
Mountain home can be the perfect rental investment!

Deborah Korlin's Real Estate BLog
Great real estate values in the Great Smoky Mountains
Many of you are of Cherokee descent like me and it just seems right! The Cherokee called it “Land of the Blue Smoke.” Shaconage was their word for it. You pronounce it “Sha-Kon-O-Hey”! Sounds so good, right?
When thinking about the best real estate investment ever, think about purchasing a cabin with a view of the Blue Smoke. The fact that it changes all day with the weather is superb. Sometimes it disappears and then an hour later, mountains upon mountains appear like from nowhere. It’s part of the joy that visitors have when they come. It is equivalent to buying beachfront property. Of course, you may have to “wait” for the property to come along and sometimes there is a compromise on the fact the drive is a little “crazy”— but weigh it out. The drive can’t be too crazy. Maybe you should load up your grandmother and your two year old and see if any one throws up breakfast. If so, no matter how amazing the view you need to pass. But if you can put it on your list of top wants in a property that would be good.
Just as a side note, where does all that blue smoke come from? Volatile organic compounds, or VOC, is fog from vegetation. The plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. The VOC’s refract light that results in gorgeous bluish tint. They have a high vapor pressure, which means they can form vapors at room temperature. Millions of trees, bushes, and other plants create a concert of VOC’s and we have Shaconage. This is also shared with the Blue Ridge Mountain range. As I was born on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Galax, Virginia, perhaps it is in my blood. Some of you might know that Galax is an awesome mountain bush but also home of the Fiddler Festival known nationwide for great Bluegrass.
But back to great investments. So what is a view worth in dollars and cents? An appraiser will often not give value for a “view,” but in reality a lot without a mountain view might be worth $40,000. The same size lot on the top of that resort will be sold for $90,000. And rental revenue from a cabin with no view will be $70,000 a year on a typical well outfitted 3-bedroom with a view. Add another $15,000 or more of gross revenue a year. It makes me love Shaconage even more!
However, do not despair if you cannot find the mountain top view of Blue Smoke. I have several alternatives for you that will get you very close to if not on the mountain top itself. I can help you find a cabin on a water amenity, such as a creek or waterfall, or perhaps a place on a small mountain with a lake of its own! Find a cabin with a pristine private view where your guests feel like they are Adam in Eve in the garden of Eden before they had kids! When you find the private setting, place a fire pit or a garden to meditate in, or a walking path to go exploring. And last of all stack your cabin with fantastic amenities such as giant screens with a home theater, crazy arcade games, driving games, shooting games, putt- putt courses, sauna’s, and gourmet kitchens to make our local chefs envious.
Now you can own your own perfect getaway with this cozy two bedroom and two bath cabin smack dab in the center of Wears Valley! It’s located just minutes from town and offers easy access to either Townsend or the National Park. This is a mountain lover’s dream!
Well maintained and newly stained, this 2-bedroom cabin’s open floor plan will offer you the chance to relax with family and friends or enjoy a nice game of pool in the downstairs game room.
I always tell them, “Awesome, you want to become an investor! I can definitely help you with that!”
The conversation then turns to identifying what exactly they are looking for in an investment property and what their budget is for buying real estate. Once we have those parameters figured out, the next point to focus on is understanding what their long term plans are with buying real estate. Always be looking for real estate property with the expectation that you will sell at some point. This is the first, most important step in the process of buying real estate. We have found that it is fairly common for investment cabin owners to relist their cabins within five or so years. Either their investment strategies evolve leading them to buy other cabins or to invest in other ideas, or life happens and their focus on where they want to spend their investment dollars changes. So, always buy with the sale in mind. What does that mean? Well, it means there are several criteria you want to do your best to meet as you search for the best investment.
Remember, the goal in real estate investing is to make money with the property, both on the front end over the years as you rent it and on the back end when you sell it for a profit. If you’re not striving to reach those two goals, it might be someone else buying your mistake instead!
Next month, I’ll take you through some of the strategies I encourage my buyers to use once they’ve found the “diamond in the rough” so that remodeling the home increases their profits rather than cutting into it.
We are finally reaching the end of 2017 and wow, what a year it’s been! We started with one of the worst tragedies our region has seen as we watched the Smoky Mountains and parts of Gatlinburg burn just over a year ago. So many vacation and rental cabin owners were devastated by the wildfires and we worked with many of them as they made the tough decision to either build back or buy something else. As the costs of materials and construction climbed over the year due to catastrophes in other parts of the country, even people who planned to rebuild their rental cabins slowly abandoned those plans because the price of doing that was just too much.
Not everyone who owned a cabin was eager to sell, though, so what we ended up with was a market of anxious buyers without enough cabins on the market to meet the demand. And many of them had cash from their insurance checks, so they were willing and able to pay a little more than someone who was new to the idea of buying a cabin, or who was working with a lender. The result was that prices of existing cabins began to steadily climb as well. The price to buy remained lower than the price to build throughout the year, and we still haven’t reached the point where building and buying are equal in price.
The number of residential properties, including rental cabins, didn’t quite reach the number sold in 2016, but the average price of such properties increased roughly $25,000 on average and our total sales for the Great Smoky Mountains region passed $540,000,000. Nearly 1,100 of the properties sold were vacation and rental cabins. With the flurry of buyers, we saw properties on the market sell very quickly, sometimes in less than a week if they were competitively priced or in a fantastic location for the right buyer.
So what does all that mean for 2018? Well, the number of residential homes and rental cabins for sale in our market will continue to be down and the market for buyers will remain a competitive one. This is good news for sellers but not good news for buyers. If you are thinking about buying a cabin, sooner is better than later. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to find a property within the price range you want to be in and the more competition you will have for what’s available. The market price for residential property will continue to climb until it reaches a point where the cost of building is a reasonable option. The most important thing to understand in that statement is that the cost of building isn’t likely to go down in the foreseeable future, either. So as the price of building climbs, it will be that much longer before building and buying are the same price.
Finally, none of this is exact science. In fact, there’s a lot more art to it than science. But what we do know is that the vacation rental cabin market is booming and because of that, cabin owners generally aren’t likely to sell their investment properties as long as they can make more with the rental income than they can from the sale of the cabin. The other factor for owners is the tax depreciation. Until that is used up, they will keep going. (Talk to your tax attorney if you want to understand more about how tax depreciation can be beneficial to you in the vacation cabin market.) And, the increasing number of buyers, especially people who are moving their investments from the coast line to the mountains, is expected to continue. This high number of buyers will drive the market.