Our featured “Cabin of the Month” is this amazing investment cabin located in Sherwood Forest resort!

Deborah Korlin's Real Estate Blog
Great Real Estate Values In the Great Smoky Mountains
You’ll be “Steppin’ on the Clouds” in this gorgeous eight bedroom rental cabin in Wears Valley. This is a fantastic income-building investment, on track to pass $170,000 in gross rental income this year!
With its absolutely magnificent panoramic 180-degree views of the Great Smoky Mountains, you and your guests will love relaxing in front of one of the best views of the National Park any rental cabin here has to offer. Enjoy the cabin’s large fire pit or hot tub, or make your way over to the nearby resort at “The Preserve” to go swimming in the pool. Best of all, this cabin is just minutes from the National Park!
You’ll find plenty of activities inside this eight bedroom rental as well, ranging from the cabin’s fully outfitted gaming room with air hockey, foosball, and a pool table (not to mention an arcade game system). The cabin also houses a fantastic huge theater room. The cabin’s design includes handsome tongue-and-groove, gleaming large wood beams, walls of glass, and a stone fireplace centerpiece. It’s the perfect place for a relaxing vacation getaway, and can sleep up to 28 guests.
To learn more about this eight bedroom rental cabin, click here.
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.
Nestled on more than 12 acres, it is the perfect retirement home, second/vacation home, or overnight rental! With three bedrooms, two full baths and two half baths, this nearly 4,000 square foot home utilizes a large open floor plan encompassing a great room with kitchen and dining areas perfect for hosting guests and family. You will be dazzled by the gorgeous wood floors, tongue and groove throughout, custom build all brick fireplace, hand carved wood, and cathedral ceilings with wall of glass. The custom kitchen has stainless steel appliances, striking artistic solid wood bar top, granite counters, custom cabinet finishes, large pantry closet, and tree rack to display all of your mugs! Enjoy your morning coffee in the dining area while taking in the views or take a step right out onto your over-sized back deck to experience all of the peace and quiet nature has to offer. The master suite with fireplace perfect to cozy up to on those cold nights, jetted tub and shower, walk in closet, and private entry to laundry.
If you’ve ever thought about ways to increase your rental income, this topic about indoor swimming pools is for you.
One of the things we do to help our cabin owners in maximizing the return on their investment is to keep up with the trends and amenities that are the most appealing in our clients’ best rentals. And one of those things that we are finding to be successful more and more are indoor swimming pools at the cabins in our area. Indoor swimming pools are the latest and greatest amenity for investment cabins. At first glance, that sounds absolutely dreadful. However, before you say no to the idea, let’s talk about what makes indoor swimming pools so attractive to renters.
Let’s start with one of the most apparent truths about rental cabins in the Smokies: any cabin can, and does, rent throughout the summer months, our most popular time of the year for obvious reasons. Kids are out of school and people are vacationing. Dollywood is open. The National Park is holding all kinds of workshops. It’s not commonly known, but it’s true: if you have a cabin that you are renting out to vacationers, then you know you can pretty much count on people to stay at your cabin during the summer. Therefore, if you are an investor, you really never have to be too concerned with amenities like outdoor or community pools as being important to offer guests in the summer time.
The game for increasing investment revenues is to fill in the calendar. You need guests to stay at your cabin during the non-peak months in order to reach that revenue gap that really makes your investment profitable. Indoor pools make that possible. In the first few months of the year when it is cold, snowing or raining, and people just don’t want to go out to do anything, an indoor swimming pool provides hours of fun for your guests. Cabins with indoor swimming pools will attract guests who might not have even made the trip otherwise. What a cool thing for people to be able to stay in a cabin with an indoor pool!
You’re adding bookings in the winter time, bookings in September before the leaves start to change, and bookings during spring break. These are bookings you probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. It gets you past the unpredictability. In addition to the increased number of bookings, you’re also able to charge a little more for the added amenity. Owners of one to four bedroom cabins who have indoor pools are seeing gross rental income amounts of $20,000 to $30,000 more than owners of similar sized cabins without pools are earning.
How much does it cost? Well, if your cabin can be remodeled to include an indoor swimming pool, the cost to install it starts at about $30,000 and go up to $150,000. You will have some additional expenses each year, such as insurance on the pool (you’ll need to shop around for that, as not everyone offers that coverage) and there will be costs for cleaning that you can pass onto your guests. So the best news is that depending on the amount you would spend to put a pool in, it should pay for itself within just a few years. And if you ever decide to sell your cabin, the pool will increase its resale value.
Before you put an indoor swimming pool in, check with your local zoning board to make sure you are following the safety requirements. Some examples of the requirements include a door lock with a coded pad – preferably one that is high enough up the wall that small children can’t reach it, a motion alarm for the water to alert other guests if someone enters the water, and only one door that allows access to the pool room. You’ll also want to make sure you have a way of controlling the chlorine smell. Also, keep a cover that can be placed over the pool in between guests. This is very helpful in reducing moisture levels in your cabin.
One of our specialties is building cabins with indoor swimming pools, and we’ve been helping clients do that for almost five years. Some of our builders have been constructing cabins with indoor pools for even longer, so we are always here to help answer any questions you have about putting a pool in your cabin – or even building a new one to upgrade to!