Setting up Sweet Pine: An off-grid Airbnb
Starting a short-term rental business has been a goal of mine for awhile.
Last year I relocated from the NYC suburbs to DownEast Maine, near Acadia National Park. The area is extremely beautiful and gets a whopping 4 million visitors every the summer. It’s the 5th most visited National Park.
And an obvious place to buy a vacation rental property!
I’ve done the research, I’ve read the books, I’ve saved the money and I’ve listened to a billion hours of real estate investing podcasts while folding laundry. I’m ready!
But what to buy?
Like most tourist hot spots, this area is not cheap. If I wanted to buy a small house to turn into a rental, I’d be looking at a 4–500k investment. That’s above my budget right now. I also don’t feel ethically right about taking small single family or starter houses out of the market. People live and work here, and they should be able to afford homes and not be driven out by summer folk.
I had been thinking about creative solutions: Glamping setups, camp grounds, treehouses, tiny homes, those dome things, etc.
Then I saw an Instagram post of a friend of a friend in Canada selling a vintage 1972 Airstream Land Yacht. It had some upgrades, but was mostly original and very cool. He had tried to use it as an Airbnb but his neighbor hated it and would harass his guests by blasting heavy metal music for hours at a time lol.
His guests had loved it. It was something I personally would love to stay in. Perfect. So I bought it.
Starting a business like this requires a lot of paperwork and logistics.
Phase 1 of probably 50 I have ahead of me: Wait for new passports, stress for weeks about whether our Jeep could tow the thing (it’s a hybrid and no one could tell us for sure), figure out what import paperwork we needed to bring it back to the US (did you know you can just call a guy at the department of transit directly?), get temporary travel plates at the DMV and then find a place to store it while we were moving.
It all worked out fine. The Jeep did great! The Airstream does need a bit of work and setup, but it was winter at that point and too cold to build things, so I moved on to the next step. I needed to figure out where to put it.
Follow along, because it’s time to go land shopping!
Read the entire Sweet Pine setup story here: https://medium.com/sweet-pine
