All Forum Posts by: Jon Martin

Agreed, pull out sofas that you would actually want to sleep on are the white whale of the STR world. I find that the typical fold out design is inherently flawed because you can't fit enough mattress inside a couch to be comfortable if it needs to be folded 2-3 times, and then you have a support bar running across the center of your back on top of a thin mattress.

The pull out roller style is a better design but much less to choose from. 

Buy everything pre-assembled if possible, especially items with drawers and moving parts. At least some of what you save buying it unassembled you will pay to someone else or your own time putting it together, plus that adde time with bottleneck and delay the rest of your setup. Pre-assembled items also tend to be of better quality and have less parts, making them less prone to failure and saving you replacement and liability costs over the life of your listing. 

Also agree with consolidating vendors and buying stuff in sets when possible. You will have a literal mountain of cardboard, so you may want to get a rollaway dumpster as well (not an exaggeration), so the more you can cut down on the total number of boxes shipped the better. 

For anything that can fit in a suitcase, shoot for "value" grade items that are good quality/durable and pleasant to use, but not luxury, because if it's too nice and unique someone will help themselves to it. I have a shopping list with these items so feel free to PM me. 

Wouldn’t want to turn on a black light in that house 

There are a lot of hotels/motels/traditional BnBs for sale in the northeast as well. Not sure if this is because of aging owners, tough labor pool for cleaners, access to vendors and/or lack of visitors? Seems that there is good proximity to wealthy metros in the northeast and guests who return to the same places over and over, so hopefully it's just a succession issue. 

There are a few destinations with good mountain biking, hiking, lakes etc and other outdoor stuff in Arkansas. Look for that kind of destination that is drivable from bigger metros in Arkansas and neighboring states. 

Incredible reading a story like this from someone at age 24!  

I think if you have gotten yourself this far in terms of assets and knowledge of various debt vehicles, that you can probably scour the country for niche markets where the revenue to price ratio works for you. You've managed to find yourself at this website with the capital to get in the game, so I know you are capable of researching the right markets where the numbers work for you.

STR is the same game everywhere, just different leagues in different markets.

I'd say about $10K for a 1 bed/bath. Add $4K for each bedroom from there, which in the addition to the furnishings of the additional bedroom covers the additional seating, flatware, towels etc that scale up with the additional guests added to each bedroom. I have an excel sheet if you like, feel free to DM me. 

That you are either 1 bedroom or 5+ bedroom. 2 & 3 bedrooms (and in most cases/markets 4 bedrooms) are the saturated and squishy middle. Too much space and high of a cost basis to compete with hotels, along with being excessive space for 1-2 person stays, while also not big enough for multiple families. You end up spending the extra money to purchase, rehab, furnish, clean and heat/cool the extra space for a return that doesn't scale with the added costs and often ends up underutilized. Which is not to say that the right property and location could not work great with that bedroom count, although you probably need an A+ location to really make that work given how many of them are out there. 

Even with what I said above, I would only invest in a 1 bedroom project if there were multiples of them on the same property like a hotel or group of cabins. You are directly competing with hotels at that point so you will have less lead time and shorter guest stays for a solid portion of your bookings. Whereas with 5+ bedrooms people plan much further in advance and don't mind 3 night weekend minimums. Which IMO makes 5+ bedrooms the winner. 

Great design! Love that rug in photo 3, did you get that from Revival? I did a reverse image search and it came up there sold out. 

Agree with not going the kitchy neon and mural route, I don't think that design trend will age well. A design like this is timeless, well done. 

I just dealt with this with Airbnb after noticing that views and bookings dropped off in the last 1-2 weeks. Somehow the lat/long changed in the Airbnb server and it was showing up in the middle of nowhere.

Why Airbnb prioritizes what they think is the lat/long over the physical address is beyond me . . . .