Steve + Sandy

our story

We have two vacation rentals and have been in business since 2012. It’s funny how time can go fast and yet slow at the same time. In one sense we feel like we’ve been vacation rental hosts forever, yet when we realize that it’s been five years our reaction is “Dang already?!” LOL

Our vacation rental ownership journey started in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. We were living in NYC at the time and after Hurricane Sandy hit NYC pretty hard, we decided it was a good idea to have a house outside the city.

At the same time, a friend of ours (Julio!) told us of someone he knew that was doing vacation rentals. When he shared that tid-bit of information a light bulb went off in our heads. We had a plan, get a house that would be a vacation/bug-out house for us and rent it out to others when we’re not using it.

We did quite a bit of searching around NYC for the perfect place, and came across our first vacation rental, Feels Like Heaven. We loved the house and figured if we loved it, chances are others would love it to.

After some rehabbing, the house was ready for renting. We had no idea what to expect and to our surprise the house did really well pretty much from the beginning.

A couple of years went by and we wanted to try another vacation rental. That’s when we thought it would be great to get a place that was in warmer climate. We discovered that Kissimmee is the vacation capital of the world so we dove into that market.

The house in Kissimmee had a much larger learning curve… since there was a lot more competition.

It took about a year before we felt we were doing well in that house. After that, things started to settle down and we got into our groove.

During the entire process we have learned boat loads of stuff.  The entire time we were going through the process we felt we needed to share what we’ve learned. We took tons of notes but never felt like we had the time to start a blog.

Thankfully, finally, we decided to just start. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s a way for us to share what we have learned.

We hope you find this blog helpful and wish you success in your vacation rental business!

PS – Here’s a shameless plug for both our vacation rentals 🙂