Everett, MA · Member since 2016 · 2 posts · 0 votes
Closing on my first vacation rental property in a few months. The property is 2.5hrs from my home. Looking for advice on marketing for all seasons. This is a condo near Lake Winnipesaukee New Hampshire. Any suggestions on the bookkeeping aspect of keeping everything organized?
@Deborah N. Good luck with the new place near Winni. My family spends a lot of time there during the summers! I have a vacation property in the White Mtns, North Conway area and have had success using both Homeaway.com and Airbnb. It is not difficult to manage a vacation rental, but you must find yourself a reliable cleaning person or company to do your turnovers. For bookkeeping, I use Quicken, but I know there are many other ways to easily track income and expenses.
@Deborah N. congrats on your first VR! I would suggest looking for other vacation rentals in your area and see how they are listing their rentals. VRBO? AirBnb? I would suggest listing with the site that has the most listings for your area, at least in the beginning and you can change to what you may think would work best once you get a feel for it.
As for bookkeeping, I would say try and keep it as simple as possible. I know many investors that just use a simple spreadsheet to keep track of expenses and rental income. I personally use the Wave accounting app. It's a free cloud based accounting program that's fairly simple to set up and use.
@Deborah N. Good luck with the new place near Winni. My family spends a lot of time there during the summers! I have a vacation property in the White Mtns, North Conway area and have had success using both Homeaway.com and Airbnb. It is not difficult to manage a vacation rental, but you must find yourself a reliable cleaning person or company to do your turnovers. For bookkeeping, I use Quicken, but I know there are many other ways to easily track income and expenses.
Just a simple Excel sheet with some quick and easy formulas, and you can view your progress daily. I have to pay state lodging and bed taxes, every quarter, so basically, I just catch up on taxes 4x a year, and that's all.
I buy a lot of things through Amazon Smile, and just copy and paste date straight from there into the sheet. The rest of my receipts go into a shoebox, and then I input them like I said earlier, 4x a year.