All Forum Posts by: Eddie Gonnella

 Thanks, Ian. I'll be there. 

Haven’t experienced any decline in occupancy in the Acadia region at my two properties. They are on lakes in Bucksport Maine about an hour from Bar Harbor. Both are about 97% booked for the summer and 75% booked for Sept / Oct. At rates higher than last year. Generally all bookings are through Airbnb. Have had a few cancellations. 

Eddie

 Hey y’all, I’m unfortunately stuck on a work meeting and won’t be able to jump off of it on time. Hopeful to join a bit late if anyone is still on the zoom. 

Sorry about that. Feel awful since I spun it up in the first place. 

@Garvey Melmed @Travis Timmons

@Ian Meyer

Awesome. I like the idea of Zoom during the busy July season and then let’s check that place out in Ellsworth next time. Wednesday July 27th at 7pm? I’ve got that in my calendar.

Does anyone have a Zoom account subscription? The free caps us at 40 minutes. Or Google Hangouts will give us an hour which might be enough for now.

Looking forward to it! Love the idea of doing it at one of the lake houses. Could be cool to move around to different towns in the area each month or different airbnb spots if the booking calendar allows sometimes.

@Pete Collier @Ian Meyer - Awesome. I found another who owns in Ellsworth that is interested. Are you all on Facebook by chance? I find it is a good free way to organize a group/meet-up. Open to other ideas though. Looks like you guys are BP pro so you may be able to do it through here as well? I'm thinking a Wednesday night, maybe the last Wednesday of the month? We could keep it simple for July and meet on Zoom and then look at planning something in person for the future, or if you all have a spot in mind for something in person we can try that for July as well. I was thinking somewhere somewhat central like Ellsworth if we were to meet in person. These are my listings, if you're curious. https://www.airbnb.com/users/9... @Garvey Melmed

Hey y'all, did you ever continue on with this meet-up? A friend of mine (we both own STRs in Hancock County) are considering starting a meetup/group for anyone in the area to get together and share/learn from each other. Did this meet-up continue on? Thanks! 

@Michael Baum So that is what my question has been from the beginning here. It got dismissed by a few people stuck in some nuances. 

Do I #1. set it up so that I personally own the listing with my personal Airbnb account? 

OR

Do I #2. create a property management account, the same way Vacasa does, that owns the listing? 

With option #2, if I sold the cabin complex, I could also sell the property management company/account to the same person, and they could keep the listings and goodwill associated with the branded account. 

Does this make more sense? 

Curious which one you would do if you were going from 2 to 12 units? Keep them under my existing Superhost personal account, or set up a new branded account that could stay with the complex forever. 

Thanks.

I did my first BRRRR-BnB in 2022 after doing about 10 traditional LTR BRRRRs over the last few years. It was a big learning curve, and I already had one STR. I wrote about it on my website if you want to learn more, but here are some of my biggest lesson's learned. #1 was that it was much more difficult to refi the hard money loan after the renovation on the STR than it was on my LTRs. I would make sure that you have that lined up and that it is a sure thing. Otherwise you might be stuck in your short term financing longer than expected.

Lesson’s learned…

• I didn’t expect to have so much difficulty with refinancing a short-term rental. Others have not had so much trouble, but I am not sure how. I shopped around to 3+ lenders and could not find anyone that would lend against the full appraised value without seeing some rental history.

• Because the project took so long and the economy was changing, the interest rate and lending conditions really changed between February 2022 (purchase) and December 2022 (refinance). I think I was lucky to get out of the project as well as I did, even though it was not an ideal refinance. The economy, lending and interest rates could have changed even more and I would have been stuck in a difficult spot. The lesson is to turn renovation projects around as quickly as possible.

• Using the BRRRR strategy on an STR presented a lot of new challenges. The refinance was one in particular. But also the pressure and opportunity costs on an STR renovation really add up. Every day the project continued in the summer was a large revenue opportunity missed. This increased the pressure and stress of the project a lot more than a long term rental project.

• Additionally, the pressure of making this into a high-end STR contributed to the cost runaways on the renovation. Every decision had to be framed with the high-end STR in mind, so it was really difficult to ever go with a lower cost option, knowing it might come back to haunt you when trying to attract the best guests and highest short term rental rates.

• The layout was a missed opportunity. Trying to salvage any of it was a mistake. I should have a rule of thumb that if more than 2/3 of building or layout has to change, that the whole thing should be scrapped and gutted. By the time you get to 2/3rd of the way you end up just gutting and changing the entire layout anyways, so you might as well start with that end in mind and work from that assumption. It opens up a lot of ideas. If I could do it again, I would have placed the kitchen and living room on the main floor instead of the walk-out basement. Then I could have stuffed a bunch of bedrooms into the walk out basement area. The kitchen was already down there though, and it didn’t strike me to move it until it was too late. There was no cost saving or advantage to leaving it down there, even though it might have seemed like that would help in the beginning.

@Leslie Anne Morris If you had a property that was hosted by Vacasa and then you sold the property to someone else who intended to also have Vacasa host the property, Vacasa wouldn't have to remove the listing and restart it? So in that way, it seems to me that a listing can be "sold". Just in this thread I'm seeing a lot of people who are setting up their listings in a similar way so that the Airbnb brand account could live-on with the property. 

But I think many others take the strategy/approach that you have with your set up and it seems like there are merits to doing it that way too. Is there any ever any confusion for the guest as to who they are talking to? Does every employee sign off to them through the PMS as "Josh" from "Josh's Cabins" or do they disclose that they are a different person? Or do you mean that you have a branded account that serves as co-host to all the listings and you respond to people via the PMS through the branded account?