All Forum Posts by: Yitzchok Carmen

Quote from @James Hamling:

Quote from @Yitzchok Carmen:

Quote from @Collin Hays:

I did a quick check on VRBO for a McMansion cabin this weekend - Friday and Saturday only, 10 people, 4 bedrooms, 4 baths.  There are over 50 pages of vacancies, which means there are hundreds of McMansion cabins available, for as little as $254 per night, including all fees and taxes.  By my math, that would put actual nightly rent in the $130-150 range, on cabins that recently sold for between $1 and $2 million.  At 10 guests, this works out to $13-15 per night per guest. That rivals Salvation Army.  

No wonder my cute 1-bedroomer @ $90 sits empty.  

Regarding home sales, I talked today to a well-connected realtor in the area, Phillip Derosia, who told me things are not moving at all, even with significant price cuts.  He knew of a short sale just last week.  

An interesting year this will shape up to be.  

 Im not sure why you are saying this. I just did the same search myself. June 6-8, 4BR and 4BA, 10 travelers. For the Gatlinburg PF area. Sorted to only show those rated 9+ (4.5, i think that is reasonable).

170 properties came up which, at 50 listing per page, is 3.5pages. Not 50. At the top it says 

Gatlinburg - Pigeon Forge is popular!

Only 12% of properties are available on our site for your dates.

Only the first 10 properties listed come to under 900 with the fees for 2 nights which brings it to 450 per night.

I have 8 properties in the smokies and they are all booked for this weekend.

I do think that this summer may be a bit slower or more last minute and i def would not be buying cabins at this point. I do agree with you that the there is still more unravelling to go for sure. But there is a little too much fear mongering here i feel

Aaaaahhhh..... 

When I do a basic search in the area for a very near term date, it says over 1k available....... Notice in top left of page, it says how many there is because it max's out the page count. 

And that's looking less then 10 days ahead for booking. 

And as I narrow in on Gatlinburg it comes just under 500

That's a lot, that's a hell of a lot of offerings.... 

 That is true but that is a search for all listings not the mcmansions. There are 10s of thousands of listings in the smokies

 If I remove the ratings filter it goes up to 290 listing which is a bit less than 6 pages. Perhaps ypu are getting confused about 50 listings per page vs 50 pages?

Yes its def more than we would like to see but even still the cheapest place you will find is about 350/ nightly. And again it still says that only 13% of the places are open which means there is an 87% chance that you are booked this weekend.

Could be better for sure, but terrible? I dont think so. Its def harder than it used to be and sometimes I am still stumped by a cabin that is rated well, priced right etc and still just wont book for specific date. But if you bought right even the last few years I dont think the sky is falling.

I have seen on FB groups that people are blaming a slowdown on the "trump economy" bc Canadians are boycotting the US etc but how many Canadians and Europeans come to the smokies anyway... These are the same guys blaming last year on the "Biden economy". I think some years are better and some are slower but again unless you paid a million dollars for a 3br house you should be okay

I feel like as long as there's not a massive stock market crash or something like that, we need to just be proactively priced and roll with the punches.

I hope I can look back at this in a year and have been right :)

 Im not sure why you are saying this. I just did the same search myself. June 6-8, 4BR and 4BA, 10 travelers. For the Gatlinburg PF area. Sorted to only show those rated 9+ (4.5, i think that is reasonable).

170 properties came up which, at 50 listing per page, is 3.5pages. Not 50. At the top it says 

Gatlinburg - Pigeon Forge is popular!

Only 12% of properties are available on our site for your dates.

Only the first 10 properties listed come to under 900 with the fees for 2 nights which brings it to 450 per night.

I have 8 properties in the smokies and they are all booked for this weekend.

I do think that this summer may be a bit slower or more last minute and i def would not be buying cabins at this point. I do agree with you that the there is still more unravelling to go for sure. But there is a little too much fear mongering here i feel

Quote from @Collin Hays:

I was going through some of my old blog entries and found this one from 38 months ago. Maybe I should become a coin-operated sooth sayer. ;)

WARNING: ROUGH TERRAIN AHEAD

I love you Collin and enjoy reading your no punches pulled posts, but you don't have such a great track record with the gloom and doom stuff:)

 Do you think that long term appreciation will be better for the 1800 st ft cabin even if it doesn't yield higher rents?

 Honestly I think this is a bit overrated. I have hosted thousands of guests since 2019 and never needed to charge a guest for anything that i thought was unreasonable wear and tear except one time when a guest broke a pool table. I filed through Airbnb insurance and got approved for approx $800. Not the full value but I felt it was fair. On Vrbo we have never charged a deposit as we felt that would scare off guests from booking. Never had any issues. Recently we did start with the min security insurance Vrbo offers bit have never once made a claim.

Almost always when I have asked a guest to pay for things like late check out through the airbnb resolution center I have gotten paid. 

Now noise ordinances etc that may be a dif story, I can see where this would hurt potentially. Although I dont see why you cant just leave the warning about the fines, a guest wont know if theres real teeth in that or not, no? 

 The issue is that its not about the review per se. Its about the algorithm unfairly hurting you as a result of that review. Although I suppose that has nothing to do with the OPs point

Oh I agree with you if that rent will be a business income to live on vs just an unrealized gain. To add to your argument I suppose the tax implications are better with RE too bc theres a capital gains tax ceiling of 20% vs standard tax rates for IRA withdrawals that are potentially much higher. At the same time depreciation recapture is taxed at regular tax rates, not capital gain rate. So a lot of it probably depends on your bracket when you end up selling the RE or cashing out the IRA. I have actually cashed out a lot of my IRA now bc I have so much depreciation from RE that my tax bracket is very low and the taxes to pay on the IRA withdrawal are also pretty much non existent (taking aside the penalty). In short its complicated:) each situation is different

 Yes but the S&P has triples since 2013 too. Had you left your 430k that would be worth about 1.3 million today probably. Instead you traded that for 800k valued RE and 696k rents. If there is no debt service probably 30% is still going of the rent is still going to operating expenses which means that you only made about 480k or so. 480k rents + 800k property is the same 1.3million roughly. Same thing as SPY but dealing with so much more headache. No?

Quote from @Collin Hays:

Merchants rarely win chargeback disputes. I’ll fight them 100 percent, but the deck is way stacked against you. I chalk it up as the cost of doing business.

What changed:)