I have been looking for an additional income stream for a while, and was surprised my wife was open to a rental property.

We are looking local for AirBnb/VRBO vacation rental. We have friends who never have vacant nights (only two all of last year).

I understand the basics but am curious if there is any wisdom out that that would help before we dive in.

In our market, you can get a 2 bedroom, 1000 square foot home under 125K and those can be rented for around $90 bucks a night. The math works for a decent monthly little monthly profit.

Who is doing the cleaning every time it turns? Any HOA issues where property is located?

Do t know what you're putting down, but buying SF rental may be the better route. Fix it up front, get leased at just below market rent, start cash flowing right away.

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Who is doing the cleaning every time it turns? Any HOA issues where property is located?

Do t know what you're putting down, but buying SF rental may be the better route. Fix it up front, get leased at just below market rent, start cash flowing right away.

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All good points. We have several rental properties & a few weeks ago decided to fix up one as an AirBnb. We, too, know a few people that have one & they stay rented most/a lot of the time. A lot of up front expense to furnish a whole house - especially if you are starting from 0: furniture, full kitchen, all utilities, fast internet, etc.

We are trying to set up consistent cleaning - not that easy with an inconsistent schedule. That might be the killer because we aren't gonna do it - we will occasionally if in a bind, but not after every reservation. We are doing a 2 night minimum to cut down on it.

We're giving it a shot thru the first of the year. If we hate it or it's not considerably more than we can get for a typical SFR, we'll convert it back to year rental status & be able to drop all of the utility bills. We'll evaluate once this gets going. Next step would be maybe keep it going as a furnished traveling nurse place or anyone coming to town for 3-6 months without furniture, then if that doesn't work, we'll have an estate sale of the contents.

It'll be interesting. We have already gotten our first booking!

The biggest issue I've found is with HOAs. Make sure they're BNB friendly.

We would be purchasing outside an HOA.

Thanks for the advice on posting/listing. We are fortunate to have a close friend who owns two rentals in the same market who is also very handy for renovations and refurbishing, as well as good advice. She has her two units on the market and has them for rent almost every day of the month.

She does her own cleaning of her units. We have teenagers and our plan would be to allow them to take that on as their job, then we can keep that cleaning fee income in our own house, but would have backups for when we can't do it. That's the model our friend uses and it works well for her. Don't worry, we will hold them accountable to doing a good job.

The units we are looking to purchase are all 1 and 2 bedroom, under 1000sq feet.


We don't quite have the funds in place for a cash purchase, so we would need a second mortgage. My thinking is that we use the rental income to pay the mortgage off in 5 years. I've put a spreadsheet together to account for all expenses, taxes, monthly incidentals, repairs, etc. We can pay the thing off in 5 years and still create about $1000 of income monthly per unit, which would grow once the mortgage is paid off. Then, we can can keep the higher monthly income or we can sell the property and keep 100% of the proceeds.

When I was looking at finance options today, I came across an article suggesting it is an idea worth considering to use your exiting home equity to purchase the investment property. We have enough equity to cover the entire cost of the property we are looking at. I can't quite get my head around how that works, pros and cons, etc. If anyone has any advice on that, I'm all ears.