Return on Investment on a STR Vacation Home

As you can imagine working out the ROI of a property a year in advance is not an exact science. Many of the key elements that go into the calculation are not readily available before hand and often a good result is based on knowledge, experience and historical values. Perhaps not quite the iron clad the result you may be looking for but the best educated guess given the circumstances.

Let’s take a look at what the variables are, where you can find the constants and how you can affect the end result.
Finally we’ll put it all together and you can run your own ROI.

CONSTANTS
Property taxes, house payments, insurance costs, HOA fees are some of the numbers you can easily find out before you purchase.

VARIABLES
How many weeks you will book.
Probably the most important item and also the most difficult to assess. Getting historical data from the owner is an option but sadly not something you should expect. If the property is bank owned then you can be sure you won’t be getting any data. Probably the best source is by talking to property management companies and asking them for historical values.

But property management companies want your business so getting embellished results such as their best client rather than an average is something you may have to be prepared for.

If you can’t get a qualified number then a good rule of thumb is to assume that a good PM company in a high end resort will bring you 18-26 weeks of bookings. 22 weeks is a good conservative starting point.

BOOKING RATE
There are two rates.

Retail – which is the full booking rate
Wholesale – which is the fee negotiated with the travel companies

There is also what the owner is able to generate if they decide to be part of the process. But generally that comes under the retail rate.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT
Fees are something you can make a reasonable assumption with numbers.
Each PM company has different contracts but either knowing which company you will be working with or working with an average assumed numbers will give you a reasonably accurate return.

THE OWNER

Property management companies can only generate so much. Generally if they can get you somewhere in the region of 20-25 solid weeks of rentals a year then you’ve found yourself a great PM company. The additional weeks rentals can only come from one other source and that is the owner.

Owners are the full spectrum of involvement. Some want to do nothing more than show up a few times a year and enjoy their property. Others want to be involved with the booking process as much as possible and spend many hours a week enjoying marketing their property and generating additional revenue.

This single item will change the annual ROI of an investment property more than any other. An active owner can as much as double the annual earnings of a property and the owners input in many ROI calculations can be the difference in a small annual loss and a large annual gain.

OWNER USE
One final addition to the ROI calculation is owner use. If for example an owner would visit Orlando with family a couple of times a year and spends say $5,000 on accommodation then that is monies no longer paid out. That figure should be applied to the property ROI as it is an important reason for owning a vacation home investment property.

Armed with the knowledge from above you can now proceed to our unique SHORT TERM CALCULATOR, type in the numbers and you have your own ROI ready for printing.

REMEMBER  the philosophy of the STR program and you won’t go wrong with your STR investment property.

If you have any questions on ROI or any aspects of owning or renting a vacation home please contact us.
We’d be delighted to give you comprehensive and detailed answers to all of your questions.