All Forum Posts by: Kim Durst

Question When your calculating cash on cash return. If we are leveraging equity from another property to pay the down payment on a new purchase, do you count that as your cash investment?

Or, are you only counting actual hard cash for furnishings,etc?

Hi @Michael Baum, Our property is on Airbnb, Vrbo & Booking.com. No mentions of LGBTQ friendliness has ever been mentioned. I was just curious if anyone had feedback:) 

We have a property in a strong LGBTQ area and are looking at adding our listing to Mister BNB. Curious what the feedback is. Has anyone tried it? Good, bad? 

I am looking for fellow STR investors to chime in here. Have you ever had that little negative voice tell you what the hell are you doing? You're making a mistake, this could all crash, STR's are going to be history (according to the chatter out there) Robert Kiyasaki says don't buy right now, and it goes on and on and on....

We've been in the STR business since 2018 and have done well. We are under contract on our 5th rental property and now have 4 STR's and 1 long term. The property in question is the most expensive we've ever purchased and it has me nervous as hell. I've run the numbers several times, researched the hell out of the area not to mention....we previously owned 2 STR's on this lake and KNOW 1st hand what the numbers do (that sounds crazy just typing it).

$530k, 20% down, 7.6%...ouch. All in cash to close roughly $119k plus 10k to furnish. Now....based on our old numbers pre, during and post Covid we should do roughly $100k plus we rent our boat which brings in around 20k. COCR at 100k is around 24% using Luke & Avery's spreadsheet. If I look at AIrdna, Price labs, etc...the data comes in a lot lower which is where I think I'm getting doubts. I'm stuck in the data.

This little voice is questioning all the what if's and the if only's....I'd love to hear from those of you who have had similar thoughts. How did you manage the voice? It can be exhilarating yet, terrifying at the same time. 

What do you do with the proceeds from sales when your done with property rentals? It’s time. We are on the way to retirement. We own several properties and are tired. We have sold all but two. One just hit the market this week. 

What do you all do when you sell everything and have large amounts of cash? Investing in the market scares us but letting cash sit in the bank isn’t good either?? Or so they say. 
our financial advisor is telling us to invest our cash in low risk/protected funds, etc. 

would appreciate feedback. Thank you! 

Kim

@Amanda Kessler yes! this is how I think at times....what are we doing? It's going to be too much work, what if it doesn't rent, what if we don't get the rent amount we expect to, did we forget anyhting in our calculations? On and on...almost talking myself out of it. Not backing out though. Here we go!

Dave and I are in contract on our third property. This will be our second purchase within a years time. Talk about being out of our comfort zones! Part of me wants to stay safe and not continue on but the other part says push on and get uncomfortable!

Would love to hear your stories.

@Rod Joseph against our association rules and city. 

@Michael Baum

Nice to hear from you. I agree. We did do well for our first season. We decided to keep the place and run it a few more years. In fact, our neighbors house just went up for sale and we snagged it! Inspections today. Now we decide.....Airbnb that one too or, do we move in to the new place (live next door to the other STR) and leave our high rise downtown condo and rent this long term? Number crunching a lot this weekend:)

Starting out with NO reviews is a risk for guests. Since then, we have ALL 5 star reviews on both Airbnb and Vrbo platforms. In terms of savings, not much we can do on that. We have crunched those numbers to death. These is other value in this property besides income. We also use it as a cottage in the off season. Here's some info for you.

We are open year round, close to skiing, snowmobile trails, ice fishing on the lake, farm markets, orchards, golf courses, and of course, all of the summer lake activities.

Our home if 4500 sq ft, 4 bed, 4.5 bath. Sleeps 8 or more, each bedroom has it's own full bath. A HUGE plus for guests. We also have a game room, smart tv's in every room, wifi, a full house generator, we supply coffee, laundry, trash bags, toiletries, toilet paper, kleenex, paper towel, games, and more.  Guests love this. We try to give them a five star hotel feel. We try to meet needs they didn't even know they had. 

Rates vary from $275-$340 depending on the season. We have competition, their rates are similar to ours but, we offer more. We manage the property but hire a cleaning crew. We charge $185 cleaning fee to guest and pay our girls $210. That's a tough one but, we don't want to charge guests a higher fee (ours is high enough) the house is huge, it takes 4 hours to clean. Dave and I were doing it for a while but that got old real quick! We both have full time jobs on top of that. 

I think we are priced a bit high and sometimes start to worry however, people are booking. The $325 range seems to be the sweet spot. We are pushing it a bit at $340 next year for June, July and August rates, but, we shall see.  I don't want to price us out of the market by any means. 

Would love to hear more about your place. What are your rates? What do you offer? 

Kim

@Colton Fairchild @Marcus Auerbach @Dennis Fernandez @Tim Herman I am wrong on our numbers. Completely Forgot to add figures from when we had our property manager! We are cash flowing 5k this year. We started late this year and started with low rates to get going. Next years projections are looking great so far. We are 50% booked for june, july and August at $340 per night.