All Forum Posts by: Rik Hunter

1. (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Mid-Term Rentals But Were Afraid to Ask. <-- Longest BP book title contender.

2. Straddling the Fence: A Real Estate Investor’s Guide to Mastering the Mid-Term Rental

3. 30-Day Stay: A Real Estate Investor’s Guide to Mastering the Mid-Term Rental

Right. We're have mid to higher end furnishings, but we're about 15-20 minutes from the cluster of hospitals East of Downtown. That's worked fine for nurses willing to drive, working at Memorial-Hixson, and a couple working in Dunlap or Dayton (I forget which). So, our distance from the main area of medical services is hurting us, but the quality of our unit generates the interest. 

@Bonnie Low and @Bonnie Griffin Kaake, I heard some talk on the podcasts about using cost segregation, but the costs of the study seem pretty high, especially if you don't have a high value property. Diminishing returns in this situation? In Chattanooga, this duplex would top-out at $300k. I'm also not in year one with this property. But, I pretty much know nothing about the process! 

@Christina P., thanks for the tip! I've read her book and listened to her on the BP podcasts, but haven't gotten to her podcast. 

By chance, we've had an engineer through AirBnb and a traveling high school basketball coach. We've also been contacted by a couple families looking for a place to live during house-hunting and remodeling, but they had pets, which we don't take. 

@Josh Ledbetter, we're outside the overlay! And we're charging nearly as much as anyone else with an MTR list on FurnishedFinder. Being closer to the hospitals gives you a bit more leverage to charge more, but we're on of the farthest out from the hospitals. It was fine before LTR rents went up. 

@Chris Allen, In our area in Chattanooga, we're about $50-100 below the next closest properties, and we're a few minutes farther from the majority of hospitals. 

Using the FurnushedFinder map, you can get a full home with 2 beds for $2000, and a 3 bed is about $2,250-2,300. I found one 3 bed for $1,800 and a 2 bed in the hip Northshore for $2,000.

Very few hit or exceed $2,500. 

We've got two travel nurses right now, but they came with one lease. We could consider renting by the room, but the results on FurnishedFinders for rooms. They run from $800-1200. 

Even at $1,200/rm, I'm not sure that the time and energy put into self-managing is worth it. 

Definitely not with the increases in LT rents over this year. I've added another $100 to the rent to see if we get any bites, but we're seriously ready to call the experiment "failed" and go back to an LTR starting in July-August.

Average LTR rents for a comparable unit were $1,000/month, and the MTR is at $1,650, so we were making more, but now rents are at $1,200-1,300, and we can't go up that high on the MTR. 

Luckily, we're rehabbing a SFH and can use some of the MTR furnishing for ourselves and store what we don't need for a future STR.

We're still unsure after 7 months. We've only had a few days of vacancy (for us to clean), and we're rented through mid-June.

1. Nurses seem to get (or lock-in) contracts just a few weeks before the contracts start, so we get leases signed a couple weeks before the move-in date. 

2.  We don't see a ton of local demand for travel nurse housing. First, you won't see nurses contacting landlords directly on FurnishedFinder, but FurnishedFinder allows travelers to register and put in their needs. I get an alert and check to see if we're a good match. 

3. We also use AirBnB, but without automation tools, I have to make sure that once dates are locked in on AirBnB or FF, then I have to black out the other site's calendar. 

4. We chose a price in the same way you would with a STR. We checked out the competition, and it had to cashflow.
 

Not accounting for the start-up costs (which we want to pay off in the first year), we cashflow about $200/mth on that door ($400 if we do the cleaning and lawncare). 

1. Nurses seem to get contracts just a few weeks before the contracts start, so we and move

Sorry for the slow response, Bob. We starting renting it out in October and have only had about 6 days of vacancy that we use to clean the unit ourselves. 

We're on track to average $1400/month, while we had been charging $995/mth as a LTR. So, by that measure we're doing better and are on track to cash flow after the accounting for the start-up costs. 

The problem we're seeing 7 months later is that rents have risen in our area that an unfurnished apartment like ours is getting at $1200/mth. Accounting for our expenses to run the MTR means that a LTR and MTR are equivalent—while us doing the cleaning and lawn care. 

In our case, we can maybe squeeze out another $100/month on the MTR, but that's the tippy-top of market.