All Forum Posts by: Jon Martin

Are you looking to find a long term tenant on airbnb? I think there are better sites for that, you will lose a lot to platform fees. 

2 properties in Greenville SC. Thankfully both are undamaged but power is still out. Of course I had guests checking out and back in on Friday . . . Sigh. One in on standby in Clemson and ready to move in, was supposed to stay through the weekend but I will probably have to refund them everything or close to it. Getting lots of inquiries from neighbors and people from Asheville leading with "do you have power". 

Reminder that some geographic diversification in my portfolio would be a good thing. 

Microwave popcorn from Costco is the only food item I do. I applaud the efforts of others but I don't feel the need to supply a bunch of snacks, especially with a larger home where I would have to leave a lot for everyone. I don't like the idea of staging photos with flaming hot cheetos against my new penny tile backsplash, but then again I see other listings getting mentions in the reviews so who am I to question it?

There has to be a dominant website out there for wedding venues, just a matter of finding it. 

This . . . Setup your property so that emergencies are avoided in the first place. Be sure to have redundancies for lockouts. Place "how to" signs next to any complicated amenities and front load your messages to make guests aware of any quirks. 

Most issues will pop up in the first few months as guests use the place regularly, so have a good relationship with a handyman and maybe throw him some small jobs so that he will be on standby when needed. Beyond that, there is very little to worry about in terms of "off hours" emergencies so long as you are proactive with maintenance. 

I agree, especially somewhere that is barely habitable those other 6 months, which describes the UP of Michigan quite well. Unless you are near a ski hill, there are very few reasons to be there at that time. 

That said you certainly need to manage your cash well in order to cover the bills in the down season. 

That, and not taking the furnishing/decor and management aspects of it seriously. They put their old hand me down furniture and cheap plastic Dollar Tree kitchen utensils in there, pass off the management to Vacasa or Evolve, and expected to make a killing. Those days are done unless you have a property in an A+ location. 

"and understanding that not every location is still a goldmine for STRs"

IMO the goldmines are the places that you don't think would be goldmines. Everyday mid-sized cities with growing populations have people traveling to them for all sorts of reasons. Especially with a bigger home. I'm getting weddings and events on weekends booked well in advance and work crews working on new construction booking mid-week. 

Plenty of listings with cell phone pics showing basic interiors in my market have the top 10% trophy and well-populated calendars. Those are the markets I go after, because if I go a few notches about that I know I can easily be in the top 5%.  

The market is saturated if you don’t have the creativity to look beyond the top dozen or so markets. It’s a big country out there, plenty of potential. 

@James Hamling "Your a waste of my energies. You run wild with assumption, infer things I never inferred or stated, disregard facts,"

Um, really? How many times now have I pointed out in this very thread where you changed a few key words and then formulated an argument against it? That is the definition of a Strawman argument. 

""the us and Taiwan lead in....." no, it would just be Taiwan, the US produces diddly squat in contrast to Taiwan" 

The USA and Netherlands make the machinery that is required to make the make advanced semiconductors. 

"And BRICS is resource rich, more so than the US."

If you combine them all together, sure, but the US still has a vast natural and intellectual resource base. China is more dependent on natural resources from elsewhere than the US. 

"And yeah, the melt-down of our society does matter when were trying to convince the planet to use our USD as world reserve, it does matter that the society backing it is a dumpster fire, that = volatility"

Like I said, the culture wars stuff in the US is insane, but why don't you also take an honest look at the social and demographic issues that these countries are dealing with? I'd rather live in a country where there is confusion about what a woman is, than a country where women have minimal rights or where they are in short supply because of failed social engineering policies. 

"The US "democracy" is a faint, it's a perception of choice"

Again- is there a more democratic and less corrupt BRICS country that we can look to? 

You still haven't touched the trust issue in regards to how confident the rest of the world will be in this new currency. If the people of those countries don't even trust their own banks, and instead put USD under the mattress and buy real estate in Europe and the US to store their wealth, what makes you think there will be any trust in this new currency?

Nowhere did I say "superior" and nowhere did I limit what I said to the US. These are western society values. 

The difference is that you won't get arrested in San Francisco and potentially do years in prison for wearing a MAGA hat.