Pt. 1 The Glamping Collective- A Mountaintop Retreat Near Asheville, NC with Matt Bare (Founder Story)

Are private hot tubs a profitable investment?  Is it foolish to build in a booming glamping market with high competition?  What is better a glass cabin or luxury dome?  What does it take for your glamping property to survive a hurricane?  Find out in Part 1 with Matt Bare, the founder of the Glamping Collective near Asheville, NC.  He shares how he transformed 130 acres of private mountaintop land into a five-star glamping destination. From uncompromising design to unforgettable guest experiences, Matt reveals what sets the property apart and why passion and excellence drive its success. 

Stay tuned for Part 2, where the conversation continues with deeper insights into his journey and the future of glamping.

Learn more on the Glamping Collective website or instagram.

Sponsor: Clockwork Architecture and Design Website the outdoor hospitality industry leader in site design, entitlements, permitting, and architecture. 

Email Christian Arnold at christian@clockwork-ad.com to see if their services are right for your project. 

For inquiries or feedback email Connor at schwab@sageoutdooradvisory.com

If you appreciate this free content, please consider leaving our podcast review!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:09

Welcome back to another episode of the Unique Hospitality Podcast. Today I'm joined by a very special guest. His name is Matt Bear, and he's the founder of the Glampian Collective outside of Asheville, North Carolina. He started his, he launched his glamping business. They opened for business almost three years ago. And they have 130 acres on an entire hilltop. I had a chance to actually go see the property when I was on a site visit, or at least see the entrance and see some of the units from afar. I saw them from miles off. So it's pretty special. And he has two of my favorite units in the industry, which is a glass cabin and two different dome types. Many of the units having private hot tubs with broad sweeping views across the board. And he's starting to work on his next locations. And I was just doing a little bit of research on his brand coming into this, and I saw that out of 458 Google reviews, Matt has five stars, which is probably the best I've seen from a Google review perspective of any of our guests. So super impressive. And then I was looking on his Instagram, and he's got uh 27,000 followers on his Instagram as well with some absolutely stunning content from his property. So really excited to dive in today. Matt, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33

Thanks, Connor. Good to uh good to be on.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35

Perfect. Well, maybe we'll we'll dive right in and I'll ask what sets maybe your property apart, what's special about it, or have there been any really special um customer moments out there that are you know dear to your heart?

SPEAKER_01: 1:50

Yeah, absolutely. Uh first of all, I think owning our own private mountaintop. You know, it's uh you'll see us in our marketing. We talk a lot about our mountaintop, or we'll see you on the mountain, or um, but there's just not a lot of uh of glamping locations, certainly on the east coast, that uh that own their own mountaintop. And that's such a unique, I think, experience for our guests. While we didn't build on the mountaintop, I mean the very tip top, we protected that from a conservation perspective and just didn't want to didn't want to build right there. Um we built about 300 vertical feet below the top. So we have 160 acres, so it's a large property. We built vertically about halfway up our property, and uh so still stunning views. We built at 4,000 feet our summits at about 4,300 feet. But it gives us what we one of the things we become become famous for is our Sunset Summit Trail, which is about a mile and a half hiking trail to the top of the mountain where you gain that 300-ish vertical feet. Uh, and it's just such a unique guest experience to be able to come. We have a total of five miles of on-property hiking trails as well as another 10 miles adjacent to us on a protected property that's owned by the government. Um, but to be able to come and have five miles of your own private hiking trails that takes you to your own private mountaintop experience, like it's the kind of thing you people are like, oh, I want to have a mountaintop experience. It's like, well, that's literally what we do. We give guess a mountaintop experience. And uh it's a really, really special place for so many things. I mean, that's one of my favorite things. One of my personal favorite memories is right before we opened, I had a bunch of buddies up, and we hiked to the top of the mountain at like one o'clock in the morning after working on property all day, cooked out some hamburgers, had a big bonfire. Then we hiked up to the top. He was like, Do we go to bed or do we take a bottle of bourbon and go to the top of the mountain? And uh we took the bottle of bourbon, went to the top, and we're just laying there at the top of the mountain, looking at the stars, and um, and there's this huge like star presence above. And I'm not like I don't know all the star things, but one of my buddies who's really into it was like, Matt, that's the Milky Way. Like, you can just lay here and look at the Milky Way right above your property. And I was like, that's unreal. Um, and just one of those favorite experiences, one after a long, hard journey to get through construction on the top of a mountain through COVID, um, to then be at a place where you can stay in your accommodations. You've got some of your closest friends on site helping make that final push to be guest ready, and then to have such a beautiful, clear night to just lay up there at the top of the mountain and take in the Milky Way and uh and just hear, you know, the life, the animals, the nature, all the things around you was such a surreal experience and one of those core memories uh that that's that will stick with me uh as a founder and that I hope sticks with our guests. You know, that's really what we built the Glamping Collective for was to create a place where people could separate from it all, they could develop their own core memories, and we really tried to think through all those details to get that right, from how we developed to the things we put in the accommodations to what we built, um, to what the arrival looks like, to just really thinking through all those, all those little individual things. And I think some of my favorite guest stories wrap around that in a lot of ways. I think one of my favorite things to do when I'm on property is to just go out. We have a community fire pit area in one of our like key view spots. I mean, the entire property has stunning long-range mountain views, but we built this big flagstone patio with community area for people to come together and meet other people because that's one of my favorite things to do when I travel is meet other interesting people. And I think the most interesting people stay at places like the Glamping Collective. So we wanted to create a place for collision where guests could come together and meet each other and hear each other's stories, but then they could also go back to their own private accommodation and just be alone, be private, have their own space. Um, but if they wanted to come to that guest area. So, as I was saying, one of my favorite things to do is sit around that fire at night. Um I don't ever talk about who I am or anything. I just, you know, sit around the fire and ask people, like, you know, why are you here? How'd you hear about this place? Like, what do you think? Um, and not telling them who I am. Obviously, don't lead to leading answers. Um, but I remember one of those nights sitting there with a couple um and then looking at me and being like, oh my gosh, like we are absolutely in love with this place. Like this place has we've been here, we just I think they had just arrived that day. It was their first night, and they were like, it just totally like the sense of calm and peace that is here just totally came upon us. We we checked into our dome, everything was perfectly clean, perfectly placed. We settled our luggage into where it needed to go. We went on a hike, we went into town, had dinner, and now we're sitting around this bonfire, and it's just the most amazing experience. And I was like, man, I'm I I had a similar experience. Like everything's just just right, it's just it is what it needs to be. And um, and I was like, Well, why are you here? Like, what brought you out? And they said, Well, we have a child with special needs who's 18 years old, and in the last 18 years of our marriage, we have never had a night away. I don't choke it up just talking about it, but it's like, man, just that for 18 years they haven't had that. And they finally met somebody in their church who could stay with their child, their now adult child, overnight for them to be able to get a night away. But at the same point, like that's the responsibility that we have as operators is those people's first night away in 18 years is at the Glamping Collective, and that's the responsibility that I talked to our team about. They're like, guys, this is this is this is real. Like, these people have waited for this moment. We've got to get it right. Everything has to be spot on the moment they arrive because that's not a unique story, like that's their story, and it's the next person's story, and the next person's story, and we might welcome a hundred guests a week, but for that one guest, it's their one time, and we've got to be perfect for that one guest.

SPEAKER_02: 7:55

Wow, I love it. Um what uh passion and dedication. And yeah, just a special thing for your for your guests to be able to experience and have have the stresses of life wash away and and get to be present and and relax. So um thank you for sharing. And how how was it that you what were you doing before you got into you know the glamping space?

SPEAKER_01: 8:19

Yeah, so I spent uh yeah, sorry for getting emotional there, didn't see that one coming. No, you couldn't. When you care, you care. Um, I spent the last uh pre-opening the glamping collective, it's been about the last 12 years building out a digital marketing agency. Took us a little bit to figure out who we were and find our identity as an agency, but for about the last probably eight years of that 12 focused exclusively into the hospitality space. So we worked with hotels, resorts, vacation rentals, bed and breakfasts, other glamping properties, and we were their kind of digital marketing agency, did everything from identify for the brand identity to the website, their search engine presence, manage their social media, manage their content strategy, search engine strategy, like everything digital we did. And we told our clients uh it was our job to put heads in beds. Like you build the beds, we'll put the heads in the beds. Like that is soup to nuts, you know, what we do and or what we did. Uh the company still exists, going strong today, but um, but obviously I've I've stepped on to other things. But it was such a strong opportunity, such a strong background to set me into a position to be able to do this uh because I was able to learn from the best of the best. You know, we were certainly not an inexpensive provider, um, but as such, being on the higher end of the space, we worked with some of the best of the best. And um many of those are still friends today, was literally before getting on here, was on the phone call with one of my former clients planning a trip to uh to get together and and um and and go see some different sites. But uh many of those became friends and um and have stayed friends for a long, long time. But it's it really, I feel like, set us up to be in a good place because from the beginning of looking for land to developing it, we I was always looking at it as a marketer. I was always saying, what is the guest going to see? How do I want the guest to experience this? How do I want the guests to picture this on Instagram, or how do I want them to interact, or what language do we need to be using as we're describing, you know, XYZ to be able to really resonate with our guests? So that background, I think for me, was just uh such a key point. I know a lot of people have gone the other way. They've gone from being on the operator side to being on the technology side or the software side or the marketing side. Um, but for my journey, it was going the other direction. And it was certainly a transitional period from managing some short-term rentals in Charleston, which is where I call home while running my marketing agency, to investing in commercial real estate and then you know, ultimately into uh exiting my agency and getting into full-time lamping development. Um, but it's been uh it's been exciting, it's been a labor of love for sure. I I can't imagine doing anything else. A lot of my friends are like, man, there's a lot better ways to make money than lamping. Like, what are you doing? And I'm like, there are, but there is nothing else I can think of doing other than this for the same reason I got choked up a few minutes ago because um, you know, yes, I could write software and I could start another software company or I could stay in commercial real estate and do that, but it's just um those uh both those industries may make more money, I don't know. Um, but it's not uh it's not the same. Like it's not a the what you give to people um and give back to people is not the same as what I feel like we get to give back as a glamping industry um for people.

SPEAKER_02: 11:40

Very cool. You know, it's so interesting because I as I've been in the industry longer, and especially with the podcast and just speaking with top operators, I've really started to realize that there's there's basically two halves to each glamping business, and that is, you know, once you're up once you're open, you know, you have obviously your operations and making sure everything on site is is good and important. And obviously that's huge and critical, but almost the entire other half of the business, if you're just thinking about effort and man hours and resources, is really you know what would historically be called sales, but in the glamping space, that's basically digital marketing uh in this day and age, and it's just so important, and there's such an immense amount to know now with all the different specializations, um, which maybe we'll get into in a second. But I would love to hear what do you what a valuable skill set and perspective to have had leading into this. So it's not a surprise how you've gotten such good success becoming uh such a known commodity in the marketplace and had so much traction with customers. But when you were, when you had all these different customers in boutique hospitality, what did you notice? What did you take away from that that was the key threads of success where it was like, oh, if if if you you were looking at your customers who you were doing digital marketing for in hospitality, what were the things that where people were being successful? What were they doing?

SPEAKER_01: 13:09

Yeah, there were there were a couple um big ones I would say that that stick out to me looking back at that. So I exited my agency right before COVID in in 2020. Um so a lot has shifted since then, as we all know. But um, but there were a couple things. One is uh, and this was kind of, you know, you think back where we were as an industry five years ago, but some of the ones we saw seeing the greatest success, both from a financial perspective but also social media perspective, were really the ones who were starting to get architecturally interesting. So they were breaking out of the box of what everyone expected, um, whether that was a BB or a vacation rental or a glamping project, probably less so on our hotel side of the business, but maybe on the boutique hotel side of the business. Um, and that architecturally interesting was which is now a mainstay, right? Like that's no surprise to anybody, everybody in the glamping space knows it. But being architecturally interesting was amazing what that could do for a social media perspective. Um, and then the other one, and this one's probably maybe feels a bit more obvious, although that one feels obvious too once you say it out loud, but it's just a commitment to excellence. Like that there's just no question about how we do things. Um, there's no question about the commitment that we have to our product, to our customer, to everything. I remember being, and this is a much bigger story, and I don't even know that this story is true, but it's a story I was told. Um, but I went to a wedding in the uh Branson, Missouri area, I think is where it is. Somebody might fact-check that, but um, to Johnny Morris as a resort out there. And I remember somebody telling me when we were out there, uh, the bride of the wedding worked for Johnny, and um and that the project was super delayed. And and people, some people were upset, some people were like, oh, that's just how Johnny does things. Like, well, tell me more about that. Like, what do you mean that's just how Johnny does things? That like things are delayed, because you think as a highly successful businessman, founder of Bass Pro, and I think Field and Stream maybe, um, but uh that he wouldn't want things to be delayed. And then the the story was well, this entrance that we're driving down right now used to be over there, and he paid to have the entrance put in. The first time he drove down it, he hated it and he completely moved the entrance so the approach to the property would be in a different location. And I didn't know then what that cost. Now I have a little bit of an idea after building in a mile and a half of mountaintop roads. I have a little bit better appreciation for how much road building costs, but um but man, that commitment to excellence is what I took away from that. And that's one of the things I talked to our team about when I had my agency. It's one of the things I talk to our team about now. Um, there's so many stories where you can say, we did this and it's okay, but it's not great. Are we gonna spend the money to redo it and make it great? Or are we gonna just send it as okay? Um, and one of the stories of the glamping collective, we uh, and one lesson that I learned early on, um, we so we have 26 units, so we have a lot of the same units, unlike some glamping spots where every unit is its own unique experience, its own unique thing. You know, we have 12 of this dome, and we have 10 of the glass cabins, and we have five of the XL domes. And of course, they're all a little unique because of their place on the mountain. Um, but generally speaking, they're they're similar. Uh and I we built our first eight domes and they grouted the showers and them all in the same day. And I wasn't there that day. And by the time the grout went in, I hated it. Uh, and we used uh a chevron or excuse me, herringbone pattern, so it was a little complex and there was a lot of tile, and um, and I saw it for the first time, and I told our contractor, I was like, I hate this. And he's like, Well, like it is what it is, like it's done. And I was like, nothing is what it is, like everything can be changed. And he's like, Not that. Like, I mean, and I was like, no, that that can be. And he's like, You're crazy. And I'm like, no, we're gonna grind all of the grout out of these showers, and we're not talking straight lines, like we're talking like tons of man hours with a Dremel and just getting after these teeny tiny, like 16th of an inch grout lines, because personally I hate grout lines, so we used the smallest possible grout line to begin with, and I still hated it. Um, but we did. We ground out the grout of every single shower and we regrouted it. And I don't even know how much that cost me, um, but it cost a lot. But the point was if I hate this now, I'm gonna hate this forever. And if our guest hates it, that's an even bigger problem. And that's kind of a small example, uh, much smaller than moving an entrance. Um, but uh but the kind of commitment to excellence I think we have to have as operators to say, like, this is what we do, guys. Like it has to be perfect for the guest. And if if it's not right, we're gonna make it right. Um, even if it means we spend$10,000 regrouting these showers, like or whatever. Um, we're just gonna do it right.

SPEAKER_02: 18:02

Yeah. Wow. It kind of reminds me of of almost a Steve Jobs attitude where like even the inside of the phone that the customer doesn't see needs to be beautiful and aesthetic because we see that, you know, as the company, and you know, yeah, that same commitment to excellence. Um, and man, well, now I feel like I really need to see your showers and see what they look like now.

SPEAKER_01: 18:23

The point is you don't notice what they look like, uh, I guess, because it doesn't look wrong. It looks right. Um but uh and as somebody else would say it looks wrong now, I'm sure, because we all have our own design styles, but um, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 18:36

So uh so on the topic of digital marketing, how I'm really curious how AI is going to change. I'm just I'm so curious because the digital marketing landscape is changing so much, and with social media and how much content is automated and just how much content in general there is, and now content creation is kind of limitless with AI and even also SEO, and how you know traditionally people would search for glamping probably on Google, but maybe now they might type into Chat GBT what's the coolest glamping experience in North Carolina and and how does that change searchability? So I guess the question is how how is AI changing the the digital landscape? What are you investing in, or what where do you see the the future trends to stay on pace with that?

SPEAKER_01: 19:30

Yeah, it's a great question, and I don't have all the answers other than that. We all know AI is changing everything. Um one of our projects literally, I just got an email an hour ago, um, that here's our new wedding marketing plan to attract weddings to the property that AI did for us. And it's like, man, I would have worked 40 hours on this, you know, two years ago, and now my director of sales is just cranking it out with a quick chat GPT prompt. Um, so I haven't reviewed that. I don't know how good that is, but um, but it's it's a baseline, right? And then that's huge. Like that's that's uh a game changer in a lot of ways. The content piece, I mean, that's tough. I I'm not personally a huge fan of AI content, not that it's good, but or not that it's not good. Um, but I just I just I think it's hard and I don't know. I don't I haven't spent the time researching that to really be able to speak intelligently to say, like, does Google rank it the way it the same way that they rate that they would rank you know human-written content? Um my gut would say that they probably wouldn't. Um people have told me both of people have claimed to know the answer to that, and I've heard those people claim both answers, right? That they do and that they don't. Um we try to just keep um keep our content all human created at this point, which a lot of people were like, ah, you're wasting energy. And I just you know told you we created a marketing plan at least uh off of off of AI, but uh but we still have humans creating that content. I mean, I used to when I had my agency, I think our content creation team was 15 people. So I had 15 people that all they did was create website content, blog content, social media content. Um so we invested a lot of money into it, um, you know, leading up to that, had huge success, huge results as part of that. Um, but man, I can't even imagine what it would be like, you know, now running that with really one editor or two editors maybe overseeing that content creation if you could see the same results. And back when I had a uh 300 clients and a team of 15 people, I could have tested that in a heartbeat and would have if I was still running it. Um I just don't have the same resources to be able to roll out tests like that. So I don't know the answer. I know it's gonna transform a lot of things. I know um I planned a trip to Chicago a couple weeks ago. I'm going to Zion in a couple weeks from now. And both of those trips I have leaned on AI to help plan with mixed results, uh, as you would expect, of course. It's the same you get from any search, you do, you get mixed results. But so we're thinking about that. You know, we um are doing AI searches to see like, you know, things, the same things we used to look at, how is Google serving up search results for? We're looking at how are the top AI bots, you know, returning that uh returning that result. You know, if I ask ChatGPT or Gemini or um co-pilot or whoever, like, what are the best clamping spots in North Carolina? Like, are we the answer to that? And where are they sourcing their content from? Are they pulling it from blogs? Are they pulling it from uh Google reviews, which we dominate on? Are they pulling it from somewhere else? And then understanding where, what sources the different AI engines are pulling from gives us the answer to like, okay, where do we need to be investing? Do I need to be getting some influencers out here specifically who are great bloggers because co-pilots pulling blog content into the answer to that question? Um, or do I need to be, you know, double down on my my Google review strategy because Jim and I is answering that question with their own Google reviews? Um so those are the things that that we're looking at right now. Um don't have all the answers, but we're certainly staying on top of it because it is um it is a big shift in search traffic. And I think, you know, one of the I used to speak at a lot of conferences and one of the talks I would do that was most popular was my my Google crystal ball, and we would always look at search trends and where things were going and where we saw the search engines going. And now that's really AI, right, is the answer to that. But we were trying to do predictive analytics predictive analytics on where we thought Google was gonna be taking search results in the coming year to then help people get out ahead of it, but also internally to help our own search engine and content teams to get ahead of those things. Um I think we just do that, apply that same methodology to AI as far as like, all right, how do we think consumer behavior is gonna change over the next year? And if we see consumer behavior going that way, how are the uh AI engines going to change to meet that behavior? And I think a big piece of that is we're going to see a decrease in search traffic, we're gonna see a decrease in organic traffic coming into our websites as glamping operators, probably see a decrease in the available clicks if you're doing Google paid advertising or Bing Paid Advertising, probably see a decrease in search share that's out there is available. So you need to rethink, you know, if you're getting a lot of business from organic SEO or from paid search engine marketing or meta, you know, uh read meta search, rethinking kind of okay, what's that marketing mix going to be looking like and how do we shift to make sure we're prepared for that?

SPEAKER_02: 24:36

Yeah, that's that's super interesting. And whenever I talk about marketing and advertising, I I always try to encourage people to think of you know, what are the things that you're investing in in marketing versus just spending and how those two can be different. And you know, historically speaking, I think uh blogs and backlinks and SEO and like real substantive online content that leads to traffic to your website was some of the best things you could be investing in that would live online forever, or like long-form YouTube videos, right? Once you make a great online long-form YouTube that lives on there forever and theoretically keep continues to collect views. Um, but yeah, how does that, you know, it's interesting, how does that change with AI and what's the new thing? You also mentioned um uh Google search term predictive analytics, and that's something that I've done a little bit of, but I've only scratched the surface. Did you get any in what did you do any of that sort of researching before you opened your property? And did you take anything away from you know, any nuggets from search terms that you incorporated into your you know, brand and property?

SPEAKER_01: 25:47

Yeah, I ours was pretty obvious, um, at least on the surface, uh, you know, some of the terms that we needed to be going after. So making sure we were building out our site to have pages dedicated to going after those terms that are going to be our high high performers, high producers. Um, you know, the glamping space in an individual market outside of a national park is still not all that competitive. Um, so it's pretty easy to get rankings um for those. Um anticipate in that, and that was a battle, um search engine battle, was that we were going to be up against collective retreats. So, from a brand perspective, we didn't anticipate the glamping collective. You know, in the first three, four months people were searching it. Um, we were serving up a lot of collective retreats content. Uh, and that was a challenge, just to try to overcome that. It was a challenge that got solved with time and as our brand grew, um, and it grew very quickly as we came out of the gate. But um, but didn't anticipate that one we probably should have anticipated, so probably missed the mark there. But um, but yeah, just knowing yes, the answer to your question, I think, is just they were kind of obvious to me in that stage as far as like Asheville clamping and and some of those types of things. Um, the other thing I would say where we maybe have used that more is as we have started to shift into thinking about where are we going next. Um, so we've recently announced we're going into the Chattanooga, Tennessee market, which we are super excited about. I have been a huge fan of the Chattanooga market as a consumer for a long time. I'm an outdoor enthusiast, clearly, since I work in the clamping industry. Um, but love Chattanooga as an outdoor uh town, uh, one of the top towns in the country, I think. People always say it's a top town in the southeast, but I'd put Chattanooga up against any other town. So we're really excited to be there coming into that market. Um, but it's an area as we have started thinking about, you know, second, third, fourth, fifth locations, where we're really looking at some of that search data to be able to say, like, okay, do we want to go in a market where we know there's built-in demand, um, which is like a national park market, or do we want to go into a market where we know there's demand, but maybe not as much of demand, and using some some search insights, Google insights to be able to lean into and understand, like, okay, how much search traffic is there in a particular market? And how does that traffic compare to uh the markets that we're already operating in? And how does that compare to what AirDNA is telling us or something else? So, like really trying to map out and pull those data points from um from different places. Because I would love to put a glamping spot in Charleston, South Carolina, my hometown, my backyard. It'd be nice to not have to uh you know to travel to our development sites. Um but interestingly enough, while Charleston is a massive tourism market, it is like non-existent as a glamping market. Um, that doesn't mean you can't put it on the map, right? It doesn't mean that you can't just do such a great job with your product and your brand and those other things that you're gonna blow it out of the water. But I do think it's harder. I think it's harder to come into a market like Charleston that has like zero search volume for the term Charleston glamping, whereas Asheville has really strong um search volume for Asheville glamping. Um and uh and then as we look at other markets and trying to understand that, you know, just kind of fleshing that all out to be like, okay, how much how much market share do we think is here? And then looking at, you know, how many people are in the market of you know, if there's X number of people searching, how much inventory is in the market to meet that demand, um, then how much can we capture?

SPEAKER_02: 29:27

So such a good question, and one I get asked all the time and think about a lot, and that is, you know, and I think actually Asheville is the example I've used because it's a small, it's a small town, right? And there's probably like per capita more glamping there than almost anywhere, perhaps uh with the exception of maybe Zion, um uh from a population per glamping unit volume. And but I also wonder, you know, you've you've certain areas. Has become known for certain things like Napa for wine. And I was looking at a property in Oregon wine country, which is now known almost globally for its Pinot's. And you know, there's so much winery volume there that is that a good place to be, or is that a bad place to be? If you're you know, if you're a tasting room, and it's it's interesting, particularly with Asheville, because it's like, does it just become known as a glamping destination? So it just the demand almost compounds, and people are going there to do this specific thing, so it doesn't matter that it's saturated, or does it still get difficult? And you know, is it still a real hardship that you have to go through? I guess. Do you have an opinion on that? Like if you're looking at what like if you had no properties right now and you're looking at Asheville or you're looking at Charleston, like which which direction do you think you'd go?

SPEAKER_01: 30:50

Yeah, I mean, if I had no properties right now, I would go to Asheville over Charleston. Um, just because there's built-in demand. Um, and it is so much easier to go into a market with built-in demand than it is to build demand. Um, right? I mean, that's why location, location, location is so key for real estate because you and that's why it's so expensive when there's a lot of cars driving by every day. You know, you look at any market, the real estate's more expensive in the places the cars drive by because that's built-in demand for whatever it is you're selling. And then you just have to think about is like, okay, is it willing, is it worth me paying that inflated price for that real estate versus being you know a row back or a street back from that um and losing the visibility um and but gaining the lower rent or the lower purchase price? And those are the hard questions, right? Like, should I be in that market? Might be easier than well, where should I be in that market? Should I pay for the premium to be downtown? Which for a clamping site, of course, doesn't make sense. They're probably not going to be downtown, but um, but you get what I'm saying. Like, it's just um it it's really some of the decisions are easy. Um, like, should we be in Asheville? Well, yeah, like Asheville's uh, and I say that as I realize I'm inviting you to compete with us, but like I mean, everybody I talk to in this in the industry, both glamping as well as hotels, is like, man, we want to be in Asheville. Like, if you do anything outdoor hospitality, Asheville and the on the East Coast is probably the number one market um for outdoor hospitality. So we have no, you know, no qualms about that. That's where we just have to be better than you, right? So I don't say that arrogantly, but like that's the message of that I talked to people that our I talked to our team about is it's like the moment we came out, we were the best. But the moment we came out as the best, everybody else's bar went up, and the next person that comes out is gonna now try to not beat the set person who's in second place. They're coming for us, right? Like they're coming to beat what we did. And that means as an organization, we have to be always getting better. And as I've led a lot of different organizations through my lives, and I'm a little bit off topic of your original question, but as I've led organizations, it's not about like growing or getting bigger, it's about getting better. And if we get a little bit better every day as an organization, we will be unstoppable. Because if we keep getting better, our competition can't catch up. They're aiming for a spot that's here while we're already working to go here, and they are gonna come out and come up to the market, be like, all right, we made it, we're here now, or maybe we're here, but we're already up here. So it's like, while you're trying to catch up to where we are, we're trying to get 20% better and just push past that. Um, and and those are the questions as you continue down that road for years and years, it gets harder to answer. It's like, what does it look like to get 20% better? Um, doesn't know doesn't mean we're gonna build more units, but like, what does it look like to do what we do better?

SPEAKER_02: 33:46

I think going into a saturated high demand but also high competition market, it's going to be the excellent operators that do well in that space. Uh particularly, right? Because if you're if you're operating at an excellent level, then you're capturing the most of that of that big demand. And if you're maybe struggling from an operational standpoint, that might be when it starts to get hard. Um versus, you know, maybe if you go to Charleston and you're the only game in town that's less consequential. You might not have as as much high reward, but you might not have as much downside, too, um, because of competition. How how many, how many, how is the population around Charleston? I'm not super familiar with that area.

SPEAKER_01: 34:29

It's big. I mean, it's it's a I believe it's a bigger like metropolitan area, bigger market than Asheville is. Um, and it's certainly a bigger tourism destination than Asheville is, as far as I would say, I haven't fact-checked that, but as far as like raw tourism every year that comes in, it's just like can you can you shift that from I want to stay in a four-star hotel downtown Charleston to I want to stay 20 minutes outside of Charleston at like an outdoor hospitality experience? And is that the same customer, right? Like, yeah, there's a ton of people coming to Charleston, but most people would say the the ideal clamping customer is the same national park customer, right? Which is why so many brands just follow the national park, well, they don't follow them around, they go where they already are, um, which just makes a ton of sense because it's even if the volume at a national park is lower than the volume coming to Charleston every year, it's the right volume. You know, Charleston is a lot of like boutiques and shopping and culinary and like, and that's all great. Uh, and there's overlap there, but it's not necessarily like a pure match. Whereas the outdoor enthusiast probably would, if if an outdoor enthusiast was planning a trip and you said, here's Charleston or here's Asheville, they'd probably go to Asheville because it's more it lines up with who that target market is. And understanding that and then being able to slice and dice that and say, okay, outdoor enthusiasts are our target market, but even within that, who do we want to serve, right? Because the outdoor enthusiast market is a big market. You know, there's the REI customer, and then there's like, no, that's cool, I'll just go buy my hiking boots at Walmart. Like, I don't need to spend$200 on a pair of hiking boots at REI. I can go get a$30 pair of hiking boots at Walmart. Well, for the glamping collective, like, we want the$200 hiking boot customer, not the$30 Walmart customer. And while we know both are going to come to Asheville, we don't we want to make sure we're reaching the$200 hiking boot customer and we build our whole experience around that. And everything we deliver is on brand for that person and for that experience. Um, down to like, okay, what kind of cars are they going to be driving up here? And what does that say about what our roads need to be like and all these other decisions that are made uh over the course of a design and development of a project? But but being able to really get back down to like it's not just about raw volume, it's getting into some of the nuances of that data and saying, okay, yeah, there's more people coming to Ash to Charleston than there are to Asheville. But which one's the right place for us to be? Or are they both right and we just have to approach them differently? And I think the answer is they can both be right. It's just you have to think about it differently if you're gonna create demand versus if you're going to um get in the path of existing demand.

SPEAKER_02: 37:22

Yeah, yeah, I thought I that's super interesting. I think from from my perspective and what I've learned, I think if I was getting into this five years ago, I'd 100% be going to the the Asheville's and the Grand Canyons and National Parks play. You know, now so much has happened, and that's probably where 70 to 80 percent of you know glamping units are concentrated. You know, I actually, as I've done this more and interviewed some folks in the short-term vacation rental space, that leans a little bit more Airbnb. Um, I actually really like the Charleston type markets. And the reason being, and the reason, and I'm talking about hard hard-sided units for the most part, or domes, which I consider to be hard-sided. Um, and that's mostly because of the seasonality. And that is, well, one, because of the competition, and then two, because of the seasonality. And most national parks are gonna have a really just a three to six month season for the most part, and it's really tough to make all your money and staff and spread that out only over three to six months. Whereas if you go to a place like Charleston, you know, that there are people there living there year-round, right? And those people might want a vacation or a romantic getaway in the winter six months of the year that's smaller and maybe uh still getting a little bit of the outdoor hospitality experience, but maybe less heavily recreating outside in those months, um, but still wanting a unique stay where they're feeling like they are in nature. Um, so I really like those Charleston type markets where you know the people are there year-round and it's about becoming known and the competition is low. So I think like in this day and age, I find that really interesting. And that that might be where I would look.

SPEAKER_01: 39:05

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's definitely an option. You're just then kind of trying to get in the path of that person coming and make them think about something differently. And I think this is oftentimes something people don't do well, but it's just going and asking the question. Like, just go talk to the customer, like go down to Charleston and go sit at a brewery and talk to people and be like, hey, this is what I'm thinking about. I'm guessing you're here on vacation. You think I'm crazy? Like, look at these renderings. Like, would you stay here? Now, know that like most people, because they don't want to hurt your feelings, are gonna tell you, yeah, that's amazing. I'd totally stay there. I'd give up my firstborn child to go stay there. Um, but that's like, so you gotta weigh that with a bit of a grain of salt, but like get old-fashioned boots on the ground um and just go talk to people. Like, you think you want to be in Charleston, you think you want to be in Asheville, you think you want to be in Sonoma or Zion? Like, man, you better be going there and spending some time and learning about the market and the nuances and the government and permitting, and like you you really got to dig in and know what you're signing up for.

SPEAKER_02: 40:09

It's that's so I love the old-fashioned boots on the ground ideas. I think that's super important. Actually, funny enough, like I I still do feasibility studies and site visits, and the you know, uh at Sage, we have access to the probably the best occupancy data that anybody in the industry has. But I will still go to properties and I'll try to go there at night after 9 p.m., drive through and count cars at units to make sure that what be like, hey, I need to see how how many people are sleeping here tonight and know. Be like, hey, how is this place half full? Is this a hundred percent full? Um, so that I can like really properly do my research. So you you you can never fully get rid of those just you know talking to people and being there in person. Um, and then you brought up search terms earlier, which I think is a fantastic way that I actually don't do that much in my research, but you know, to search Charleston, who is searching Charleston glamping is anyone, is that trending up or down, and like what's the volume is also a really good tool. And you said something that was really important, and that is being in the path of demand, and that's super important. And I want to clarify a slight difference because we get people all the time who want to build a really cool glamping place in the middle of nowhere or super remote, uh and there's nothing around it. And so that is a really, really dangerous place to be, and that that is definitely when you're in the build it they will come, which is um risky. Certainly, there's certainly places that can make that work, especially if you have a hilltop with stunning views, you might be able to create demand in that area, but most of the time you're not, you're gonna have to earn and pay for and find and secure every single customer, which is hard and expensive, um, versus people are coming to an area for something else and you're the solution to what they need. Um so and then when I look at an urban area, I see I see both the national park and an urban area as um built-in demand, just different, you know. Um, but going to a remote area that's by neither of those things, that's a really dangerous place to be. So just a word of caution to the listeners.

SPEAKER_01: 42:23

Yeah, and to jump in on that for a sec, if I can, that that's a great thought. And that's I appreciate you sharing that because it is a very dangerous thing to do, and you have to be exceptional to do that well. Um, and that was a question I always had at the Clampin Collective after we launched, because we went from no one knew we were coming because we did zero pre-marketing, to we opened booking five days before we actually opened on Labor Day of 2022, and we sold out Labor Day in five days and with zero advanced marketing, and then we ran into an 85% October less than a month later. And a lot of people are like, Matt, I've never seen a hospitality company launch like this. Now, I give a lot of that credit back to the marketing we were doing, and we were in the path of demand. So it was October at Asheville. You had to be an idiot not to fill your place up. Like you could be the ugliest thing in town and still fill up. But my point being, or where I was going with that, is that while I always wondered that, I wondered like, are people coming to us because we're in Asheville, or are people coming to us because we actually are exceptional and they would come to us regardless of where we were? Like you could put us in Topeka, Kansas, no offense to Topeka, and we would still crush it if Topeka had mountains. We would still crush it. Um, and I didn't know the answer to that, and it was really hard to get to the answer to that until Hurricane Helene hit. And um and while it was a really painful experience and still is a painful experience, um, it's taking time to rebound. So shout out to anybody who's planning a trip. Plan a trip to Asheville and give some love to Asheville right now because they need it. We need it, um, as we're still bouncing back economically from Helene. But what that did was all of a sudden, all the people going to Asheville disappeared because the government came out and said, don't travel here, cancel your plans, go anywhere but here, um, with like the strongest, worst messaging a government could ever have for a tourism industry. And even our Visitors Bureau or the North Carolina Visitors Bureau, whatever, um, in my opinion, and not to get political, but everybody botched it. Like we needed a hard stop for like a week to figure out where we were, but then we needed to get back to work. Um, but what that did for us was it enabled us to start drawing a line between who's here because we're in Asheville and who's here because we're exceptional. Um, and as Asheville has been on its path to rebounding from that, we're really thankful we made the investments that we did to be exceptional because that has positioned us while we are down year over year because people aren't coming to Asheville like they were, um, we're still doing way better than our competition is doing because we spent the money, we spent the time, we spent the energy to be in Asheville, get in the path of demand, but at the same time, be exceptional and be worthy of if all you do is come to our property and you never leave, and we have a lot of guests that do that. They come, they bring their supplies, and they never leave. Um, and that's great. So we can do both. We're exceptional enough to be able to be that, that bucket list, that destination property, where it doesn't matter where you drop us, we will find guests. But we also jumped into the path of demand in a great town like Asheville and are now working to be, you know, to boost our neighbors up and be a part of the community there. So while we talked about them as if they're two paths, really they can be both. Um you can do both paths, and then to a certain extent, you're protecting yourself in the event of a natural disaster or an economic disaster or something else that can set your destination behind.

SPEAKER_02: 45:57

Yeah, yeah. I'm glad to hear um, you know, the your property's been recovering since that. I'm sure that was a super difficult time. I know a lot of people got hit hard. Um, as you're bringing that up, I'm I'm realizing we're 45 minutes into this podcast recording, and and uh we didn't even like we didn't even go over the launch of your property. This has all been such good, good rabbit holes. All right, so let's maybe back up for a second. You sold you sold your digital marketing company, decided to get into the glamping space. Like, walk, walk me through that journey, how you found the property, you know, that story.

SPEAKER_01: 46:33

Yeah, yeah. Um, man, that was a crazy time. So um, so sold the company and um was staying on board for a year um to kind of transition out of the company, make the leadership transition, do all those things um that needed to happen. So I had that year to kind of you know spend some nights and weekends working on other things and dreaming about what I wanted to do next. Um, and you know, backing up from that, probably 15 years, um, my wife and I had gone to Costa Rica pre-kids on a trip, and we stayed at a little tree house B up in the mountains near uh Arenaal. I think I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, but near a volcano up there in the cloud rainforest, and absolutely loved it. And it was like, oh my gosh, like this would crush it in Asheville. It was like five tree houses in the rainforest, which technically Asheville's a rainforest. Um, and uh, man, this would crush it in Asheville. But I just had to like file it away in the dream folder because I was um that was the early days of Q4 launch, but trying to stay focused and not just jump around chasing the greatest new idea all the time. Um but it was back there, you know. So it was like, okay, so as I was doing that and thinking about man, what do I want my next to look like? Um, you know, that that dream kind of resurfaced and said, man, I would still love to do a tree house BB, tree house, you know, and obviously fast forward 15 years to 2020. Now glamping is a big thing. Um so I was like, man, I'd love to do a tree house glamping deal in Asheville and go back to that. And I looked at several other markets just to do my due diligence, but in my heart, I always knew Asheville was where we needed to be. Uh, almost bought a winery um about two hours from Asheville, um, but decided that that the winery piece was gonna be too much work on top of it. Um, and uh and and still fell in love with Asheville, so or still had the love for Asheville. Um, so that was kind of how we got to Asheville and then uh went up. Um me and a buddy went up in um I don't remember the exact month, but uh went up there to just look at land, and there was this one spot I had seen online, and it was a ton of money um being marketed, and the pictures were terrible. Um, but it was like you could kind of tell like it was in the mountains, it was not too far from downtown, it was a lot of land, it was advertised to 210 acres, and I was like, ah, and I called the agent, talked to him, and like just kind of just couldn't get any clear answers on like what it was. Like, what is it? What is it used for? It's like, well, it's a cattle farm, and I'm like, it's a cattle farm, like you're asking this price for a cattle farm. Um, and uh, and it was just like one of those situations where it was just horribly represented, um, in my opinion. But um, so we went up there and looked at it, and I just remember getting on there were six inches of snow on the ground when we went up there for the first time, and there was no roads, there's like four-wheeler trails. So we're we're navigating the thing on like a uh four-seater uh Polaris Ranger, and um I remember stopping at the entrance to the property for the guy to open the gate, and you could just kind of see a peak between the trees out to the views, and I was like, whoa, like these views are beautiful. It's winter, so there's no leaves on the trees, but still like kind of obstructed. Like, they're there, this is beautiful. We tour kind of the lower end of the property, and I'm like, this is nice, but but not quite what I expected. And then and then we move up and we move up to like the middle, low to middle part of the property, and we're just like me and my buddy are blown away. We're like, we're we're from Charleston, like it's it's flat, like there's nothing, like no mountain views, and we're we're at I don't know where we were, 3800 feet elevation, maybe at that point, seeing those views and just in love. And the I remember the the agent looked at us like, what are you guys doing? Like, he's like, You think these views are good? And we're like, Yeah, this is amazing. He goes, Oh no, like this is nothing. You just wait, like we're just wasting our time here. We just gotta go. And I was like, All right, so we just kept driving up and we stopped at where really our main kind of hub is now at 4,000 feet, and there's a the property opens up into what was some pasture land, and it was stunning and gorgeous, and and like I started to really see it, and then we kept going up to uh what we now call Sunset Summit, rode the Polaris Ranger all the way to the top of the mountain, and it was just like awe-inspiring. Um, and I just knew, like, I was like, this is it. Now, little did I know how hard it was really gonna be to cut a mile and a half of roads across crazy steep mountain slopes and run a mile and a half of underground power and all the other challenges we were gonna run into. But at that moment, it seemed so obvious, so easy. Um and uh and it was just it. Now, we've sure we looked at a lot of other sites, um, but we had we looked at that one first and um and it just set the bar for everything else that we looked at. Um and and I knew I knew that was it. And on on uh as soon as I got home, you know, called the agent back and started the process of trying to put that put that property under contract and and it was a journey um to getting it done. It's a really special piece of property with an incredible history that we'll have to price jer another day, but um, but really cool piece of property, never been developed, been in the same, it was originally a Revolutionary War land grant, and the same family had had it since the land grant um for the Revolutionary War. So incredible history, and I'm the first person to buy it from that family, and honoring their legacy um has been a big part of what was important to us from a development perspective, um, and doing that in a way that um protected the land for the local community, and our neighbors love what we've done, they're super supportive because they were terrified somebody's gonna go in and put in like another million-dollar home neighborhood kind of situation. Um, but but really being a conscious um developer who comes in and develops in a way that protects the land was a key focus for us.

SPEAKER_02: 52:30

So I love that. So when you say bearing in mind that the family's legacy before, that was mostly just like conservation of the land and low low impact development, is that what you mean?

SPEAKER_01: 52:41

Yeah, low impact development, protecting some of the structures that were there, um, some historical structures. We have a historic tobacco um barn, um, and I use barn very loosely, but an old stone structure that no longer has a roof. It didn't have a roof when we bought it, um, but uh or when we bought the land. Um, but protecting that, um, and yeah, just trying to be as low impact as possible as we made development decisions and honestly fighting hard to stay low impact because um most people just want to clear cut stuff and get to work, and um and that's just not at all what we wanted to do. We we fought like for individual trees to protect them. Um it's uh you know, and it's a it's a trade-off of opening view portals um while also protecting trees, and we think we've struck that balance well. Um but uh but yeah, I mean it's just you know, doing your best to do right by the land um from a development perspective.

SPEAKER_02: 53:41

So so for finding the land, so this was the first this was the first property you toured in your search.

SPEAKER_01: 53:47

Yeah, yeah, it was the first property we toured. It wasn't the last, but it was the first.

SPEAKER_02: 53:52

So and then you put it under and it was listed online for sale by a broker.

SPEAKER_01: 53:56

It'd been listed for over two years and no one could figure out what to do with it.

SPEAKER_02: 54:01

Wow. Yeah. And so then you put it under contract the next day.

SPEAKER_01: 54:06

It took a few days to actually get under contract. We started the process of getting under contract, but it was heirs land, so we had to get four people to agree, and that was a journey. Um it was an interesting negotiation because uh they couldn't agree with each other on how to do anything. So it was like they were all over the place from uh uh a negotiation perspective.

SPEAKER_02: 54:32

That's interesting. Yeah. How did it and then meanwhile, presumably while it was under contract, you wanted to do your research and look around and see some other place, and nothing really held a candle to what you saw through this first location?

SPEAKER_01: 54:45

Yeah, no, I mean we looked at a a lot of other sites, um and I I mean, still to this day, I have not seen much that holds a candle to it. And honestly, that was I know this might sound weird, but like one of my fears um in preparing to go to another location was did we set the bar too high? Like, is this too good that we can't go somewhere else and do this again because we'll let people down? Um, and we're not. I'm super Chattanooga's gonna be very different um than what we've done in Asheville, but it's gonna be just as good, if not better. Um, and uh and we're you know taking a unique approach to some of it, um, but uh to make it that way, because you know, it is different, but it's uh it's certainly going to live up to its its older sister, if you will, um, and hopefully be uh somewhere that people are just as excited to go. They'll maybe they'll find us in Asheville or they'll find us in Chattanooga, but then they'll be like, I love this so much, I've got to go to the other location.

SPEAKER_00: 55:49

Hello, listeners. This is Sherry Halala, founder of Sage Outdoor Advisory. If you're launching an outdoor hospitality project like Clamping, we can help. We offer feasibility studies and appraisals. What that means is we look at your specific market and proposed business offering and complete an in-depth analysis to make sure that your planned business will be profitable. Getting a second opinion on your proposal and forecasted financials is critical to understand before you spend years of your time and hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is particularly important if you are looking to raise money for your project from a bank or private investors. They are going to want to see this type of deep dive analysis from an independent third-party specialist in the industry. We at Sage have completed well over 250 feasibility studies and appraisals in outdoor hospitality in North America in the last four years so we understand what it takes to bring a project from concept to reality. If this sounds like it could be helpful to you, you can go to our website, SageOutdoorAdvisory.com, and schedule a call with our team while you're there. Check out our proprietary glamping database map too. Thanks. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_02: 56:50

What's what was the the entitlement you know, zoning, permitting, and entitlements process like? Because I I feel like oftentimes you find beautiful land like that and and it's like, wow, this would be amazing for glamping. And then it's like, oh, but the zoning in utilities is won't allow for this use, and utilities are gonna be prohibitively expensive. So, like, maybe walk me through those those two pieces and how you how you solve those problems.

SPEAKER_01: 57:20

Utilities were prohibitively expensive. I just didn't know how expensive they were gonna be. So ignorance was bliss on that one. Um, we went way over budget on utility infrastructure. Um, so that one we didn't do didn't do well. People the only negative we ever hear from a review perspective is that you're too expensive. Like when we don't get much Airbnb business, I think we're just kind of outpriced the market on Airbnb. But um, but we'll get if we do get Airbnb business, we routinely get five stars across the board, except where Airbnb goes to value, and then we get a four-star. And it's like because we are expensive. People are like, man, this feels like a lot for what it is. And I'm like, yeah, that's because we spent a million and a half dollars building roads. Like, that's a real number, no joke number. Like, million and a half dollars just to get a road to where you can sleep. Like, uh, and I don't think you know, you drive up there, you don't realize that, and then you utilities on top of that, like that was a lot. It was all I'm gonna get choked up again talking about that because that was a painful thing. Uh but uh some trauma there. Yeah, so so the utilities we didn't do, we didn't budget well for, but the zoning piece that was one of the gifts and one of the things that that was great about it was it was uh it was an unzoned properly. I mentioned earlier it was up against some government land, which is a watershed, so it's a protected watershed. So that was actually the only real hurdle we had to do was go and go to the county, or I think it was the county or the town. I don't remember who oversees the watershed, but whoever it was, and and have a conversation, a meeting about the watershed and like how to be a good neighbor to the watershed, where where I mean, watershed is literally like what water runs off of it, and supposedly it's the cleanest water in the state of North Carolina comes off of that watershed. So, how do you go and be a good neighbor to the cleanest water in the state? Um, people ask me if they need bottled water at the clamping collective, or they don't ask me, but they ask our team, and we're like, no, like our well has the cleanest water in the state of North Carolina. Like you could go buy water from the grocery store and it will be dirtier than the water you will drink at the clamping collective. Um, but if you want to, you can. Um but uh but that was it, and that was a huge part of it because it is so hard. And that's part of why I don't want to come to, I want to come to Charleston, but I don't want to come to Charleston because I had the same conversation in where we are outside of Asheville. That took us a week. It took us a week during our due diligence to have the conversation and get a letter from the county or the town, whoever it was, that said, this is what you need to do to be a good neighbor to the watershed, essentially. Like these are the things you have to meet, these are the requirements you have to meet. It took a week and it was basically just like, don't build within 50 feet of the property line, and you're fine. And I was like, Well, we got 160 acres. I think we can avoid building within 50 feet of the property line. That's no problem. Um, but you contrast that to other markets, and I've had that same conversation with Charleston County where I live, and they're like, Well, here's the process. You go spend about a quarter, and they don't tell you quite like this, but you spent a quarter million dollars on an attorney and you spend two years talking to neighbors and counsels and this and that and going through meetings, and then we'll give you a yes or a no. And I'm like, y'all, I'm just like a guy out here trying to make it work. Like, I don't have a quarter million dollars in two years of my life to get a yes or a no. Like, if it's a yes, maybe I could go down the journey. But if it's a yes or a no, like I can't imagine going two years and spending that kind of money just to be told no. Like, that just could crush most entrepreneurs.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:57

Yeah, no, that's it. And and you know, I've seen that happen to entrepreneurs in this space. Like, same, same exact thing. They either either the zoning entitlements killed them, they got the no, or they put all they spent all the money on infrastructure and then couldn't build the resort. So it's it it happens and it's it's just like development is not for the faint of heart, and most of the time it has a lot of uncertainty and a lot of capital needs, you know, to do all sorts of things, to do, you know, to do perk tests on this on the septics, or to uh test uh well flow or to pay for a feasibility study, um, you know, or to have someone uh or get an attorney who's gonna find out the likelihood of you getting you know a business, a permit to operate your business. So I I'm very happy that you got yourself smoothly. That's a nice uh change of pace.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:48

It was, but it was a hurdle we knew we had to run into, and and it's changing. I mean, unfortunately, a many, many markets are becoming anti-development. Um, and that makes it really hard for entrepreneurs in the clamping space to do what we're doing. Um, but I think there's a couple things you can do. One is go visit with the visitors bureau and have that conversation about like, is this community an anti or a pro-development community? And then go talk to other business owners because they'll tell you what it's really like. The visitors bureau might paint a rosy picture for you, but the other entrepreneurs in town, you know, going into the coffee shops and the restaurants and the, you know, especially if you can tell somebody like purpose-built the space that they're in, like if they didn't just go into a blank shell uh in a strip mall, but if they like actually purpose built what they're in, um, which you see more with like breweries and some more interesting, or just talk to food trucks because they'll probably have the scuttle butt on like what the local municipalities are like, but just you know, try to go to those places that want you to be there, um, which is hard because typically the people that are that we talked earlier about being in the path of of demand, the places that are in the path of demand are also the places that have become anti-development. So it's kind of it's really hard to find these markets where they're pro-development, pro-growth, um, and have the demand coming into them. Um, but when you can find them or you can find the right people to work with and and and the right people to help you get things done, it can go a long way. Because I, yeah, I mean, I've I've heard a lot of heartbreaking stories and and have friends that have you know had properties shut down or whatever else um because of it. So I mean, same thing happened to me in the Charleston short-term rental space. I had four short-term rentals downtown Charleston, and then they changed the rules, and all of a sudden we were illegal, like overnight, and they shut us down. And it's uh it's tough. Yeah, gosh.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:43

Man, entrepreneurship not for the faint of heart.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:45

No, it's not what most people think. You know, most people see uh they see the Instagram pictures and they're like, man, I want to do that. And you you don't know what it's like sitting in the council meeting, seeing if you're gonna get voted yes or no, or going through you know, the hurdles or the over budgets or the the money to build your roads, or like it's uh or under budgeting your utilities. Like it is, I mean, I've built companies before, and this was hands down the hardest thing I've ever done.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:13

Like so, how did you so you found the property, put it under contracts, you know what happened next? How did you capitalize the projects? And um, and then yeah, how did it go from putting the infrastructure in?

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:27

Yeah, so interestingly enough, when Charleston County shut down our short-term rentals, um, I knew I didn't want to run college rentals, which was really the only other option. So I sold those and um and then was able to use that money to 1031 that money into the purchase of another building, which was like a kind of short-term holding building that I didn't really want to buy, but I didn't want to pay taxes either. So I 1031 into that. And then when I started getting ready to clamp uh and buy land for this, I put that building up for sale, sold that building and 1031 of that money into what would become the land for the glamping collective. So those early days of having four short-term rentals downtown Charleston ultimately paved the way for some hospitality experience on the operator side, not the marketing side, but also really paid for the land that became the glamping collective. So I was able to, because of the appreciation we saw and other things, we were able to buy the land with that money through a 1031 and then use that land as a down payment on our loan with the bank. Um, and it's a lot harder. You know, financing is its own big topic, and I know you've had some great podcasts on that. Um, but for us, it was we were fortunate having been in real estate for a while and in different uh sectors. I built a lot of relationships. And our main bank that we were working with, um, we had a really good relationship with them. We had trust with them, and and they actually did our loan for what would be the Lamping Collective. So we put up the land um and then got a loan for the construction through them. And it was interest-only variable, uh, which was amazing because during COVID, interest rates went to zero. So my monthly payments on our construction loan, one of the few bright spots of COVID was our interest rate going to zero or nearly zero on our construction loan. And um, our interest only payments on the construction loan were like almost nothing, um, which made it go so well. You know, I have friends who have interest only loans on, or not interest only, who have variable rate loans on properties now, and they never thought they were gonna see a 10% rate, but because of the interest environment, you know, they underwrote their deals at 6%. Now their rates are at nine and a half, 10%, um, and they're not making any money. Like they made money at 6% and they're hitting their other numbers, but with that 4% bump on their loan, they can't make any money. Um, and that's a you know, nobody saw that coming, nobody saw rates going where they went. Um, and that that's a tough, tough place to be.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:03

Um, but that's a good that's a good lesson learned and for for people to hear, and it's something that's talked about a lot in the real estate world, but not maybe so much in in the glamping world. But um just an important thing to keep an eye on is if your loan's gonna be a fixed rate or variable interest rate and how that can change. Um so so all right, then you you know you were able to purchase the land, finance the construction. What happens next?

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:30

Yeah, so we set right to it. Uh we closed on the land, I think it was May 31st, if I remember right. We broke ground on our roads June 1st, and we were actually cutting down trees before closing on the land. Like it was, which is not recommended. Um, but it was a sure enough thing at that point that we were going to close, that the owners approved us doing that. Um, you know, and and if it didn't close for some crazy reason, there's a ton of trees, so it probably wouldn't have mattered. But but the uh the excavator, you know, closing got delayed like a week or two, and then the excavator was like ready to start. So it was like, well, what do we do? Um we don't want to lose this guy to another project. So they went ahead and started with the with the current owner's approval. Um and they all knew each other because it's this you know small town, but uh um, but yeah, so I mean we went right to it. So we we we started cutting trees down, we started putting a like blade in the ground June 1st. We broke ground on our actual first unit. Um, I think it was July 5th, and um, and then opened 14 months later, Labor Day weekend. Uh so it was 14 months to to do what we did, which was crazy. Um, and and just took a lot of like being on top of people every day, like calling people, you're showing up today, right? You're showing up today, right? Why weren't you here today? Like um, you know, just staying on top and grinding and grinding to get it done. Um, and it was painful, like it started out great, and then it got really painful um just to try to get the thing to the finish line. Um, but yeah, in a nutshell, that was the journey. Like it was um, yeah, 14 months to opening day from when we actually started, you know, unit construction. But the first stretch, like the roads weren't moving along at the pace they needed to. And my contractor was like, Matt, I brought my guys over here, like we're ready to go, and you guys aren't ready for us. And I'm like, Well, we'll get we'll make it happen. Like, what needs to happen? And he's like, Well, I need building materials up there. So we literally got a four-wheeler and we were strapping six by six posts to four-wheelers and riding them into the property on four-wheelers because the roads weren't ready to to take a delivery truck. So, like, I mean, you just you just solve, I mean, it sounds silly now, but it's like, man, you just solved the problem that's in front of you. And um, and that was the problem was how do I get these six by sixes up this hill? All right, well, we'll get a four-wheeler and we'll strap them to them and we'll just drive them up there. Um, and uh, and that's what we do, right? I mean, that's the journey of entrepreneurship, but uh, but you gotta be ready for some of that stuff, especially on the mountaintop site, which is probably why most people don't build on mountaintops, but um, but it's it's a journey.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:11

So the so the road ended up being a million and a half for what would you say a mile of road? And that was a steep topography. So that you know, because I'm projecting these costs all the time, and it's so it's always really interesting for me. So that's that's cutting down the trees and the road. That is it's all on a steep topography, so it's you know, moving the earth and the dirt to get the flat area. Then was it gravel finish or did you pave it?

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:36

No, it's gravel. Yeah, we didn't even get to pave in that budget. Um, but yeah, so much of it is steep enough. So generally, when you build road in the mountain, you're cutting from the upslope and you're dumping it on the downslope and you're compacting it to basically, you know, every foot you take from the upslope side, you dump on the downslope side, you compact it, and you get two feet. Um, and you don't have to move dirt. Well, much of this is not like that. Much of this is so steep that if you dump dirt on the downhill side, it just disappears. And you can't um compact it and build up the downslope side. So a lot of that dirt had to get hauled into other places or get hauled off site completely, um, which was not a cost I anticipated. Our excavators who have lived there their whole lives, they should have anticipated it, but um, but whatever. Uh and uh and it was yeah, I mean it's just and if you think about it, as you go into a mountain, right? Like I gotta see if I can get this right here, but um, but the farther you go this way, the more volume of dirt there is above you, right? So that foot first you go, the first foot you go is not a lot of dirt. But when you're 20 feet in, there's a lot of dirt above you, and you're having to dig all of that out um and and then find a place for it. If you can't dump it off the downslope side, I say dump it off, like it's you know, and compact it and build that to be your road. Um, and and then who knows what happens. You know, there are mountains for a reason, and that's because they're made out of rock. So you dig far enough in, you're gonna find some rock. So, I mean, we spent tens of thousands of dollars on just dynamite, um, of just blasting out spots where we dug in as far as we could, and just we were up against the mountain at that point. And it was like, there's no we rock hammered, we chiseled, we did all sorts of things, and some of it came, some of it didn't. And if it didn't, then we had to, you know, call in somebody and dynamite it. And it just like it just gets gets to be a lot. Um man.

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:34

And you had to dump the dirt off-site.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:36

Some of it, yeah. Much of it we were able to use on site either for fill and other spots. Um, like our main parking area is uh is is built uh heavily out of like good dirt that we were able to harvest on site. Um, but yeah, a lot of it we had to take take off site. And if you can, I mean, I you know, I have friends that have literally bought bought land just to sell dirt to the Department of Transportation to build overpasses and stuff. That wasn't an option for us. Like, we didn't make money on this dirt, like we had to pay to get it hauled off. But if you can, like those deals are out there, so you know, certainly look. Like, if there's if there's construction happening near you, um road construction happening near you, and you're doing a site like this, you know, just stop and talk to those guys and figure out where are you guys getting your dirt and can I sell you some? But that that didn't work for us. Um, but uh I wish it would have.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:32

So and how did you do power, water, sewer?

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:37

Yeah, it's all uh power we brought in. We we wanted to to do a solar array, um, but once our electrician did the load calc, the solar array was going to be the size of two football fields, and um and I just said no. Like I wanted to do it because I thought it was like more sustainable, lower impact. And I was like, we don't have two football fields of of non-tree locations to put this thing, and let alone how hideous it would be to see two football fields worth of solar panels. Um and with the domes, you can't put solar panels on the roof. So uh, I mean, I guess technically it could, but it would look ridiculous. Um so we were just like, yeah, that that eliminated that out of the equation. So then we ran. I mean, there is a mile and a half of power buried on that site that we had to get go to a neighbor and get a um we had to go to one neighbor to be able to make a connection at their property, then we had to go to another neighbor and get an easement to bury power line across their property um to shorten one of the distances that we had to run. Um, and it's just like and it's just a journey, like all of those things. And I mean, I spent so many, so much time out there walking through the woods. Like, what's the best way to get the power from here to there? And like, you know, can we go up here? Is it too rocky? Is it too steep? Is it too this? Should we follow the road? Should we not follow the road? Like, where are we gonna do future development that it would make sense to go ahead and like bring power through, you know, so we're we're ready to go for that. Um, and wire, like, gosh, wire is expensive. I don't remember which one it is, but I think one of the wires we used was like seven dollars a foot for just wire. Like, and I'm like, come on, like, and that's where we under underestimated our utility cost was trenching all that, and then the cost of wire um that went nuts during COVID, like so many other things. Um, and some of it's hard too. And it was harder in that season. Like, are you just telling me the prices are going nuts, or are you just making a ton of money off me? Like, what's really happening here? And it's just hard to know. Um, you can shop, you can just you you know you shop everything multiple times, but it's just it's just tough. Tough to know. So that was power. Water. We have two wells. Both the wells are over a thousand feet deep, but they bring incredibly pure water to our whole site, and there's a ton of water line buried everywhere. Um, because again, back to excellence, we wanted really hot, really high pressure showers. Um, we actually blew water lines uh multiple times because the pressure was too high. Um, so learned a lot about water uh and gravity. Um turns out pressure increases as it flows downhill. Um makes sense, but didn't even even the plumber who put the water line in didn't know that one. Um so we learned that lesson. Uh and then um sewer, it is all on septic systems. So we have three main septic systems that support the entire um community and had to have an engineer-designed plan to do it that way, but that saved us a ton of money versus having individual septic systems for every unit, which other municipalities that we've talked to require that. Um we weren't required to do that. We were able um through the engineer designed system, we were able to hook up multiple units to the same septic system, which saved us a lot of money. I mean, it was still a lot, we still spent a lot of money on septic systems, but we but we saved a lot of money over you know, having to have a one or two units hooked to each individual system, which would have put us at tons of systems.

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:16

Yeah, yeah. How much do you think those each cost costed like the power water sewer for the pro to bring it to the property?

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:23

I uh don't know. Um, I have that number, but I don't know. Um and uh because it came in so many iterations, you know, it was just like you pay this guy that, and then you pay somebody else to trench it, somebody else to lay it, somebody else, like there's so many people involved in all those things, um, at least there were for us, um, that it got hard to keep track of it. Now it's all captured, it's all in we did a cost segregation study, and so it's all captured in there, but it like I never went back to actually look, and part of that was out of fear. And I was like, if money's been paid, like I don't really want to know. Um, the road one was was individual bigger checks, so it was easier to get to that one, but uh but we way underestimated the cost of utilities. And the other, but back to that excellence thing is like people were like, well, just put the units closer together. And I was like, no, like privacy is so important to us. Like, and I mean there was a point where I knew every foot we moved a unit was gonna cost us like$200. Like when you put the electric, the power, the sewer together, uh, and that$200 number is not the right number, but it's an it's a number like that, where it was like, man, if I want this to be 10 feet away, it's X, if I want it to be 50 feet away, it's 5X. Um, and but we made the decision to put it 50 feet away. Um, like that's really how our closest units are about 50 feet apart. Um, but we did that from a you know a privacy perspective. And then every unit is like positioned and turned in just such a way that it maximizes the privacy for every individual unit.

SPEAKER_02: 1:18:57

So I love that. Yeah, and the reason I ask is because it's one of the hardest things that that we have to do at Sage is try to project horizontal costs, and it's just uh a property with topography, a property that's remote, a property with a lot of bedrock or just rocks in the soil. Like you just got all the combinations for the hardest, hardest projections, right? So um uh I'm glad you at least were able to do it with just three septic systems. So that was a good one, at least.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:24

I I get that question a lot from aspiring glamping entrepreneurs, and I tell people that ours is unique, it's higher than most, but we spent half our money vertically and half our money horizontally, um, which is exceptionally high. And I don't do feasibility studies, but for us it seemed high. I don't know if you know a percentage that's kind of ideal, but um, but it it felt high and it it it hurt um because we underestimated for sure in that area.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:50

It sounds right, actually. Um obviously it depends on the property and for for what you described for the the the property characteristics and how spaced out they are, that definitely makes sense to me. Um obviously, if you're in a a flat a flat area that with soft dirt and your units are 20 feet apart, that your horizontal costs are gonna be a lot lower. Um and I I always try to tell people when you are projecting, most people do really detailed budgets on their units and how much you know the linens are gonna cost and the cups and the you know the decorations and all the fun stuff that you you know you can find out exactly how much it's gonna cost you online. And they spend most of their time on that budget. And I'm like, guys, you need to be calling contractors, civil engineers, you know, excavators. Those are the numbers, you know, utilities, those are the numbers you got to figure out. The the vertical stuff you can get within 10, 20% pretty easily. But anything that's below the ground, those numbers come very widely.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:50

Yeah, and I mean another piece of advice is just develop a relationship with a good engineer, obviously, that's licensed in the state you're building. Um, because, and at least with us, I mean, if you're doing something more vanilla, you probably don't run into this, but we wanted to do a lot of out-of-the-box things. I mean, we harvested a ton of lumber that we used on site. We just did a lot of things that were very different. No one had ever built domes in our county before. So, like, a lot of challenges with the building department about like, well, what is this and how is it? But like, man, time and time again, we were able to go back to our engineer and be like, here's the challenge we have, here's what the building department wants to know, like, here's what we have. And he would come out or he'd stay at his office, but you know, run his calculations, do his thing, and he could write a letter that basically said, like, you know, I've done this calculation, this is the result, and as such, it meets code section 5439er. Um, and times, like multiple times, the building department said, You are never going to open this, it's not gonna happen. And we were just, I mean, this is like we're ready to open the doors and getting told that, like for final inspections. And I'm like, how are we having this conversation today when we've been working on this for 15 months? Um, but, anyways, that's a different conversation. But going back to that engineer and be like, here's the problem I'm facing, how can I solve it? Um, and having a solutions-oriented engineer saved the day for us in so many situations where as a non-experienced developer, I was like, man, I don't have a clue how to solve for this other than ripping it down and starting over again. Um, how can we solve for it? Or things that people told us were literally impossible. And I was like, nope, there's a way, we'll find it. And and we developed a solution, we presented it to our engineer, and he goes, Yep, I think with this one change that can work. And then he would test it and he'd make it work, and it would pass the test, and we'd be off and running again. And those letters from the engineer were like the get out of jail free card. Like they weren't free, don't get me wrong, but they at least got us out of jail.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:54

So the get out of get out of get out of jail fee card. Um how how'd you find this guy?

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:04

Um, actually, another project I was working on, he was referred to us by somebody on that project. So totally random. And I just was at one of those, like, I mean, I called like probably a dozen engineers, um, and everybody was so busy at the time, nobody would even call me back. And I was working with them to solve some small problem on another project in a completely different part of the state. But he was licensed in the state and happened to live really close to our site. Um, did not happen to live close to the project we met on, but happened to live close to our site. And um, and it was just like, and I just I presented it to him and I was like, hey, here's the challenge I'm facing. I don't know if you can help or not, but I'm totally stuck here. And the dude just just helped me out, and he just came to the table and helped us out. And um, you know, not to get all religious, but I am a religious person. But there were so many moments like that in our project where we hit what felt like an absolute standstill, absolute dead end. Um, and somebody would show up at that moment with just the right answer to break down that hurdle that felt insurmountable. Um, and I I mean, I can only attribute those to God moments because there's no way, like working on this project three hours away, I should have met this engineer who was gonna who lived 10 minutes from my job site over here and was gonna like come to the table and save the day in so many ways. But there's story after story after story I could tell you like that, where it's just like, man, like we met the Red Sea and it parted. And um, and only by the grace of God did we get to get to where we got to. But we also think that's part of our responsibility and why we take our guest experience so seriously, because we're creating a place for people, whether they're looking for God or not, whether they're looking for peace or not, we've created a space where they can come and experience nature and they can call it whatever they want to call it based on their relationship with religion and all the other things. Um, but we believe that they will experience it. Um, it's just up to them, you know, what uh what they call it. And we're okay with that. You know, we we're totally okay with everybody has their own um their own, they're all on their own journey. Um, but we we know what we call it and um and what we believe in uh and and what we pray over the people that come there uh and just trust that they will uh they'll find their own find their own journey, find their own experience.

SPEAKER_02: 1:25:30

So the godsend engineer. Literally. I think literally. Yeah. We had um we had my good friends on the on the last podcast episode. We did I helped start a company called Sandy Vans, and the two main founders are my good friends, one of which is an engineer, and like he's our godsend engineer. He says this all the time. And um, I've also heard that um you know uh God is an anagram for the great outdoors, you know, G-O-D. And uh so I think like having that common con you know, having that common connection for people to experience the outdoors or experience spirituality or religion or whatever it means to each individual um is a special common ground, you know, out of nature. And um, all right, so so you you you you get all the utilities built. How did you decide on domes and these glass cabins?

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:22

Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, my heart was in tree houses, right? Like that's how the whole dream started. Um, and I just love them, you know, like there's just something special about them. And I'm not saying we're never gonna build them. There's actually a part of our property I have set aside specifically for tree houses that would just be incredible. Um, but um one of our clients, actually the same guy I was just talking about that I'm gonna go on a trip with, uh, was supposed to be this this week, supposed to be tomorrow, had to reschedule it. Um, he had built three domes um and I saw them become a viral sensation. So uh online, and we, you know, our staff helped make them a viral sensation online, but the the design his team did and the structure itself, man, I just loved it. And like during our due diligence phase and figuring out what we were gonna do, I went up and visited them and um and I loved them, loved what the you know, loved the way you could build them and not do like a solid foundation, but build them on stilts and uh or what we in Charleston would call stilts, um, but uh but build them elevated off the ground so you could do like no impact or low impact to the ground. Um but really kind of what it came down to was I spent a massive amount of time on Airbnb and online looking at various clamping types, um, and and then created this massive spreadsheet of clamping types and what their ADRs were and estimated cost to build them, and and then ran them through like the challenges we had on site, right? Like originally I wanted to do shipping containers up there, and then I found out you can't get a 40-foot shipping container up the road to our site. So it was like, do I want a helicopter shipping containers up here? Okay, scratch shipping containers off the list, like not helicoptering shipping containers up here. Um, but I'd stayed in some really cool shipping container homes and had some cool ideas with it, but um but scratched it. So back to that spreadsheet of like I just put this spreadsheet together of all the unit types, the average ADRs I was seeing across the industry, and then what looked to be the average cost to build those is as best I could tell. Um, and that's how we landed on our glass cabins and our geodomes was the relationship between development cost and nightly rate. Um, and didn't just do I love it, right? Like, sure, there's there's you could go prefab, you could do other things, but like at least at that time, what existed in the prefab space did not meet the do I love it checkbox. Um, and I wanted to be really proud of anything that we built. So, but at the core level, like that's what it came down to. And a lot of our calls about me being a a geek, and that's really like what the journey is like um for me is like I just do the math and the math works, and all right, this is what we're doing, and then finding ways within that to make it exceptional.

SPEAKER_02: 1:29:07

Well, that's that's I can relate to that so much. And I we should have had you come writing feasibility studies at Sage and working on our data projects because that's kind of exactly how I and and we approached it, and how I came up with a pretty similar conclusion. Um, you know, with with looking at our data, and I was like, man, these domes just seem to kill it with rates um and be all season for the most part, and um and have have a relatively low cost. And I'm sure you know this, but I I bet you your deck costs five to ten times as much as your dome structure costs.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:41

Yeah, yeah. The decks on those slopes. I mean, we had some of them have special order posts because you can't get posts that long because of how steep the slope that they're built on is. Um, and people are like, Matt, just carve out the dirt and like lower the whole thing. And I was like, No, we're not doing it. Like, we're not we're not just making a scar, a literal was like. We're not scarring the mountain. Like, I can't imagine how many times I said that. And there were places we had to. Like building a road, you don't have a choice. You just have to do it. But anytime we could not scar the mountain, we just didn't.

SPEAKER_02: 1:30:11

God, there's so many things that you say that I really appreciate the style and the approach that you you used in this. I feel like we're we're very aligned in how how we think about these things. The um the your friend or the the person who had the domes that were really successful, it wasn't Tennessee Glamping, was it?

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:32

No, it wasn't. Um no, it actually Okay, because Yes, it's in Ohio in the Hawking Hills. It's the in-in-spot, Cedar Falls. Um they were one of our most successful clients for my agency, and they actually got the person who hired us there sold it to another guy, um, and that guy became one of my good friends.

SPEAKER_02: 1:30:54

So that name sounds so familiar. Is that the one with the is it the one with the oh there's a uh it's called the Hawking Hill Cedar Cabins?

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:05

In and Spa at Hawking Hills. No, in and spa at Cedar Falls. Sorry. In and spa at Cedar Falls. I was just curious if I knew it. Um and they have he has expanded that business tremendously. They have a ton of stuff. They have 12-bedroom lodges, uh, he bought a golf course to he like dude's a crazy entrepreneur, um brilliant guy, but uh um and a stunning property. So very cool. Did you uh did you ever see Tennessee Glamping as when you have in your I've seen Tennessee Glamping actually in our research for our Chattanooga site? I've come across them.

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:45

Because I I remember coming across them kind of early days, like 21, 22, and I just thought their domes out on the decks with the privacy, it's very, very similar like type of feel and and layout, I think, that um with your domes. And I remember seeing them, I was like, oh they were 450 bucks a night, and they were like 95 to 99% booked. I mean, you could not find an availability in those calendars, and I was like, man, this this guy did it really well. And yours has the same, that same um level of quality and views and and sit similar type units. Um, so so you settled on the the domes. Tell me a little bit more about the cabins. Were those but those were all built on site, you know, um right? Those were prefab?

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:31

Yeah, we used a company called EcoPanels out of uh I think it's Moxville, North Carolina. So they're not prefab. Um eco panels uh are structurally insulated panels or SIPS panels. Eco panels is a brand um of SIPS panels. Um so they come out, so we did I literally uh I architected everything on site, um which we mostly because I couldn't find an architect during COVID. Like they're you just they were all too busy. So I was like, oh, it's cool. I stepped at a holiday in last night. I can do architecture. Um, so I did all of it. Um somebody else did the engineer, as I said, but I did the architecture. Um and uh and just I I wanted while I wanted the dome, and it we call it a little more rustic modern. My personal style is much more modern, modern. So we wanted another product um that was a more traditional product that was more modern in its design. Um, and uh, and that's you know, spent a lot of time, you know, just searching for inspiration before I kind of landed on the design for for that. It was actually originally, we were originally going to do a cedar shake siding and call it, they were gonna be pine cones. Um and uh and we still stuck with some of our pine cone elements. We have pine cone lights inside of them. Um some people use them called hop lights, which is great for Asheville. Um, they're not hops, they're technically, I think, pine cones, but they look a lot like hops. But uh um, but yeah, so we built those cabins, and the main thing I wanted there was this solid glass wall, right? Like that glass wall to look at the mountains and to be able to open that completely up to be able to like lay in bed and feel like you're outside. So it's this indoor-outdoor living environment, which I love the domes, but you can't open those giant windows. Um, so I really wanted the other product to be able to be like really opened up, to be able to um to just lay there in bed and like let the mountain just wash over you. Like the property is covered in birds, like these you know, hawks and all sorts of gorgeous songbirds, and um, so to just lay there and listen to the birds and um and and just take in the mountain views, like you can see at least 40 miles off your deck, like so you're and you don't see anybody else. So you're just like laying there looking out at 40 mile mountain views um from your plush king-size bed um wrapped in luxury linens. You know, it's just like it's just dreamy and a really, really special experience. So I don't know, I'm a little biased, but um we I love our tiny cab or our glass cabins. Um, we switched that name from pine cones to glass cabins. Um, again, just in development feedback, we were we kept talking about pine cones and people just were like really confused. And so we're like, all right, like so we we moved away from the cedar shake. We went to just more traditional cedar board siding, um, more traditional but still modern um cedar board siding. And when we made that move, we also made that name change. Um, and um, and and and part of that was actually a search thing, part of that was an SEO-informed decision that no one is searching for pine cones to stay in. A ton Asheville Cabins is like one of the highest search terms out there, and yes, we could we were gonna call them the pine cone cabins, but it just got to be a lot. So part of it was a SEO thing of moving to glass cabins because we we wanted to kind of really go after that cabin keyword.

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:07

So smart, smart. Yeah, I I recommend the listeners to to go check them out, they're stunning. Yeah, this this design is uh in all of my research, and it's basically exactly what I would do in the sense that one side is all glass that can open up to the outdoors. My dream is to have accordion style doors. Um I really love people to get to experience the nature and the outside to see it, but I've just learned of all the drawbacks of tents. Um so I was like, how can we how can we still have all the benefits of a hard-sided cabin that make ownership and guest life so much easier, but still be able to let the nature in and one side that opens up that's all glass and lets in the stunning views that you have. Um, and then it also, and it looks like you did this very well. I love the idea of saying, hey, our unit is totally focused on sending people's view in one direction, and we make that just beautiful, stunning view. Everything's focused looking that one way, um, kind of like in the 90 to 100 to 180 degrees. But then it also allows you to position the units on the property so they're all focused and looking where they're it's a natural view, and it's they're looking where you want, and you just make that everything focused on that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:24

And it creates that natural privacy, right? Like you could be 50 feet apart, but when you orient everything to look one direction, you've got the privacy that you need to feel comfortable, you know, doing whatever it is that you want to do, um, you know, on vacation on your porch, um, which we have lots of stories about people making interesting choices, but um that's the hospitality industry, right? Um and we give them the privacy to do what they want to do. Um, but uh yeah, and I love the accordion doors too. Actually, I have another project uh that's not a multi-unit glamping project, but I did an accordion door and I negotiated the door down, and maybe you can give me a better source, but uh it was a$17,000 door. Um and and while I do talk about commitment to excellence, I am a geek with spreadsheets. The doors we put in um into the glamping collective, I negotiated them down to$4,000 a piece. And that delta at that time between a$4,000 door and a$17,000 door, um, are$4,000 doors, um, are four-panel systems, so it opens up completely in the middle. So you have eight feet wide by eight feet, or excuse me, six, yeah, eight feet wide by eight feet tall that is totally open. And the cost to get the other eight feet open to a true accordion door was just like oh, like I just it it felt like it was one of those areas where I had to say no, and and as much, you know,$130,000 no was uh was tough. But uh but I love that you considered it. I oh I was the point it was the plan until I got the$17,000 number, and then it was like, okay, what is almost as good and cost a quarter of as much?

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:12

Um but let's talk about one of my favorite conversations, which is hot tubs. Uh and normally I talk more about saunas, but I, you know, those are kind of the same, similar in the the amenity world. But tell me about your decision to add hot tubs to most of the units and what have you learned from putting that them in.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:31

Yeah. Um we had already ordered and paid for all of our hot tubs before what happened what I'm about to tell you happened happened. Um because it was COVID and hot tubs were like a year out or whatever. Um, we ordered them, paid for them all, and um, and then the county told us we couldn't have them. Like they literally came and said, you can't put hot tubs on it on private decks. We have had so many roadblocks with those hot tubs, but they are there. Um, and they're our number one, uh, other than maybe our trails, actually, they're our number one most loved guest amenity. Um but uh if what was your original question? How did we decide to have them? Like that was a no-brainer. That was the question, like we had to have hot tubs. Like there was a no doubt. Um, we designed the project with half of the units having hot tubs and half of the units not having hot tubs. Um, and I split that across the board all of the with the three accommodation types we have the class cabins, the domes, and the XL domes. Each of those got split into a standard and a luxe version. And there were other amenities that made that differentiation, but the the hot tub was the biggest one. But what I did from a development perspective was I pre-built, I knew the data was gonna tell me that hot tub units outperform non-hottub units. I knew it was gonna happen, but you only have so much money, whatever. So we we did it half in half to see what would really happen. Um and I but when I did that, I pre-built everything that was significant from an infrastructure perspective. I built in a way that I could put a hot tub on that deck in two hours, um and uh and and basically flip it from a non-luxe to a luxe version um very quickly. Um it it's I thought it was gonna take two hours. It took, it takes longer, it takes like a whole day. But um, but the point being, like, I didn't want to put myself into a corner and not be able to take a unit from a standard to a lux. I wanted it to be able to make that transition. Now there's a few that probably can't because of uh some view things and access things and other things, but like for the most part, I wanted all of them to be able to have that upgrade. And after being open for three months, our first winter, um, it was hands down. The data was like abundantly clear. I think our occupancy rates were 20% higher, and our ADRs were about$100 a night higher. So you put the two of those things together, higher occupancy and higher ADR, and the hot tubs were paying for themselves, I think, in like two and a half months. So I did all that math and I was like, yep, the other units are getting hot tubs. So we have kept three of our glass cabins without hot tubs, and we've done that because I want people to be able to experience the glamping collective at an affordable entry-level price point. And to keep that, hot tubs are expensive to buy and they're expensive to maintain. Um, I think a lot of people under underestimate the maintenance expense of a hot tub. Um, we have one full-time person at least every day touching hot tubs. Uh, I mean, it's a full-time, at least a full-time job for us. And if it's a busy day, we have multiple people there touching hot tubs. Um, you know, it's just balancing the chemicals predominantly. Yeah, draining hot tubs, refilling hot tubs, balancing chemicals. Um, the other thing we did, which a lot of people are doing now, but it was kind of novel at the time, was we put external hot water fills on all of our units. So when we dump a hot tub, we can refill the hot tub with hot water so that when the guests arrive at three o'clock, which is our check-in time, the hot tub, even if it was emptied an hour ago, we can fill it with a mixture of hot, cold water that we can dial that in to get it like 98 degrees for your arrival. Um, so you never arrive to a cold hot tub at the Glambin Collective. Um, and we did that. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:30

Go ahead, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01: 1:43:31

Yep, yep. Uh a small cost that goes back to commitment of excellence um or commitment to excellence. But um, but uh but yeah, big thing uh from a guest uh experience perspective. So um is a no-brainer. The data informed us to put more hot tubs on, but then we kept some units without hot tubs, even though we know it's not the right economic decision for us, it helps us make the property more attainable for people that may that financially it's a stretch for. Like we know we're not for everybody, no matter what, financially, and and we can't be. We don't ever want to like we want to be, but we just can't be. But we do want to keep some units that can be our entry-level price point um that are even if it feels like a stretch, most people could make the stretch, you know, for a for a bucket list kind of trip. So and some people don't want hot tubs. I mean, you know, we have a lot of we have not a lot. We have some guests that specifically say, like, I don't want a hot tub, which unit should I be in? And and that's that's cool too.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44:28

Like the way you have approached and designed your your property and your business, I have to say, almost every single like decision you've made and prioritization, like, oh, that's that's the same with me. That's what I would do, that's how I would do it. I'm not telling you all the well, but um no, I I love the idea of keeping, I always wanted, you know, if and when I open my own property to have like one day of the month that is for uh like low-income locals, uh where it's you know, it's 60% off or 70% off or something like that, uh, for people in the community to come use it and keep it available to those. And um, and I like that you kept those units at a more affordable price point, like for that same reason. And also thank you for validating the hot tub conversation because I've had it so many times. And I and I always tell people, I'm like, listen, it the data is pretty undeniable that your RevPAR for the same unit with the hot tub is probably gonna be anywhere from 20 to even 50 percent, 60% higher for a unit with the hot tub. And I'm always like, if it costs you 10, 15, even 20 grand to put it in, that is gonna pay off in the first year every time. And um, so it was just nice to hear it from you. And and I'm always like, hey, listen, design all the units so they they can be added later. Start, put them in half, or put them in just a few, and you see how it works. But make sure you can add them to the other ones down the road if you you know you see the revenue increase that you're that you want.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45:58

Yeah, yeah, that you expect to see. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. One of the other things, and again, more people are doing this now, but this was one of those roadblocks with the building inspectors that I love the way it turned out. Um, but we originally on our glass cabins, which have it's a small porch out front, but we had the hot tub on the deck, and we we showed them the plan, they approved it, everything. Then we built it, we're ready to open, and our final inspections, the hot tubs actually were on the decks. And they said, Oh, you can't do that. Department of Insurance says a hot tub can't be within 30 inches of a handrail. So they were like, You got to build your handrail that's seven feet tall. And I was like, You I'm gonna put a seven foot tall handrail on a cabin. Like, what are we talking about? And um, they're like, build your handrail seven feet tall, call us back when you're ready for your final inspection. And I was just like, You have gotta be kidding me. Um, and I was literally sitting in a doctor's office just like mourning um that, and um, and I was flipping through this magazine, and there was an ad with a person in a hot tub with their arms up on the edge, and they were looking out at the mountain view, and the hot tub was recessed into the deck of whatever they were in. It wasn't even like a house, it was just like a deck, like that was it. The house must have been in the background. I don't know. But it was just this light bulb of like, we don't have to raise the handrail, we just have to lower the hot tub. And um, and man, I went back to my engineer and I went to my contractor and I said, here's the plan, this is what we're doing. Engineer it up and um and let's make it happen. And it was a lot of money and it was a lot of time, but we recessed all those hot tubs down into the decks, and it was a total game changer from like just the mass of the hot tub on the deck to how you felt with it when you were in the cabin and the hot tub was there, versus like now it's recessed into the deck on this platform, and it's man, it's just um it felt like a roadblock, um, but it turned into uh a much, much better product uh at the end of the day. And and now we're recessing hot tubs at left and right everywhere we can.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:05

I I love how a roadblock turned into like a feature, yeah, you know, a feature of the property. And um, I know O'Nera Wimberly uh Ben Wolfe's project out in uh Hill Country outside of Austin. That was the first time I saw the recessed hot tubs out on their deck, and I was like, oh, this is the move.

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:23

Yeah, that's such a good difference, such a difference.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:26

Um and all right, I do I gotta ask, did you ever think about adding saunas and what? How did you uh how did you make that decision?

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:34

Yeah, I have another project we just added a sauna to last winter, and guests love it. Um I'm not a huge sauna guy, whereas I am a hot tub guy, so like that's it's probably that's stupid, but a little bit of personal preference. We have a spot uh that we set aside for a sauna um and we just haven't put it in yet. We have a we have a spot we set aside, it's one of our amenity areas, and there's a spot for a hot uh, excuse me, a spot for a sauna built and a spot for a bouldering wall built. Um, and uh and they're both on the future development plan. Um I have since got a little bit of a different vision for the sauna, so I don't think I'm actually gonna put it there. We are going to put in a sauna, um, but now kind of our next, like our next big dream for the Lamping Collective, we expanded this winter, um, which we had planned to do. Then Helene hit, then we're like, can we still afford to do this? But we we were able to secure some loans to to do that with disaster loans, but um, but we did that, we did the expansion, and then maybe this winter we're we're starting to really look into like how do we do a spa and and do that really, really well, and uh with that same commitment to excellence. And that's where I think while I originally had a standalone sauna plan as an amenity, I think now we're we're pulling that into more of a bigger spa vision um of uh bringing that to the table. So we'll see, we'll see if financially we can do that this winter um or if it has to be uh a next winter thing. But we try to use our winter months to do some of those expansion development um growth things so that we're not doing construction when when guests are there, if at all not possible. Like we just to protect that serene, quiet environment. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:50:16

Well, you know, we had to deviate somewhere because yeah, I'm more of a sauna guy than a hot tub guy. So there's our there's our difference. Um I don't know. I love that you're putting it in that you're gonna be adding it and adding the spawn wellness. I think that'll take you guys to even you know, in in even next level at the property. Um, you know, it's interesting. I think the data is much more concrete and strong to suggest that a hot tub is a good investment. Um sauna's a little bit newer and less common, so it's not, I don't think the data's quite there to suggest as high of a correlation or with as much confidence. So, you know, we'll see as it gains popularity. Um, but I love that you put that in. And I think uh I think what we should do, and I've never had to do this, but I think we should pause here because we're already at an hour and 15 minutes on this episode, and I still have so many more questions to ask you. So I think we should make this a two part uh a two part story if you're if you're up to that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:51:14

Sure. Yeah, absolutely.