Taking Over Family's 6 Cabin Resort - Harder Than It Sounds
Hi BP community,
This has weighed on me for quite some time. I grew up on this 6 cabin property in northern WI that my parents own. This includes a larger house they live in 50 yards behind the cabins, behind a road. They've tried selling it in the past for around $400k-600k as well as selling individual cabins; however, there were never qualified buyers.
My parents are nearing retirement and the burden of this property is eating into the years they'd like to go elsewhere and enjoy. They hire high school cleaners with a couple adults at $14-$22 per hour - so they're not doing everything. In fact, in many ways they act as property managers themselves.
For the longest time, the property broke-even or lost a little money (in part to help with student aid for myself and siblings go through college). However, since I've helped them integrate online bookings the property is turning a modest profit.
My career and home is now 3 hours away where managing the 6 cabin property would seem impossible. My job requires visiting people in-person in my local area.
Instead of selling the property off, or having my parents forced to live out their days chained to this property, I'd like to see if anyone has any suggestions on ways to keep the property in the family without having to shell out huge sums of money to buy the existing mortgage ($300k).
The big roadblock is managing the property effectively from a distance and quality control of cabin maintenance and guest experience.
If the mortgage was paid off, the profit would be fairly significant (it's all relative I suppose).
I know this post is sort of a tangent but figured I'd put this out there in case someone has experienced this / seen this before with retiring parents / owners.