Vacation Rentals 1,000 miles away from primary residence?

[Lily Ardila]

Hi All!

Currently looking to purchase our first vacation rental/second home with 10% down. We live in the metropolitan Washington DC area and as you can imagine, its pretty expensive to really pay 10% on anything here in this area. Our options right now are Ocean City, MD where its pretty cold most of the year or Fort Lauderdale/some beach in Florida.

Does anyone currently have something similar going on? Investing in a vacation rental that's 1,000 miles away or investing in Florida? Any recommendations on great beach rental areas along the East Coast? And how is that working for you?

Thanks :-)

[Valerie Rogers]

I live in CO and have 2 rentals in the Panhandle of Florida (Fort Walton Beach.) They are condos in the same building. 

When we were beginning our search to buy our first rental in FL we looked all up and down the Gulf coast of FL. I loved many of the cities we saw along the southern Gulf coast, but found most of them to be way out of our budget and a lot of them had rental restrictions that would have made it impossible for the property to pay for itself. (Example: limited to on rental per year, at least 30 days.)

We decide to purchase in Destin, which does not have any such rental restrictions. But even in Destin we were having a hard time finding a condo in a nice building that was directly on the beach, that had an amazing view and was within our budget. Our realtor took us over the Destin bridge to Okaloosa Island (which is part of the city of Fort Walton Beach) and that is where we found our first unit. It is in a small building (20 units) that sits right on the beach with a beautiful view. This condo was actually larger than any we had seen in Destin and it was well within our budget. We bought the first unit in 2014 and the second one last year.

The occupancy rate has been great; actually more than I expected. I assumed we would be able to rent the condo during the summer season and maybe secure a few snowbird bookings during the winter. It turns out that the condos rent well throughout the year. Our "slow" times are usually January (unless we are able to get a snowbird booking), November and December. Last year our occupancy rate was 78%.

As others have said the crucial thing is to have very good, reliable help on the ground. My housekeeper is great, I couldn't do this without her. I pay her more than she requested when I first interviewed her because I want her to value this relationship and I also pay her a bonus for every review that I receive that mentions how clean my units are.

It is also imperative to have very good maintenance contacts. The A/C in one of my units failed one September while it is still very hot. Even though the call came in on a Friday my contact was able to temporarily fix the AC the next day (Saturday) until they could install a new unit the next week. I gave those guests a refund for a couple of nights to compensate them for the inconvenience.

Things will always go wrong....plumbing issues, etc. But if you have good, reliable contacts in the area they can be handled as expediently as is possible and most guests understand that these things happen.

Best of luck to you with your new venture!