Lessons Learned - Vacation Rental

[Leanne Waugh]

I'm considering buying a vacation rental property in the Orlando area.  I'm planning on using a conventional loan and using a property manager as I'm out of state.  I'm interested in hearing some first hand experiences from people who have done this.  What do you wish you had thought of before you did it?  Were there any big surprises along the way?

Thanks!

[Carolyn Fuller]

Lesson learned if you are going for high end and decide to have the best towels, sheets, etc in your rental: Go for all white linens. 

We purchased top-of-the-line grey towels for one of our rentals and our first guests used some sort of cosmetic stuff that bleached significant areas of the towels so they came out quite blotchy and unusable in the rental! 

Another advantage to all white, is that you, as a host, can bleach anything that is all white in the event a guest spills something like red wine on your linens. (Actually that example is me as a guest in a hotel! I thought, for sure, the hotel would charge me for the linens that I thought I had destroyed but they most graciously treated it as a cost of doing business...) 

The other big lesson learned before I began hosting is that the guest is ALWAYS RIGHT. It makes for much more enjoyable hosting...