Real Estate: The Diverse Remote Business Idea With Options for Everyone

With AI slowly steamrolling jobs, you might be thinking like I did last year if it's time to get into a more passive income business. We live in Michigan, where like many other states high interest rates have tamped down the hot real estate market of the pandemic years. But there are still opportunities. I am not an expert, but thought I might take you along on the ride for how we pivoted Cronicle from pure media and content marketing to real estate investment alongside as a business model. Maybe you'll find some ideas that work for you as well.

REITs

Hubby and I first learned about REITs, or real estate investment trusts, when a friend who was a partial investor in a bed and breakfast in a popular beach town near Sleeping Bear Dunes, recently named Good Morning America's most beautiful place in America. As you might imagine, tourism has picked up even further since the award. Many places in Michigan are like this: long hidden beach towns of every flavor now being recognized as the travel destinations they should be. We started looking into REITs as a passive, less direct involvement in this type of real estate. First, we looked at beachfront hotels and learned the economics of financing and running them. Then the question became short-term versus longterm rental properties. Longterm rental properties can be easier to make a profit on in apartment buildings or condos because of having multiple sources of rent in one building. However, short-term Airbnb bans and rental regulations popping up all over Michigan beach town communities along the west coast of Michigan in recent years told us it was time to seriously look at my longheld dream of owning a beach house. I will spare you the details, but a health condition also pushed me in this direction, both for the flexible schedule of running a more passive business and of having the chance to own a beach house before I could afford to finance it for my exclusive use. Win-win.

Well, it should be, but then I learned that with these new STR regulations came limits on the type and number of properties that could be used for vacation rentals and often cities required a local contact to avoid out-of-town investors from inconveniencing their guests by being unavailable in case of emergency.

Short Term Rental Vacation Homes

Ultimately, the REITs we spoke with were investing in real estate that didn't align with these goals, though it's still a fantastic option for parking funds in real estate without managing them directly. We even looked into setting up our own real estate investment holdings group, but it was difficult with early funding levels to attract other investors with the same goals. We have a number of friends interested in REITs or already invested in them, but each one has its own focus and rate of return that should align with your goals and resources. We moved on to the short-term rental house option, which maximizes profits from hotel pricing instead of longterm rental rates.

What we found, long story short, is that the local property manager option was the only way to make short-term rental investments truly passive. They manage licensing with the city, inspections, repairs and maintenance, lawncare, and guest hospitality, which is quite a task in and of itself. They run background checks for us to assure our house won't be used for illegal activities or trashed as can often happen with independent STRs, and they handle the paperwork and finances, bless them.

Now, that being said, this ate up our entire profit margin for the first year or two: 25% of the rental income plus management expenses. But they clean professionally, market the house on listing sites, take photos for us which is harder than it sounds at first, and generally give our little vacation home a fantastic reputation out of the gate. We have 4.9 stars on Airbnb and the managers, Jaqua Rentals or formerly Lake Michigan Cottages, also have a top rating on vacation rental listing sites. They even negotiated a contract and found us a longterm renter for the off season so we could keep the house in the housing supply in growing Muskegon where affordable housing is getting harder to find, which helped us with costs our first year.

Our realtor Justin recommended we purchase this house in downtown Muskegon near Muskegon Lake and a short drive from Lake Michigan, because if something went wrong with rental prices or our finances in this first year of being STR owners, we could more easily sell or rent out the house longterm. That turned out to be true. Thanks, Justin!

Multifamily Longterm Rentals

You can go the multifamily apartment building route if you want to live on site. It's a great option we would have gone with had the pricing been right. But it is much easier to get a personal mortgage for a single family home than a business loan for a hotel or apartment building as a new business owner. If you like us don't have a lot of capital saved up to start, try looking into STRs first. Even less popular but still gorgeous Lake Huron on the east coast of Michigan now has more regulations on how properties can be used in this way, because this is such a profitable business option it has replaced a lot of 9-5 jobs in Michigan among people like me who worked in disrupted traditional industries. It's worth looking into, just make sure that you check the rules for STRs by township and city as well as county as municipalities are still hashing out the legality and fairness of STR regulations in Michigan. This is just me saying this as a personal opinion, but you really don't want to wait for them to completely hash it out as the competition for real estate is fierce in many communities and growing every year. Opportunities are found according to what works for your circumstances: low-hanging fruit of cheap properties sold off during the Great Recession are long gone.

Flipping Houses in 2025

Finally, we have looked at flipping houses locally for years where we live in Ann Arbor, because it's a college town with lots of turnover in older housing used for student apartment rentals. If you can land one of these awesome properties and manage it yourself or hire out management locally, this is also an awesome opportunity.

Why? Because it's a hybrid between longterm and short-term rental business structures. Just think about it: a student rental house often has 6 or so rental apartment suites or bedrooms with a shared kitchen, which gets the landlord rent for several renters instead of one with a more diversified income base to boot. Now, we wanted to be mindful as I said not to hoard local real estate and take it out of a limited pool of housing in these expensive times. If you get into this business model of rental real estate investment, you either need an opening in a market that isn't as competitive as is often the case these days or a shot at creative financing for a house or building that would otherwise stay off the market. More on that in a future post. It's a doozy of a story looking at renovating properties, y'all. Stay tuned. Hope that gives you some pointers if you're getting you started. It's a convoluted story, apologies, but I wanted to bring you an overview of what this real estate investment journey is like up front so you can decide which rabbit hole to dive down for your own investments. Happy investing. We will also cover local markets in a future post if you're interested in the best (and worst) places to invest in Michigan specifically.