The Smoky Mountain Vacation Rental Forum

The second installment from The Night on Ski Mountain.  This panel of experts in Vacation Rentals represents 85 years of leadership with Mountain Laurel Chalets.  

Every year, Mountain Laurel Chalets gathers its homeowners for an evening called the Night on Ski Mountain — held high above Gatlinburg at the Ober Mountain Lounge. It's not a sales event. It's a conversation. Real data, honest perspective, and the kind of market talk that most management companies keep to themselves. This is Part One of three episodes drawn from that gathering. In this segment, T...

What does it actually take to succeed with a vacation rental in the Smoky Mountains right now? Not the version you see on Instagram or in a realtor's projection — the real version, from someone who walks the properties, sees the gaps, and helps owners fix them. Vernon Corum is a real estate agent, investor, STR educator, and founder of Short-Term Rental Rescue — a program where he walks struggling...

If you vacation rental reservation are all coming from one platform, you are not building a business, you are renting one.  In this episode Tom Goodwin unpacks what the data actually says about chanel dependency in the short term rental industry, and why it deeply matters for cabin owners and operators here in the Smoky Mountains.  

Tom Goodwin sits down with Paula Elliott, owner of Goldilocks Haven in Chalet Village — one of Gatlinburg's most storied vacation communities — for a conversation about what professional self-management actually looks like over the long haul. Paula bought her three-bedroom cabin in 2004 with her late husband, spent nine years learning the ropes with a management company, and has been self-managing...

Think about the last time you were a guest somewhere and walked away thinking — that felt like they actually cared. Not just clean, not just functional. Like someone thought about you before you arrived. Like you mattered beyond the transaction. How long ago was that? Now here is the harder question. Is that what your guests experience when they stay at your cabin? In Episode 3 Tom Goodwin makes t...

When was the last time someone gave you a completely honest answer about how the Smoky Mountain vacation rental market is actually doing right now? Not a projection. Not a pitch. Not a number someone pulled out of a report to make you feel good about signing a contract. Just the truth. That is what this episode is. Tom Goodwin has been watching this specific market for over 30 years — through fire...

SHOW NOTES When was the last time you sat down with another cabin owner or property manager in the Smoky Mountains and had an honest conversation — not a sales pitch, not a comparison of numbers, just a real conversation about how to do this better? If you're having trouble remembering, that's exactly what this forum was built for. In Episode 1, Tom Goodwin — CEO of Mountain Laurel Chalets and a 3...