All Forum Posts by: Jeffery Wilen

@Rachel Hughes

@Jon Crosby was spot on, completely agree. 

@Julie Groth 

I’m in the same page as Avery, we only supply coffee/tea(with sugar & dry creamer) and some dry spices. 
What we do provide as well is a few water bottles, and a couple packages of snacks, goldfish or cheese crackers and cookies. We’ve found that nearly 80% of guests use some part of these items. 

@Darrek Smith

The zoning I’m familiar with don’t restrict you from renting rooms instead of whole house. Rather they restrict the length of stay. If they have a restriction, it is a 30 day minimum. 
Generally speaking, Clark county is more landlord friendly than Oregon. 

@Jeff Quinlan

It really depends on the investment return that you’re seeking. As a point of reference a general rule of thumb that big business uses for capital investment is payback in 5 years or less.

Your $6k investment option is a 5 year payback. Your $18k scenario is 5-1/2 year payback. Both would be marginal for us.
We’re currently rehabbing some of our units, total cost $15k, increased rent of $490 for a 2-1/2year payback. 
Just my $.02

We had 3 large mulberry trees at one of our STR. Fortunately, we were able to cut them down. They drop A lot of berries that make dark black/red stains on everything!!

@Dwight Anderson

You're going to have a hard time finding a lender that will appraise the property based on NOI. As you stated, that is only used on 5+ unit buildings.

Your best bet is to find the comps you want an appraiser to use and make sure you’re present when the visit the property so you can “inform” the appraiser of what you feel the value should be for the property. 

We have ours set moderate as well. So far we’ve only had a few cancellations. As stated by others, we stick firmly to the policy. We’ve never refunded a payment. Nearly all of the cancellations were far enough out that we rebooked. If that becomes a problem in the future, we may change it. 

@Joseph Moore Jr

What do you have to lose to try it? Unless you’re there at the time, the only drawbacks are letting the guest in and cleaning. If there’s a way for a separate entrance, you could do electronic locks to solve to check in/out. 

@Brady Beshear

I don’t know how VRBO handles the August locks. We don’t use their platform for booking. We’ve been able to essentially fully book our units on Airbnb. As such, we’ve not looked at other platforms and having to combine calendars and block out dates etc.

@Brady Beshear

We use August Smart lock Pro.  This lock connects to the existing deadbolt on the inside of the door, no need to change the keys.  It also connects to wifi, so we can access it remotely, enabling us to unlock/lock remotely if necessary. You can set it up for notifications as well.  We can give access codes to our cleaners and maintenance people.

It links with our Airbnb account. Airbnb automatically sends an email to the guest upon confirmation. This email contains a link for them to either use the smart phone app or a keypad code to open the door. The access is setup to begin at the check-in time on Airbnb and end upon check-out time.