All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

I live in Ogden, own an STR in Kanab, have explored just about every meter of Utah, and have looked into buying STRs in most places here.

Utah, sadly, is a tough area for STRs.

St George is an awesome place, but STR regulations are tough. You're limited to a few STR zoned areas, most of which require a city approved property manager (of which their are only a couple, each of which charge 30% for management given their monopolies), self management is not allowed in most of the few STR allowed areas. And oversupply barely begins to describe the area. Sadly, an area for people that like to vacation there and want to supplement the mortgage a bit. Not a place to cash flow.

I love Ogden Valley (Eden, Huntsville, etc) but property values are through the roof with legit 2nd home buyers and uber rich farmers buying up all the homes, and occupancy is low.  You're talking multi million dollar properties that are lucky to do $60k in revenue.  Obviously not anywhere close to cash flowing.

Park City has tourism, but prices are extremely high and, again, oversupply is nuts.  We recently spent the weekend at a nice property on main street for about $299 a night that was pretty empty even during high season and we were able to book it a week before the trip.  With that location, it had to be a $5M property.  We haven't explored the area for investments intimately because just at a high level glance it didn't really seem doable at current home values.  There's a POSSIBILITY you could make something work with a condo over at the Canyons or something like that.  Last time I underwrote that it worked for a little bit of cash flow (nothing to write home about).  But that was pre-pandemic when the condos were half the price they are now.

Hurricane is a fun area, but the waiting list for an STR permit is 10 years. The permit does transfer if you find someone selling a home that has one, but you can expect to pay double market value for that property and, again, totally wreck any chance of cashflow.

Toquerville (near Hurricane) requires you to be a resident of the city to run an STR.

La Verkin (same area) is one of the most doable spots. STR permits are broken down by areas of the city (each area has a limited number of permits available). When we looked 2 years ago there were still some areas with permits available. Not sure about now. Also new builds aren't eligible to be STRs. The property must have been used as a residency for at least 1 year (they're trying to prevent developers from building homes specifically for STR).

Kanab is just such a freaking cool area that I was initially drawn to as a fine art photographer (ryanmoyer.com plug!) and is where we bought, and it's been good to us.  But we bought before the big price run-up.  It would be much tougher at current prices.  Other headwinds are that the locals HATE tourism and will hate you, and vote against everything that helps tourism.  Last year they voted against a proposition by the NP service that would have had Zion shuttles run all the way into downtown Kanab, so instead of only the current south entrance visitors center shuttle stop, you also would have been able to catch a Zion shuttle direct from Kanab.  They voted that down by a lot.  Then they voted down a measure to add a golf course to the area as well.  Oversupply is an issue here as well, as STRs have exploded since Covid when everyone started temporarily making even more road trips to Zion.  That's only going to get worse as while everyone was up in arms fighting the golf course, the city slipped in a measure for a new development under everyone's noses that will add something like 300 new vacation homes to the area.  So things are decent now, if you can find a super great deal, but I'm not sure they'll stay that way for the future and there are a lot of headwinds for growth.  Locals are obsessed with "making sure Kanab does not become the next Moab".

And speaking of which, Moab is another awesome place, but STR restrictions are very tight. At this point you're looking at condos way out of town for $800k that might gross 1/12th of that or so annually is my impression. Haven't spent a ton of time on this area (in STR investor terms, I spend a ton of time there as an STR guest) but that's my impression.

Salt Lake City I have admittedly not spent as much time researching as I should given that it's right next door to me.  But my understanding is that it's technically illegal but unenforced.  So right now everyone operating there is operating illegally, but the city doesn't enforce it at all.  But that could change at any time.  It's also the same story of the supply blew up during the pandemic, and now the demand is receding back to normal while the supply stays high.

Bear Lake is beautiful, and I need to spend more time looking there as well, but again property values are up probably more than 100% in the last 2 years and it's VERY seasonal (pretty much only rentable in the summer), so I can't imagine returns are very good there.

I love Utah, but it's a tough STR area. The reality is that, unless you're looking for somewhere that your primary goal is your own usage, it's just too late. Over the last 10 years the state has transformed from "Utah, why would you go to Utah"? to the hip new beautiful place, and property values have exploded as people have moved here and bought legitimate second homes here that they intend to use for themselves. And alongside the soaring property values have been extremely tight restrictions all across the state as every area struggles with a shortage of affordable housing for low wage tourism workers.

I'm happy to answer any questions as best I can, but it's just a tough market unless you really want a place primarily for yourself. 

 This is what my header looks like on USBank currently.  No idea what "Couldn't load component" is supposed to be, but it's not something you expect to see on the website of a $66B company, and is the kind of thing that just pops up all over the place all the time.

Currently when I try to open the "Transfers" page to initiate an ACH transfer I get the error "The system is temporarily unavailable" which I've had for the last 3 days.

Just stuff like this, all the time, on the website.  I appreciate that they're trying to modernize it (and it looks much better now than it used to) but it's just constant stuff like this popping up.

Wouldn't it be pretty trivial to take an existing pro-forma and just add this one field to it?

I think people have pretty well nailed it on the head here.

I don't have a problem with people terming it "MTR". Even if it's not a legal term it works fine as a distinction of something between STR and traditional true LTR in practice.

I'm not sure why you think there's something you have to be "missing" here or what sounds "too good to be true".  This isn't like the early days of STRs where people are buying a few and getting rich off of it.  MTR doesn't really promise too good to be true returns.  Maybe a little more than LTR, for a bit more work than LTR.

I think once you factor in the cost of furnishing and utilities (both of which would be paid by the tenant in traditional LTR) as well as vacancy (it's typically not nearly as easy to find MTR tenants as a lot of people imply) the returns are probably similar to LTR, maybe a little better.  One nice advantage is you'd have eyes (and cleaners) on the place more often than LTR, where you don't know what kind of disaster you're going to be walking into after a tenant has been in there for years.

So yeah, it's fine. Just because influencers have jumped on and started pumping it to make a quick buck doesn't mean it's bad. Perfectly fine strategy with reasonable expectations. If you're already buying the place you can try it out and let the rest of us know how it goes, as most of us don't really have much hands on experience with it to compare it to STR that we're very versed in.

I've been using US Bank for the last year and am in the process of transitioning out of it now.  Their website is just a constant slew of issues.  It used to be really bad, they've finally updated it within the last couple years to upgrade from the 1998 style to about 2005 style, but technical issues are rampant.  Yesterday ACH transfers were down all day.  If you use any automatic reporting or wealth management (stessa, personal capital, mint.com, etc) its connection to them CONSTANTLY breaks, and all those sites note that issues with US Bank are constant and don't recommend connecting it.

Just my experience.  I only stuck with them because they also hold a few of my mortgages so it made it easy, but I decided to move on.

I am currently trying out Stessa Cash Management and Baselane.

They both operate the same.  Unlimited accounts you can spin up with a click.  A little less than 4% APY on your active checking account (which can really add up).  Each account you spin up can have a debit card that earns rewards, foregoing the need for a credit card and a bit easier for your accounting (since the money comes out of your account in the same month you spend it, not the following month).

Automatic transaction tagging, reporting, etc.

The main downside I've found so far is no Zelle and no physical checks.

Like others have said, this is probably true technically but not in spirit.

Airbnb's algorithm is even more opaque than Google's.  No one really knows how it works.  But it's widely accepted that it likely focuses a lot on interest/engagement, similar to social media platforms.  In that sense conversion probably does matter in the same way that someone seeing your post on Facebook but not liking/commenting on it is bad for the post's reach.  But it's unlikely that 1 measly view occasionally will have any tangible impact.

Generally the big box shops aren't the way to go in that area.  I would look at a more boutique place that's going to spend more time and energy on your place rather than your place just being another home in the blender.

Collin H and @Leslie Anne Morris come to mind.

 And now that I think of it, it's really everything, not just travel stuff.  Even if you go to walmart's website and go to a particular product page or your cart it doesn't show you the true price including tax and shipping until you get into checkout.

It's interesting that all the vitriol is directed at Airbnb for this when basically every website in the country does it the same way.

Maybe I'm confused.  I'm definitely not a financial advisor, so maybe I'm missing something.  But why would you pay off 3% loans just so you can take out a new loan on that equity at a much higher interest rate?

I think you need to make a decision on whether you want to buy additional properties or not.  Not just now, but ever.  If so, it doesn't make much sense to keep aggressively paying down cheap loans when you know you'll likely want to access that money later and have to pay a higher interest rate for it.

You can literally put the money you're using to pay down the loans into a fully liquid money market account right now that makes more than 3% interest, and retain complete access to the money at no cost when you want to buy another place.  So why is paying down the principal on the two non-commercial cabins even on the table as a consideration?