All Forum Posts by: Ken Boone

Haha.. im still stuck working out everything for last year.  Trying to get a cost seg done on my last cabin.

So I guess the question is.. who owned the cabin last year? Was it the LLC or was it you guys personally?

having said that, since you have the land trust that owns the cabin.. i dunno then.  

nope no return needed.  

Man that a great tip!  I always try to find the original sources, but never thought about using the image search.  That's awesome.

Hey Jon correct me if I am wrong but I was under the impression that Greenville had a 30 day minimum stay for vacation rentals.  Is that not true?  The place looks great though.

So this depends on your goals.  It's kind of like the pet / no pet policy.  What I mean by that is if you have a pet policy, you have a much larger potential customer base.  Those who want to bring their pets on vaca with them AND those that don't.  If you don't allow pets, then you just cut off a portion of your potential customers.  In my situation, I have my reasons for not allowing pets, but I am in a high demand area and I have a high quality product and it does not impact me. 

So getting back to your goals.  Is your goal to maximize cash flow or is your goal to have the place for yourself with your ideals, and you rent it out to help cover the costs for your vacation home, or something in the middle?  If your goal is to maximize on cashflow, then you do things, buy investments etc, without thinking about what YOU want in an investment, you need to think about what does my prospective customer want. 

Having said all that, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who could care less about a TV, however, that is a small minority. 

If you don't have TVs, then you should absolutely make that a very visible statement in your listing for sure.

IMO, you are cutting out a large part of your prospective customer base without having TVs.  By having only 1 TV say in the living room, you are most likely still losing to near by competition that has large flat screens in every room.  Also think you would have a hard time matching their ADR all things equal except the TVs.  Again, gets back to your goals and your market.  I don't know your market.  These are just things you have to think through.  

You just tell Vrbo/Airbnb to add the extra fees, and they will collect them and send them to you.  What I think you are trying to say is that AirBnb/VRBO does not collect & submit the taxes on your behalf.  If I am wrong then my bad, but you should be able to add those feeds in there for the OTA to collect the taxes for you, to which you will have to submit the taxes yourself.

I mean yea that's a good question, but the answer will be different for everyone. Everybody has a different time worth and so that it why it is a personal question. I know folks that are happy to make 1k month on their STR, and I mean just thrilled with that. If that is all I was making it would not be worth my time to manage my STRs. My LTRs on the other hand, I let a management company handle. They get 8%. For the minuscule 8% that I pay them to manage, I do like almost zero work. A couple calls I have to answer a year from the management company about a repair or something like that. Yea so in that case, my time is worth much much more than that 8%.

The difference with my STRs is that they make significantly more than my LTRs, they absolutely take more time to manage, it is a business.  However, it is worth it for me to manage them due to the income produced.  But that number is going to be different for everyone depending on where they are in life.