An Idea Turns Into A Dream
Hey Friend! I’m taking you back to 2018 when Jason and I took our annual anniversary trip to Charleston, SC. We love Charleston so much! We honeymooned there and have tried to celebrate our anniversary there each year. We love the history, the architecture, the vibe, the shopping, the food…mmmm… the food. There’s so much to love about that coastal town. So on that trip in 2018, we decided it was time to invest in a property there. We were committed and even spent some of our anniversary trip looking up properties on Realtor.com and seeking them out. One evening we were headed to dinner, Jason called a bike taxi to take us to our restaurant. Have you ever used a bike taxi before? So fun! And the drivers are always so fun to talk to!
Anyway! We’re on the bike taxi, heading to dinner, chit-chatting with the driver and Jason mentions we would like to buy in Charleston so we have a place to stay when we go there, but also rent it out too. Thankfully, the driver told us to check into some new ordinances and restrictions that had just passed specific to short term rentals in Charleston. So, we did! We found a local realtor and started digging to make sure we were well educated on the local laws. What we learned was the only way to own a short term rental property in downtown Charleston was to live onsite full time OR the property has to be located in a commercial zone AND have a dedicated parking spot. Well, we obviously weren’t going to live on onsite full time, and do you know how hard it is to come by an apartment located in a commercial zone with a dedicated parking spot in Charleston?! Nearly impossible. We searched for a few months, but came up empty handed.
By now, we had latched onto this idea of becoming short term rental hosts and decided we were going to give it a try even if we had to change cities. So that’s what we did. We’re from Knoxville, TN and one of the largest tourist areas is right here in our backyard, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, so we thought “why not?”. We switched gears, found a realtor that specializes in that area and started our search for property in that area.
I’ll be honest. I’m the picky one. Jason was pretty open minded, but I was determined to find something that didn’t look like every other cabin in the mountains. And if you’ve been to the area, you may be familiar with some of the intense mountain roads. That was a hard pass for me. I didn’t want anything to do with scary mountain roads. We searched and searched and searched. Finally, we came across a new construction cabin that we really liked, so we made the one hour drive to check it out. It was raining that day and when we got there, we could clearly see that there were going to be some water issues with that house. It was a bummer because the house itself was perfect. So the search continued. A few weeks later a new listing popped up for a new construction house and it looked just like the one we loved but had water issues. Jason quickly dug in to determine the location of this new build and found it was in a prime location with a creek behind it. He’s not typically the risk taker in our relationship, but he was adamant we needed to quickly lock this one down. So without evening seeing the lot, we put in an offer and bought it! The contractor was great and allowed us to select most of the colors and finishes. He broke ground in late December 2018 and finished in March 2019. And by April 1, 2019, it was available for rent and it’s been booked since! We didn’t know it then, but launching that little modern style cabin was the beginning of a dream.
