Year one netted $25.7k, and my own pricing floor cost about $7k of that

You buried the part I'd have led with. The city has been studying a cap for two years. Does the registration attach to you or to the parcel, and if a cap passes, do existing registrations renew automatically or do they re-compete? Those are different worlds and the answer sits in the ordinance text, which is a local question you'd need to read for that specific jurisdiction. I ask because I look at land where the entitlement is the whole asset, and this feels the same shape. You own a house. The business you actually own is a permission slip.

Your $25,700 is real cash but the cash on cash you're implying is doing some work it hasn't earned.

Two things missing. First, furnishing reserve. You put $22k of soft goods in a house that gets 240 turnovers a year. Mattresses, sofa, the dishes, the linens that get bleached weekly. Nobody gets ten years out of that. If you replace on a five-year cycle that's $4,400 a year and you booked $5,500 of repairs and restocking, which I suspect already includes some of it, so tell me how you split that line.

Second, your labor. You said Sunday mornings plus guest messages plus rebooking around the surgery week. Price that at even $25 an hour and five hours a week and it's $6,500. You may be happy to work for it, that's fine, it just isn't a passive $25.7k.

My version of your year is roughly $17k to $19k of return on capital after reserve and labor, against a long-term rental on the same house that would have returned maybe $4k and asked for four hours a month. Still a win. Just a smaller one than the headline.

240 turnovers and you only listed repairs once. What actually got damaged? I'm still on my first long-term rental and my whole plan is screening people carefully, which doesn't exist as a concept when someone books for two nights from a phone. Did you take deposits, and did you ever collect on one?

@arbor asked the ordinance question and I want to extend it. Say the cap passes next spring and you keep the registration. Fine. Say it passes and you don't. You're holding a house that rents for $1,850 against $1,425 of debt service before tax and insurance escrow, which means you're feeding it. What's your decision at that moment, and have you decided it now while it's cheap to decide? I hold things for twenty years so I want to know the plan for the bad branch before I admire the good one.

I came to this room wanting the version that works without much drama and this post is a good argument that the drama is the product. You made an extra $16k over long-term rent and gave back $6,800 of it to a checkbox you forgot in February. That ratio is what I keep failing to get comfortable with.

Two operational things. Your insurance is written for nightly stays, which most standard landlord policies aren't, and I'd want to know whether your lender knows the use, since occupancy and use language varies by loan and by lender and it's the kind of thing to get confirmed in writing rather than assumed. Separately, what do you pay per turn and did that price hold all year? Everyone I talk to on the service side says cleaner pricing moved more than nightly rates did.