My apologies for a ridiculously slow response. Here are my thoughts:

1 – It’s been a great experience for us. We had a bad experience a few years ago when someone broke into our owner’s closet and stole some personal items from us, but otherwise the majority of renters have been kind to our home and treated it like their own. We’ve actually gotten to know some of the families as they rent from us year after year. We don’t turn a profit from our house, since our mortgage is quite large and we purchased our house at the near peak of the market, but we are able to afford it and the minor maintenance issues that come up each year. We have had a few big expenses like a new roof, a new hot tub, etc, but this is all to be expected over the amount of time we’ve owned it. We bought in 2005 so it’s been a solid 12 year run and I wouldn’t change anything about this purchase!

2 – We’ve had a few minor things broken over the years but that is to be expected. As I mentioned above we were essentially robbed a few years ago, but the key is not to leave anything personal in your home even if it’s locked up. We learned that lesson the hard way. My husband had some family momentos in the home that were stolen. They weren’t worth anything, but they meant a lot to him. We put them out when we were there and locked them up the rest of the time. In 12 years we’ve only had an incident like this once. In fact, many times if owners break something they head to Walmart and replace it for us. I’ve also had checks written to me to cover the cost of broken radios, etc. Overall people are good and kind.

3 – We actually use the same rental management company as the previous owners. We looked into different companies but they had rules on how many weeks you had to rent it and we like to loan it out to friends and family sometimes. So we stuck with the company that allows us to reserve a lot of weeks and doesn’t give us much grief about it. The rental property owners take a bigger and bigger portion of our rent each year and that bothers me. They charge more fees and provide less services, but since we don’t live close by we just deal with this.

I’m interested to know a few things, especially since it has been seven and a half years.

1. In the beginning there is always the newness novelty, now that you have a good data base of seven seasons, what has beach property ownership really been like? Overall, has it been an enjoyable experience (I’m not interested in the family/personal memory part, those will always be a given)?

2. What are the challenges you’ve faced as an owner? I.E. problems with the property, issues with people that have rented your property, items that are associated with the rental part of owning beach property?

3. Have you had any issues with the management company that you chose and what did you do to resolve them? What types of things did you look for in the management company that you ultimately contacted with and is your current company the same one that you signed with when you first bought your property?

Thanks again for writing the blog on vacation property ownership and I look forward to reading your thoughts on your experience with your beach house since you’ve purchased it.

Congratulations on owning your home free and clear! That’s great. I am not familiar with renting mountain homes. Do they rent year round or just certain seasons? Any reason you are thinking of renting versus selling and keeping the profits?

Thanks for all your good articles,

Mountain Daisy

Because of the amount of hours, (over 750 documentsed hrs/ year), our VR qualifies for active real estate status, we are now able to deduct the expenses which has put us into a lower tax bracket. We needed to do this because of our High AGI.

Even with those deduction living in CA is expensive and I need to have a good financial picture of what is going on with this VR. My problem is getting a hold of the true expenses to make sure that the rates that I am setting cover those expense when everything varies so greatly from week to week, season to season, and year to year.

Does anyone have a tool, expense planner or some idea as to what I can do to get a true picture and make a better plan?

Thanks