Hello there. I don’t recall exactly how I originally found this forum. I believe it to be the single most helpful site for short term rental host information. It has been extremely informative and occasionally very very amusing.
Back in ’16 we were making plans for an apartment building. It must have been sometime around then when I found this site and I’ve been lurking, learning and reading for sure since I joined in Feb 17. (We is me and my ‘sig fig’ AKA significant figure in my life, a term I learned from a millennial.) This was when there were stories of so many people making so much money in Chicago on short term rentals and when there was furious debate over the future of allowing them.
Considering the future viability was so uncertain we didn’t design an actual STR or lock-off into our apartment renovation plans. However, we had begun looking into ABB since we had never even stayed in one. We had thought in general the idea of staying in a room in someone’s house was not very appealing and yet we had stayed in plenty of actual B&Bs. Since that time, we stayed in a half dozen ranging from wonderful to a quite negative experience. Had the negative experience been our first, it would have absolutely been our last. Now being much more familiar with how ABB works, we should have requested a refund. Fortunately, our first ABB stay could not have been better with our hosts being wonderfully nice people.
I have learned a tremendous amount from this forum and would like to thank the contributors for being so helpful to the community. For a very long time, it seems the forum notifications come on Friday night and I regularly get up early Saturday mornings to read the updates and new postings. I have spent many an early Saturday on here. Three names that immediately come to mind are Kona, K9 and Ken. There are a lot of others who seem familiar too but don’t immediately come to mind (maybe the alliteration thing). I would also like to thank whoever operates this site so that it is free!
As I said in my first post, we are actually going to try a STR. We have regular apartments and due to a variety of circumstances we are going to try one of our apartments as short term rather than a one year lease. I hope I’ve learned enough and we are lucky enough to avoid some of the disasters that I’ve read about on this site and heard anecdotally.
