I sell short-term rentals near Yosemite. I own three of them.

Most people who call me want the same thing, and they’re a little sheepish about saying it: a place near Yosemite they actually get to use, that doesn’t cost them money to own.

They’ve been told that’s naive. That the real move is to optimize — put in the hot tub, take every booking, stop thinking of it as yours.

Here’s my answer. My own data says a hot tub is the single biggest amenity lever in this market, worth $15,000 to $20,000 a year, mostly by raising your nightly rate rather than your occupancy. About one in five listings around here has one. Neither of my Yosemite properties does, because my wife doesn’t want to deal with one.

Three properties, deliberately unoptimized, roughly $130K gross a year, three years running.

Two things before that number means anything to you. One of the three is in San Antonio, Texas — it tells you I can run a rental from a distance, and nothing about what a house near Bass Lake will do. And the one that carries a mortgage is financed at 3%, a rate that no longer exists, so my carrying costs are not your carrying costs. When we underwrite yours, we use your rate. Never mine.

All three properties, with the numbers and the caveats →

Which is the actual pitch. Not that you can squeeze the most out of a mountain house. That you can leave real money on the table for reasons that matter to you, and it still works.

This is the part most buyers find out too late. Oakhurst is Madera County. Mariposa is Mariposa County. Twenty-five miles apart, completely different rules:

That bedroom cap is the one that costs people money. Buyers assume a bigger house in Mariposa means bigger revenue. It doesn’t — you can’t permit past three bedrooms and ten guests. The way you actually scale there is a second permitted dwelling on the same parcel, which is a zoning question, not a square-footage question.

Both counties let you start the permit application while you’re still in escrow. I use that on every deal to pull the launch date forward.

I license AirDNA’s data for this market directly and refresh it monthly, then run it through an analyzer I built. It filters comps by amenity — AirDNA’s own tool can’t — so your projection comes from properties that look like the one you’re buying, not the market average.

It also models whether the house is worth more split into multiple listings than rented whole. On some floor plans that gap runs into six figures a year.

Cleaners, handymen, contractors, inspectors, Starlink installers, septic and well specialists, insurance, photography, a management partner if you’d rather be passive. I hand out those numbers constantly. One client had four TVs land in his driveway and I drove over and put them in the house. That’s the job.

Since 2021

• 82 closed transactions, $36.1M in sales volume
• 52 of those were short-term rental deals — $24.6M in STR volume
• In 2026 so far, 11 of my 14 closings have been short-term rentals
• 10 years as an Airbnb Superhost across three properties — two near Yosemite, one in Texas
• 850+ five-star guest reviews across those three

Short-term rentals are about two-thirds of my business by volume. Not a sideline I added to a listing practice.

48 reviews on RateMyAgent. 5.0 average. Every one verified against a real closed transaction — RateMyAgent asks every client, not just the happy ones.

• Madera County Winner — 2025 and 2026
• Oakhurst City Winner — 2025 and 2026
• Mariposa County Top 5 — 2025 and 2026

“He backed his advice up with real numbers, including some genuinely impressive AI tools and licensed market data that gave us a level of confidence we weren’t expecting.”
— buyer, first short-term rental, Oakhurst

“He is surely 2 steps ahead of you and has most likely already made a YouTube video on that home.”
— buyer, Oakhurst

Read all 48 reviews →

Closed with me already? Leave a Google review.

You’re in the Bay Area or LA. You’re in tech or something that pays like tech. You want a second home close enough to drive to on a Friday, and you want it to cover itself when you’re not in it.

You are not trying to build a fund. You want one good property, bought right, launched properly, that you’re not embarrassed to hand to guests.

That’s the client I do my best work for. Partly because it’s an honest target — “pays for itself” is a bar you can actually clear — and partly because owners who use their own places make better hosts. You notice the tired barbecue. You notice nobody can find the pots and pans. You fix it because it bugs you, and the reviews follow.

Oakhurst and Mariposa are the two markets I know cold. Also Ahwahnee, Coarsegold, Bass Lake, Fish Camp, and North Fork. Tuolumne County — Sonora, Groveland — when it’s the right fit, since it feeds the same park.

Yosemite takes roughly four million visitors a year, and the reasons people come overlap — the park, Bass Lake in summer, fall color, holidays, weddings, remote workers wanting a view and decent internet. That’s why demand here spreads across the calendar instead of collapsing into one season.

The question was never whether guests exist. It’s whether the specific house you’re looking at gets its share of them, at a rate that covers the note.

Send me an address and I’ll tell you.