All Forum Posts by: Ryan Moyer

I manage 25 properties in the area.  Here's the reality.  Everyone here is being nice to you instead of telling you what you really need to hear.  I'm not saying any of this to be mean, but you need to hear it.

You say you have a great, themed property.  By national standards?  Sure, you have that.  By Disney standards.  You don't.  I'm sorry, that property is not themed.  By 2019 standards, it's light theming.  By 2024 standards, it's not even close to being considered themed.

Same thing for the game room.  Pic #25 is not a game room.  That's a garage with a pool table and a ping pong table.  In other markets, that would qualify as a game room.  In Orlando, you need $15,000 worth of arcade games and some cool custom lighting to be middle of the pack.  A pool table in the garage isn't even enough to be bottom of the pack.

I don't intend any offense by any of this.  It's just the reality of this insane market where they build INSANE houses by the thousands.  Your property may have been a 70th percentile property in 2019, but now it's a 20th percentile property.  And 20th percentile in a collection of properties that has doubled in size.

It sucks.  I get it.  My property (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/52612233) was a 95th percentile property in 2019.  Now it's a 70th percentile property.  I could charge $600/nt in 2019.  Now I've added amenities, I work 5x as hard on pricing, and 10x as hard on marketing, and I can charge half as much and still bring in a lower occupancy.  But it's just the reality of this market where everyone has one-upped everyone else so many times that the standard of a high end listing is insane.

4.74 is not a great review score by Airbnb standards.

Small changes like photos or changing the title just aren't going to move the needle.  If you could pick up this house and drop it in a normal market you could charge 5x as much.  But the bar is so high here.  If you were shopping and this house and a thousand others like it are available for basically the same price, is there anything that could be written in the title of your place that would cause you to choose it over that one?

I know you don't want to hear it but your options are really to either stay in the mosh pit of regular houses and fight the pricing wars to the bottom, or invest $100k into the house to price higher.  But as you can see from the linked house (and a quick Airbnb search), it's not like you're just naming whatever price you want even if you do that.

Becoming more popular and less special every day, but there is a timeline where it will work for sure.

For us it varies by market but in our primary market 15% plus a small monthly fee to help cover software costs etc if it's a lower gross property.

That's full service, host doesn't have to worry about anything and can forget the property even exists if they want to.

We do have tiered services where it's 10% (w/ no or lower monthly fee) if the owner wants us to only do one side of it (either manage bookings but not guests/cleanings/maintenance, or vice versa).

25-30% used to be more normal but that's legacy pricing now, for a couple of reasons.

1) Of course margins are much thinner for owners now that revenue has generally come down across the board from the peak, while home prices and interest rates have risen alongside that.

2) Probably even more important, a simple supply/demand equation, particular to the case of increased supply.  Simply put, there are a lot more co-hosts/managers like myself and yourself who got started self-managing their own properties around covid and are now afraid or unwilling to buy new properties at current prices/rates, but want to use their knowledge/experience to keep increasing income in the space.  So if owner's shop around at all, they're going to find plenty willing to do it cheaper.  We even see some charging 10-12% in one of our markets now.

That's not to say 25-30% isn't possible anymore, but it most likely would have to come via a referral where the owner isn't shopping around at all.

 I manage 20+ units in Kissimmee/Davenport.

The area is simply overbuilt for STR which has pushed prices way down and made returns much tighter. Demand remains strong but even on peak dates with every park full the parks can't pack in enough people to fill up all the houses.

Both Universal and Disney are expanding (Universal sooner) so that will drive up demand even more, but the problem is there is endless land out there so supply will always have a chance to catch up if developers get wind of new demand.

That's why, at least for my own purchases, I'm focusing on areas with limited buildability where supply can't just scale in lock-step with demand for eternity.  Broken Bow is another major market I would never consider for this reason, having just visited there.  Even if demand increases any advantage to the side of demand will only ever be short lived, as there is endless cheap land out there for supply to quickly catch up and surpass that demand.

Haha fair enough. I guess my point was the ROI was good there based on 2021 home prices, but Matt was talking about looking there in 2024. Does that $40k/yr still represent a good ROI at today's prices?

 What is that cabin worth today?  2021 was right when things really started going up so I'm guessing a fair bit more than that?

Would something like this have to be bought in cash or can it be financed?

 Thanks, ChatGPT!

 What features did hostfully have that you wanted to that were missing in Hospitable?

 I think you took it out of context.

You can only use bonus depreciation one time because once you've used it, you've used it.  But classifying your depreciation (either the leftover annual depreciation after taking bonus depreciation, or the regular amount of depreciation if you didn't take bonus depreciation) can be taken as an active deduction against your W2 income for as long as you materially participate in the property.

Disclaimer: I'm not a tax professional so not financial advice.  This is just my understanding of it.