All Forum Posts by: Ken Boone

@Jessica Piff - I have LTRs and STRs.  I started with LTRs and saw that I could make a ton more with STRs so since then I have invested in STRs.  I am at a point now where I will continue with my STRs and will probably start buying more LTRs whenever the market crashes - which it will at some point.    Having said that the LTRs are easy.  I do next to nothing, the management company makes 8 to 10%.  For the 8 - 10 % they get, I get income which is about 95% passive.  Now the STRs are a different story.  STRs are a business and need to be run like a business in order to make the great income you hear folks talk about.  I make way way way more $$ on my STRs but it is not a passive investment - it is an active investment or rather a business.  

For me, the income from the STR is a huge multiplier over what I get from the LTRs so for me it is worth the extra work involved. This is what you need to figure out. I guarantee you are going to be doing a lot more work with these units as an STR than as an LTR. The question for you is - will the increase in income be a great enough factor to offset the extra time and work you will have to put in to manage the STRs? This is something only you can answer. For me it absolutely is, but I have invested in a proven tourist market where my occupancy is closer to like 85 - 90% or more.

@Daniel Kyle The book "How To Rent Vacation Properties by Owner Third Edition: The Complete Guide to Buy, Manage, Furnish, Rent, Maintain and Advertise Your Vacation Rental Investment" by Christine Hrib-Karpinski was a good overview that pretty much covers everything soup to nuts.  I read this before I started and felt it was a good overview.  I felt like I knew most of the material as I spent a lot of time on this forum and other places researching and the book pretty much confirmed things for me.

@Lorraine Patterson

I and many others would generally not stay at a place where I cannot have a king bed to sleep in so you will lose out on a percentage of potential rentals without a king.  Having said that, other amenities and locations could make up the difference. For instance, @John Underwood has a waterfront property on a popular lake destination. Also, depends on what you are competing with.  You need to know your competition.  For instance my stuff is in the Smokies.  I definitely want king beds there if they will fit.   I think the room is big enough for a king bed.  A king is 6'4" x 6'8"  Add another 6" to length for the headboard and gap between it and the wall.  I think that size will leave you enough room for a small nightstand on either side of the bed.  I would put a king in there.

@Chris Gottshall Like @Michael Baum and @John Underwood have said I have only had a handful of COVID cancellations other than the initial wave that hit last March.  In all cases I rebooked.  This is across 3 cabins that stay pretty much constantly booked.  Not as big of an issue as you might think.  Don't sweat it.  But like @Nancy Bachety said, if the week before a trip your dad died from COVID complications you would want the host to work with you don't you think?  So just don't sweat it.  It doesn't happen often enough to add the verbage you want to add to your contract.

@Andrew Simms We provide all the information to the guest up front once they have signed our rental agreement.  Even if it is a booking 6 months out.  Guests seem to appreciate getting something like that after they dropped the dough on your rental.  We also re-send that same info 7 days prior to check-in.  My locks are on automated process so if though they know the code, it won't work until the day of their check-in.  We also have a lock box and we do not provide that code to the guest.  That is simply a failsafe if the digital locks ever fail.

@Joe Splitrock Hey man it's kind of tough to just pick an area unless you kind of lay out the kinds of things you want to do. I think @Luke Carl is right.  Unless there are certain things you want to be right by, just pick a cabin you like and enjoy.

@Justin Griffin - Ok so here is the deal.  If the seller is willing to work with you it should not be a big deal.  Like @John Underwood said though you cannot take over the account you need to create your own account. So here is what we did when we went through this process. The seller will need to provide you the guest's contact information and booking dates and rates for all future bookings. Prior to the closing you will need to go ahead and set up your VRBO account and listing for the property. Perhaps the seller would be willing to provide you with the existing pictures. Once you have your listing up, the seller will need to contact all of the guests of future bookings and let them know they are selling and you are buying. They will need to inform the guests that they will need to cancel their reservations, but if they still want to book the property, they can book with you at the provided new listing. We also told the seller to inform the guests that we will be honoring all of their prices as well. When you set up your listing you will need to block all of the future booked dates. You or the seller will need to communicate to theses guests that they will need to contact you prior to booking so you can open up the blocked dates for them. We also provide a timeline like it had to be done in the next two weeks or we would no longer hold the dates for them. Blocking the dates prevents someone else from out of the blue taking their dates. When we went through this process we had about 30k worth of future bookings. We changed two things - no more fire pit - due to new HOA rules and no pets. Out of all the guests that were previously booked with the old owner we only lost 2 guests and that was due to the no pet rule. Overall it went very smooth and provided us with immediate cash flow as well as reviews on the platforms.

Now after we went through this process we learned from VRBO, that if we would have contacted them first and let them know that we are taking over the property and we are re-listing the property under a new listing, they would have transferred all of the previous reviews over to the new listing.  I did not know we could do that at the time and so we started with 0 reviews.  So I would definitely talk to VRBO about this before you set up your new listing.

Hope that helps.

So I have a website as well but like @Jon Crosby said as far as generating new traffic and leads you can forget it.  My cabins are in the Smoky Mountains with 20,000 other cabins to which a large portion of them are in management companies promoting their cabins on their own websites.  You won't rank on your keywords or even be able to compete.  

These are the reasons I have a website:

1) It helps legitimize your business

2) It is a landing page I can send people to.  It is a lot easier to just tell them go to peacefulcabinrentals.com to see my cabins than it is for me to give them a vrbo or airbnb reference.  It is just easier.  

3) It gives me a website I can put on an email signature, a business card or any promotional material I may decide to use.

Generating tons of traffic so I don't need vrbo and airbnb  - ain't gonna happen.

Hope that helps.

I have one cabin with a real fireplace and I do provide firewood through the wood burning season.  The reason I provide it is because this cabin is up on a knob off of Cove Mtn overlooking the valley.  Like most cabins with a view like this one has, you have some steep roads to get to it.  If we get snow or ice my guests may get stuck up there an extra day.  If they lost power in a storm they would not have heat without the fireplace.  I would hate for that to happen so I just provide the firewood.

My pool cleaning company is recommending converting to a salt system at this point.