All Forum Posts by: Scott K.

I own 3 airbnbs at this point and they all make about 3% per month. Those 'hard and fast percentage rules' are garbage, never use them. Run your own analysis and decide if this is the best use of your money, in your situation. My long term rentals never made 1%, then they doubled in value due to the neighborhood, and now they cashflow well.

If you want to run an analysis, don't use airdna. I've found it WAY off base on my own properties. I haven't found a better site either. The way I run my own analysis goes like this:

1. Find a house similar to what you want to buy on airbnb

2. Check it's nightly rate (NOT what is listed, that is a misleading marketing device), to check the proper nightly rate just find some dates (in the future a month or two, nearby dates have discounts) and do an entire week. Remove any 'weekly discounts' they give you. Take note what the weekend rates are, and what the weekday rates are.

3. Check nearby dates for that property to calculate what it's getting booked for. You'll see blocked off dates, that means its booked most likely. Calculate on average how many weekend nights, how many weekday nights per month. Multiply by your nightly rates. THis is your monthly rate.

4. Keep in mind, that some areas are VERY seasonal. I make 2.5x during summer months. This is where websites like airdna are good, for 'trends', not for 'rates'. You can evaluate which areas are seasonal, and get a good idea of what multiplier you should use to calculate the yearly rate, based on your one months rent you calculated.

I should also say - 10% isn't the best situation. Usually to get that sort of loan (or less than 20%) you have to pay PMI, and you have to pay a ton of points up front, making your ROI suffer greatly. Your goal should be to maximize your ROI, not lower the down payment.

Investment properties are harder to finance than homes you live in. Usually the LTV has to be 15%+, depending on how many you own. My first investment prop was 15%. My 2nd, 3rd, and 4th had to be 20%. Now I usually have to hit 25% for them to finance me. It also varies by lender, some are more willing to do lower amounts.

There are plenty of ways to get around this, most of them involve taking loans from people with much higher interest rates, who don't care about the property and will just lend you money. They're called hard money lenders. Rates can go between 10-20%, and usually people plan to do this just for a year, then when the income they have from the rental property qualifies for a conventional loan (usually 1 year) they can apply at a mortgage company and switch over the debt (pay off the hard money lender)

Best of luck to you... The market is basically dried up and any inventory has 20+ offers in a day. I'll see you out there :) 

Yeah since we're not in a city, getting guests during the week is pretty uncommon. So occupancy rate is not my major concern. Its more just, can we squeeze out an extra 10% of revenue by having access to a greater pool of people. We saw that vrbo increased our revenue by 15-20% because the clientele happened to want to stay longer than the average airbnb guest. So I wonder if there is some 'hidden advantage' like that, to booking.com. Seems not.

Thanks for the input. We get probably 60 percent occupancy in a remote rural town where people generally only come for weekends with huge groups, 14+. So while it's possible to get higher occupancy I think it's unrealistic given the market. We still make a lot of money. 120k revenue for a 300k house. 

While I'm doing incredibly well on airbnb/vrbo, its really taught me that multiple platforms helps a lot. Whether airbnb is banning certain dates for no reason (no parties on halloween, 2020) or vrbo doesn't have enough bookings to sustain all year so I need airbnb guests, I was wondering if booking.com was a good alternative. Is anyone using all 3? Anyone use booking.com at all? It seems all my software backend is already setup to include booking.com so it'd be pretty easy to integrate.

I have a very different perspective. I've hired at least 6 different companies so far for my 2 6 bedroom rentals. Some quit because i was too demanding. Others I fired. Others tried to quit and I gave them more money. 

The only thing I've learned is you NEED a checklist, preferably with the app Get Properly as it let's them take pictures. I can't tell you how important it is to force a cleaner to take a photo. They can check things off all day and not read it, and not care, but if they take a photo, it will be correctly cleaned/organized/restocked. It also gives you evidence against crazy guests. I've had guests try to extort me, and luckily I had photos to show to Airbnb the cleanliness and stocking of each item I promised and it proved without a doubt they were lying. 

Another tip, have a separate cleaning crew per house. It helps because they'll have their own network of Handyman and cleaners when one drops the ball. I'm on my 3rd house and we're hiring our 7th company just to constantly evaluate them and hopefully one day end up with the best in the area. 

We have 3 full sets of linens for quick turnovers. They try to do as much on site as they can but they sometimes bring extra off-site. I don't think an extra set of washer and dryer would hurt, just an expense you could probably push onto the cleaners. 

I use quickbooks for accounting. I keep hearing stessa, what's the advantage?