Managing STR in Smoky Mountains Versus Outer Banks and Other Locations

[Josh H.]

We recently bought an 8 bedroom cabin in Sevierville, TN, after successfully self-managing two beach front short term rentals in the Outer Banks for the past couple of years. We put a lot of emphasis on design, staying on top of any guest issues that come up and making sure guests are happy - so our reviews are great. We are AirBNB super hosts and VRBO premier hosts.

We were planning on self-managing the new cabin as well, but the current property manager said that he has managed in Outer Banks and Sevierville/Gatlinburg as well - and we are in for a huge learning curve since the Smoky market is a lot more competitive. We use PriceLabs for dynamic pricing but he said a lot of things have to be manually adjusted in order to be a top performing STR - the pricing needs to be a lot more dynamic. And a lot of other things need to be done, such as updating pictures every few months.

For anyone with cabins in the Smoky Mountains, are there any tips you can give us in regard to extra dynamic pricing or anything else?

[John Underwood]

We have a 6-bedroom cabin in Wears Valley.

Make sure your PM is local to your cabin or there isn't much value Add in my opinion, and you may as well self-manage.

Things are very competitive for the PF area, especially now.

Someone recommended getting your future pricing in line to capture people looking 3 to 6 months down the road and I agree with them. 

We just booked 5 days over Thanksgiving at over $8,000.

We also changed to Pet Friendly as that has made a little bit of an impact.

I check our pricing regularly. I look to make sure minimum days don't orphan any dates after bookings. I manually check the competition, which frequently requires overriding automatic pricing.

You have to have a standout property as there is definitely some saturation in the area. 

I hope you went through the STR permit checklist to make sure you don't have any large expenses like adding a sprinkler system. Also I hope you had your well checked out to make sure it can keep up with the demand. We have 4 large tanks that fill to add a buffer to water needs. I also installed a wifi sensor on our water tanks so I can monitor water level remotely.