Our Smokies Cabin: Before and After

One of the things we always try to do when purchasing a new property is to add sweat equity wherever we can. It can help ease the risk of purchasing a property that may or may not perform well as a Short Term Rental. Our third purchase, an adorable cabin in the Wears Valley area of the Smokies, we purchased sight unseen. I know, who does that? We did. And it was super risky. But we knew time was of the essence, and we didn’t want to risk losing the property because we couldn’t get out there to see in person quickly enough. So we had family members who live in the area tour it for us. We leaned on their opinions quite a bit, but it wasn’t too difficult to see the potential in this cabin just from Facetime, pics and videos. While this project was not a full gut rehab like some others we’ve taken on, we still did some updating to every room of the house. Our biggest project for this house was converting the garage to three new rooms, a living room and two bedrooms. So we easily took this cabin from a 3 bed 3 bath to a 5 bed 3 bath. Its now our top performer in our portfolio for 2024!