What Type of Short Term Rental to Buy in Blue Ridge: A Cabin Buyer’s Guide for Airbnb Investors

Luke Carl [00:00:03]:
Welcome to the Short Term show from Blue Ridge, Georgia. We will cover everything you need to know, including buying, holding, managing from a distance, raising rents, renovating, and how to rent it when you are not using your very own vacation home in the North Georgia mountains. For more information on current purchase prices and income data, please visit theshortermshop.com welcome to the Short Term show special episodes from Blue Ridge. Here we go. Short Term show from Blue Ridge, episode two. We’re going to talk about what to buy. What is there to buy in this market? What should we buy? What should we stay away from? Yuck. Is a fantastic real estate agent with the Short Term shop.

Luke Carl [00:01:01]:
Dude’s a total rock star. Mississippi born and raised. And is that not true? Are you originally from Louisiana?

Yok Re [00:01:08]:
No, I was born in Italy.

Luke Carl [00:01:10]:
Oh, that’s right. That’s right. But came over here. All right, now I need to hold backstory.

Yok Re [00:01:15]:
Well, yeah. So born in Italy and you can probably tell by this accent I’ve lived in the. I’ve lived between Mississippi and Georgia my entire life. So. Yeah, when I was. Yes. Somewhere when I was about two years old, we moved back. I spent most of my life in Memphis, Tennessee.

Yok Re [00:01:33]:
I shouldn’t say most part of my life in Memphis, Tennessee, part of it in Starkville, Mississippi, and a large chunk of it right here in North Georgia.

Luke Carl [00:01:39]:
Yes, that’s where it comes in into the family. Avery’s again from Starkville and Yak’s family and. And Avery’s family know each other. So anyway, just one small happy family around here at this short term shop. And Lexus, you are a client of the shop, have bought multiple properties with us. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Lexis Hanson [00:02:01]:
Yeah, I’m Lexus, as you said. I have two properties in Blue Ridge and two more in the Pigeon Forge, Severville area. And I bought my first house in Pigeon forge back in 2021 through Derek. So I’ve been with y’ all for a little while.

Luke Carl [00:02:15]:
Cool, cool. And you are a nomad, right? Where are you right now?

Lexis Hanson [00:02:18]:
I am in Warsaw, Poland, of all places.

Luke Carl [00:02:20]:
Fascinating. And did. Was this on your own free will? You just picked it to go there for a while or.

Lexis Hanson [00:02:26]:
Yeah, we. We tend to bounce around. My husband and I, we work in software engineering. So we get to work from our laptops, which gives us a little bit of flexibility. We got married earlier this year in September and honeymooned in Japan, came back through Helsinki and we’re in Poland. So yeah, I’ll be back at back stateside next week for the holiday. With Thanksgiving in Arizona. So.

Lexis Hanson [00:02:49]:
So hopefully I’ll have some T shirt short weather there.

Luke Carl [00:02:51]:
Love it, love it. Living the life that we all wish we were living. So enjoy every second of it and the traveling. Anyway, so let’s talk Blue Ridge. Where should we, where should be, you know, what type of property are we looking for? Obviously they’re cabins here. Yock. But are they going to be a little older? Are they going to be newer? What, what kind of, what product are we looking at?

Yok Re [00:03:15]:
Yeah, so you know, most of the cabins here, they start, kind of started building the cab probably in the late 80s. But you know what’s on the market are going to be a lot of cabins probably 15 years old or newer. There are going to be some of the, some of the older ones that were built in the 90s. And I know a house built in the 90s, oh, that’s not that old. But you know, for us that, that kind of starts skewing on the older side. You know, people, you know, want to ask what am I looking for? Yes, you do want the cabin. Okay. Four sided brick or the vinyl sided house.

Yok Re [00:03:46]:
You know, not really going to work. You know, people are coming from the city and you know, you go to Atlanta and they say, hey, we’re going to, we want to stay in a cabin in Blue Ridge. You know, it’s kind of like, kind of like Xerox and Coke. They kind of own the, the verbiage of that, you know, cabin in Blue Ridge. That’s it. That’s the, that’s the cliche. That’s what people want, that’s what people expect. You know, we’re not, I tell everybody, we’re really not a honeymoon destination and we’re not a big corporate retreat destination either.

Yok Re [00:04:15]:
So we don’t have a lot of one bedrooms. We have some two bedrooms. Okay. The one bedrooms that may be one bed plus loft. And we don’t have a lot of these. Six, seven, eight bedrooms. We don’t have multiplexes, duplexes, whatever plexes we don’t have, we don’t really have much of that. So you’re looking at two threes, fours and fives, really what we have.

Yok Re [00:04:35]:
But you know, the three bedrooms being kind of the most prevalent.

Luke Carl [00:04:38]:
Okay, Lexus, what did you end up buying and how was that decision made? Was it based purely on the, the, you like the cabinet yourself or were you looking in certain pockets or how did that go down?

Lexis Hanson [00:04:50]:
Yeah, great question. I was largely looking for that more like modern contemporary chalet style type of build and so that’s how we kind of honed in on what we were looking for. The two properties that I have at Blue Ridge, we purchased I guess like a year and a half ago, year ago. And so this was, you know, peak demand before interest rates took the, the turn that they, they have been. And so to be honest, like, we didn’t have the wealth of choice that you have nowadays. Right. But we got very lucky with the two builds that we have. One of them is three build three and a half bath and then the other is four bed, four bath.

Luke Carl [00:05:25]:
And they were both new.

Lexis Hanson [00:05:26]:
Yep.

Luke Carl [00:05:26]:
Are they in the same general area or are they a little bit further from each other?

Lexis Hanson [00:05:29]:
A little further. So one is in Appworth out west a little bit. And yawk, you can help contextualize this if you want, but that’s that one. And then the other one is in mineral bluff about 12 minutes from town.

Yok Re [00:05:40]:
Both. And she bought two kind of like you said, the contemporary style, you know, that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But I call it kind of looks like that, that modern ski lodge out west, you know, with the, you know, the single slanted roof, you know, the real mega cool, you know, looks like something out of a magazine. You know, she owns two beautiful properties.

Luke Carl [00:05:59]:
Yeah, there are a lot of. Well, at least seems to me like the most of the newer properties in your market, they do look like they could be in Montana. You know that.

Yok Re [00:06:09]:
That’s right. And I think that’s what attracts a lot of people. I mean, I tell everybody, if you want to find yourself in the 90th percentile, you know, that’s where you’re going to have to be. You know, that that’s a lot of these people, you know, that are, you know, a lot of the consumers that are coming from metro Atlanta, you know, a lot of young affluent families. And when they’re shopping around, man, they want, they want new, they want sexy and that’s, you know, that’s it. It’s those contemporary style cabins right now that are kind of the pinnacle of, of ownership. Ten years from now. Is that going to still be the style? I don’t know.

Yok Re [00:06:42]:
But I can tell you this, with all the custom windows, the light, it is what everybody wants. And they do tend to make a premium over everything else.

Luke Carl [00:06:49]:
And the older ones, are they going to be less expensive if. I mean, obviously it depends on the amount of rehab. But is there a price difference in something older?

Yok Re [00:06:57]:
There can be. There certainly can be. And not necessarily vage. Right. It has More to stylistically. So even some of the new, you know, newer builds, some of them, they’re kind of building them in the. I want, I don’t want to call them the old style, but they’re kind of have that rough un. Flat sided lumber, you know, on the side where they kind of, they have, they’re built like the newer ones, but they don’t have all the custom windows and they, they kind of have more of a traditional shape.

Yok Re [00:07:23]:
But the exterior covering of it may look a little more old school than new school. Are they building the old, you know, the, what are they calling the. The D log and the, you know, the, the round log exterior. I don’t see a ton of that. I see maybe some price point stuff being built like that. But for the most part right now everybody’s doing the flat, you know, the rough un. You know, flat sided lumber on the side for the most part is where everybody’s going right now. The contemporary style has most.

Yok Re [00:07:51]:
Mostly to do, I say with the, with the interior, with all the custom windows inside to let all that light where you do feel like you’re kind of, you know, in a ski lodge to me is what, is what I, what I think of when I see these cabins.

Luke Carl [00:08:03]:
Alexis, do you find that since both of yours are this newer style that you have an advantage over your enemies? How much? I guess. How much are you paying much attention to your enemies and are you doing better than they are?

Lexis Hanson [00:08:15]:
I’d like to say I overanalyze all the data and have all these spreadsheets and things, but we’ve been staying pretty booked. So I don’t really have a huge need to go out there and do all of this enemy analysis at least right now. But we are seeing quite booked, I will say the four bed property that was at a $1.1 million purchase price. And then the second was. Y’ all keep me honest. I think that was that 700 or 699 in terms of ROI. That 699 property has paid off much better. I think once people have a certain baseline of nice, then they’re happy with it.

Lexis Hanson [00:08:50]:
Like and then at that point it’s just bedroom counts. But that property has really been a huge cash cow for us even in the last like six months, October through the end of the year, we’re almost 100% booked.

Luke Carl [00:09:03]:
Well, listen, I don’t want to think anybody start thinking this is some kind of paid advertisement because that was an amazing. Just made everything look wonderful for, for us here at the short term. Shop. But what do you think that is? Because, I mean, there are folks that are, you know, maybe not doing as well as you in this market. It’s not like a, you know, low hanging fruit type of a market. You do need to put in some effort. What do you think is setting your properties apart?

Lexis Hanson [00:09:28]:
I think it’s really knowing your customer, knowing who you’re catering to and building the house around that. So our larger house, right, we, it’s, it’s a little bit further away from town. It’s about a 20, 25 minute drive, something like that. And the drive up is not super ideal. It’s got a really street, steep driveway going up to it. And I say all that to say like once people get there, sometimes they want to hunker down. And so we really doubled down on making the house part of the experience. We’ve got one gigabit WI fi there on fiber, so people can work from there pretty easily if they’re traveling through.

Lexis Hanson [00:10:00]:
Or it’s a family that’s staying for an extended time and mom or dad wants to work. We have things like a peloton there which does get.

Luke Carl [00:10:08]:
You have a peloton. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay. Because I desperately want to put a peloton tread in one of mine.

Lexis Hanson [00:10:16]:
Oh, nice.

Luke Carl [00:10:16]:
I just have it because I’m a huge, I’m a big runner and, and I’ve got a, I’ve got a house. Our, our main house in East Tennessee, which we go to often. The running there is just kind of stinks, you know?

Lexis Hanson [00:10:27]:
Yeah.

Luke Carl [00:10:28]:
I mean it’s. There are actually really good pockets. I don’t want to. If you’re a runner, I’m not saying don’t go to East Tennessee, there are some fantastic areas, but I got to drive to them and I have young kids and I don’t usually have the extra 20 minutes worth of driving in the morning to, to, to spend. So I’ve kicked that around. So tell me about the peloton. I guess give me your peloton system. I’m sure you’ve got some sort of system.

Luke Carl [00:10:53]:
And how do you, how do you, how does it function with the guests?

Lexis Hanson [00:10:56]:
Yeah, I, I pay for the like monthly digital fee for it, which I don’t remember right now, but I think it’s 40 bucks a month or something. And I, you know, a little label tape, I put the username and password on that just in case people sign out or try to go into their own account. So it’s always available if people want to log in. And use it. And then on the other side, I can go back and check how much people are actually using it, which tends to be about eight to ten times a month. And I like checking the data and actually looking at it there because people may or may not tell you that they’re booking the place for the peloton. Right. You have to actually go in and see if it’s being used.

Lexis Hanson [00:11:30]:
And that’s probably a driving factor for some people that if they’re going to spend a week there, they want to be able to get exercise, move around and be active a lot of times.

Luke Carl [00:11:38]:
Eight to ten times a month. Yeah, I’m shocked by that. I. I have, I have yoga mats and little dumbbells, you know, just like, you know, like a 5, 10 pound dumbbells. In all of my houses, the last two of my houses that I was in most recently, the yoga mat still has the plastic wrap on it. Nobody really at all, which I’m shocked by that as well, because I, I do yoga every morning. I have to. I mean, I’m getting up there, you know, the gray hair is coming in.

Luke Carl [00:12:09]:
And if I don’t do yoga, I mean even just like four or five minutes, you know, because the kid, the hate crazy hectic with the kids and everything, I don’t, I can’t do a whole class generally, but five minutes or I just, just do not feel like a human. And so I went out and I. Actually, what it was was we stayed in it. We stayed in a vacation home and it was in Colorado. It was a little townhouse and they had a yoga mat. And I was like, this is the greatest thing. And then actually the house was a kind of a dump. It was really not that nice.

Luke Carl [00:12:39]:
I don’t know how she picked it. Avery, the boss picked it. And. But in the corner there it was, there’s a yoga mat. I’m like, this is amazing. And my, my kids do yoga with me too, in the morning and, and crawl all over me and they have their own mats. But anyway, that’s good to hear. I’m gonna look into that.

Luke Carl [00:12:55]:
Do you think the treadmill would be as successful as the bike? Do you have any thoughts there? I’m assuming.

Lexis Hanson [00:13:00]:
I mean, I would love, I would love a treadmill. This one, this one’s the bike. The only thing I would think about, like, is liability and making sure you’re protected there. And maybe this is in my head. I feel like the treadmill might be a little riskier. The stationary bike, like it’s, it’s A little bit harder to hurt yourself on that, I think. But I love treadmills. I love fancy treadmills.

Lexis Hanson [00:13:20]:
There’s, there’s a difference between the, the Rolls Royce. Royce of treadmills versus your average Walmart pickup.

Luke Carl [00:13:25]:
Oh, 1,000%. Yeah. We’re Peloton fans. I mean, and I, I’ve. We lived. I lived in New York City for a really long time and we had Soul Cycle, which was like the big, the first big, big spin studio. And then of course there’s all these franchises now. But.

Luke Carl [00:13:42]:
Huge fan, huge fan. Do you have. And again, I don’t want to get into legal territory here and we’re way off topic, which is fine. Do you have some sort of insurance or something for the bike?

Lexis Hanson [00:13:54]:
We just have general umbrella across the properties, so umbrella liability that covers us through all of them. And of course, final agreement.

Luke Carl [00:14:01]:
Do they sign something?

Lexis Hanson [00:14:03]:
Yep, yep. We have rental agreements as well.

Luke Carl [00:14:04]:
Oh, it’s in the rental agreement. Okay.

Lexis Hanson [00:14:06]:
Yep. Yeah.

Yok Re [00:14:07]:
All right.

Luke Carl [00:14:07]:
No legal advice.

Lexis Hanson [00:14:09]:
Yes, no legal advice. It’s, you know, it’s up to everybody what their level of comfort is and even the exercise equipment. Right. I don’t, I don’t think it’s something for everybody, but for the people that really want it and choose it, I think it does stand out. There’s even, I mean, you know how peloton people can be. They. There’s a whole website of people looking for short term rentals that specifically have pelotons, and I got on that. So if you go with the word of advice.

Luke Carl [00:14:33]:
Yeah, you’ve got me. I mean, I’m, I’m usually actually kind of a less is more guy. I, you know, you get a lot of these houses today that they’re just like so many freaking amenities. It’s like, where does this, where is this going to stop? Yeah, but you did get me excited about this. I could get on board with this. At least the ones that I go to the most often. That would be really cool. So anyway, where the hell.

Luke Carl [00:14:55]:
Where were we?

Yok Re [00:14:57]:
Luke, I think the moral of the story is pretty simple here. You know, the Blue Ridge Market, like I said, we’ve only got 2200 cabins to rent and where you can carve yourself out and create some uniqueness. I mean, that’s where you’re going to make your money. You know, that’s where you go from the 50th percentile to the 75th percentile. It is, you know, again, it’s, it’s just that extra 1% of effort or amenities, having something unique is going to push you over the top. Don’t have a ton of competition here, you know, in terms of, of amenities. So it really is a place where if you put in that extra care and effort like Lexus did, I mean when she was, when we were shopping for houses, you know, we were pretty deliberate. She wanted something that was A going to be turnkey and B, stand out from the crowd.

Yok Re [00:15:42]:
And she did that, you know. And you know, we talked about it earlier about the grandma’s big brown cabin is not what she bought. She bought the opposite of that. And you know, if you want to, if you want to, want to make that money that everybody else isn’t doing, you better own something that everybody else doesn’t own.

Luke Carl [00:16:00]:
This isn’t an area where there’s, I mean I know there’s the one down by Ella J. But are there like short term rental specific neighborhoods with amenities in the neighborhood?

Yok Re [00:16:09]:
Not at all. We really don’t have that, you know, no real swim, tennis or anything like that. And even, even the Coosawadi, which is that Coosawadi River Resort, which is down in Ellajay, they don’t really. It’s short term rental friendly. But even their amenities, they don’t make it easy for guests to be in, quite frankly. You get a punch card with six or eight visits to the pool per year. So that means a family of eight could go once a year and that’s it. Like that’s period the end.

Yok Re [00:16:37]:
Then you have to pay for another card. So they really kind of keep that for homeowners. But to be honest with you, nobody’s. It’s not like Florida or you know, some of these other places where they’re renting a place for a swimming pool. We’ve got very few cabins that have them, very few tennis courts, anything like that. So it’s not really, you know, not really a thing here.

Luke Carl [00:16:58]:
Okay, that was going to be my next question. Are there any swimming pools? And it sounds like pretty pretty much no, man.

Yok Re [00:17:04]:
I know one guy that has one in mountaintops and my understanding is in 2020, 2021, he made $400,000 a year off a six bedroom. It’s five bedroom plus a, plus a pool house. And he paid for his cabin in two and a half years. Purchase price of 1.1 million.

Luke Carl [00:17:23]:
So why wouldn’t I just put in a pool?

Yok Re [00:17:26]:
You can, you can. I mean, you know, it’s definitely. I have sold a house with a pool. I think it was an eight bedroom. We don’t have a lot of them, it could definitely separate yourself, but it’s kind of hard to do, right? You buy a house, you’ve got geological issues to build. You know, this one, they were very deliberate when they built this house. It has an infinity edge pool kind of going off the, the mountain. You know, it’s, it’s, you know, it looks like something and you know, better homes and gardens.

Yok Re [00:17:51]:
But if you can do it, it’s a great place to do it. You will be in the 1 percentile. 1, 1% of 1%, probably.

Luke Carl [00:17:59]:
Got it, got it.

Yok Re [00:18:00]:
But again, not a, not an expectation. Okay. For when I want, I want that to be clear when people come up here, a swim pool is not an expectation of runners.

Luke Carl [00:18:10]:
Well, and listen, I probably shouldn’t say this. I have a few pools and they’re pain in the ass. I mean, they do, they just are. You know, I like them, I’m glad I have them because the kids really love them when we go, but man, they are a lot of work. What about location here, Alexis? You. You mentioned one of yours has a big windy road. Is that normal? And, and has it affected your rentals?

Lexis Hanson [00:18:33]:
Good question. I think for, for that house in particular, I lead with telling people exactly like it is. Right. So I state the reality on the listing description itself. So maybe some people filter out then and there, but I say that, you know, in good weather, like a sedan makes it just perfectly and that helps people understand the situation. But yeah, it might have an impact. The other house that. The three bed in Mineral Bluff, it’s an easy drive.

Lexis Hanson [00:19:00]:
It’s a couple minutes off the main road, fully paved up till the last little bit, and they have to go up a couple hundred feet that, you know, there’s no scary drop offs or anything like that. So that one’s pretty straightforward. Yak. You can probably speak to like the distribution of scary drives versus, versus, not.

Luke Carl [00:19:15]:
But yeah, yeah, let’s hear about that. How is there a percentage of nasty.

Yok Re [00:19:19]:
Drives or very few, to be honest with you. And it’s hard for me to say because, you know, I can whip my Subaru around anywhere in the mountains, right? Like, I bought my vehicle specific for being a realtor in Blue Ridge, you know, to do my job. But I do have to kind of, you know, I pretend I’m Florida man. You know, if, if I’m, if I’m Mama Bear coming up from Florida, am I going to appreciate this drive? And I, it’s hard for me to kind of. Sometimes I probably undersell or oversell the difficulty of a Drive, because the last thing I want is a client showing up and going, holy crap, this is scary. But to be honest with you, I don’t think even Lexus will say hers. That’s kind of all the one in Epworth. It’s not a scary drive at all.

Yok Re [00:20:03]:
I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s flat. And matter of fact, your cabin is at the bottom of the neighborhood, so. And Luke, I’m going to put air quotes on neighborhood. There’s what, nine houses there? Eight.

Lexis Hanson [00:20:13]:
Yeah.

Yok Re [00:20:14]:
Okay, so that’s. We’re calling that a neighborhood. Hers is the first one in, so it’s kind of at the bottom of the hill. But again, it’s a, it’s a flat drive, but you just go down this little, you know, road on the side of a cow pasture. Literally what it is, the only time it gets scary is when you got, you know, oncoming traffic. And some of the locals can, you know, they don’t tend to share the road as well as you would like, but. Different conversation. But now for the most part, you know, I tell everybody we’re going to find you a property that you can, you can get in there in your Honda Civic or your loaded down Honda Odyssey.

Luke Carl [00:20:49]:
Okay? And again, locals, people that are familiar with mountains, you get used to it. Are there any condos in the area?

Yok Re [00:20:57]:
No, we really don’t, we really don’t have any multiplexes or anything like that. So here again, it’s two, three fours and five bedrooms. That’s really going to be the bread and butter.

Luke Carl [00:21:07]:
No townhomes either?

Yok Re [00:21:08]:
No, I mean, there’s some in the city, but you can’t rent them.

Luke Carl [00:21:10]:
Got it. Speaking of, are there HOAs and are they, are there ones that you can’t rent in? Yes.

Yok Re [00:21:16]:
So yes, and yes, there are HOAs. Matter of fact, most of the properties you’re going to find are going to be in an hoa. And I tell everybody, you know, in Florida, hoa is like a dirty word, but here, quite frankly, I know nobody wants to pay the money, but they maintain the roads for you and they maintain, they make sure you have water. You know, two things that are absolutely critical when you’re owning a cabin. You need, you know, you can’t. You know, I tell people that the HOA is designed for a few reasons. Number one is to make sure everybody, you know, you kind of pass the hat to make sure the well is running, you know, so you, you don’t have sole ownership and the sole responsibility of a well. It makes your life a lot Easier.

Yok Re [00:21:57]:
It also same thing with, you know, if you have to, if you have a gravel road, you know, it’s part of, you know, pass the hat or the, for the maintenance and, and grading of the road. And the third thing is to make sure your little community or your little neighborhood remains what it is, right? You don’t want, you don’t want the trailer hood popping up behind you. So, you know, they do have architectural control. They’re going to make sure that people don’t paint their cabin purple, but they’re also going to make sure that, you know, the lot in front of you doesn’t turn into an RV park either. So they’re all there for good reasons.

Luke Carl [00:22:29]:
You mentioned water. Well water, pretty common or city water.

Yok Re [00:22:33]:
Yeah, yeah, 99% of it’s. Well, you know, some of the. Tom, I’m starting to see some more community water heading, you know, going into Morganton, going up toward McKaysville. Some of the stuff just off the highway, especially on the east side of the road, they’re starting to get some community water in there. Honestly, I think, you know, if, you know, you change your filters out in your, in your system. In my opinion, our well water tastes better than the community water. You know, I personally have not had bad experiences. I’ve had bad experience.

Yok Re [00:23:08]:
I’ve had experiences with a bad well. But on the whole, the water, if your filtration works right, you got a pressure tank and the water gets circulated every so often, you shouldn’t have too big of a problem. But I think our, the community water, the county water is pretty, you know, but you do kind of have a little more reliability, I guess, just to.

Luke Carl [00:23:29]:
Speak on that subject a little bit, because a lot of folks aren’t familiar with well water and I’ve only got, I think three wells right now, which is crazy. I’ve had way more than that in years past. But you know, if I had to pick, like, if I had the exact same house side by side well water or city water, it would be a difficult decision. It would because I kind of, I think I would lean towards the well just slightly that way I’m in control. Mother Nature’s in control, obviously. But man, those water bills, you know, they can get annoying sometimes too. And then, But I don’t know, it’s kind of a, it’s a weird trade off where you, if you replace your filters, get everything where it needs to be and you have a nice well pump, you generally don’t have to think about it for, I mean, could be five, 10 years, you know, hopefully, knock on wood, but that water bill is going to come in every month, you.

Lexis Hanson [00:24:16]:
Know, so that’s 100 water bill in Pigeon Forge, so.

Luke Carl [00:24:20]:
Oh, 600. You know what. Why? Was there a leak?

Lexis Hanson [00:24:24]:
Yep. Toilet running. A couple toilets running, actually. And I didn’t know. So I’ve got like the. In. In Pigeon Forge, they have like a water monitoring thing that you can do online. So I got that all set up.

Lexis Hanson [00:24:36]:
But of course, that was after the fact, after the water had run, so.

Luke Carl [00:24:41]:
Yeah, but they’re still. They only call you until you’ve used like 20,000 gallons, you know.

Lexis Hanson [00:24:45]:
Yeah, exactly. And at that point it’s, It’s a little too late.

Yok Re [00:24:47]:
So.

Luke Carl [00:24:48]:
Yeah, I actually had that same thing happen to me. One of my houses. Not as bad as that. It was 200 bucks. Is that how. Not. It’s not a rental. It’s.

Luke Carl [00:24:55]:
It’s. We have a house in the woods that we take the kids occasionally, and I got a $200 water bill. I’m like, there’s. There’s manybody here in a month and a half. What the. What is this? And so they found, you know, there was something running and, And I’m actually looking into a monitor now. They, they. There’s.

Luke Carl [00:25:14]:
On Amazon, there’s several options. Kohler makes one that’ll actually even turn your water off to the home automatically. Well, you can push a button and it’ll turn it off. You have to have it worked into the plumbing. So you definitely going to want to call a licensed plumber to do that one. Or there’s another one that, give me a second, I’ll think of the name. It just straps to your meter. Now this.

Luke Carl [00:25:34]:
You’d have to have a meter. So if you got a well, like, well, what we were talking about before, again, but the well water is not going to cost you anyway. That’s all. Yeah, and a word there.

Yok Re [00:25:44]:
Look. And again, talking about the ways, you know, again, people kind of, you know, maybe if you’re from Florida and, you know, how much HOA cost, you know, sometimes they’re, you know, three to eight, you know, three to nine hundred dollars a month for a lot of these places and even more here, you’re usually talking between three and nine hundred dollars a year. So I don’t want people to think like this is a significant cost, you know.

Luke Carl [00:26:05]:
Yeah.

Yok Re [00:26:06]:
You know, again, you’re paying. You’re not paying for a monument on the front of the, you know, neighborhood. You’re not, You’re. You’re paying for things you use and that need to be maintained. It’s not a. It’s not a slush fund for somebody.

Luke Carl [00:26:20]:
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that back up. Yeah. So enough. And Flume. Flume is the name of that. The water meter that straps to your water sensor that straps to your meter and you know your phone will get a notification, hey, you got a leak. You know, I haven’t tried it. I’m actually looking into it right now.

Luke Carl [00:26:38]:
I’m leaning towards the Flume over the Kohler, but we are again, way, way in the weeds. Lexus, how did you discover this market in general? Are you familiar with the area? Do you have an affinity to the area?

Lexis Hanson [00:26:51]:
I do now, but no, I think at the time I was looking to scale up a little bit more and the Smokies was, you know, a tough market and hyper competitive and Blue Ridge was sit sitting there and a little bit more available and that’s how we started looking into it. And you know, North Georgia is a different vibe than East Tennessee.

Yok Re [00:27:09]:
Right.

Lexis Hanson [00:27:10]:
It’s two different types of people that often go to both places. And so given the type of house that I was looking for with like more modern, contemporary style at the time, there were a lot of builds coming around in Blue Ridge with that style. And the first house that I bought in Pigeon Forge, that was a 1994 build where I did go through and do all the remodel and all the work, which I recommend everybody take on at some point because you learn a lot about a lot of things doing that. But it was nice to be able to get something a little bit more turnkey in Blue Ridge. That said, turnkey doesn’t mean all the time that you can walk in and run it out the next day. Right. There’s still a lot of work to put in to customize things to set it up and get it working well with what you want to offer to your guests. And then also I’m passionate about making sure all the tech stuff works well.

Lexis Hanson [00:27:58]:
And I’ve got all my same gadgets for the same app, so I don’t have to have three different lock apps and, you know, wi fi things and all that. So.

Yok Re [00:28:05]:
Can I ask you a question, Lexus, since you had mentioned it, you have your, your house in Tennessee, your property in Tennessee, and you have the ones in. In Blue Ridge. What do you see are the big differences in the. The clientele.

Lexis Hanson [00:28:17]:
Great question. I will say the clientele in Pigeon Forge with the, the older house, just generally they’re harder to work with. Not every time the VRBO guests, they’re, they’re usually a little bit easier to please. But Airbnb paired with a slightly older home is often not a great mix. And it takes.

Luke Carl [00:28:33]:
Wow, look at you going out on a limb, throwing airbnb under the bus. Okay, all right, go ahead, Go ahead. Sorry, I didn’t say anything. Go ahead.

Lexis Hanson [00:28:41]:
No, no. I mean, Airbnb works well for me in Blue Ridge, so I’ll say that much. I think, you know, I’m oversimplifying here to a large degree, but oftentimes you’re going to get a younger crowd. With Airbnb, you’re going to get people that demand a little bit more. And so I actually, in Blue Ridge, I do a large amount through Airbnb. I’d probably say 75 to 80%. But I also try to build things in place to make my life easier. I have a demanding W2 job that takes a lot of my time.

Lexis Hanson [00:29:11]:
And so I offer like a 15% weekly discount because I like to get those week long bookings. And for a lot of people, it doesn’t matter, but I find that usually the most legwork I have with a guest is within the first 24 hours that they check in. They want to know how something works or they can’t figure out the fireplace or want to know about grocery stores. And you do all that you can to, to get those questions out of the way ahead of time. But if I can get a week long booking after day one, a lot of times I don’t hear from people until, you know, they check out or not at all.

Luke Carl [00:29:40]:
That’s common. You’re able to get seven day bookings?

Lexis Hanson [00:29:43]:
Yeah, quite a bit. Wow, that’s, that’s. I get a lot of weekenders too, so it goes both ways. Weekenders, it, it varies, but I actually do get a lot of people coming up to celebrate birthdays from Atlanta and engagements and things like that or anniversaries. And I was actually surprised by that because I’ll get, I’ll get a couple renting out either house, it’s, you know, three or four bedroom and the other rooms just sit there. But they, they want that experience of being out in the middle of the woods and the hot tub and just being able to hunker down and enjoy it and go into town, do some hikes, all the other things that come with the area.

Luke Carl [00:30:20]:
Wonderful, wonderful. It’s been a lovely conversation. Anybody have anything, any final words they want to add on, you know, what, what to look for when shopping in, in Blue Ridge, I’LL just say you.

Yok Re [00:30:31]:
Get, you get rewarded for being unique here. You know, going over, you know, going over and beyond kind of what your neighbors have. And, and, and Lexus does that, I mean, with the peloton or nice amenities in her cabin. Again, you know, it’s not, it’s not about buying that $12,000 lazy boy sectional. You know what I mean? That’s not what I’m saying. But you, at least visually, because you’re, you’re no better than your listing, right? Somebody that’s never stayed at your cabin, your property is no better than its listing. And if you’re not able to kind of create some visual impact for people when they lay their eyes on your listing, you know, it could be tough because we do have a lot of cabins that, quite frankly, they look all the same. And when you hear people in any market start using the S word, saturated, it’s simply because their cabin looks, or apartment or condo or whatever looks just like everybody else’s.

Yok Re [00:31:23]:
And I urge people, you know, when you go to buy, you know, the more creative you are in my market, you know, in the Blue Ridge market, the more money you’ll make.

Luke Carl [00:31:32]:
Wonderful, wonderful. You guys are fantastic. Couple of rock stars. I’m happy to be in the same room with you. Lexus, we really appreciate your time. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for being a client. We really can’t thank you enough for, for believing in us and, and coming and hanging for a little chat today.

Luke Carl [00:31:49]:
So on behalf of the Short Term shop and the Short Term show, we’ll see you for episode three in just a little while.