All Forum Posts by: Chayton Wagner

It is a good looking place for the most part. First thing I would do is swap out the daylight color bulbs with a warmer tone. Those are 6500k and I would want 3500-4000k. Makes the place look like an exam room

$590 is a lot of dough. I would maybe rethink that a bit.

Now, on to the worst thing. Evolve. They own that listing. They own those photos. Once you leave Evolve, you will have to start over.

Seeing as you have only 1 review, getting out now is good. You aren't giving up a ton of 5 star reviews.

You will need to get a photographer, easy to do, just call a realtor in the area and they will have contacts for that.

You will need to get a new cleaner. The area has a lot of rentals so getting one should be pretty easy as is a handy person to handle quick repairs.

IMHO the toughest part is done. You have it furnished and decorated. Just update that lighting to make it look warmer and you should be good to go.

I would create a separate bank account for the place. Savings and checking. Keep the funds away from your day to day accounts.

Check your insurance. I don't know if Evolve advises on that but make sure you have the correct STR policy. If not, Proper, CBIZ, Foremost and a lot of others offer them.

Get it listed on AirBNB and VRBO. Seeing as it is already running, you can make it live right away.

Personally I would avoid dynamic pricing for a time. Look at all the rentals like yours in the area and undercut them by 10-20% for the next couple of months at least. Get those bookings going. Then implement Pricelabs or whatever you choose, but don't go radical. If you price it at $250 a night on your own, don't let Pricelabs boost it to $500 overnight. Put a limit and stagger it so as not to look crazy.

Full disclosure, I don't do dynamic pricing.

Once it is up and running, it isn't that tough to keep it going. Make sure you stay up on maintenance. Service the furnace, A/C and water heater regularly. Furnace and A/C should be 2x a year. Water tank should be yearly.

You can do it Kyle. We manage our lake house from 7 hours away and have been doing it for 7 years. No issues at all.

Keep asking questions here. Start a new thread on specific topics. Read more of the forum. There is a ton of info here.

Looking forward to seeing you get ahead my man!

If I do leave Evolve today , what happens to all my bookings in Jan and February? DO they cancel them or do they transfer over? I did purchase the pictures evolve took a while back, so I do own the photos. That's the part I am worried about it.

Hey Kyle, Evolve should have a 90-day clause, most property managers have this to protect their relationship with Airbnb and other platforms by honoring bookings up to 90-days. So your relationship with Evolve should end Jan 18th or sooner if you don't have a booking that week. Starting over with a new property manager with a new listing can be a positive, as Airbnb and others reward new listings with additional exposure, especially if you are headed into the busy season. I would get the ball rolling with your new PM, onboarding, photos, etc so that once Jan 18th hits they can flip the switch and turn your property live.

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Quote from @Andrew Steffens:

It is definitely doable. We use VA's in Philippines for our reservations team. They work for me directly and have been with me for years. They also do a lot of data entry and admin tasks. However, I handle the biz development. I feel like you only get one shot at a first impression with a potential client and I want my best foot forward. That means it would be myself or a trained and trusted sales professional if I decide to hire one. Would getting a good VA to handle some of your admin tasks free up enough time for you to make the necessary calls?

Yeah, that was my concern is having a VA aimlessly make phone calls and not convert because they aren't asking the right questions. My goal is to have them be more of a "BDR" and hand it off to me to close. I have a couple thousand "cold leads" to go through, they are all the homes in the area with a TPT license, so I know a lot of them are trash. So I need this VA to also do a good amount of research before calling to make sure the property is a good fit. We don't have that many properties for admin yet, we aim for properties that make at-least 60K a year in revenue, which has proven to be a slow crawl for our company and are not growing at the pace I would like. I like to keep things lean as possible and obviously recoup the money invested into these as quickly as possible. My mind-set is if I could find 5-6 more of these properties I could leave my job and focus on the company full-time.

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I've been kicking around the idea of hiring a VA to make calls for my PMC to generate leads. The company is netting 70-80K a year (This is split between my partner and I) so obviously this isn't something right now that I can live comfortably just yet to step away from my full-time job. This also means I don't have the bandwidth to cold call all day to gain traction.

So questions for you all:

Do you have experince with a VA? How did that work for you? How many SQl's did they bring you?

How many doors or what was the company generating when you hired a VA? Am I jumping the gun to early?

Do you have a company you recommend to get a VA?

2 Votes

I always recommend and strongly advise all my clients get a hot tub for their property as it's a 100% CoC return.

Here are some statistics to share -

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Quote from @Collin Hays:

Quote from @Chayton Wagner:

Quote from @Collin Hays:

With my first rental, I had a PM. But they were awful. Constant housekeeping complaints, bookkeeping errors, them using my property for their personal gain without me knowing it, charging outrageous "fees" that they didn't share with me, which effectively lowered my rents, and questionable repairs and maintenance expenses and quality. I used them for two years before embarking on self-managing. I started a PM from chance; a couple of owners next to me asked me to manage their cabins, and things developed from there.

Anywho...

A good PM is going to take care of every single detail, with minimum intervention from the homeowner. A good PM will also make as much or more money, net to the homeowner, than (s)he would on their own. So if it's a break-even scenario, why hire a PM? It's all in the value of the owner's time. To earn good money self-managing, the owner has to stay on top of things. Inquiries, expedient responses for assistance, repairs, and maintenance, frequent rate/yield analysis, etc. A good PM takes care of all of this. Most folks unhappy with PMs are co-managing their rental with the PM. That never works.

In 2020 and for about 3 years thereafter, self-managing was a cinch, because you could do a really poor job and still be flooded with business. That's when the DIY craze took off, folks started writing books, and it was the land of milk and honey.

Today, we've returned to reality, which is, you've got to work vacation rentals for them to really pay off. I am absolutely a proponent of self-management, but only if you have TIE. Time, Interest, and Energy. If you don't have TIE, and all of TIE, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table by not hiring a PM.

Not all PMs are created the same. We are a "boutique" PM. We manage 30-40 and leave it at that. I believe Andrew Steffin's operation is similar, perhaps slightly larger. We've got 3 FTEs, and cabin management is their only job, 365/24/7. And to give you some context on how "rich" the PMs are getting, in case you are wondering for your own PM business, the margins in this business are incredibly slim: We had about $1.3 million in rental revenues last year, and yours truly bagged all of $32K. Of course, I don't pay for the company to manage my own places, otherwise I wouldn't be in this business.

Sorry for my Saturday night soap box; I'm not sure if it answered your question.

Hey guys wanted to pitch in here (I'm new to BP), I'm a little confused with your statement Collin. How are you only bringing in 32K from 1.3 million in rental revenues.

I started my PM company a few months ago with 5 properties projected to bring in 400K a year with our company projected to bring in 70K in gross revenue.

Can you explain why YOUR margins are so slim?

Already did.

Yeah, but then you also said "And to give you some context on how "rich" the PMs are getting, in case you are wondering for your own PM business, the margins in this business are incredibly slim" which is probably the most untrue statement.

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Quote from @Collin Hays:

Anywho...

Sorry for my Saturday night soap box; I'm not sure if it answered your question.

Hey guys wanted to pitch in here (I'm new to BP), I'm a little confused with your statement Collin. How are you only bringing in 32K from 1.3 million in rental revenues.

I started my PM company a few months ago with 5 properties projected to bring in 400K a year with our company projected to bring in 70K in gross revenue.

Can you explain why YOUR margins are so slim?

0 Votes

All Forum Posts by: Chayton Wagner

Chayton Wagner has started 1 posts and replied 6 times.

Post: Looking for guidance on STR

Post: What are your thoughts on VA's calling homeowners for STR's?

Post: What are your thoughts on VA's calling homeowners for STR's?

Post: Hot tubs boost your STR revenues by 34% ... and other AirDNA findings

Post: Pros and Cons of STR Property Managers

Post: Pros and Cons of STR Property Managers