All Forum Posts by: Wilson Hunter

Hi Sarah,

I think there are a lot of pain points for STR hosts, and you will have no issue finding problems to solve for them with virtual assistants. My suggestion for you in pitching a business (which you are always doing, even when searching for feedback / data) would be starting with "why" you want to start this business and then solicit feedback to help refine your approach and offering. It can often be ineffective to begin with the "what" or the raw product idea. Ultimately businesses are most successful if you start with your vision and the why and then go from there.

Regardless, I hope you’re able to get some helpful data points from host feedback!

Quote from @Ryan Moyer:

Many realtors in 2022 are the 2008 version of loan officers, getting people in over their head with really bad advice. We're lucky around here on BP to have some of the world's best STR realtors who truly understand the STR market and are realistic about it, but I've come across a ton in FB groups, markets I'm looking in, etc that are really misleading new STR buyers, especially in terms of presenting what the possible risks are.

 100% 

I would be careful in general because it’s likely we’ll see some amount of correction in the Smokies, but the cabin you’re referencing will definitely make good money (saw it this morning). I’m grossing over $70k on a cabin similar to that one and still have a full summer calendar despite much of the doom and gloom.

When looking for advice here I’d heavily weigh the opinions of prop manager Collin H, Luke Carl, and others who own in the area. They will have different opinions but are well-informed opinions because of their experiences.

The OP asks a great question - it’s really the million dollar question that is impossible to respond with certain answers. There is obviously no official Airbnb source for how to hack their SEO ranking algorithms, so the best we can do is perform the scientific method to try to figure out what’s up. And by the way the answer seems to be quite different today than in April thanks to the May app update.

My opinions based on your questions:

-Get people to stay on your listing and click through all your photos. This means engaging description and great photos that aren’t redundant. You need to make the user to want to click or scroll to see the next photo, even if they ultimately don’t book.

-Don’t use photoshopped graphics on your photo that obfuscate the photo content.

-Photo #1 is more important than ever.

-Listing titles are coming back to the search map per Chesky’s announcement last week. Make them engaging and cause someone to want to emotionally click to learn more about your offering. Do not provide sterile objective content in your title.

-While not official, it does SEEM that one of the biggest changes to the May update was using text analysis to affect ranking. This means all photos should be captioned with property type and amenity terminology. Captions should be the opposite of what a professional journalist would teach you about good caption writing. The user experience design makes captions almost useless for the end user, so you’re only writing them for the algorithm and “listing completeness” which is a ranking metric.

Take all of that with a grain of salt because it’s just my opinion based on experience and research.

Sick cabin!

Hey John, I’ll second the above posters. I found awesome contractors minutes after posting in those Facebook groups.

Pay $10-$20 for PriceLabs market dashboards for the markets you’re interested in and start diving into all the comps in your price range. It will help you generate projections and start to figure out what listings make good money and why.

My process for getting into STRs was:

1) Research the numbers/comps to determine what property type and location I wanted to invest in.

2) Figure out how to buy a place - finding the right property is arguably the hardest part of the process.

3) Learn everything else by “just doing it.” I think management is the easiest part but will also separate you from the pack if you do it well. The bar is low, and simply by self-managing you’ll be better than a huge portion of the market. 

Don't get overwhelmed by how to manage a STR. People who overthink everything past step 2 before buying a place create a barrier of entry for themselves.

While I’m bullish on STRs for the longterm and will continue to invest in them, the situation is different than 2020 and is not only interest rate hysteria. There is a legitimate decline in vacationing in many markets (especially mountain markets or low lead time markets) in the summer of 2022. This is likely to have some effect on prices in the next 3 to 12 months. For example, many Smoky Mountain cabins were priced in anticipation of continued tourism growth from 2021 numbers. While the decline or normalization is fine for most of us it definitely is not fine for many of the cabins purchased in the past 6 months. I have a hard time seeing how 90% of the cabins sold in the past 6 months in the Smokies are making money with the numbers for this summer, for example. This is the same for smaller cabin markets like Blue Ridge where you can already see price drops on types of cabins that were being bid up way over list merely 3 months ago. 

I know the STR gurus push "names don't matter," but I find it's helpful for signage to direct people to your cabin, and some percentage of my guests refer to the name of the cabin when they thank me for their stay. My main photo embodies my cabin name Southern Nights which I'd like to think has some amount of positive impact on connecting guests to the experience pre-booking.

Quote from @Collin Hays:

Quote from @Ken Boone:

Oh yea @Collin Hays there are going to be some people freaking out this year for sure.  I have seen some people pay some crazy money for average cabins and think they are going to hit this superficial number for gross rents that are in their head.  There will be without doubt many people burned in the next several months that purchased in the past year in that market.  Most of them being first time investors jumping on the hype.

I got a call from some folks on Saturday wanting my advice.  They paid $360K for a cabin - thinking it was a bargain - that the realtor told them should easily yield $40,000 a year. Well, it isn't. They've made about $7K so far this year.  If they get $20K this year they are going to be really lucky.  This cabin has issues that are not easily solved.  They asked me if I thought i could do better by managing it.  Perhaps I could, but regardless, this isn't going to have good outcome.  The cabin can't produce even $30K a year in the best of years.  

Negative cash on cash is their reality, for a long, long time.

Over the Memorial weekend, I did a spot check of VRBO available cabins for under $200 a night and there were some mighty fine looking places still sitting empty.  

People quit using their good sense and just started making wild and crazy offers.  Pain ahead.  

Wow I’d love to see this cabin. $7k so far this year is crazy low. 360k matches sale price of one of the places on Blackberry so I wonder if it’s that one… I actually inspected that place in person…

I’m still on track for about 60% CoC on a place I got last year, but I know that would be an impossibility now.