As said above, Short Term Rental, Long Term Wealth is worth the read, but it is a very base level education on STRs. I swam through the STR section of this forum before reading the book and found that 90% of the book was basic knowledge I already had, but worth the read.
I stumbled onto STRs in my local area when a coworker bought a nice 3/2 SFR and had to move. He left the (sparse) furniture in place and turned it over to a property management company and come summer he was doing very impressive numbers. I took a look at AirBnB at equivalent properties and found that among the niche he operated in it didn't take a home run to make good money. The other homes were ok, but I knew that I could do better.
My STR was my first investment property, I bought it in September 2022 knowing I was going into slow season for our area. For outfitting the house I found a room-by-room checklist that showed essentials, I believe I searched Google for AirBnB checklist. It has the essentials, nice to haves, then luxuries. I bought everything on all the lists. Then I went over the list of amenities on VRBO, AirBnB, and Booking.com and bought every amenity within reason so that I had the best equipped house in the area. For outfitting the house I didn't have spare funds laying around so I found the credit cards that had the longest interest-free introductory offers, 18 months and 21 months, and I put all the furniture, etc. on unsecured interest free debt. Some may disagree with the practice, but it works well for me. I bought a lot of my stuff from Amazon and had it shipped directly to the home. I took my time to get everything together and was able to get it done within about 2 weeks for a 3/2 SFR.
I started hosting October 1st of 2022 which is slow season in my area. The first two months I learned a lot and made a small profit. December and January were rough, I lost money those two months, but with my w2 it's not a problem to carry the property in the slow season. The next two months I will make a profit and the following months all have at least one booking until 6-7 months out. The average time between booking and stay in my market is 24 days, so I am optimistic. Beyond that I have a major improvement in the works with heating the pool which is not something available at any of the STRs in my area and should boost my off-season occupancy quite a bit based on the $8,000-10,000 in bookings that asked if the pool was heated and didn't book once I told them it was not currently heated.
I would be VERY cautious purchasing an STR right now as I believe markets are starting to become saturated and believe the past two years were VERY good years for STRs and I don't know if that will continue. But if you find a market where other hosts are just cruising along with a subpar property and you know you can execute at the top 25%, I would not hesitate to open an STR.
