Did you rent your Deer Ridge Mountain Resort unit through Ridge Management Ltd., RML, for all of 2009?

Wonder how your unit’s performance stacked up against the other units for rental?  Well, here’s a chance to find out.

An owner of one of the 2-2 units at Deer Ridge provided me a copy of their year end RML statement.  Here’s what their numbers looked like for 2009 (used here with their permission):

A Quick Analysis

• Owner X had gross rental income on their unit of $14,454 for all of 2009.
• In December, the income was $456 for 6 rental nights according to the above information.  This works out to an average nightly rental rate of $76.
• Since this is a 2-2, let’s assume that the average nightly rental was $105 per night across the whole year.
• This means that for $14,454 of gross income, this unit was rented for about 138 nights out of the 365 nights in a year.
• This means that this unit saw an economic occupancy of only 37.7% – or conversely, a vacancy rate of 62.3% for the year.
• These numbers are consistent with the entire Deer Ridge property as a whole, which has suffered from an average annual economic occupancy of only 39% for the past 8 years under the very questionable leadership of General Manager Joe Thomas.

Is Deer Ridge A Good Investment? / Bad Investment?

• Owner X saw distributions for the whole year of $4,504.  This works out to an average monthly check to them of about $375 per month.
• From this distribution, Owner X had to also pay:  Sevier County taxes, electricity, content and liability insurance, HOA fees and other maintenance from wear and tear and theft.  All of this added up to about an additional carrying cost of about $5,800 for the year.
• This means, that Owner X lost about $1,300 for the year – not counting debt service.  This also does not include the costs for any of the thousands of dollars the board is requiring for the upcoming Asinine Assessment.
• If the monthly mortgage payment was $320 per month, then the total LOSS for the year for Owner X was over $5,000!
• If Owner X keeps their unit for 10 years – and these same trends continue, this means that the aggregate loss for them will exceed $50,000!

Does this make it a good investment – or a bad investment for owning a condo at Deer Ridge?

The answer to that is not quite so black and white – and needs a much more in depth analysis to reach a valid conclusion.

Because so many owners, and prospective buyers, want to know if Deer Ridge is a good or bad investment, my next post will be a comprehensive analysis and downloadable document – so you will finally KNOW the answer!

How Did YOUR Unit Compare to Owner X?

In the meantime, how did your unit stack up to Owner X?  What was your economic occupancy rate with RML?  How much did you REALLY end up making or losing on your investment in Deer Ridge when you count all the costs?

Please comment below – and stay tuned for the next post!