Calculating Vacation Rental Income for North Carolina Oceanfronts

This property manager is inept, unqualified, I don’t care what their name is or how long they’ve been doing this, their seller, the client is getting shafted here.  Money on the table that should be going to this owner’s family or for other investments, etcetera, is just not there and it’s not right. So I’m going to use a couple of examples here and I’m going to try my best to not really go into the addresses.  And show you how to run numbers on a vacation rental. Let me throw in some keywords here, we’re talking about oceanfront homes for sale in North Carolina. On beaches such as Sunset Beach, Carolina Beach, Holden Beach, Oak Island homes, North Topsail Beach, Kure Beach, Surf City.  Okay. The Oak Island oceanfronts are down below, etc.

Now let’s use an example a home came on the market this weekend in Ocean Isle Beach and it’s a little one bedroom condo.  Let’s see if we can find it real quick and somewhere I believe I read it’s listed for 210,570 square feet. I thought I remembered reading something about it grossing $12,000 a year or something.  So here’s what you do, you go to the website and you type in on the beach you’re looking for, okay? Ocean Isle Beach and then what you do is you just go very near that building on the map you – you tune in right to the map on VRBO, Vacation Rental By Owner.  And you find the exact address of the property and then you search you know right around there for other properties that are the same size.  So this one I’m just going to zoom in a whole bunch.

Oak Island Oceanfronts

And this is slow internet, it’s called satellite internet, isn’t that great?  Stuck with satellite because I live in the country and what I’m going to do is use a quick filter to help get some of these extra ones around.  So I’m going to say maximum bedrooms one. That’s going to narrow these – all these listings down right away because this is a one bedroom unit here.  So what you do is you zoom in on the map where the building is, the condos that you’re looking and then you go click on these units here or here and you find the one that matches up.  And sure enough often you’ll find one right in that building or within a few blocks that’s very similar. Here is that the exact same building, same floor, one bedroom. And I see in June it’s renting for $1800.  Okay, so what I do is I take that times 10 to book it out for the summer, now I’m at 18,000. And then there’s bookings in the offseason, as well like the whole month might be $1800 in October. So I add a few of those months there and we’re at 6,000 plus 18,000, 24,000.  So solidly this is a 20 grand rental, but may really it could even get up to 24 grand, okay?

So if I saw through disclosure online rental history of $12,000 I know wait a minute that’s irrelevant, it’s not being rented out to its full potential.  I can tell my client, “No, it’s really a 20,000 rental,” if it’s in the same condition you know as this one. And that’s – that’s like an example of how we find it.  I’ll use another one here. There’s a property over here, higher, it’s more than $1.5 million in Kure Beach, okay? And just look at photos real quick. It’s a monster property I think eight bedrooms and it has the sought-after pool.  Ocean fronts with pools, wow those make a lot of money.