All Forum Posts by: Avery Carl

Bedding: whatever I can get at the time with the least hassle on Amazon. 

Coffee: we get the gigantic cans from Sam's Club and then have our cleaners transfer it to a clear decorative jar so that it looks like fancy coffee when it's really just Sam's Club brand haha.

Thank you for listening to The Short Term Show!! SO many books that I like on this subject but basically anything by Ryan Holliday. 

There are pros and cons to both. Pros to building is that you'll have a brand new and modern space. Chances are good that by the time it's finished it will be worth significantly more than the market value at the time you started as well. Con is that most new constructions will require construction loans that you'll be making interest only payments on throughout the build process, with no cash flow, until it's finished.

Pros of existing construction are that you can use pretty much any financing option you choose, and you can start cash flowing almost immediately.

If you're buying in the right market, you will not have to go nuts to get booked. Just make sure that the property is in line with what the tourists in the market have come to expect, that you have amazing professional photos, and a nice, informative listing.

It depends on what type of financing you are getting. If conventional, it will be based on your personal credit score, income, debt, and a number of other factors. If you're getting a 10% down vacation home loan, (make sure you are following the vacation home loan requirements and rules if you do use this type), projected rent income cannot be used. If you are doing a conventional investment loan, projected rent income CAN be used. These types of loans are typically 20% down, although my mortgage brokerage is able to do them for 15%.

A really popular loan type in this space currently is the DSCR loan, or Debt Service Coverage Ratio loan. My mortgage company does a lot of these. These types of loans use the property itself to qualify instead of your personal debt to income ratio. That means that you just have to show that the property will make the same amount as the mortgage per month. For example: if the mortgage is $2000 a month, you'll need to show that the property can make $2000 a month. Which of course it will, otherwise it would be a bad investment and you wouldn't be buying it. ;) Another cool thing is that they can be 20 or 30 year fixed so no ARM to worry about. These are typically 20% down.

There is no one way to get to a goal but for me, a person who WAS in my 20's when I started with a similar goal to yours, I would not have been able to hit that goal as quickly if I hadn't bought STR's toward the beginning of my investing career.

Well you'll typically need to show 6 months reserves to your lender if you are using conventional financing. For me, occupancy rate doesn't matter as much as gross annual income. I paid similar prices for my 4 bedroom in The Gatlinburg / Pigeon Forge area and my 4 bedroom in Destin, FL. My Smoky Mountain property has an 85% occupancy rate and my Destin property has a 70% occupancy rate, but the Destin property actually makes about $25k more per year than my Smokies one. It just makes all of its money in a shorter period of time over the course of a year.

I try not to inject my own bias too much into the advice I give, but I'd say stick to regional drivable vacation and tourism dependent markets as they tend to be both affordable and accessible vacations for people, which makes them more recession resistant than big fly-to markets or metro markets.

STR's are very easily to finance conventionally and cash flow much heavier, in most cases, than traditional LTR's. So they are like little cash flow turbochargers in any portfolio. If you start with STR, then you're generating more cash more quickly than starting with LTR, so you're able to scale more quickly than if you started with LTR. I recommend sticking to regional drivable vacation/tourism dependent markets because typically they will have more stable regulations.