San Diego, CA · Member since 2018 · 1 post · 0 votes
We were thinking about buying a condo in San Diego and Airbnbing it. This would be our first investment property and was wondering if anyone and any experience or advice with buying a condo on the beach and Airbnbing it. We currently live on the beach and a lot of the neighboring apartment units are now Airbnb only. I spoke with one of the owners and she has kicked out all eight renters and turned them into Airbnbs and is making a lot more money than when she rented them out. This gave me the idea to looking into doing that myself. Any advice? Thank you for you input, I look forward to reading them.
Checkout AirDNA - its a great source to find data on your area for short term rentals. I personally like making investment decisions based data. AirDNA shows you average nightly rents, what tops STR are and what amenities they have, average occupancy. Its not a perfect data set, but its a great place to start.
Then for STR, you can make a lot more per month than on a LTR, but keep in mind it is a lot more work.
Also, there are tons of great articles here on BP about STR that can help you get started.
Investor · San Diego, CA · Member since 2017 · 6 posts · 2 votes
8y
Great idea, but before buying a condo make sure the HOA will permit short term rentals. We Airbnb part of our house by the beach and it's great, but we previously owned a condo and HOA wouldn't permit short term rentals.
Investor · National · Member since 2017 · 123 posts · 101 votes
8y
Philip Price
Just like any other real estate purchase it comes down to due diligence. Doing your homework in regards to potential revenue generation for STR Using platforms like Airdna, Everbooked, and Eliotandme. Check out bookin platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway to see what your competition is, running the numbers and being realistic about what type of return you are looking to generate and what the property can do.
At the end of the day run a doomsday scenario. If laws change, if Airbnb dies, if you are just over STR... what would this property do as a LTR, what’s the potential resale value, what can you walk away with if you had to change your business model. Hope this helps.
Happy Hosting
We have an STR duplex 4 properties from Mission beach board walk (the ocean side) and have been STR at least one of the units since purchase in 1999. For the last about decade both units have been 100% STR.
So the good as you indicate is the rents are high. We achieve virtually 100% occupancy from $91 (think early Nov mid week) to $471 (think July 4 weekend) per night per each unit (so Property rent ranges from ~$200 to over $900 per night). In the summer the rates start at around $200 midweek. These rent are for units that are miniature, I would guess <500'. BTW the rents on this place in a year could possibly rebuild both units.
Here are the bad: 1) STR in San Diego are constantly under intense scrutiny. There are regularly proposals almost non-stop to impose new STR rules. For this reason alone I would be leery of purchasing a property in San Diego expecting it to be an STR. The last STR potential regulation had a residency requirement; the owner needed to be on-site for it to rent any significant amount of days. 2) I have horror stories. People rent at the beach sometimes to party hard. We had a tenant turn our yard into a mud pit for girls to wrestle in. We had a tenant get decked by a neighboring tenant. There are either calls complaining of our tenant or our tenant complaining about neighboring tenants too often (mostly late noise but parking, etc.). Our STR we use a PM and it is work (we tried doing it ourselves many years ago and we are fairly experienced PMs but this was too much work for our lives - we self manage around 20 LTR units if we thought it was not easy imagine less experienced PM).
As @Aaron Friberg indicated before considering STR on Condo make sure that it is allowed in the complex.
In summary, the rents are good but STRs in San Diego could have legislation curtailing them and STRs at the beach are not passive.