All Forum Posts by: John McGonigal

@Deanna Lawrence Congrats, and welcome to the Branson STR market! My wife and I bought three condos in Branson in Nov '19/Feb '20 and couldn't be happier with our choice. We went with Evolve at first but decided to self-manage pretty quickly. It has been a great experience so far. Best of luck to you!

@Matt Schreiber my wife and I have owned three condos since 2019 in Branson, Mo. We self manage and have enjoyed the experience so far. Branson is similar to Gatlinburg TN area as far as being a high tourist area, and some investors are looking here due to being priced out in Tennessee. It really only has a two month down season in Jan-Feb. great town.

@Trey Broussard

Our three 2BR/2BA condos are currently averaging 238 days this year and should be around 260 by years end.

@Danny Evans sounds like you have a nice property.

Lending is very tight right now. I was surprised to hear we might not be approved for a VA loan as our primary residence due to already having 4 rental properties. It doesn't seem to matter much if you have a strong financial position and payment history.

Nicely done! We’re from that area so it’s nice to see improvements in town. I’m curious how the remodel compares to other homes in the neighborhood now that it’s complete. There are some rough areas in PB. 

Hi Nathan, sorry you had 3 bad experiences with Airbnb. As a relatively new STR host for our 3 Branson condos, we (wife and I) self manage and advertise on Airbnb and VRBO exclusively. 184 of our 200 bookings In 2020 used Airbnb. Based on their reviews and our interactions with all of them, I believe they had a great experience overall. Most definitely not your experience.

In general, It does appear the VRBO guests  fit a different mold as compared to Airbnb guests (longer stays, Booked farther out, etc) but I wouldn’t label them better or worse. We have a lot of great customers from both platforms.

However, we are in a vacation market as compared to a large metro where your bad experiences occurred, so maybe there's less need for Unethical/illegal hosting. Since we host on both platforms, I don't recall either of them requiring proof of legal hosting though both asked to make sure we were authorized owners and to comply with local STR laws.

Bottom line, there are a lot of great hosts who legally use Airbnb to market their rentals and provide excellent service to their guests. Sorry again for your bad experiences.

I have a family member in her early 20s who is about to receive $500k from a settlement. She asked me to initially serve as executor over the account to help protect the money from being squandered.

I’m not a CPA or financial expert, but do ok with our personal investment strategy. I’ll obviously have her consult with a CPA and/or financial advisor as a first step.

I’m concerned with the tax implications of her receiving that much money at once, and would like to provide her options for investment that would minimize the tax burden. My first choice would be real estate, but would like to provide her some options. Any suggestions?

We were looking into a PMS to streamline our process, but this may solve the problem. We currently send out a check-in, mid-stay, and checkout message manually. I wasn’t aware of an Airbnb messaging update. 

Evolve isn’t a full service PM. They take care of the advertising, marketing, and billing  of your property and then hand off customer coordination responsibilities to you or your “on the ground” team once the guest is booked. We used them for a while, but decided to self manage. Our workload didn’t increase much and we saved the 10% Evolve fee. They were enjoyable to work with though. If you decide you need full service PM, then recommend you find a local agency. Good luck.