Renting our Boca Raton pool home: a year in numbers

My wife and I bought our house in Boca Raton in 2021, the year I retired. It is a three-bedroom pool home east of Federal Highway, a ten-minute bike ride from the beach, and we paid $1.15 million for it. We had rented in Boca for years in the winter and knew we wanted a house here, but we also knew we were not going to live in it all year. Renting it to guests was the way to make the arithmetic work.

How we use it, and how guests use it

This is the part most owners get backwards. We do not come down in February. February belongs to the guests, because that is when the house earns the most. We spend six weeks here in May and June and three weeks in October, when the weather is still beautiful and the rates are lower. The rest of the year the house is booked by families, by grandparents visiting children who live here, and by people in town for events at the resort or the university.

The numbers

Over a full year the house runs at about 65% occupancy, which is around 237 booked nights once you take out our own weeks. Our rate card starts at $399 a night in standard season and goes to about $600 over Christmas and New Year, and the average over the year works out to around $425. That is roughly $100,000 in gross rent.

We have no mortgage, so the rent covers the property tax, the insurance, the pool and lawn service, the utilities and the repairs, and what is left is our travel money for the rest of the year. If we had bought with a loan it would be a different story, and I would want the rent to cover the payment before I counted on anything else.

What I would tell a buyer

Insurance is the cost that surprised us. Florida insurers care about the age of the roof above almost anything else, and the house had a roof from 2019 when we bought it, which kept our premium reasonable. A friend two streets over with a twenty-year-old roof pays a great deal more and was asked to replace it to keep his policy. Look at the roof, the air conditioning and the pool equipment before you fall in love with the kitchen.

The pool heater earns its keep. Guests who come in January expect to swim, and a heated pool is the difference between a booking and a cancelled inquiry. Ours runs on propane and we budget for it as part of the cost of a winter booking.

We also kept the furniture simple and sturdy. Nice, but nothing we would cry over. Guests have been careful with the house, and in four years the worst damage was a broken patio chair, which the deposit covered.

What success looks like

For us the house is not an investment we are trying to maximise. It is where we want to be in May and October, and it pays for itself the rest of the year. Boca is a quiet, family town and the guests reflect that. Being able to say the house costs us nothing to keep, and that it is there whenever we want it, is exactly what we hoped for when we bought it.