Short Term Rentals: Should You Invest in This Asset Class?

Are short term rentals a good asset class to invest in? Tim Hubbard will share all the knowledge he has acquired over the last 10 years investing in real estate, and managing thousands of bookings online since then.

You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/3kcZ8bC

What are some of the benefits of investing in short term rentals?

There are quite a lot and there are some that I just realized recently, like eviction moratoriums, for example. That was never a thing with short term rentals because if someone is staying in our properties less than 30 days, normally they don't have any tenant rights. So we had quite a lot of flexibility there. Along these inflation lines, all the money that we printed to help the economy with everything that's been going on, we've had a lot of inflation, and that's one of the reasons that rents are going up. With short term rentals, we can change our rents every day. We don't get locked into a year lease and under-rent our properties, we can use tools, and there are tools to do all this. We can set up a tool that'll change our price everyday.

The biggest reason or advantage that I've got into short term rentals is literally the fact that some of my properties making like five, eight times the amount of rent I was making with a traditional long term rental, like a single family home. Back in the day, if I was thinking that I want X amount of dollars a month to become financially free through properties, I could literally divide that number by five times. And that's the amount of short term rentals I need to accomplish the same amount of money. That was the main reason, the biggest advantage, coming down in income.

How do you choose a market within this asset class?

I choose the market as I have always chosen markets, based on the fundamentals, a place where people are moving to and not moving away from, where the employment is diverse, there's not just one industry, and it's landlord friendly. And that's a big thing, because aside from all the traditional fundamentals we look for, for a good real estate market, we have to take it a little further if we're looking at finding properties to do short term rentals. And the big one is regulations. But before that, I'm looking for places that has good fundamentals, where people are moving to, and there's population growth. The Sunbelt areas in the US have been growing a lot. So I think those are good areas. But then the landlord friendly one is a big one. And I found that there's a pretty good correlation between landlord friendly cities or states and short term rental regulations. If the city's very landlord friendly, then it's probably a little more likely that they're going to be more friendly towards short term rentals as well.

What are some of the scariest things about short term rentals?

The scariest thing that someone's going to trash my house and have a party. And that's possible, that could happen. But there are lots of ways to prevent that. There are lots of tools now like noise sensors, that can notify you automatically if the noise goes above a certain level.

Another thing that might be scary is, when you first start, if you're taking a long term rental, for example, and you're going to turn into a short term one, you wonder, How good is this actually going to do? How do I forecast occupancy and things like that? What if I put all this furniture in there, and it's vacant all year? It can be a big investment to put all the furniture in there.

Tim Hubbard

www.restmethods.com

Short Term Rental Riches Podcast

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