All Forum Posts by: Paul Sandhu

Find a different market for your STRs.  I paid between $6-$9 per square foot for the last 4 houses I bought.  They are all 3 bedroom, 1 bath, central H/A.  They all needed another $1000 of additional work after buying them.  I can't imagine paying half a million dollars for a cabin.

I rent the houses for $400 to $600 per week.  They are rented out 5-9 months out of the year.

A lady I know cleans and stocks them between vacancies, but that is another story.

Do you think a car rental company would rent you a car for a week, while you drive it 12 hours a day on Uber and your friend drives it another 12 hours a night on Uber?

There is the implied use of a residential rental, which is to be renter occupied.  But you are using it in an unimplied manner. 

My advice would be to change your approach.  Instead of approaching the landlords to rent from to do your Airbnb, approach them as a business partner is doing Airbnb.  Maybe you manage it and get 2/3 of the profit, the landlord gets 1/3 of the profit for providing the property.

@John Bucknum My town does not have typical demographics.  There have been 5 homicides this year, with a population of 9,000.  The national rate is 5 per 100,000.  Drive down any main street and you'll see meth heads, zombies, tweakers on bicycles, and other non-productive members of society.  Vacant houses can be occupied by squatters.  One local police officer was caught in an undercover prostitution sting.  Another was caught supplying minors with alcohol. 

This town has bigger problems than rental legislation or hotel taxes and the like.  That's why there is almost zero legislation regarding these matters in this town.

@John Bucknum

I spend about 20-30 hours a week total with my rentals for all the reasons you mention in your post.  That's 3-4 hours a day. But about half of that time I'm not really doing anything serious.  30-90 minutes a day is collecting rent, or waiting to collect rent and drinking beer.  I meet the STRenters at their house to collect.  Repairing some appliance or doing something crafty in the evening while drinking beer is another 30-90 minutes a day. 

Cleaning, restocking, buying supplies from WalMart, etc.  That's 5-10 hours a week.

My regular job is about 1-2 hours a day at a medical clinic doing pre-employment drug screens. It's 10 minutes of work at a time spread out randomly between the hours of 8:00 and 5:00 (but about half of the days work is done between 8:30 and 10:00 in the morning). I don't have to be at the clinic all day, but all 22 of my STR's are in a 1.25 mile radius of the clinic. So I can be there in about 3 minutes if I'm doing work or just goofing off at a vacant house.

The people I test are the people I rent to.

When I'm at work and not doing drug testing, I do all the promotional and marketing work for my STRs.  Mainly sending sales letters and flyers to companies that will be sending their employees to this town for work.  I also plot and implement the stealing of renters from my competition and getting them out of this business.  I also see what's going on in the local real estate market, who is buying what and who is selling what, and for how much.  This is about an hour or two a day.

A lady used to clean my houses for free.  Now she takes some of the rent money, whenever she wants and however much she wants.  But I get to sleep with her.

I'm probably the only person on this website that specifically rents STRs to full time working people.  Full time is 50-84 hours/week.  They are all contractors working at a local refinery.  

Perhaps you can find a smaller town with a large industrial or institutional employer and set up shop with your 4-plex?  I know big cities with universities or hospitals, these STRs are common and you would have competition.  So try to find a smaller town with a big employer that brings in people from far away to work temporary jobs.  

You might consider Galveston.  There are several refineries there plus it is a tourist location.  Look on Craigslist to see what your competition is like.

You might consider Las Vegas.  They are building a 1.8 billion dollar stadium there.

You might consider Humboldt Tennessee.  Tyson was considering 2 locations in Kansas to build a 320 million dollar chicken processing facility (my town being one of them).  They chose the Tennessee location instead.  I felt pretty deflated after hearing that news about 4 weeks ago, I normally make rent of 1/10 of 1% of the project cost whenever there is something big. The construction should begin in the spring of 2018 and finish sometime in 2019.  When it's complete, there will always be maintenance that needs to be done.  Those are your prospective tenants.

                                                                         ^^^Listen to them^^^

Sounds like a guy I know that invests in the stock market.  He buys a stock at $50.  He sells it at $48.  Then buys it at $45 and claims to make $1.

Try to make your real estate ventures profitable as a stand alone entity, or at least have that sort of mindset.  Don't co-mingle different income sources to try and offset one with another.

You can try to minimize your taxes at the cost of reducing your net income, or you can try to maximize your net income at the cost of increasing your taxes.

That's like saying "I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure".  Why would anyone rent a timeshare from you, when they could buy it directly from the source (at a lower cost)?

I don't charge tenants any sort of cleaning deposit or cleaning fee.  I figure if we did, they would make sure we earn it.  Most of them leave the places reasonable clean, or not too messy.

The lady that cleans my STRs used to do it for free.  Now she takes a portion of the rent, whenever and however much she sees fit.

But, she also sleeps with me.

@Maggie Jones

You need 3M talent.  The three talents stand for Mechanic,  Mindreader and Magician (in that order)