Building a Successful Outdoor Resort Business with Clear Summit Investments

**Miles Hobson** (0:11)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast. I am your host for today, Miles Hobson, Head of Marketing here at Hospitable. Today, I am speaking with Zander, the founder and CEO at Clear Summit Investments. He's a seasoned real estate developer with experience in both residential and commercial projects. He has developed and asset managed high-rise hotels, affordable housing, and industrial subdivisions. In total, Zander has personally completed 50 real estate investments. He is a former USA Army officer and paratrooper with an Iraq deployment and served in Special Forces.
If you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, and we're going to get started right now.
Okay, hello, Zander. Nice to have you on. It's a pleasure to meet you.

**Zander Kempf** (0:57)
Likewise. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

**Miles Hobson** (1:00)
No worries. I guess first off, we should actually ask whereabouts you're calling from, Zander. Where are you joining today's podcast episode?

**Zander Kempf** (1:08)
Yeah, so I live out in Hawaii. I'm on North Shore of Oahu.

**Miles Hobson** (1:12)
Nice. I can see some palms of the background. It looks like a nice view out there.
Great. So obviously, we're here to talk about outdoor adventure, short-term rentals. So we're going to get straight to the point of asking you, why should a successful short-term rental host consider potentially moving away from traditional apartments or houses, or someone that's not even a host yet, consider not choosing that, and instead choosing something like an RV or a glamping resort space instead?

**Zander Kempf** (1:46)
Sure. I wouldn't necessarily say that everybody should. In real estate, I think there's a thousand different ways to make money, and a lot of them are very viable. I have friends that are very successful in everything from single-family flips, to wholesaling, to large high-rise construction and development.
More than anything, it just matters that you pick a niche and you stay with it, and get really, really good at just doing that one thing. So some reasons for transitioning to larger resorts, that I could say is economy is a scale. Rather than having smaller individual short-term rental units, now we can have a high volume of these units on one property, and we can build in all the efficiencies with that. I have one website, one set of marketing, one set of guest communications that covers a much wider piece. It also lets us add revenue streams, which isn't something that you can really do with an individual like a single house. On a resort, we can sell food and beverage, we can sell advertising, we can sell local tours or other adventures around.
If our resort amenities are really nice, we can even sell day passes. We do some hot springs as well, so we can sell day passes to our hot springs, and that ends up being some really significant amounts of revenue on top of just the nightly stays.

**Miles Hobson** (3:15)
Nice. Okay. And have you seen a lot of people that enter the space, are they entering as kind of a first time host? This is kind of their first time into kind of hospitality, or do you often see people kind of transition from either short-term rentals in kind of a traditional sense, in apartments and that kind of thing, or homes, or are they maybe even coming from hotels and coming into more of this kind of short-term rental resort aspect?

**Zander Kempf** (3:43)
What I see people entering the most commonly is glamping resorts, smaller boutique ones. Those have gotten really popular over the last couple of years, where people, small piece of land, and maybe they put a couple of yurts, a couple of tiny homes on it, and those typically do really well. Some areas now, just like we went through this big Airbnb boom, everybody putting single short-term rentals on, there are now a lot of smaller glamping units, so there is getting some saturation in the market. But that's certainly the entry point of starting with a small handful of units on a piece of land, the build out cost sometimes can be relatively low. These yurts or small canvas tents might just be five or 10 grand each.
So there are some lower entry points. Now, you're getting into the world of developing, so you have to look at what the zoning is and kind of play with some of those pieces. But depending on what county you're in, that could be a pretty low cost entry.

**Miles Hobson** (4:43)
Yeah, potentially much higher margin possibility and higher return on investment if you're choosing the right place to do it, I guess.