Best STR Markets

[William Pabst]

Where are the best markets for STR's? I was looking at Lake Anna in Virginia

[Ian Tyndall]

The "best" STR market really depends on your investment strategy. Are you optimizing for personal use, cash flow, appreciation, tax benefits, ease of management, or long-term optionality?

I'm also in Virginia, and Lake Anna is definitely a market I track. That said, I've personally chosen to invest outside of Virginia for most of my STR portfolio. I tend to like more year-round destinations with multiple demand drivers, like Arizona and South Carolina, where you have beach demand, golf, events, snowbird travel, and broader tourism patterns.

Lake Anna can make sense, especially if proximity and personal use are important to you. If you’re close enough to use it yourself and manage it more easily, that can be a perfectly valid reason to buy there. But if the goal is purely investment performance, I would compare it against other markets before assuming it is one of the “best.”

I recently pulled a sample property in Mineral, VA just to get a feel for where the numbers are. Based on that quick look, I wouldn't immediately call it a top-tier STR market from a returns standpoint, but I also haven't done a full underwriting on Lake Anna. I do own an STR in the Shenandoah Valley, so I like Virginia vacation markets, but I think you have to be careful about seasonality, achievable ADR, occupancy, regulation risk, and how much demand exists outside peak summer weekends.

What has you interested in Lake Anna specifically? Personal use and proximity, or are you seeing something in the numbers that looks especially strong?