Lendmire Research

How Much Down Payment For A Short Term Rental: what investors need to know about DSCR financing — eligibility, coverage, and loan structure, from Lendmire.

Cash-out refinances on an existing Airbnb typically require more equity, capping closer to 70% LTV.

If the owner occupies it part of the year and controls the booking calendar, it’s usually a conventional second-home loan.

It’s also called rent-to-rent or lease arbitrage. No purchase, no mortgage, no DSCR loan involved.

Some lenders skip STR income entirely and underwrite the property as a long-term rental instead.

Everything downstream — the coverage-ratio math, the leverage tiers, the credit floors — runs through the same DSCR machinery used for a long-term rental.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, and VA guidelines exclude most condotel projects outright, which pushes financing into the non-QM/DSCR space.

The loan itself isn’t a separate product. It’s a standard investor DSCR file with a different way of proving the income side of the math.

Before a DSCR lender will fund a short-term rental loan, the file needs proof of a policy actually built for STR use.

Clear all three and most 1-4 unit residential properties qualify for DSCR financing built on short-term rental income.

Get the report wrong — thin comps, no occupancy adjustment, wrong forecast window — and the file stalls before it ever reaches DSCR math.

Without that track record, lenders don’t just turn the file away — they lean on a market-data projection or an appraiser’s rental analysis instead.

Federal beneficial-ownership reporting for domestic LLCs has been eliminated, but state entity law and lender document requirements haven’t changed at all.