Everly Lodging: Sonia x Jeff x Mike

 

Hey everyone! Last week, I was lucky enough to sit down with Sonia & Jeff - two STR operators running a beautiful series of cabins - Everly Lodging - in Red River Gorge. They've got an Outpost, an A-Frame House, and soon will complete construction on an Alpine Cottage. 

Join us as we run through Jeff & Sonia's experience building with DEN plans, Jeff's mastery of the Airbnb algorithm and general STR marketing, as well as local haunts. 

Find Everly Lodging's main site here, their Airbnbs for the Outpost here, and A-Frame House here, respectively, and their IG here. 

Hope you enjoy this one!

1. Introductions & Context

Mike: Welcome to another episode of the DEN podcast series, where we interview our customers to hear about how their projects went and the realities of what it means to build something in the United States. We're joined by two new folks today. I'll let them introduce themselves! And with that, we'll start with the easy questions guys.

Who are you? Which DEN design did you build? And where did you build them?

Jeff: I'm Jeff Walker and this is my wife, Sonia Scorsone, and we started this about three years ago. We built in the Red River Gorge in eastern Kentucky. The Red River Gorge geographical area is about 29,000 miles of sandstone arches.

[It has] some of the best rock climbing in the world. 500 miles of just some of the greatest trail heads. And it attracts a lot of outdoor enthusiasts. There's like a million folks a year that come into this very small community to do outdoor activities. And there's not a lot of places to stay.

Sonia: No, there aren't.

Jeff: We have been going there since we were younger and hiking. And we thought, you know, what a great thing it would be to own a piece of property out there. My wife is a real estate professional and she's actually sold quite a bit of property. She works all over Kentucky and I'm in brand strategy and marketing, so we kind of combined our two- We love-

Mike: oh, wow. You guys are truly like a power couple, huh?

Sonia: Well, we both have great strengths that compliment each other. Would've helped in this project. Definitely.

Mike: Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. I love both of those topics, actually, real estate and brand strategy as you can imagine.

Fun fact, I've actually climbed in Red River Gorge.

Jeff: Oh wow. Oh wow.

Mike: Yeah. In, what is it, the Muir John

Jeff: Muir Valley.

Mike: Yeah. Muir Valley, exactly! And right down the road from our place.

Sonia: Very close.

Mike: Is it really?

Jeff: Yeah.

Mike: Oh man. That's amazing. Yeah, for some reason the kind of cornerstone institution of that whole area is Miguel's Pizza.

Jeff: Oh yeah.

Sonia: Yes. Yeah.

Mike: Why is that? Like, have you guys been to Miguel's?

Jeff: Many, many times.

Sonia: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Mike: What is like the magic and the romance of Miguel's? Like, why is it such an institution down there?

Jeff: Well, it's been around for years and I mean, it was the first place to eat and it's just grown and expanded into a camping area, an outdoor area, where you can play basketball and kids and families that do outdoor activities, you know, they go there to eat. It's huge and it's usually so crowded. And Miguel's son... bought a hundred acre farm and opened up a barbecue place and that seems to be the new hot spot.

Sonia: Which is amazing as well.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Awesome.

Sonia: Mm-hmm.

Jeff: Which [is] about five miles from our house, so we frequent there.

Sonia: From the cabin.

Jeff: Or from the cabins rather. Yeah.

Mike: That's so cool. Yeah. That's so cool. So it's sandstone and limestone, Jeff. Um, there's like a ton of limestone. It's like one of the few places in the United States that has really great limestone formations for climbing. Which, for our listeners who are also rock climbers, uh, limestone climbing is just great for sport climbing in my humble opinion. But that's cool. And so do you guys hike, climb, like, what's your poison down there? Or just real estate development?

Sonia: Uh, we're not major climbers by any means. We have family that that climbs. But we definitely love to hike.

Mike: Awesome.

Sonia: There's so many wonderful areas and trails to hike there, so.

Mike: Amazing, amazing. Well, yeah, I mean, this is also why I started this company; to  meet with cool folks like yourselves, who are developing in really cool parts of the United States.

2. Choosing DEN & Project Vision

Mike: So tell us, which DEN designs did you guys pursue?

Jeff: Well, we bought a track of land and our vision was to first have one or two cabins on it. But there were a couple of older cabins there and we ended up pushing those down and tearing them down 'cause they didn't really fit the aesthetic we were looking for.

We love modern design and when we found DEN, we're just like, 'oh, that's it. This is the aesthetic that we want'. There's a lot of more traditional cabin type style things down there, but not too many modern, architecturally distinct structures. So we know there's a lot of people that love that type of aesthetic, that type of design.

So to answer your question, we didn't build one, we built three. So...

Sonia: At the same time-

Mike: I'm looking at the site right now. So you guys have an A-Frame and an Outpost, and then...

Jeff: -we have an Alpine cottage that is in construction. We're just finishing that one up right now.

Mike: Amazing. Amazing. Wow. So you guys, uh-

Jeff: We are DEN experts.

Mike: That's crazy. Yeah. So you guys have built now across three designs in our catalog. Also, you know, we will post some of these photos like in the rollup post of this interview. but you know, as I look at these images on your site, you guys have done such a great job in executing the designs.

These like look like our renders. It's like- it's amazing. Congratulations!

3. Construction Experience

Mike: Did you guys gc the project, did you work with the gc? Like, what was your approach to constructing these buildings?

Jeff: Well, first of all, let's just tell you we have no experience.

I mean-

Sonia: -[no experience] building!

Jeff: I can't say that we have no experience with building, but we've done a lot of remodels and flips and things in our lifetime. This was totally new to us.

Sonia: Anything from the ground up was new to us. But yeah.

Mike: Amazing. I mean, most of our customers are new to construction, right?

And like, you know, our goal is to like demystify the construction process and also create just like a more accessible entry point, right? So that people who've never done it before, you know, we kind of like bridge that gap of like, you know, a lack of experience and kind of potentially a lack of confidence to execute the project well, you know, and we bridge that gap by trying to give people like incredible designs.

You know, like all of this, like supporting material, like a support layer with the DEN team itself right? To get people over this chasm of like, not starting. So that's cool to hear. I mean, it's cool to hear that you guys went back to the well three times, also. So we must be doing something right.

Jeff: Well, yeah, and I think, gosh, it's just the, the resources that come with the plans. You're right, it's not just the plans, but having a running list of every single piece of material that you want that's specked out. Having guides for your materials and recommendations for furniture.

I mean, just everything, the flooring and everything was so valuable in the process.

Sonia: And the plans are so well done, in general, just, easy to read, easy to understand. And, um-

Jeff: -yeah.

Sonia: Ya know, it just, it helped a lot.

Jeff: But the community down there... we really had problems finding a contractor down there. Everybody's busy. I guess it's the economy at the time. Of course, now we're... Our project started two years ago, or three years ago. And we would get a contractor and be down the road and they were very honest and straightforward about it.

They would be [like], 'Hey, I just got a bigger project. I'm sorry, I can't really do this'. So we had a lot of false starts. So, we ended up just buckling down and saying, 'hell, this will never get done if we can't do it ourselves'. So we found a group that did framing and we framed all three cabins at the same time.

Mike: Oh wow. Cool. Okay.

Jeff: And then from there we did a lot of hands-on work and this was a project that involved our daughter and our son and us. And actually the community, 'cause we started trying to find - we're from Lexington, which is about an hour away - so we tried to find people there that would come down and work, and they just didn't wanna work down there.

So we started meeting our neighbors down there. It's a very close knit community. Rogers, Kentucky, where we are, there's only like, the population's like 480 people or something like that.

Mike: Oh wow.

Jeff: But even when we tore the cabins down, it's a very underserved rural community. We did it in sections and there were people that came by that wanted the material and we tore it down strategically so we could give it away, that they could reuse, and that led...

There's like a corner marathon there where all the people meet, the workers and stuff meet. And once you get into that group, you start to meet people that do excavation and do concrete and lay...

Sonia: -all the different trades. And, 'cause we did become our own general contractors and then we hired out for all the other traits.

But the community, as Jeff is saying, it's a great tight-knit community. And when you get to know people, you get to know who does a good job and, you know who you can count on. And we were very fortunate.

Mike: The visual quality of the projects speaks for itself, right?

Like, it looks like you guys did an incredible job and like whoever it is that you integrated to the project clearly executed the project well, right?

Jeff: Yeah. And it's funny because if you hire a local person, their reputation's on the line, so to speak. There's a lot of pride. Where if it's somebody in the state or somebody, they, you know, they're in and out. They may not ever see you again.

These people we see all the time. It's so different down there because you know the electric company, the engineer from electric company, the fiber optic guy, we're lucky we have a fiber optic branch that goes right through our property, so they dropped us a line.

And all the different utility companies. We have names of people in our phone, that we can just pick up and call individuals that are now friends that'll come over. We cut, I don't know how many time we cut our fiber optic line-

Sonia: Just building by building.

Jeff: And we call our engineer Jason. He'd go, 'oh, dang it. Okay. I'll be over...' you know, it's not like you're in a queue and you're waiting and you do a help ticket number. It's very personal down there.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the other thing I really love about this story is that, like you guys taking a very like sensitive and careful approach and like upcycling the legacy buildings, had the benefit of both upcycling all the materials and also getting you introduced to this local community of folks who helped build these projects for you, right? So like it goes to show like recycling is good for the planet, right? It's good for community development, like...

Y'all better recycle. This is the PSA, you know, hidden in this particular podcast.

4. Site Planning & Environmental Considerations

Sonia: Well, another thing too that we did, because when we started this project and we wanted a blank canvas to just see our vision into brand new, fresh start on everything, but the land itself needed to be developed.

So we had to build the road and clear out where we were gonna put the cabins. You know, we had to do a lot of excavation work, but it was very important to us to preserve as many trees as possible. We did not want it to feel like just some subdivision in some city. We wanted it to feel rural and a real getaway, a real experience away from the hustle and bustle.

And so we built, instead of building up top, closer to the road, we developed the road to go down the ridge. So the cabins are farther away and you don't hear any traffic.

Jeff: Yeah, they're parked off a ridge line. So the deck, for example, is like 20 feet off the air. And our property's surrounded by the little fork of Devil's Creek, so, you know, looking down off the ridge and there's a lot of wildlife and things down there. So our backyard is basically a forest that's never been developed.

Mike: Cool!

Jeff: Like Sonia said, in some cases we modified the plans so that we wouldn't encroach on a tree. 'cause we definitely did not wanna take down any trees that we didn't have to.

5. Hands-On Construction Stories

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I'm noticing in these photos, a couple of like really tasteful decisions that you guys have made here. Right? I noticed that you have the electrical transformer box, at grade, so you buried all the power lines, right? Yeah.

Jeff: Actually Sonia and our daughter, buried the schedule 80 pipe, 36 inches down. We had an excavator digging, but they were bringing in the pipe, pulling the pipe together.

Sonia: We had supervision that knew exactly what they were doing, but.

Mike: Yeah. Cool!

Sonia: We actually own a pair of bibs that we wore.

Mike: Nice. That's cool!

I mean, like, look, everyone can just hop in the seat of some heavy machinery, you know, and give it a whirl. Huh?

Jeff: Listen, our daughter operates an excavator now, and she loves it.

Sonia: She's quite good at it.

Mike: That's amazing. That's amazing. And I'm like looking at the photo of the Outpost right now.

And like this one tree that's like right next to the deck, that's not too far off the deck. What is that? Like a foot off the deck maybe?

Jeff: Yeah.

Mike: Two feet off the deck?

Sonia: It feels like you're in a tree house when you're-

Mike: Oh, that's so cool.

Sonia: -back there. Yeah.

Mike: That's so cool.

6. Favorite Features: A-Frame

Mike: So of the two buildings that have been finished, the A-Frame, and the Outpost, let's talk about what your favorite aspects of those designs are, right?

So maybe starting with the A-frame, what initially drew you to that design and what's your favorite place to hang out? Either inside the building or outside the building?

Jeff: It's gotta be the wall of windows. That was the biggest pain in the ass for construction.

Who knew that windows would take four months to come in? Gosh.

Mike: Did you guys use Marvin Windows?

Jeff: No, we used Anderson.

Mike: Anderson. Oh, wow. And they had a four month lead time.

Jeff: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. Okay.

Jeff: Well, I mean, if you wanted black, we wanted black. If you had wanted anything else but black, you could get 'em pretty quickly.

But black, I guess that's what everybody gets. The architectural series.

But they're beautiful. And, just to nod to Anderson for a second, our front door is an Anderson. You know, a high-end metal door that has the three brackets that go in and when you open it, it's just like a safe and a bank.

And since I'm a brand guy, everything adds to or takes away from your brand, right? The first thing that you experience when you walk up to that cabin, besides the visual, is your hand on that lever and when you click it, that feeling of security when this heavy metal door opens. And I just love that.

So Yeah. That's a small thing. I'm sorry. Just, you know what feel of that.

Mike: In the industry we call that the entry sequence. And that's what people think about a lot actually. What is it like to drive up to a property, up to a home, enter a home, you know?

And if that entry sequence is powerful and has the characteristics of what you just described, that's great for guest experience, that's great for people who live there.

Jeff: I don't know who designed these, but they deserve a medal.

I mean, when you first walk in, you've got that, that little mud room there. We modified ours to a certain extent, in certain areas, but when you walk in, we actually have a mudroom where you come in. Ceiling's a little lower, so it gives you a feeling that you're kind of enclosed, but then when you turn the corner and you walk in, there's that huge wall of glass.

It accentuates that initial expression, it is so powerful. So that first walk-in point, and if you're upstairs in the loft, you know you've got that huge bank of windows over there. And then you've also got the upper area of the big wall of glass there. And you scan around, we're surrounded by trees and there's constant movement in those trees, but it's so quiet.

It's mesmerizing!

Mike: It's very romantic! The DEN Design team is responsible for creating this design.

Jeff: Nicholas Pots, we followed Potsy, on Instagram and we've actually collaborated a little bit and we took some design cues from him.

Mike: Oh, cool.

Jeff: We opened our plans up, we pushed out what was the washer dryer room or whatever.

We put a home office in there.

Mike: Cool!

Jeff: And we did a larger 12 foot wraparound deck since the outdoor area was so important to us. So you can hang out there. So we took some design cues from Potsy and...

Mike: Awesome! Yeah, Potsy was like one of our first customers, right. And I've been in his A-Frame.

Yeah, for me like that was like another kind of magic, transformative moment, because that was like the first time that I had ever stood in that design, right? In Potsy's A-Frame. And I felt the exact feeling that you're describing, which is like, you enter and then you have this like massively tall cathedral ceiling and this like wall of windows and it's a really impressive space.

Yeah.

Sonia: I think that's one of my favorite things about the space is you can be either up in the loft area when even when you wake up in the morning, the way the light comes in, it doesn't come in and blind you. You see the light, but it's far enough away with the distance of those, that window wall.

But you can still just appreciate the sunrise and, it's a very magical feeling up there. And then down below in the living room, just the way the sun comes in from that bank of windows. It's breathtaking. I think those are two my favorite spots to just hang out, where you're asking about.

But then I think the wraparound deck really transforms it because, you can go so far out and because of the height of where we are, it does feel like you're in a tree house somewhere, so you can just open so cool everywhere and it just be one with nature. I love that so much.

Mike: That's amazing.

That's amazing.

Jeff, did we get a direct answer from you? What is your favorite spot in the building?

The tough questions here they are.

Jeff: Tough question.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff: You know, if I'm just hanging out, we have a couch in there. I love sitting in the corner of our couch and the view of being able to look out the windows and then at the same time look at the kitchen wall, which I'm very proud of.

We have integrated appliances where you can look at that, the modern details of that, how clean that is, and that just gives me so much joy. I love hanging out there. I can just read a book in a corner. We've got a little sectional couch there. I just love parking my butt in the corner right there. Just reading a book or just, you know. Take a few minutes just to relax.

Mike: Amazing. So you're, you are either a house cat in a former life, or you'll be reincarnated as one. [laughter]

7. Favorite Features: Outpost

Mike: Nice guys. Well, that is so cool. Okay, let's move on to the Outpost, which is a very unique design. I mean, you guys picked three very unique designs, right? But of the two that are currently on your site, you've got like one A-Frame, which is great, super differentiated relative to a lot of the other assets presumably around you guys. Right?

And then the Outpost, which is this like prismatic design, that we came up with a couple years ago. And has like yielded an entire design series.

You know, we have the Outpost, the Outpost Plus, and we just recently launched the Outpost Medium, right? Which is like a three bedroom version of that particular design. What drew you to that design initially? And same question, like favorite place to hang out in that design?

Sonia: The uniqueness was a huge appeal. Being that it's a family business that we created, our son was a big decision maker in the design of that one. He loved the uniqueness of it. And then with the concept of the deck, again, a very nice wraparound deck.

The way we placed the deck, it's in the front of that bank of windows, so you can be inside and enjoy the view, enjoy the trees, or you can be right outside and then, in the evening, you can look into the space and it's just a neat concept to look up at all those windows and see the lofts and just, I can't, I don't know how to explain the charm of it.

Jeff: My favorite feature is the roof line. It's so unique. And it took me a while to get my head wrapped around it because I've tried to draw it a few times. I'm like, what? It's like almost like a saddle, but it looks different from different angles of view. Right?

Mike: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

Jeff: And you can take a wide angle lens and get up real close to it and it exaggerates it and it just looks so bizarre.

You're like 'is that a loft? How is that...' Every different angle has a completely different look to the thing.

Mike: Well, for folks listening in, the thing that we did, that was innovative in this design, is we essentially ran the ridge beam of the building from corner to corner, right?

Instead of the ridge beam going from like gable end to gable end on the flat side of the elevation, the ridge beam goes from corner to corner, and it creates this like beautiful, prismatic effect in the geometry of the building. Which, Jeff, to your point, is both hard to capture, right? Because the different angles that you can photograph the building from, present the building very differently, but like, I feel like the only way that I've seen it really accurately expressed is through drone photography, like overhead. It's like you really get a sense of what the shape of the building is.

But yeah, it has this like almost beguiling effect, when you're trying to capture it like from, various sides of the building.

That's really, really cool. And then how did you guys. You know, to just get into the weeds of the construction process, how did you approach the framing of this building?

Did your framing team, were they like scratching their head? Did they understand it from the plans relatively well? What was the approach there?

Jeff: There was a lot of questions and a lot of questions we didn't know the answers to. So I think we contacted your team a couple times to get answers to questions, but we got it worked out.

The windows was very hard for us because there was not a lot of Anderson experts, and if we chose Marvin, we might've had a better experience.

Sonia: A different experience, yeah.

Jeff: But there was not a lot of people, so we had to find the most expert window person that we could find who still wasn't that experienced.

We downloaded every PDF possible off of the Anderson website.

Mike: Yeah.

Jeff: They came in a different section, and they had to be molded together, which means they had to be actually assembled, you know, and joined together in the field. So we built the deck first, so we'd have a platform to put all those things on and we finally got them put together, but it was like, 'okay, let's open these books. I've got a window expert and I'm sitting there reading and we're trying to figure', but we got it figured out and, god, it was so satisfying to sit back there and see that thing up, raising that final pane of glass and nothing broke.

Sonia: Holding our breath several times.

Jeff: Everything was fine, but it was, gosh, what a feeling of accomplishment. It was, yeah.

Mike: Amazing. Amazing.

Jeff: It was so worth it. I'll tell you, that's the one thing, the architectural detail that is common amongst these cabinets is that what that wall of glass is just...

Mike: That's so cool.

Jeff: Fantastic.

Sonia: And that's what we love too, is because we were building three at the same time. We wanted the aesthetic of the outside to be similar, to have a lot of similar components, metal roofs and, you know, the windows and so forth, which were so much of the wow factors of these builds.

And then inside they're all different as well. Not just the build of it, but the decor and, you know, the feel in each.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this might not be surprising to you guys, but also for folks listening in, there is a lot of intentionality in terms of like how we plan our catalog and our catalog strategy.

Right. And you know, we do have the intention of ensuring that there is like a holistic design language between our buildings, right? So you could, you could develop three totally unique designs and they would all make sense sitting next to each other, right?

Because they're from the DEN catalog, they share the same kind of design intent and design strategy from the ground up. And they compliment each other, right? But yeah, that's really cool to hear, that that is also like, you know, expressed in your project, and noticed in your project.

And you know, it's also funny because like so many people share in the anxiety and satisfaction of Windows, right? They're like, holy shit, are these gonna break? Am I now gonna have to like double up on my costs or am I gonna get it done correctly? And like that, like magic moment is very similar, across multiple customers that we've interviewed.

Jeff: And we were hell-bent to honor the design aesthetic. We didn't wanna alter, 'cause we got so much pushback, 'oh, you could do this or do that, and we never do it this way'.

Mike: That's amazing! I mean like-

Jeff: Stick to plan! Stick to the plan!

Mike: Yeah! You know, honestly I think that that is super apparent in the photography of the projects, right? Like I said earlier in the interview, right? It's like it looks like our renders have come to life, right? And you know, as someone who's spent so much time thinking about how to like productize architecture and like standardize outcomes for people.

Our thesis is like if we give you guys this like overwhelming amount of information, you know, like that would support every detail of the project, all you need to do is execute on the details and like you'll get to, you know, like a standard outcome.

Right?

And it's crazy to me like how often people still color outside the lines. And I think that there is like this inherent tension, between like local service providers being like, 'you could add overhangs or like you could do the windows slightly differently'.

There's like these like things that they start to lobb into the project that like take it away from what the project is essentially. Like in, its in its core specification. But it's always great for me to see people who are just like, 'you know what? We like stuck to the playbook. We executed the playbook' and you know, guys, it's like visible! I'm just like, 'holy shit, this looks incredible'. Well done. I gotta say like, you should be proud of yourself and proud of your effort. You know, I'm certainly proud of just like looking at your photos because it's like our mission kind of come to life, you know, through your project.

Sonia: Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Yes.

Mike: Yeah, so I can't wait to see the next one that comes up.

But yeah.

8. Hospitality & Airbnb Strategy

Mike: So with the remaining time that we have left here, tell us a little bit about the business itself. Right? Tell us about how you came up with the name Everly Lodging.

You mentioned that it's family run. Do you guys manage it, you know, yourself?

What do bookings look like? Tell our listeners all about this lovely business that you guys started.

Jeff: Well you came up with a name, so Yes.

And the brand. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Sonia: Yeah. The Everly means woodland clearing. And so it was very iconic, I guess that might be the word. It basically, we wanted to preserve the land, we wanted to preserve the trees, and so that was our mindset as we cleared this land and made this vision, created this vision.

So that's how that started. And, it was very much a family run business. Has started that way. We knew we were going to use it as an Airbnb business. However, it was also something that could become a legacy, when we were no longer around that our children and grandchildren could enjoy.

So it was very special. It wasn't just a business venture, but it was a passion project really. There was a lot of love spent on it. Now the business end of it, we definitely go into that some more, but it's been a very, very wonderful experience. I mean, there's a lot to the Airbnb business and, there are definitely different ways to go about it.

I mean, some people, we even came into it thinking it was a little bit more of a passive income venture. But it really depends how you approach it. And we have become very hands-on.

Mike: I feel like this is like the fallacy of like real estate investing, right? And like short-term, short-term rental operation.

It's like people are like air quotes, passive income, but like its anything but passive.

Jeff: Well, exactly. I'm a marketing data nerd. I've done a lot of research on the area and we've done a lot of hands-on research. We hang on at restaurants and I take pictures of people's hiking shoes. I look at how much they cost, and I'm like 'that guy's wearing $500 climbing shoes' and I'm looking at license plates in the parking lots of places where they come from.

Mike: Oh, wow. Okay. We, we've got a quant brand guy here. Amazing.

Jeff: I know exactly how many Airbnbs are in our market, and I will tell you that I probably know more about their performance than they do.

I can tell you the average occupancy rate amongst all these cabins- there's over 1,000, 1,200 hundred- is about 30%, and a lot of 'em, they use management companies, they just turn it over and they want to collect a check. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you wanna really have a high performance cabin, that's gonna be very, very profitable, you gotta be hands on and you gotta understand your. Your competition, the pricing.

Sonia: The market around the-

Jeff: -market around you, what amenities are gonna bring people in. You've gotta know historically what the demand is. We're onto all of that. We have a hybrid approach. We have a full-time communications manager that manages the communication for us.

We manage the marketing, the revenue management, the cleaners, we manage all the other aspects of a short-term rental business, and we make-

Mike: so one, one comms person. Right? So you've operationalized it with one comms person. Are they a local comms person or is it like a third party service that's like

Jeff: No, no, no.

It's just an individual that has a lovely communication style, his tone and the way he writes, and he messages. He has his own Airbnbs, he doesn't live down there. He lives in the city where we live.

Mike: Oh, cool. Okay. But local, within Kentucky.

Jeff: Within Kentucky, yes.

Mike: Yeah.

Got it. Got it. Yeah.

Jeff: He's an individual. He's an individual.

Sonia: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. They're, they don't live in like Columbia.

Jeff: No, no, no.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Sonia: Our cleaners are local as well.

Jeff: And we automate where we can, we use ai, in some instances. But yeah. We have a lot of different pricing strategies and a lot of things at play.

But I will tell you have to have that base, you have to have a very attractive product. The experience has to be consistent. I mean, we're down there several times a week, checking over the cleaners, making sure that everything is staged exactly the same. Things are, music's going on. We have this whole thing that when someone walks in, we want it to look a certain way. We want it to smell a certain way. We want the lights. We want all that experience to be consistent. That takes time and personal attention and training cleaners to make sure that that experience happens the same way every single time.

But I'll tell you as far as our performance goes, this month was a hundred percent occupancy. We average about-

Mike: what?!

Jeff: -90% occupancy rate.

Mike: Woo!!

Jeff: We have almost since the get go... It's been crazy. Our cleaners, I mean, they're turning cabins every two days. We've got a shed of supplies down there so that they don't have to carry around a lot, but the laundry and turning things over the inventory, it's very much a business.

9. Performance & Recognition

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you guys presumably do like all of your acquisition through Airbnb, is that correct?

Jeff: Well, no, we're experimenting with VRBO on one of our cabins. We get a little bit of... you know what?

I'm an expert on Airbnb and Airbnb's algorithm, and how to modify that so you come up and search and all of that. To learn that takes a while. And we do AB testing. So everything is tested. The language and text on our site, our title and everything, we do AB testing to see how it performs. Is it gonna increase our search results in Airbnb to do that in VRBO, i'm like, 'gosh, that's gonna take me another year to learn that platform and how that thing goes'. But we're getting such good performance with Airbnb. We haven't really concentrated that much on VRBO, we do have the big A-frame listed on VRBO multiple platforms.

Mike: I just did a search for Red River Gorge and you guys are... both the A-Frame and the Outpost are in the first row of results.

Jeff: Yeah.

Mike: And both of them are listed as guest favorite and you have like a little trophy on the A-Frame, which is like, amazing.

Sonia: We worked, we've worked hard for that.

Mike: That's amazing. Holy smokes!

It's like, that's so cool. Even, you know from, oh wow, this is so crazy. Between page one and page two of the results, we have four DENs. Between three different projects, three different owners, listed, in this particular area.

That's amazing. On pages one and two, which is, you know, proof positive that design matters. And an incredible approach to like operating and providing hospitality, matters immensely, right? But that's so cool to see that the combination of all those factors has helped everyone succeed.

So people can find you on Airbnb, do you guys offer direct bookings through your website? Like how do people stay there?

Jeff: I'm actually, we were going down that road as a strategy to eventually, 'cause it is unnerving to only be on one platform.

In case something happens. Your business, you know, it makes me nervous and we thought we would diversify, but, if you study Airbnb, some of the regulations have changed and they're trying to protect their customer base.

So I'm afraid to do that. I don't want to lose. You know, or be penalized by Airbnb, so I need to understand a little bit more about that.

There's been a lot of changes on the Airbnb platform. We're trying to stay ahead of everything and study it. So we're not moving quickly, and we're already booked out two, three months out. So our performance, I don't even know if our cleaners could, I mean, I, I'm so happy with the way we are. I don't want to mess with anything right now, but.

Sonia: We were pretty excited the other day. We got a booking for February of 2026 already, so that was pretty neat to see. And then we had another couple ones start. So.

Mike: Amazing.

Jeff: We've already got people that are booking both cabins at the same time.

Then we have one guy that's like, 'well as soon as the third one's going, I wanna rent all three at the same time. And if it's go, if it finishes by the time my stay is, I wanna rent that one at the same time'. 'cause he wants to put his family down.

Mike: I'm like, looking at your calendar. 'cause I'm like, I'm like, I love to climb. Like.

Sonia: Come visit!

Mike: I would love to like come there with, you know, we've got this like great camera set up in a drone, right? And like we could film these projects, but I'm like looking at your availability, like your occupancy calendar, and you guys were like booked solid until November.

Jeff: I know, it's...

Sonia: it's exciting.

Jeff: It is terrible. 'cause our friends are like, 'Hey, we wanna rent your cabin'. And I'm like, 'uh, we can't even stay there'.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm so sorry guys, that you're business is a runaway success. That's awesome. Um, but that's cool. Actually, this like, works out pretty well because, no one wants to climb in like hot, sweaty weather, so it's like better to climb in like November.

But yeah, I might actually book some time in November after this call. But, guys, that is incredible.

10. Reflections & Advice

Mike: Okay. One last question, um, since we're almost at the top of the hour here, you've been like really, really lovely across the entire interview.

What would you tell your friends if they were trying to pursue a similar project with a set of DEN plans?

Sonia: I think I would say...

Jeff: You know, I'm just gonna say right now, she gets mad. She doesn't want me to tell anybody. Don't mention 'what, who go?' We're so protective of our business. I know it's no secret, but we're not advertising to our competition what our, it's almost like this recipe that we've created that, you know, so there's some...

Honestly, we couldn't recommend them more highly, but we're scared to recommend. We don't want any more competition down there, but we couldn't have done it without the DEN plans. I gotta tell ya, we couldn't have done it without the resource files that come with DEN, the great plans, the support from the company.

Sonia: DENs been fantastic and we're all about DEN. I would say regardless of whichever plan they choose or timeframe that they start, patience is key. I mean, there's a lot of detail, which is fantastic, that DEN provides. Take the time to absorb it, to learn it, ask questions.

You all have a great team, if there are questions, which we've had, um, so you're very responsive and we very much appreciated that. And so just taking the time, having the patience to know what you're doing or at least learning, if it's your first time, what you're about to do. You know, there are gonna be challenges with contractors maybe not showing up or, just finding the right fit of it all.

But it's so worth it. It is so worth it.

Jeff: And, you know, something that people don't mention, but if you've built a DEN cabin, and you're out there, we've reached out to... the guy at Clear Lake Cottages has helped us. Potsy's helped us a lot. There's this comradery.

Sonia: It's a community. It's like a community.

Jeff: We're in different markets, so you know, we'll help, like 'what did you use to put on your cedar' or 'what did you', I mean, you just share... there's an information sharing that's going on just between builders. It's amazing.

Mike: I see that. Like, that was like unintentional, right?

I think like for us, you know, like we just try to put out a good product and support our customers and that was it. And it was like, every time I see like DEN customers commenting and like liking each other's posts, I'm just like, 'wow, what a crazy, organic, like side effect of this whole experiment that like, we inadvertently created this community amongst donors'.

And it's awesome to hear that everyone like supports each other. You know? It's a weird thing that we never intended, but it's like amazing to witness!

Sonia: Great outcome. Yes.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's so cool. Well, on behalf of the whole DEN team, thank you so much. Uh, can't wait to stay.

I'm gonna figure out, I'm gonna talk my partner into doing a climbing trip, hopefully in November.

Sonia: Please do. Yes.

Mike: You'll see our booking soon. And, yeah, thanks for spending the time with us today. And, we'll certainly promote the project when we launch it online and we'll certainly give you guys a shout out on Instagram.

Great job, once again, the proof is in the pudding, the photos look great and we can't wait to stay. So, thanks so much guys. I wish you a great day. Thank you.

Jeff: Fun sharing our story.

Mike: Awesome. Thank you.