Titan Properties USA

When you think about short-term rental and Airbnb markets, what comes to mind? Joshua Tree, the Smoky Mountains, maybe Destin? We all know about the famous short-term rental markets, but what about the not-so-famous ones? You know, the unsexy markets where you book an Airbnb for a conference or when you’re going to see extended family? That’s right; we’re talking about everyday American markets like Cincinnati, Ohio. But surprisingly, these markets make some of the best investments for short-term rental investors like Jarrod Tucker and Yiwei Cheng.

Jarrod and Yiwei moved to Cincinnati for work shortly after catching the real estate investing bug. They knew they wanted to invest in real estate, but long-term rentals only came with measly cash flow that would never support their passive income goals. So, what’s the next best option? Short-term rentals! Unfortunately, Cincinnati isn’t known as a popular vacation getaway, but it didn’t have to be to support Jarrod and Yiwei’s cash flow dreams!

Now, five years after the start of their investing journey, they have ten rentals of their own and manage a couple dozen more for other investors. The question is, how do you make money with short-term rentals in an unsexy market? Jarrod and Yiwei walk through their tips for finding the right properties, keeping occupancy rates high, buying real estate when your DTI (debt-to-income) gets maxed out, and why you MUST separate yourself from the basic short-term rentals to reach your financial goals.

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Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Dave :
Henry, if you were to put together a list of some great short-term rental markets, what markets would you put on that list?

Henry:
Well, the Instagram gurus would tell me that you have to have a property in the Smoky Mountains, Joshua Tree, California or some beach town somewhere. But I know there’s tons of other really cool fancy places that I’m leaving off that list.

Dave :
But what about not fancy places like, I don’t know, Cincinnati, Ohio?

Henry:
I would say that that’s probably number 472 on my list of short-term rental markets.

Dave :
Well, today I think you’ll actually learn something new and how some unsexy markets do make for great short-term rental opportunities. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast everyone. I’m your host, Dave Meyer. Joined today by Henry Washington

Henry:
And today we’re talking with iWay Chang and Jared Tucker. They are an investor couple living in, you guessed it, Cincinnati, Ohio, and they are doing highly profitable deals today in the short-term rental space.

Dave :
And when Henry and I talk to iWay and Jared, you’re going to hear about why investors who like the short-term rental model, shouldn’t overlook Midwestern cities that might not be as sexy as some of the places Henry mentioned earlier, because they have a great approach. They basically work to understand what amenities their guests want. They listen to feedback, they look at data, and they are able to use that to still make profitable deals in today’s market.

Henry:
Now let’s jump in

Dave :
IWay and Jared, welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Yiwei:
Yeah, I am so excited to be here.

Jarrod:
Yeah, thanks guys. We appreciate the opportunity. So super excited.

Dave :
Well, I am feeling a little bit left out because you guys met Henry already at a conference just this past week randomly, and I was not there, so I’m still catching up.

Yiwei:
You should have been

Dave :
There. I should have, but I have no business. They were at a midterm rental conference. I have no business there. I have never done a midterm rental, no plans to do it, so I would be a fish out of water. But I do want to catch up on your background. And Jared, tell me about your first rental. I understand it was actually your primary residence, is that right?

Yiwei:
Yeah, so background is we used to live in California and then moved to Cincinnati for work for a corporate work. And I knew I wanted to invest in real estate, but I didn’t know what, so when I came here, I started looking for properties, but none of the long-term rental numbers made sense even though at the time it was 2018, you could buy houses for like 70, 80,000 in some neighborhoods. But I was like, even with that, a 30 year mortgage, I can only cashflow maybe 100, $200 a month. And I’m like, how am I ever going to make money? How do people make money in real estate? 30 year mortgage, $200 a month? I didn’t get it. And so I was like, well, let’s just focus on finding our primary residence. So we found a house and then we also had an apartment with a lease we couldn’t get out of.
So I listed it on Airbnb. We moved Jared’s furniture in there and literally did everything wrong from the start. We had guests who threw a party. I mean there were footprints all over the wall because I didn’t have my pricing wait footprints on the wall. I don’t even know how they got there to be honest. I was like, I don’t know if they’re doing handstands on the stairs, on the bedroom wall. It was just all over the place. But at the end of the day I was like, wow, you can really make money with short-term rentals, and it’s definitely doing a lot more than what I could have gotten as a long-term rental. So by the time we moved into the house that winter, I was like, I’m going to figure out how to do short-term rentals and I’m going to do more of it because at the same time, I also want to leave my corporate job.

Henry:
You’re telling the story of a lot of people, and what I like about your story is you just kind of jumped in and figured it out as you were going, and you did it in a way where you essentially limited your risk. You got started with properties you already owned or were stuck in a lease with. So if you don’t try something with those and you lose the money from the rent, and so it forced you to kind of learn. But let’s back up a little bit. When was this that you moved into your new house and started Airbnb, your apartment, and when did you start learning about real estate investing as a niche? And were there any other strategies you tried kind of give us paint that picture of your starting out for us?

Yiwei:
Yeah, so I think it was fall of 2019 when we got the house and started doing short-term rentals, but we started with real estate investing in winter of 2018. So I found a mentor here in Cincinnati. Jared was like, make sure she’s not a scam. So I went and met her in person and I was like, no, I think we just need to pay for experience at this point because I don’t want to figure everything out on my own from scratch. So she was like, you should start wholesaling. So that’s what we did. She also sold courses, so we did wholesaling and I was like, this is not for me. I cannot talk to sellers. I cannot look at a house and be like, oh yeah, that house is worth this much, but they want this much. It just did not work for me, for me personally, personality wise.
And then I also didn’t want to try rehabbing because I was like, I don’t know contractors. I don’t know how this rehab process goes from there. It started with the short-term rental of our own house. And then after that winter of 2019, I went to this other real estate conference and Jared was like, you should check out this person who does rental arbitrage. So basically you rent this house at long-term rate, and then you rent it out as a short-term rental. And she had 20 of them in North Carolina and we just got started with short-term rental. So I was like, this is really interesting because that I could see a way to practice more and grow into that and learn more about short-term rentals instead of making all our mistakes that we did. So that’s end of 2019 when we got really serious about

Henry:
It. Man, it sounds like you went down all the real estate guru rabbit holes, but what was cool was that you ended up landing on something that you kind of had your own experience with right through that apartment. Jared, how were you during all this process? It sounds like Yahweh was like, we should do this and then you got to go off and do it, but what role did you play in the business during this time? And maybe it was just like devil’s advocate or where did that come into play for you? How did you feel about all this new real estate investing methods going on?

Jarrod:
Yeah, I think I was nervously supportive.

Dave :
That’s a good way

Henry:
To describe it. That’s a phenomenal

Jarrod:
Description. Yeah, I mean we tried wholesaling together. We did a lot of driving for dollars. We fixed certain that was

Yiwei:
Cards. Oh

Jarrod:
My God. Yeah. We went to different neighborhoods throughout Cincinnati and we actually, we got a couple of leads. We walked through houses and just felt like, hey, we can’t envision the end product with the current state of some of the houses that we walked through. So it made more sense for us to start with Shortterm terminals. We did a few other things as well. We looked at notes, private lending, got a little bit of experience with that, but really doubled down on the short-term rentals.

Dave :
All right. So I have to admit, I’ve never been to Cincinnati where you guys invest, but it’s not one of the places that you often hear about as one of the more common short-term rental markets. So was there something about the city and living there that you gave you a good idea that this was going to work from the beginning or were you sort of taking a shot in the dark,

Yiwei:
Taking a shot at the dark? Because I also did not understand who was coming to Cincinnati because it’s definitely not on my list of vacation spots. And maybe for lots of other people around the country it’s like who would go to Cincinnati Nanny? But once we started doing arbitrage and just started buying rentals because we saw that you could make money, so it’s like why not try with? And a lot of times I feel like you really don’t know until you do it that you see who is coming. You understand the guests a lot more and what they’re looking for. So for us it was like, okay, let’s just do it because I know we can make money and I want to leave my job and then we can figure out the rest as we go. I would say now that I’ve done it for so many years, I know who the guests are that are coming, and as I start up new places, I have a better idea of what amenities to put in and what specifically they’re looking for.
But at the time I didn’t. I was just like, there’s people coming, there’s people renting. Let’s just do this. So who are the guests? So I categorize it into three different categories. The first one is more like vacation people. So they’re coming in for games, events. We’ve got the Bengals here, we’ve got the reds here, and there’s a bunch of concerts that are coming here, lots of weddings. I feel like there’s a wedding every single weekend here. And then people just coming to visit family. And then within that there’s two groups. You’ve got the couple traveling, and then you’ve got the families traveling. So there’s a lots of families that come and travel together for vacation. There’s a lot of amusement parks up north that they go to or a lot of sports tournament. That’s been a new recent thing. Lots of basketball games for the younger girls and guys and things like that.
And then the second category is the medical slash business professionals, I would say. So the people that are coming here for medical reasons, there’s a hospital that’s close by here, university of Cincinnati, and then there’s also a children’s hospital that lots of people come here for cancer treatments or different surgeries. So there’s families that need extended period of time. And there’s the traveling nurses who are coming here too. So anybody who has a one bedroom, one bath would be really great for doing the midterm rentals with the traveling nurses. And then you’ve got the actual patients who are coming in to get medical treatment. And then the third category are going to be more of your relocation business travelers. So it’s like people that are moving here for work because their company moved them here and they need a place to stay while they find a house or they’re just here traveling for work, like construction workers, even business, single person coming in, staying downtown and Ohio.
I did not know this until now. Ohio gives this huge tax abatement to anybody in the movie industry, like filming movies here in Ohio in general, they get a huge tax incentive. So Cincinnati gets a lot of films, movies get made here. So when that happens, you’ve got the actor, the actresses, and then you’ve got the film crew that’s coming in. You also get a lot of musicals that come in, so they need a place to stay. I classify that as business people are coming here for work. They don’t live here, they’re just here for work for a period of time and they leave, or it’s the people that are coming and they are moving here for work and they need some time until they find a place.

Henry:
Interesting, because typically when, especially people who aren’t doing short-term rentals yet typically when they hear about short-term rentals as strategy, they’re thinking vacation destinations, properties with tons of crazy awesome amenities, million dollar properties that you’re essentially renting out for people to have some sort of vacation experience. But there are a lot of markets where short-term rentals can do well, where you don’t have to be this vacation hub, this vacation mecca, because there’s a need for the short-term housing that is hard to fulfill with hotels. And when you think about hotel stays, if you’re coming for an extended period of time, there’s not a lot of great options that are an affordable price range because there’s really nice hotels and that’s great, but that’s not ideal. If you’ve got to stay for 30 days, that gets really expensive. But if you don’t want to stay in an extended stay either, what do you do? And so I think that it’s a really cool niche that you found.

Dave :
Now that we know why Cincinnati works as a short-term rental market, we’re going to hear about how eWAY and Jared are staying competitive despite increased supply. We’ll get into that right after the break. Welcome back investors. We’re here with iWay and Jared getting their insider tips on how to cashflow in the Midwest. Let’s get back into it.

Henry:
Are you seeing a lot of competition for properties in this short-term rental space in these markets now? Or is it really just like you can have your pick because there’s not a lot of other operators in these areas?

Jarrod:
It’s grown a lot, right, Cincinnati, since we started in 2019, the listings have grown significantly. Probably more so I’ll say at the lower bedroom counts, right? So when you look at one bedroom, two bedroom properties, obviously they’re going to be cheaper. Most of ’em probably be in condos. When we look at the market today, that’s close to 70% of the listings that are out there today. There’s probably less competition at the higher bedroom counts once you get four or five bedrooms. That’s a lot smaller percentage of the market. But the overall listings have grown significantly in the last four or five years.

Yiwei:
Yeah, I would say Cincinnati follows the same trend that short-term rentals have seen nationally, which is this huge increase in supply because lots of people are getting into short-term rentals after the whole Covid pandemic. And also what worked then in 2019 when we started is very different than what works now in terms of size and location. So now I wouldn’t even recommend one bedrooms downtown because there’s so many. And then same thing with the two bedrooms. We started going into the suburbs during the pandemic because we saw downtown shut down, but the suburbs were doing well because so many families were traveling in the 10 to 15 minute range. It’s all two bedrooms, one bath right now. It’s very hard to stand out at that size. So one of the things we’ve been doing is going up in different sizes that the guests are looking for, and I just know that because of what they asked, they said, I want a three bed, two bath. So that’s what they’re looking for. So if you have a three bed, two bath in that neighborhood where majority of the older homes are two bed, one bath, you have that as an advantage. So I would say listings have basically doubled in the last few years, but we’re still following the same trend as the nation’s rental, the national short-term rental trends.

Dave :
You talked a little bit about supply of housing, and this has been a trend that we’ve been watching on the show a bit for short-term rentals for a couple of years now that just it’s gotten so popular. You hear data about individual properties or individual cities starting to see income decline or revenue decline for short-term rentals. Are you seeing that with your portfolio or in Cincinnati as a whole that there’s more supply than the demand can handle?

Yiwei:
I would say in certain pockets, yes, there’s going to be more supply in certain pockets are more supply than demand. But there are certain opportunities in those areas too, which is why we haven’t been like, this is so oversaturated, we’re not doing this anymore. It’s like I am able to see what the guests are looking for. So for example, in that one neighborhood where it’s like a two bed, one bath where majority of the supply in that area is a two bed, one bath, there are opportunities for you to have three bed, two bath, four bed, five beds that are still doing really well in revenue. And we have this five bedroom in that neighborhood that the revenue has not changed ever since the pandemic for the last three years that revenue is super consistent throughout. Whereas some other places in general, I feel like in general, I’ve seen about a 20% decrease in revenue in 20 23, 20 24 versus 2022 and 2021 where that was the peak. So I feel like there is a decline for sure, but if you have a great product in a great location here, you can still do well.

Jarrod:
And probably one add-on to that right, is I think the increased competition has probably created better products out there in the marketplace. So gone are the days where you could go buy used furniture off Facebook marketplace in the flea market and use all your leftover linens. I mean, these are professional operators. Today we were setting up houses specifically for short-term rentals, very particular about the types of linens, the type of amenities that were offered to the guests. You

Dave :
Got to step your game up.

Jarrod:
Exactly.

Dave :
Competition is good and bad. You don’t always want it, but it makes you better in the long run,

Yiwei:
Right? It does. But on a scale from I can just put any house on the market and with my furniture that I want to leave in the house or Facebook marketplace furniture to, I need a themed house to even be profitable. In all these vacation destinations, Cincinnati is kind of in the middle. It needs to be professionally managed, it needs to be curated for a short-term rental, but it does not need extreme things that people might need to do in vacation markets to just even stand out to even be profitable. For example, people might want to put a game room in the garage and make it super cool, paint it, do a man cave or whatever. But here, people want a garage. They want to park their cars. They don’t want to carry their stuff in the rain. It rains here, it snows here. So they don’t want to be shoveling snow or trying to heat up their car in the middle of winter. A lot of people here want a garage or a garage. They’re not looking for anything fancy. It needs to be a great house, but it does not need some of the things that vacation destinations are known for.

Henry:
What I love about what I’m hearing is it sounds like a lot of the decisions that you’re making are based on feedback from tenants and data, and then you’re using that to kind of drive what you’re offering and which is super important when you’re dealing with the competition that you’re potentially dealing with, especially in the smaller bedroom bathroom counts. So what are some of the other things that you do from an amenity standpoint or maybe some tips and tricks that you do to keep your particular properties competitive? So

Yiwei:
I would say our philosophy is you have to have a great product. I’m not trying to just make a quick dollar from this guest. I want that long-term guest. So we get a lot of guests that repeat that only stay with us when they’re here in Cincinnati. They’ll say if they want to stay at one property, they’ll know that every other property is going to be consistent. So having a great product and then secondly, having that consistent five star experience every single time. And that’s how we built our portfolio on and our business on basically. And a few of the things I think through as I come up with which house is going to do well or which house we’re going to take on and which property will do well in Cincinnati and how much money it can make, it usually comes down to one, what can do to make guests want to book this house?
What is going to make this property stand out from others in the area and from others in my portfolio? And then the second thing is what are the guests want? What guests like being here? So for example, we’re getting a lot of families and kids traveling in the area a lot more than I have noticed in the past. So one thing we’ve added to a lot of our bigger homes, because that’s where a lot of the families are saying is cribs, because a lots of people are traveling with kids and we want to upgrade the experience so they’re not looking for a pack and play. It’s like a real Crip with a mattress that you can put the baby in. The other things we’re doing that I’m seeing is the beds. Before I had queen beds, I sleep on a queen bed. I’m like, everybody should be fine with a queen bed.
But no, they want king beds. So sometimes we have to go in and rebuy the bed and redo the bedding for some of our other places that have maybe a queen in the primary bedroom. So we’re taking the queen out and we’re putting in kings in a lot of these places. The mattress has to be good. And the other thing we do is all name brand products. We don’t really go for a lot of the private label. So the mattresses, the linens, the soap, the toilet paper, the paper towels is Charmin bouncy Ty Dawn, that is maybe what they would use at home. So I would create the same experience if they were traveling. It feels like they are still at home, they’re still using the same products, the same brands, the same cotton sheets and memory foam mattresses, that kind of thing.

Dave :
So Jared and iWay have built a portfolio of 10 properties over the last four years, but how have they funded these properties? We’ll get into that and how they’re finding deals today right after the break.

Henry:
Hey everyone, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. Let’s jump back in.

Dave :
I want to talk a little bit about scaling. I do think this is something that a lot of investors struggle with and it sounds like you hit a wall at a certain point in your investing where your debt to income ratio was no longer allowing you to take on more financing and just for everyone, if you’ve never heard that term DTI or debt to income ratio, it’s basically something that lenders look at basically how much income do you have? And they compare that to how much debt you’re taking out, what your mortgage payments are going to be. And for a lot of investors, at a certain point, your income from your job is no longer enough to satisfy a lender to keep giving you more mortgages. So UA and Jared, tell us how you got around this challenge.

Jarrod:
Once we hit that limit, we started talking to other investors in the area. We wanted to continue growing. So pretty quickly we learned that we could go partner with others, we could do the majority of the boots on the ground where somebody else could bring the funding. And so that’s where we started. We’ve done a couple of partnerships with folks here in the area. Essentially what that structure looked like was we would find a property that we felt would do really well. We’ve got a pretty particular process of going through and vetting that property and then estimating what the revenue will do. And we have a really good handle on what the expenses look like, and it really just comes down to the type of financing that we can get and the down payment. So typically what that partner would do, they would bring the down payment and then we would work together on the financing. Now, the financing that we did do was DSCR loans, so it’s debt service coverage ratio that we applied for as a separate entity. So that’s one structure that we have put in place and allowed us to continue to scale. The other one is just create a financing where we’ve worked directly with an owner and they would carry back financing.

Dave :
Awesome. And just for everyone, if you don’t know what a debt service coverage ratio loan is, it’s basically a residential loan product that mimics commercial lending in that the lender is looking at the quality of the deal to determine if they’re going to give you a loan rather than the borrower’s personal credit worthiness. And this is a great strategy for scaling if you do run into these DTI debt to income issues because if you’re able to source and find good deals, lenders are going to lend to you regardless of what your job income is. So that’s a really awesome strategy. Thank you for sharing that with us. And last thing here, I just would love to know, does this still work for you today? Because all of this sounds great, but we’re in a high interest rate, low inventory environment. Are you still finding deals that make sense in your market that are performing up to your standards?

Yiwei:
Yeah, so I would say back in 2021, when we started doing the DSCR loans, it was like a new product we haven’t heard of. They were lending on, like you were saying, the rental income of that house without our personal credit. And at the time we were paying way higher rates because the DSCR loans are going to be way higher rates than what you would get for your personal residence loan. So at the time our rates were like 4.75 and everybody was getting 3.2 or something. So I was like, this is such so high. But now that I look back, it is a lot lower. But at this point I feel like the DSCR rates are like 8%, and for you to really cashflow at 8%, you have to have a really low price. But in Cincinnati, the prices have not come down so much to adjust for the higher rates.
So what we’re doing a lot more of now is looking for that creative financing deal. So the most recent one we did was end of last year where the owner had to leave, they were moving out of the country, the property couldn’t sell, and we worked out that creative leave with the owner directly. So at this point, I would prioritize creative financing if possible, especially if the owner is an investor and is more comfortable with this kind of deal because it is more about trust than it is you’re a stranger. I’m a stranger. So let’s like I just promise I’m going to make payments to you, but I feel like DSCR could still work or even a commercial loan. So one of the things I was looking into is more like a 20 year am and it’s like an arm still, but it’s not as great as the DSER because you get the 30 year fixed, but it could hold you over until the rates drop some. So if I were to get financing now, those were the two, I would primarily go with the commercial if I can’t get the creative financing,

Henry:
And for those who are unaware arm or adjustable rate mortgage is what that stands for. And so I love commercial loan products, especially in this environment because yes, the property will be on an arm or an adjustable rate. Typically that adjustable rate period is going to be anywhere between three and five years, which gives you time. It’s not like it’s going to adjust in the next six months. So if you buy a property on a three year adjustable rate, if the rates come down over the next three years, you can refinance that property and typically there’s no prepayment penalty for doing that. So I think that’s a great product as well as a lot of these commercial construction loans will allow you to finance in some of the renovation money or maybe even some of the money to furnish it. But what I wanted to do was jump back to you structuring these deals with your partners.
I think that’s a great strategy for almost any investor in any niche is you can pair what you do have, which is the ability to find the deals, the ability to operate the properties with someone who has the money, and then you can create this kind of 50 50 environment. But the question I had was when you’re structuring these, how do you factor in the things like the cost for furnishing the property? Is that something that you’re bringing? Is that something that the partnering is bringing? And then how are you ensuring that everybody kind of stays in their lane when you’re doing these partnerships?

Jarrod:
So in our partnerships that we’ve done in the past, we have purchased the furnishings for the house and then you’ve got all those the setup. So that’s how we handle the furnishing just to make the partner more comfortable, making sure that we’ve got skin in the game as well financially in terms of how do we make sure that everybody stays in their lane. One is making sure that you have a clear understanding with your partners and make sure that you have lots of conversations early on with those individuals. Nothing’s worse than partnering with the wrong person or a person that has different expectations or thinks that it’s going to happen one way. So one is just learning about one another and do you feel comfortable working with that person? And then once you do have that clear understanding is making sure that it’s all documented. So all of ours are documented in operating agreements, went to attorney, had conversations with them and they helped us document everything. So it’s in black and white, plain English to where everybody can understand.

Yiwei:
And just to be more specific on the financial, how we split it. So the partner brings the financing and everything to purchase the house, like the down payment and closing fees points, all of that. And then we bring everything that is needed to make this house a short-term rental. So if we need to paint, we need to do flooring, like any of that minor stuff we will do and all the furnishing. So we’ll pay for all that if it needs a rehab. So there was one house where we actually redid the bathroom, the kitchen, if it needs a major rehab, we’ll split that 50 50. And then like Jared said, we have that in the operating agreement and we talked that early on, how long do you want to own this house? How would it look like if one partner wanted get out and the other partner wanted to stay in?
So we also try to keep a number of partners low. So it is usually us and one other person. It’s not us and 10 other people where there’s so many opinions of what we need to do. So it’s usually just us and one person or us. And the other one we did was it was him and his partner. So we have it 50 50 that way. So really between them it’s like 25, 25. But it was because they’ve worked with us before, we managed their property before and now they want to have more money to invest with us, but they have a real job so they don’t want to be active in it. So that’s kind of the specifics on the partnership side.

Henry:
No, that’s great, man. I don’t know how many people have had conversations who end up in a bad partnership because they didn’t communicate very well on the front end in terms of expectations and then they didn’t document what they talked about. I literally have an expectations document that my partner and I filled out. It’s not like an official document, but we just documented everything we talked about. We had it notarized and we signed it and we’ve called back on it multiple times to say, oh yeah, we did agree that in this situation we would do these things. And it really makes difficult conversations a whole lot easier. Partnerships are like marriages, man. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a conversation with my business partner that went something like, Hey, when you said this, it made me feel like that. So the more you can document and the more you can have those expectation conversations on the front end, it’s going to be better. So I appreciate that. Can you tell us a little bit about what your business looks like now? I know you talked about some creative finance deals. Are you continuing to expand? Are you kind of holding the line and keeping what you’ve got? And then give some advice to some of the people out who are maybe looking to invest in Shortterm in these mid-tier markets. What would you advise them to do?

Yiwei:
Yeah, so we have been doing short-term rentals since basically end of 2019. And I don’t see that changing. I feel like there’s still opportunity here in Cincinnati. So I’m recommending investors now who want to invest in Cincinnati, different sizes for downtown, different sizes for if you want to do midterm rentals. It’s specific size that I have found that worked for that particular model. And then in different neighborhoods, what sizes, what locations, what areas, what price points. So I feel like at this point, we’re still going to continue doing that here in Cincinnati.

Jarrod:
If you do want to do something hands-on yourself, do it local. Don’t try to do something five states away and manage yourself. You’re not going to know that market. You don’t know cleaners or how to get people. And it’s really easy to message people and find people on Facebook, but a lot of times once you go walk that property, it looks very different than what somebody is telling you. We’ve helped others in that instance before where they’ve been many states away and they tried managing it themselves and they didn’t necessarily get the results that they thought they were going to get. So stay local and then understand do you have the time that’s required to operate these properties? What I would say is that short-term rentals, it’s very different than long-term rentals. It’s a lot of hands-on right and time requirement that you’re going to spend on that property.

Yiwei:
Yeah, I would say do it next to you. Don’t feel like you have to go to a vacation market. You can do it in a bunch of unsexy cities that will still generate a lot of money like Arkansas or Cincinnati. It is not somewhere where people might think about, it’s not Orlando and it is not Aspen, but it will make money for you if you buy the right property. So those are the two I have. And it doesn’t have to be like a million dollar house. It could just be a 300, $400,000 house to do. Well.

Dave :
Alright, great. Well, Jared and iWay, thank you so much for joining us for the BiggerPockets podcast. We really appreciate your time and anyone who wants to connect with these two, we’ll put their contact information in the show notes below. I’m Dave Meyer and he is Henry Washington for BiggerPockets. We’ll see you Allall soon.

Watch the Episode Here

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In This Episode We Cover:

  • The three types of short-term rental guests who consistently come to markets like Cincinnati
  • How to set your Airbnb apart if you’re in a saturated short-term rental market
  • Tips for higher occupancy and what you MUST have to get more bookings
  • Scaling your real estate portfolio when you have high DTI (debt-to-income)
  • Using partnerships to buy even more properties when you’re low on cash
  • Why you DON’T need to invest in high-priced, popular vacation destinations 
  • And So Much More!

Links from the Show

Connect with Jarrod and Yiwei:

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.

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