The Underrated Mountain Market with Less Competition with Yok Re

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Welcome to The Short Term Show, the show about short term rentals and long term wealth, with real property owners hosting real properties who are crushing it in the vacation and short term rental space. And here's your host, Avery Carl.

**Avery Carl** (0:28)
Hey y'all, welcome back to another episode of The Short Term Show. Today, we are gonna talk about the Blue Ridge, Georgia area. So this area, I don't feel like, in my opinion, does not get enough love.
It is drivable from a lot of big southern metros, Atlanta being the biggest one, Birmingham, Chattanooga, several of the North Carolina ones. It's beautiful, it's a great weekend destination, and there are much fewer properties available as rentals than its neighbor, Gatlinburg and Severoville and Pigeon Forge in the Smoky Mountains. So the competition is much less. So I want to bring your attention back to this market because we haven't talked about it in a while, and it is the Blue Ridge, Georgia area. And we've got our top agent in that market, Yok, here to kind of talk to us about why people are still testing in this market. I feel like people have kind of forgotten about it. They get so on the Smokies train that they get tunnel vision and don't see anything else when it might be just down the road in Blue Ridge to have less competition.

**Yok** (1:39)
Thanks, Avery. And yeah, let me add one other area people drive to here. Florida. If you go downtown, like right now, probably 30% of the car tags are from Florida. So we love our Florida people and it's very easy. You jump on 75, head north and you're here. It's a half a day drive. So for us, Florida is a big draw and in the Metro Atlanta, and like you said, all the other areas that you had mentioned. But yeah, it's super easy.
I think what people love about this market is it's easy. It's easy to buy in. It's not hyper competitive and it's fairly simple to rent in as well because it's not hyper competitive. I tell people there's not like these management sharks around every corner like they are in some of these really, really, I guess if you want to just say more famous area. So you can come in here and not be a small fish in a big pond and you can be successful really quickly if you just go through the things and install the amenities and do the things that you and Luke and the rest of our team talk about. You don't have to have an indoor pool. You don't have to have a pickleball court. You don't have to have some of these over the top things, but there is a, I would say, basics that people are looking for and they're pretty straightforward.
I tell everybody, hey, what do you want when you go to a cabin? Ultimately, that's what you want to ask yourself. I want some fireplaces. I want a fire pit. I want to be able to see the mountains. I want to be able to see a creek or a river or maybe just a nice vista and then clean sheets and room to stretch out. We're not a big honeymoon destination. We're not a big corporate retreat destination, so you don't really have to think about that. It's mostly people just like us, Avery. They've got their family, maybe grandparents and grandkids, and they just want to load up six to 10 to 12 people, something like that, and go on vacation.
It's pretty simple. It really is, and that's the beauty of it. It is small town America with a lot of people coming from Metro Atlanta that are looking to spend money and do a little R&R and relax. Again, they don't need all these over-the-top amenities, but they do want clean sheets and some basic stuff.

**Avery Carl** (4:02)
Yeah, and I agree with that. To your point about the Florida people, I've learned something in my six years so far of being a Floridian.
Growing up in Mississippi, as you know, as someone else who grew up in Mississippi, everybody in the summer, they were either a Gulf Shores family or a Destin 38 Panama City Beach, Florida Panhandle family, and that's just where they went every single year. Sometimes once at the beginning of the summer, once at the end of the summer, maybe a full seven days, maybe 10 days. They're going for a good length vacation every summer.
What I have learned from being here in a tourist town in Florida, which basically the entire Florida coastline, even if it's a big city, is a tourist town in some form or fashion. We have a high season when all the tourists are in town and it's impossible to get groceries and it's impossible to go out to eat. Everybody here, when I'm sitting at my kids' tennis lessons, talking to the other moms, they leave and go to the mountains for a week to two weeks or more during the summer, kind of at the height of the summer. Now some of them go to Colorado, but a lot of them go to North Georgia or to Western North Carolina. They don't want to have to load everybody up and get on an airplane and go across the country. They want to be able to drive up there, stay, get away from all the tourists down here. It's less hot, cooler. They get to do different types of outdoor activities from what we do here. Then they're also only like an hour and a half from Atlanta, which the Tampa people, the Sarasota people, that doesn't mean a lot to them. But for those of us who live on the panhandle where we don't have any big cities, we can't go to SACS, we can't go. We don't have a lot of those places. It's nice for them to be able to pop down to Atlanta for the day and do a couple of things. Don't dismiss the Florida market when you're thinking about the North Georgia Mountains because not only do we all go to the mountains during the summer, we also go to the mountains during hurricane season. If there's a hurricane in the Gulf, Floridians, there's two types of Floridians. There's the ones that are going to stay and go down with the ship no matter what, and then there's the ones that as soon as there's a hurricane in the Gulf and it looks like it's coming our way, they hit the mountains.