All Forum Posts by: Jean H.

Have you thought about contacting the leasing department of the BMR building your tenant is moving to? Or at least pointing out to your tenant how the filing of a small claims lawsuit against him for nonpayment of rent might affect his eligibility for that Below Market Rent apartment?

Hi Elia. If you’re at UM, you’re in my neck of the woods. I’m in Coral Gables, too. If you want to PM me, I can hook you up with my real estate agent who’s been helping me with my investments. If you can, you should come to to the BP meet-up in our area. It’s every last Tuesday at 6:30pm at Union Beer, 1547 SW 8th St. on Calle Ocho. The next one is this coming Tuesday, March 27. It’d be a great place for you to network and ask questions.

Airbnb has more upfront costs, like furnishings. You will also have more ongoing costs because of maintenance, marketing, and management, but the 1.5-2x revenue will more than make up for the added costs. Time wise, if you hire a professional manager who takes care of scheduling, communication, and coordinating maintenance, I don’t think you’ll spend more time on a short-rental situation than on the long term rental after the initial set-up period.

Have you checked your condo docs to see if you can do short term rentals? A lot of condo associations don’t allow them.

@Frank Macias I also bought a house that came with an inlaws quarters.  The electricity was separate, but there's only one water bill for the two houses.  I could have paid to submeter the water, but instead, I listed the inlaws quarters on Airbnb.  Short term rental guests expect all the water and electricity (as well as lawn service, Wifi, etc.) to be included so I didn't have to put in money to submeter the water, and I make a lot more on short term rentals than long term rentals.  It's easy to manage when you live in the main house, and if later, you want to move out, you'll know by then whether you want to Airbnb it all out or to submeter it and get long term renters. If you choose the long term rental route, I would agree that if you don't submeter the property, you'll have to pay for the water and electricity yourself and just raise their monthly rents accordingly (and you'll have to deal with the problem of them not caring if they have the heater on full blast and the windows open).

I’m in Florida. I originally thought about charging $100/day for a late fee (I really hate unpunctuality) but my attorney said that any judge would throw it out as too harsh and that Florida law stipulates a max of 10% of the rent, so instead I revised it to “$50/day up to 10% of the monthly rent.”

@Jessica H. I opened a Total Business Checking account at Chase. I don't think they have savings accounts for businesses; at least they never mentioned one.  The minimum balance to waive fees is $1500.  Luckily, I have that to spare so it can just sit there while I transfer the $900 rent to my regular business checking account each month, but it means there's still $$ in the account the tenant could access if he hacked the account. It's a risk, albeit a small one, but it's only until his lease ends and I haven't had a problem with him so far.  Cross my fingers.

Cozy's one con is that it takes 5 business days to post the rent it collects to your account.  You can cut it down to 3 days if you pay Cozy a fee of $2.99/unit.  Personally, I just never felt the urgency to get the money now to  make it worthwhile to pay the fee but I also don't think $3 is all that much.  I guess it depends on how much your rent is.  If it's $500/month, that's a bigger percentage than if it's $1500, but you're in California, so you probably get more in rent.

I had a similar situation with holdover tenants on a triplex I bought last year. I was able to convince 2 of them to pay using Cozy.co but 1 insisted that I use the previous landlord’s method of allowing them to make cash deposits at Chase Bank. After a lot of back and forth, my hubby said something that changed my mind—always make it easy for people to give you money—so I opened a Chase account and he goes every month to the teller with the rent in cash and my account number and deposits the rent. As soon as the deposit goes through, I transfer the money to my normal business account, thereby reducing the main risk of giving your account # to the tenant—that they’ll find a way to get the money back. When their lease ends and they leave, I will close the Chase account and just use Cozy for future tenants. Love Cozy! The tenants can set their payments on automatic and have to go out of their way to stop payment and you can see when they have scheduled the payment. (That’s how I found out one of my tenants had planned to pay late—he went in and changed the date from the 1st to the 2nd—and I was able to call him before and “discuss” the late payment before it happened.)

@Noah M. Miami Beach has the strictest regulations and has even dedicated personnel to cracking down on Airbnb hosts.  In October, Miami-Dade County passed an ordinance that hosts in unincorporated Dade County must sign up for a certificate of use, register for a business tax receipt, screen for sexual offenders and enforce a number of “vacation rental standards” on their guests.  However, those regulations don't pertain to the parts of Miami-Dade that have incorporated into cities like Coral Gables (where I have my vacation rentals).  In these cities and villages, Miami-Dade defers to the those city's government to decide on regulations for the areas they cover. If Brickell and Wynwood are the same, then it's probable that they have areas where short term rentals are legal and areas where it's not. 

However, in the case of Brickell, which is mostly high rise apartment buildings, condos, etc., it's best to look at their condo association rules to see if short term rentals are allowed in that building. Some condo buildings, such as Icon Brickell, have embraced STR but have restricted STR to Tower 3, leaving Tower 1 and 2 for owner-occupied residences or long term rentals. They may even help with the whole check-in process, making management very easy.

I'm not sure about Wynwood, but I know that there are still a lot of SFRs and duplexes, so you're probably ok there regulation-wise.  You just have to be really careful where you buy since it went from a Class D neighborhood with dilapidated houses and lots of graffiti where I would not be comfortable having Airbnb guests walking at night, to an ever-expanding high-fashion retail Design District all within about 5 years.  As the Design District/Wynwood expands, houses within that zone are getting torn down and renovated, but go two blocks, and we're back to the war zone. Good for a flipping or long-term-hold strategy; not so great for Airbnb unless you buy close enough to the action that guests don't have to walk through any bad neighborhoods to get to where they want to go.

Hope that helps.

Greetings from Miami! Miami is a pretty hot market for Airbnb. I’ve got 3 currently that are doing so well that I’m considering converting the rest of my rental portfolio to short term rentals.