a perfect staycation destination and there are over 20 million people in Southern California that will still potentially staycation in the Joshua Tree area.In conclusion, can you still make money in the Joshua Tree area?

You don't have to be in one of the popular vacation destinations to be successful with short term rentals.

That was the path I started on, but like many who start on that path, the journey and "lifestyle" became more attractive than the destination.

Nice STR properties in the radius with a pool rent for around $20-25K per month, which would make this a nice cash flowing asset.My thoughts on how I would do this would be:- Scrape existing property and build a large 3,000 square foot property with a pool and make it a highly desirable Airbnb destination property- New build properties in the area with these specs sell for around $2 million, so I would use financing for the build and cash out to take on a larger loan using a DSCR product.- I owe around $380K on the property currently and it is valued around $600K with most of the value in the land. - I’m estimating that a new build would cost around $600K to build and I would use a hard money loan to finance the construction of the property and do a cash-out refi with a new loan balance of around $1.5 million and a DSCR of around 2.1 on a roughly $1.75-$2 million property.- This would allow me to have a great cash flowing asset in a good neighborhood that I can hold onto for the long-term.What am I missing?