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I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

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211–220 of 386 posts

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#211

How are you promoting Lockitron when they are still not shipping? http://blog.lockitron.com/

There was also an old version of the Lockitron. My understanding is that the old one was a deadbolt replacement while the new one goes over an existing deadbolt lock. They still sell the Lockitron Access (https://lockitron.com/store/buzzer) which works with electronic locks. It is possible that he has one of those.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illegal hotels aka slums. There is a reason hotels are fairly highly regulated. My first (and only) stay at an Airbnb rental resulted in me getting bedbugs.

It is unrealistic to expect any dwelling, whether it be hotel or hostel, to be free of bed bugs, especially if you're in a region with lots of international travelers. There is no effective insecticide for them, they can be impossible to see, and they don't need to eat for months. Now, any decent hotel will be doing periodic checks for bedbugs around the box spring and headboard, and any other wooden furniture. But t…

??? If there's no effective insecticide, how do you think we're killing them? The various -methrin-based compounds are generally pretty effective, though occasionally resistant subpopulations crop up.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TripAdvisor and others came up with a good solution a while ago - they let the property owner write a reply to a bad review, and post the reply right underneath the bad review.

That's the same thing eBay does. You know what? I never look at them on eBay. All I ever look at is the percent of positive reviews.

Being able to post a reply is a solution to a one-off or occasional bad review having an unfairly negative impact. If a large percentage of the reviews are bad, the best solution is probably to solve whatever problems are causing the bad reviews.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#216

Could someone explain to my ignorant self why zoning a property as hotel and paying hotel tax is necessary? What is it for and why was it created? It seems like a lot of these new startups are the same old business model but skirt costly taxes and regulation (Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotels, Bitcoin for money transfers)

I'm sure there are lots of reasons, but here's one: if you don't differentiate between hotel zoning and residential zoning in a tourist-heavy city, the rental and hotel markets would start to merge together. This means in both pricing and in who your neighbors are.

I'm not arguing for or against the laws, but I think it's clear why many residents of such a city would decide to use legal force to prevent that.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#217

It’s possible to find a nice apartment in a major city for less than $50,000. The place I found was in Las Vegas and it cost $40,000. Wow, I had no idea things were that good/bad. Here in the UK, I deliberately choose to live in a cheap part of the country and you'd still be talking $120k or so for an equivalent 1 bed flat. This really illustrates to me why efforts to turn various areas in the US into "mini Silicon V…

I live in London. I'm looking at >$600k for my first apartment. Jon's apartment in Vegas would be a small fraction of my deposit. Ugh, I feel sick. And need to move.

Don't move to Vancouver, Canada. We are right up in in unaffordability, just like London, NY, Hong Kong, SF, Zurich etc.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#218

It’s possible to find a nice apartment in a major city for less than $50,000. The place I found was in Las Vegas and it cost $40,000. Wow, I had no idea things were that good/bad. Here in the UK, I deliberately choose to live in a cheap part of the country and you'd still be talking $120k or so for an equivalent 1 bed flat. This really illustrates to me why efforts to turn various areas in the US into "mini Silicon V…

I also find this incredible. Particularly when you can spend $50k just renting a place in Vegas for three months. I realise there are slums in Vegas but the place actually looks quite nice for the money.

$200/month for an unlimited cleaning lady? Those are Thailand/China prices. Crazy.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#219
post #194
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be American myself, for all you know.

But, you probably aren't, as you went to college in the UK. So please refrain from your crass generalizations about countries.

That doesn't mean anything these days. UK universities are filled with students from all over the world.

Re: I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

#220
post #14

Good, concise write up with real numbers which is nice. But the woman who is doing all that cleaning and contact work for $200/month is the one making this possible (so it seems) and that could quickly eat up profits (though the ROI is great enough that there's lots of room there). EDIT: Also, is there currently an AirBnb manager market? Similar to the cleaner/manager he has, it would be great for people to invest re…

To answer your question, there's at least one company that believes there's money to be made out of this: https://urbanbellhop.com/. I read about them on Springwise a while ago, and they handle all the check-in/check-out process for Airbnb and VRBO hosts. They don't provide cleaners, but it would make sense for them or another company to do so. I think there could definitely be a market for that kind of all-around vacation rental management services, at least in cities like SF and NYC. Edit: Airenvy mentioned somewhere in this thread seems to do just that.
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