All Forum Posts by: Kyle Shankin

@Tony Bevilacqua how much cash would you be putting in your pocket if you refi-d? What kind of positive cashflow would you be looking under those conditions? 

Selling is definitely a viable, and seemingly good, option; but I don't think it's immediately the best option. It depends on your goals are with investing. One plus to note in the 'sell column' is that you can probably avoid some capital gains taxes as the house was your primary residence for at least 2 out of the last 5 years.

 Hi Nancy! No, I don't use Motopress. I actually don't have any short-term rental investments and responded to this thread initially because it mentions a few musings of mine (websites, marketing and short-term rentals).  

My day job is as a mobile app developer and I have 8 years of web development experience as well, which is why I brought up using Wordpress with motopress. I'm sure there are other short-term rental booking plugins out there, I just picked one that looked full-featured and would provide the functionality that @Nick VanDer Sluis seemed to be looking for.

As for some of your other questions, the motopress documentation says it supports paypal and stripe payments (among others), those I have personal experience with and would configure the plugin to use one or both. For the rental agreement, you can add that to the booking page. When a user goes to checkout and complete the booking, they'll need to check a box where they agree to the terms and conditions before they can finish the booking process.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about someone booking through my own website (if that's what you mean by offsite), and then maybe calling AirBnb to report me. It's the same risk as if someone booked off of VRBO and then went to AirBnb and complained, why would one care about the other? 

@Nathan Gesner I haven't had enough interactions that have required me to make this kind of decision, however, sticking with your tried and true process will yield consistent results. Speeding things up can leave room for error which may screw you over in the long run. 

 Very cool! So then, it sounds like @Anand S has a pretty good suggestion. Or you could set yourself up with a cheap wordpress site and buy this plugin: https://motopress.com/products... which manages rental bookings. It can be setup to handle payment, process the booking and then push out bookings to calendars that you've setup with your other services.

 Out of curiosity, how will your travelers know about this option? Do you get a lot of potential guests reaching out to you directly? I've (briefly) checked out Homeaway and VRBO, it doesn't appear that either offer an API to create/update bookings, so it's unlikely that there's a 3rd party app or website that allows you automatically manage your properties' availability. 

You could get an app developed that will log into these sites as you and block off the bookings whenever someone books through your site but: A. it may be against the VRBO and Homeaway terms of use to do so. B. It could be cumbersome, and therefore expensive, to maintain. 

 How does that process work? They shoot you an email and then you go and manually block off the dates in VRBO and others? What percentage of guests rent again this way? 

@Ed Sautter IMO, since the loan gets applied to that house, then it's that house needs to be able to pay for the loan and still cashflow. If all of your properties are under the same legal entity and share the same bank account, I could see where someone could argue that it wouldn't matter where you put that monthly cost, so long as your consistent.

If your deal is a large multifamily or office building, strip mall, etc. then you would leave out the loan when calculating your net operating income so that you can get an idea of what the cap rate on the property is. However, that doesn't mean that you leave the loan out of the analysis. As you stated, it affects your cashflow, so you need to account for that.

@Fred Lutes It sounds like if the tenant wants to try and get an ESA, there isn't a lot you can do about it. If they do follow through with getting the ESA, require that the tenants provide proper documentation that the dog is in fact a service animal. 

IMO, I would have them finish out the lease and then ask for the house back so you can freshen it up and maximize the rent. As people already mentioned, you can't discriminate against an ESA, but you can find a more qualified tenant to rent out the property.

I don't invest in war zones. But in my c-class (and all my other properties actually) I just hire out so I can focus on other things. The PM company I use requires a minimum credit score, clean background check and minimum salary of 3x monthly rent. So far, we've been able to find good tenants with those requirements. 

@Jimmy Wen for all legal and tax purposes, you want separate accounts; you need to separate your personal self from your business. 

If you were to use the same accounts/credit cards for your personal expenses as you do your business, a tax auditor can make the argument that there's no way to prove that the business expenses are for business use because you've muddied the waters. At that point, they can prevent you from using those business expenses as deductions.

In a similar fashion, from a legal standpoint. If it's your name on the deed and your name on the bank accounts and you get sued, the damages will come out of the accounts that's tied to the investment. Additionally, because it's your name on the account and you personally are your business, anything else that has your name on it has the potential to be seized for the lawsuit. This includes things like your personal residence, car, etc.