Soda Stays - property management alternative

[Sarah Ellenberg]

Has anyone in Dayton OH (or anywhere else) ever used Soda LLC (www.sodastays.com)?

They answered a request for info I sent via Yelp to local property managers. I'm looking for a traditional property manager for 2 of my rental homes in the Dayton area, buy I am intrigued with their model. They say they will pay me market rent for my home, not charge any fees, and then furnish and maintain the home while renting it out to corporate travelers. They claim to have a growing portfolio in the area of 96 properties. Info online is sparse, so looking here for anyone with experience with them.

thanks!

[Linda Labbe]

dot know about them but I just rented a property in Toledo using the model and it is working well.. am looking for more

[Nathan Gesner]

Quote from @Sarah Ellenberg:

Has anyone in Dayton OH (or anywhere else) ever used Soda LLC (www.sodastays.com)?

They answered a request for info I sent via Yelp to local property managers. I'm looking for a traditional property manager for 2 of my rental homes in the Dayton area, buy I am intrigued with their model. They say they will pay me market rent for my home, not charge any fees, and then furnish and maintain the home while renting it out to corporate travelers. They claim to have a growing portfolio in the area of 96 properties. Info online is sparse, so looking here for anyone with experience with them.

thanks!

It's not property management; it's rental arbitrage and most everyone will tell you to avoid it. They are using your home to make money and you will have no control over who stays, what they pay, etc. Does your property even qualify for short-term rentals? What will your neighbors think about guests coming and going? How do you know it will be a corporate traveler and not a bunch of party animals from AirBnB? How do you know they are complying with the law, paying their taxes, or properly maintaining the home? What do you think this "company" will do when the property stops producing as much income?

They pay you $1,000 a month. They furnish it and rent it on AirBnB for $200 a night and earn $3,000 a month. If your home can produce that kind of return, why not hand it over to a professional short-term manager and earn more money yourself while maintaining control?

[Jesse Watson]

Quote from @Nathan Gesner:

Quote from @Sarah Ellenberg:

Has anyone in Dayton OH (or anywhere else) ever used Soda LLC (www.sodastays.com)?

They answered a request for info I sent via Yelp to local property managers. I'm looking for a traditional property manager for 2 of my rental homes in the Dayton area, buy I am intrigued with their model. They say they will pay me market rent for my home, not charge any fees, and then furnish and maintain the home while renting it out to corporate travelers. They claim to have a growing portfolio in the area of 96 properties. Info online is sparse, so looking here for anyone with experience with them.

thanks!

It's not property management; it's rental arbitrage and most everyone will tell you to avoid it. They are using your home to make money and you will have no control over who stays, what they pay, etc. Does your property even qualify for short-term rentals? What will your neighbors think about guests coming and going? How do you know it will be a corporate traveler and not a bunch of party animals from AirBnB? How do you know they are complying with the law, paying their taxes, or properly maintaining the home? What do you think this "company" will do when the property stops producing as much income?

They pay you $1,000 a month. They furnish it and rent it on AirBnB for $200 a night and earn $3,000 a month. If your home can produce that kind of return, why not hand it over to a professional short-term manager and earn more money yourself while maintaining control?

I agree with Nathan - except I would add that if you do decide to get into short term rentals, don’t hand it over to a professional short term rental manager… at least not one of the big corporate ones. They will take 20% or more of your revenue and not leave any meat left on the bone for you — and they won’t do a very good job. Find a good cleaner, a good handyman, and learn to self-manage instead.

 
of course, this is after having done your homework that short term rentals are allowed, and that it would be profitable in your area.

[Sarah Ellenberg]

Quote from @Linda Labbe:

dot know about them but I just rented a property in Toledo using the model and it is working well.. am looking for more

 What company are you using? Is it short term rentals or longer term corporate guests?

[Sarah Ellenberg]

Quote from @Nathan Gesner:

Quote from @Sarah Ellenberg:

Has anyone in Dayton OH (or anywhere else) ever used Soda LLC (www.sodastays.com)?

They answered a request for info I sent via Yelp to local property managers. I'm looking for a traditional property manager for 2 of my rental homes in the Dayton area, buy I am intrigued with their model. They say they will pay me market rent for my home, not charge any fees, and then furnish and maintain the home while renting it out to corporate travelers. They claim to have a growing portfolio in the area of 96 properties. Info online is sparse, so looking here for anyone with experience with them.

thanks!

It's not property management; it's rental arbitrage and most everyone will tell you to avoid it. They are using your home to make money and you will have no control over who stays, what they pay, etc. Does your property even qualify for short-term rentals? What will your neighbors think about guests coming and going? How do you know it will be a corporate traveler and not a bunch of party animals from AirBnB? How do you know they are complying with the law, paying their taxes, or properly maintaining the home? What do you think this "company" will do when the property stops producing as much income?

They pay you $1,000 a month. They furnish it and rent it on AirBnB for $200 a night and earn $3,000 a month. If your home can produce that kind of return, why not hand it over to a professional short-term manager and earn more money yourself while maintaining control?

 Very good point! Thanks for this perspective. I don't think they plan to list the property on airbnb, but who knows?! Maybe they will! 

[Sergey A. Petrov]

Quote from @Jesse Watson:

Quote from @Nathan Gesner:

Quote from @Sarah Ellenberg:

Has anyone in Dayton OH (or anywhere else) ever used Soda LLC (www.sodastays.com)?

I agree with Nathan - except I would add that if you do decide to get into short term rentals, don’t hand it over to a professional short term rental manager… at least not one of the big corporate ones. They will take 20% or more of your revenue and not leave any meat left on the bone for you — and they won’t do a very good job. Find a good cleaner, a good handyman, and learn to self-manage instead.

 
of course, this is after having done your homework that short term rentals are allowed, and that it would be profitable in your area.

 I suppose there are two ways of looking at this. If the plan is to buy multiple properties, turn them into rentals, and create a job for yourself, skip the professional manager (and the cleaner and the contractor for minor fixes). Just make sure your time is fairly compensated. And there is so much more to short term rentals - constant contact, immediate replies, calls in the middle of the night, managing the Airbnb, VRBO listings, monitoring the market, etc etc etc. I don’t know what all goes into it but can almost guarantee that someone who has been successfully doing it for X number of years will more than earn that 20% (if you are lucky; the going rates are closer to 30% in Seattle) and maximize your return a whole lot more. 

And if the goal is to invest and call it a business, a reliable manager on your team is a must.

I am 100% hands off on my short term rentals, the ratings on the properties are 4.9+ stars and we achieve near 100% occupancy. Watching them do what they do (checking their phones constantly at a meetup or happy hour or dinner), needing to step out often to make / take a call, work through damage claims, and I am sure a million other things I am not even aware of) I don’t want that job. 

Call me biased (I own a management company) but self management is one of the worst decisions one can make. Yes there are lots of exceptions but I am sure the time those exceptional individual investors put into the effort would’ve produced a better return if they focused on what they do best. I have awesome staff and know the value they bring to our clients. I jump in either when things are really complicated or when the phone rings and the caller says “so we’ve been self managing and now have THIS happening”. I always have the fix and the solution, often with attorneys, architects, engineers, and CPAs needing to be brought in and that plus my hourly rate quickly erodes the years of hypothetical “savings” in professional management fees. And yes not everybody ends up in that position but I see it very often (which is yet another reason I don’t self manage - too close and too little separation between the emotional/ personal attachment and the professional businesslike approach).

[Victoria C.]

Soda LLC is a tech company more than it is a property management company. I only know about Soda because I used to work for Greystar in Chicago and Greystar relies on them heavily to lease up sometimes hundreds of units at a time. They recently raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $90M+ for God knows what (too old for that techy stuff). Soda is mainly known in the 100+ unit multi-family circles where they take over mega assets via some sort of technology and work with the city to alter zoning laws where they do apart-hotel-conversion-management deals. If there's no management fee and they take care of everything, make sure it's in the contract, have them pay a strong market rent and you're way ahead as you got the rent without the fee.

One more thing, Soda works with basically half the big management companies here in Dayton to help them lease up really quick. If you can go to Soda directly and make some extra $$$ I would do that. 

 

[Bill Jones]

About 3/4ths of my 78 door SFH portfolio in Dayton/Fairborn is with Soda LLC and I pay nothing. Over the years I've held my portfolio with everyone from Becki at Roost, ManCo, Gem City Property Management. After the 10-15% management fee and the seemingly never ending $250/month toilet, sink, dishwasher repairs my $1,000 became $600 very quickly. That’s not counting the evictions. I understand the houses are quite old around the Dayton area, but $31,000 per month in needless fees was way too heavy. Whatever would-be fees I guess have been shifted over to their renters. Over the last 2 years with Soda, I’ve gotten my check on time every month and I think they have their own maintenance crew which is great because I’ve not paid a single penny in maintenance “repairs” since switching over. They just do it. Avoid Roost, the most egregious maintenance fee offender. Roost Realty is now Flourish Realty actually and the funny part is they use Soda as a tenant while charging the owner the management fee. Ridiculous.

The 96 unit number is a bit strange, as I know for a fact with my doors alone in Fort Wayne, IN that they manage along with most of my portfolio here in the Dayton area, they have more than that with just me. There may be 90-something multifamily buildings they manage in Ohio. Also I’m surprised they’d be interested in just a few properties. I know they mostly manage large portfolios and multifamily buildings and do that hotel/apartment mixed-use concept. With a few doors access to Soda, Sonder, Mint House, etc. doesn’t seem too plausible.

[Jonathan Klemm]

@Victoria C. - That's interesting to hear the Greystar used Soda to lease up so many units.....doesn't Greystar do their own leasing?  

What did you do for Greystar?  If you are still in Chicago, would love to connect.

[Victoria C.]

Quote from @Jonathan Klemm:

@Victoria C. - That's interesting to hear the Greystar used Soda to lease up so many units.....doesn't Greystar do their own leasing?  

What did you do for Greystar?  If you are still in Chicago, would love to connect.

Hi Jonathan! I was a Senior Managing Director for North American operations. Greystar does do their own leasing; however, when Greystar is under pressure to lease up a building within a particular region for a major national owner, they turn to Soda LLC to essentially fill the vacant units. See if Soda takes 25% of the building and comes with their own maintenance staff, they reduce expenditure and widen the margins on the overall building. They also collect their fees from the ownership and never have to work for it. If Soda takes over, say, half of a 100 unit complex, Greystar only needs management the for a complex the size of a 50 unit building, yet they still charge the owner a fee as if it were managing 100 units. Costs go down for them and drive up the margins--which are slim I will say in PM. 

Yes, we should absolutely connect. Send me a private message, I am still in Chicago.

[Tracy Streich]

@Sarah Ellenberg  It really depends on what your goals are with this property.   Long term rental with a professional PM.   You will typically have one point of contact and more say in what is happening with your house. Sounds like Soda is presenting as a long term but is really airbnb or rental arbitrage.   The 2nd sounds like a much higher liability exposure.   You have to have a completely different insurance policy for nightly type rentals vs long term.  

[Donald Brooks]

Soda Stays is a tech company, closer to Google than a real estate agent led property management company. Airbnb and short term rental property management is a tech play—not real estate. They understand that well. Their founders are all from Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, and one is the founding engineer at Roblox, others former senior engineers at Airbnb. They use code injections to pump their listings to the top, use meta-deranging, and funnel jacking on competitors—these are techniques nobody else besides Sonder uses. They then will boast about how they doubled profit compared to all others in their markets—which is true but it’s due to software and coding tweaks that the other local companies, ex-real estate agents on their side hustle, don’t know a darn thing about code and couldn’t spot a simple meta-inject in the algorithm. 

I’ll tell you one thing, if you want to make the most money as an owner go with Soda Stays every single time. Not even debatable—that’s even if they’ll take you on as a client. If you’re an agent wanting to partner…don’t bother…as I mentioned they’re running a whole different operation than the low level ex-musicians that work at the best suites and other local companies. I’ll give it to Soda, brilliant young men and women that are making property owners and themselves incredibly wealthy. 

[Andrew Morris]

So reading through this. On their website it seems like they are doing this as straight management. They claim to have under 700 units under management which seems low for a national company with 95 million dollar investment.  Also only founders are managers. So like all that is managed by the founders. 

I signed up two units for 15% manager in the Cleveland Area. I met with one of the cofounders Chris and he talked a great game about how much money we could make. However almost three weeks later and I was supposed to get back designs for furniture and get moving and not a single contact from any phone number or their main email they work from. 

Anyone else experiencing something similar? Curious to hear from someone actually doing this now with them and successful. The previous posts of success seem to be their arbitrage services.

[James Wise]

Quote from @Sarah Ellenberg:

Has anyone in Dayton OH (or anywhere else) ever used Soda LLC (www.sodastays.com)?

They answered a request for info I sent via Yelp to local property managers. I'm looking for a traditional property manager for 2 of my rental homes in the Dayton area, buy I am intrigued with their model. They say they will pay me market rent for my home, not charge any fees, and then furnish and maintain the home while renting it out to corporate travelers. They claim to have a growing portfolio in the area of 96 properties. Info online is sparse, so looking here for anyone with experience with them.

thanks!

 Sounds like complete trash.

[Nikhil P.]

I had a call with the founder this morning about managing two of my STR units in Columbus. They have a pretty aggressive growth trajectory and my feedback was I preferred to work with a company that's not growing so quickly because to me that's a risk factor. The call ended and I thought that was it, just a commercial decision to not hire someone.
Apparently the person I spoke with took it personally. I just got an email from a generic inbox linking me to what looks like an AI-generated profile that trashes my background, calling me a "failed ibanker turned real estate wannabe": https://nastrm.org/listing/nikhil-prashar/
I would sue for libel but it's probably not worth it. If you talk to them and decide to decline, maybe just decline passively instead of saying no directly.

[James Wise]

Quote from @Nikhil P.:
I had a call with the founder this morning about managing two of my STR units in Columbus. They have a pretty aggressive growth trajectory and my feedback was I preferred to work with a company that's not growing so quickly because to me that's a risk factor. The call ended and I thought that was it, just a commercial decision to not hire someone.
Apparently the person I spoke with took it personally. I just got an email from a generic inbox linking me to what looks like an AI-generated profile that trashes my background, calling me a "failed ibanker turned real estate wannabe": https://nastrm.org/listing/nikhil-prashar/
I would sue for libel but it's probably not worth it. If you talk to them and decide to decline, maybe just decline passively instead of saying no directly.

 lol, no shocker that the owner of a company with a dumpster fire of a business model is a dumpster fire himself.

[Andrew Morris]

Yea - there are some serious fraud vibes there. 

They are real spin masters. 

I get the feeling that they will do anything to trash people. They manage to create some very interesting vibes by what I suspect is a lot of fake profiles.  I actually wonder if NASTRM on face value appears to either have become their marketing arm or in some way it has been coopted by Soda Stays for their purposes or is owned by them maybe. 

Their business model is based on gaming the system through script injections and other gray hat and or perhaps black hat techniques. They claim I believe to not to need to do normal best practices because they have special ins in AIRBNB to suppress reviews and get preferential treatment when it comes to charges to their guests.

I also have not seen verification of the 90 million cash they supposedly got as mentioned in post above. But when I talked to a founder there he also mentioned something to that effect. When I google it I can't find the announcement though. So not sure if they just plant people to kind of low key announce that. But having 600 or so doors and 90 million cash injection is a little odd. Especially when there don't appear to be any employees working here other than the founders themselves. 

Like what founders of a 90 million dollar company do the sales themselves? Its just all very odd. 

They sell the sizzle and cleverly project the promise of easy fortunes but they appear to be fraud fraud fraud.