Does Weather Affect Your Airbnb? | Tim Hubbard

How's the weather in your neighborhood? Or how's the weather in the city or cities where your Airbnbs are? And how much does it actually impact them? That's what we're going to talk about this week. Stay tuned. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I hope wherever you are, the sun is shining and the birds are chirping and you're enjoying the weather. Now, I know the reality is there are lots of places where the weather is better. Right. I, I love Brazil and I feel really fortunate to be down here right now. I just got back from the beach, actually. I was playing a little beach tennis, which, if you haven't played that before, well, I guess you got to be near some sand somewhere. But it's like a smaller version of tennis and I loved playing tennis back in the day, played through high school and everything. So that's been really good. Okay, I'm going on a tangent, but basically I want to talk about weather this week and how important is it for your short term rentals and how important is it for demographic changes for the U.S. for example, how much of an impact does it make on where people live? Well, I would argue it makes a huge impact. And now we didn't always have this luxury to be able to live in warmer places or I guess live there comfortably, I should say. There was a little invention that became more available in the 70s. What was that invention? Air conditioning. Yeah, it was around before that, but it came more publicly available and affordable around the 70s and something magical happened. People started moving and living in warmer areas. And in the US we have some of the fastest growing areas and what we call the Sun Belt, and that is technically 22 MSAs Metropolitan Statistical Areas. These are bigger areas that we have a lot of economic data on.22 MSAs in this sun Belt region. And so these are places like Arizona, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia. If you think about it, these places have had a serious amount of growth. Right. I pulled this stat off online, but from 1990 to 2008, I know that stat's a little older, but Arizona had a population growth of 200%. That's huge. A lot of cities are maybe not even growing in population or maybe they're growing like a percent or two per year. So imagine that, 200%. So a lot of these cities are Growing quicker with population. Why is this important? Because as a real estate investor, we want to be in areas where people are moving to, not where they're moving out of, because that creates more demand. And if we have properties in this places, it's going to be better for rents and it's going to be better for our short term rentals too. So in the sun belt in this region, we've had lots of population growth. The AC air conditioning helped that big time. But we also had some other things happen, like Texas, for example. You know, there was a, the oil industry really helped that. We've also had a lot of immigration in these areas. So needless to say, population is growing in these areas and that's one of the basic fundamentals we look for as a real estate investor is a place that has population growing because of the, the population is growing. That means there's employment growing to support it. That means the economy is on the up. And those are all good things for real estate investors. So consider some of these areas if you haven't already. Now, there's a, there's a cool website called weatherspark.com and you can type in essentially any city and it's going to give you weather trends on a city. You can see on a chart average temperatures. And so I want to bring up the topic, since this is a short term Rental Focus podcast, how much does weather actually impact our rentals? Well, it depends, right? If you're in a really cold place, but that really cold place happens to be near a ski resort, well then people are going to go there to ski, right? So it depends on the type of place, place that you are in. But I would say there's an interesting study that booking.com did. They have a lot of data, right? Because they have tons and tons of properties and it's essentially the best times to visit the US and they have a chart on there January through December with average rates across the nation. And as you might imagine, they are higher in the summer. Now, traditionally a lot of people were traveling in the summer, right, because they planned summer vacations and things like that. But now with so many of us working virtually, I don't think this summer is going to be the only time that we're traveling or planning our vacations because it's going to be a little easier to get away from the office. So I'm really bullish on places that have good, steady weather. A lot of, you know, I also spent about half the year in Medellin, Colombia. They call that the city of Eternal Spring because the weather pretty much doesn't change. It's really nice mid-70s all year round and there are a lot of people moving there that work remotely. So I think these places that have good weather, not just because of the population growth, but because of future trends and the ability for people to work remotely, I think these are going to be great places to invest. So keep an eye out on some of these places in the Sun Belt. If you're in the US investing, check out weatherspark.com they also have some interesting information on tourism and stuff on there. A really good overview view for a potential city if you're looking to invest there. So consider weather. Consider all the population growth that's been happening and the current way that we're living now and the fact that we kind of just like the sun shining, right? Vitamin D is something we need and we feel better when we have vitamin D in our system and we can get that through the sun. And that's just science. I know we don't all have the ability to be in those places, but hopefully if you keep growing your portfolio, if you're not already at the point that it's allowing you to live where you want, well, you will be there soon. So thanks again for joining us this week and I hope you have a great day and I will see you next week. Cheers.