686: Waiter to Glamping Millionaire: How to Build a Six-Figure Glamping Business

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1:15What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, where we've been sharing legit ways to make extra money since 2013. Today's guest took a unique land hacking approach to build both cash flow and life-changing wealth by tapping into the glamping trend. This is glamorous camping for those uninitiated. And for the day job, he teaches short-term rentals at BiggerPockets. But on the side, he runs a multi-six-figure glamping operation. From CameronRanchGlamping.com, Garrett Brown, welcome to The Side Hustle Show. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Me too. This is a new topic in the 670-plus episodes of the show.

1:54So stick around. I'm going to be learning right alongside the audience. We're covering how you can get started with this side hustle, how some of these can command four-star hotel types of rates without the four-star startup costs, the marketing best practices, the mistakes to avoid, all that stuff. But Cameron Ranch doesn't happen by accident. You see this trend and say, look, I got to get in on this. I got to figure out a way to take advantage of that. And before you can do that, you need some acreage, you need some land. So talk me through the initial phases here. So I went all in, for a lack of better words into the glamping side because I was able to get this land with something called land hacking is what I call it.

2:33In the BiggerPockets community, we've coined the term house hacking, which is essentially where you buy a property with, you know, four, five, six bedrooms, maybe three bedrooms, and you rent out those rooms to either, you know, roommates or friends or, you know, tenants or whatever, whatever you want to call them. And then they're helping you pay down the mortgage while you're almost essentially living for free. So I was like, why could I not take that same concept and do this with, you know, maybe some cabins and call it land hacking? So I found a property in a, I'm in Houston, Texas, and I was looking for something within the vicinity of Houston, Texas that was a little more rural.

3:15I have something I like to call a 60-30-10 rule. Now I've coined it that, but at the time I knew that I needed to be 60 minutes from, you know, a major city. And so I found some land. I didn't want to go three or four hours out from a major city because I figured people wouldn't want to drive that far. Yeah. I thought of the 30 portion was 30 minutes from some type of national, regional, or state attraction. The land I ended up finding was about 10 or 15 minutes from a lake. It's called Lake Livingston, which is the second biggest lake in Texas. But it was also near a state park. It was also near a national forest.

3:54And so there was a few like attractions. And then the 10 of the 60-30-10 rule is you want to be 10 minutes from some type of civilization, you know, a Dollar General, gas station, Walmart, anything like that. Because I knew that if I was, you know, in a beautiful place, but 30 or 40 minutes away from civilization, I was like, how am I going to get people to come out there and clean for me? How am I going to get people to come out and, you know, operate the facilities for me when I'm not there. There's such thing as too remote. Yeah, exactly. And I was and I see people, they'll see really cheap land, you know, like a really, you know, remote area.

4:29And I'm like, well, there's a reason that land is extremely cheap because you're, you know, you're going to have a hard time turning that into anything for, you know, a million different reasons. So I ended up, you know, researching a lot of places. I found a house that was on a little over 10 acres. And so I knew that having that house on the property, it's very hard to get a loan for land. Just raw land. Yeah. A lot of people have to buy it with cash. You can probably get a loan for like 50 % down, which, you know, a lot of people 50 % down, even if you're buying a piece of land, it's still going to be, you know, maybe$100 ,000 or something that's really expensive.

5:06And then you then you have to spend the money to actually develop the site. So I found this house on about 10 acres in a in a unrestricted area. It wasn't in, you know, wasn't in a neighborhood or an HOA or anything. And so I sold my townhouse that was in Houston, took a little bit of the money I made off that and put this into this new house, which I only had to put five percent down on, which it was a five hundred thousand dollars house, five hundred fifty thousand dollar house to be exact. OK, on 10 acres, on 10 acres. It came in appraised at$600 ,000. So I already had some instant equity when I went into it.

5:41But the cool thing, I had the 5 % down, but I also was able to negotiate a 3 % seller concession into my offer. And so what that did is I almost went into the property for about 2 % down because I had a 5 % down payment that I needed to put down. But within my offer and my negotiations, that seller agreed to pay back 3 % of the price. There's even opportunities out there that you could get a, and it was called an FHA loan, which could be 3.5 % down. You could even possibly get a USDA loan, which is a government loan and getting into it that wants to develop rural areas. So with all the money that I was able to save upfront, I only ended up having to put about, I think it was about$12 ,000 down.

6:28Now, that money, the money I saved, I ended up building my first tiny cabin on the property. The really cool thing about land hacking is one of the most expensive things when you're doing raw land is the utilities, getting electricity to the property, figuring out how you're going to get water, figuring out are you going to be on a septic system? Are you going to have public sewer available to, you know, have for restrooms and things like that? So one thing about having a house on the property is you've already you know that electricity is right by the property. because that house has electricity, there's a good chance that you're going to be able to either tap into that water system they have, if it's public water, or if it's a water well system, which this property had a water well already.

7:13And then the septic is a little bit of one that there's not many ways to go around it because usually the house that's built, if you're on in remote land is usually going to have septic systems, you're not probably going to be able to tie into that septic system because they're very strict on the, you know, the size of it. So one of the big expenses I had was a septic system that I had to design, which cost about$8 ,000 to put on for my first two tiny homes. And then the road system. Those are two things that people, I personally underestimated myself. So I had the land and I put my first tiny cabin, which is, it's called a geodome, basically like a glorified tent, but it's like made out of steel and it's got like this 10 year long canvas.

7:57And, you know, we bought it for about$13 ,000. There's a company called Pacific Domes in America that make them. They're in Oregon. There's a lot of like cheaper options out there, but I personally wouldn't recommend them. That seems fairly affordable for a semi-permanent residence. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you build your foundation under and things like that. But I've seen people buy, you know, two or three thousand dollar geodomes from, you know, Alibaba and all these, you know, like worldwide sites that will, you know, sell them within a year, they're deteriorating. So that's a good thing about buying with a company that has reputation.

8:32But we bought it for about$13 ,000. We built it a little bit in the middle of the property. So our road to get back there was about$5 ,000. It was a gravel road. And then we had to put the septic in, which is about$9 ,000. And so we're all in for that for about, I think,$30 ,000. We worked with our county. One thing good about Pacific Domes is they actually have architectural plans from an architect that comes with your geodome. So I went to my county and I said, hey. Yeah, a little easier to get that signed off. Yeah. Way easier. You know, they were very skeptical at first, but they were open to hearing what I had to say.

9:07And then I was like, hey, this is what I want to do. Like, I have these plans. These are stamped by an architect. Like, is this doable? And, you know, luckily my county, I was in an unrestricted area. My county was on board with it. Not every county is going to be. So make sure you're talking to local permitting departments and just be honest with what you're thinking about doing. Yeah. You get me searching like Redfin for, okay, I need three plus bedrooms on five plus acres and not a lot of options come up, but some do. And, you know, there's price difference between the Northwest and Houston, But there's also that regulatory component where it's like probably a stricter building code environment than outside in the Texas rural area.

9:51But you never know. You never know until you ask and figure out, well, what can I realistically do with this parcel or this piece of property? And so this is where the math gets kind of interesting. So, OK, we've got that. I got a place to live, right? So the land had a house on it if you wanted to go live out in the burbs, deep, deep burbs. And then for$30 ,000 with the septic and the road and the structure, now all of a sudden I've got this asset that could potentially start cash flowing. It's like, now we got to turn around and rent this out. Yep. And we tapped into the water and the electric that we already had at the house.

10:26And so that was about another$5 ,000, I think, to, you know, trench some lines and add some lines to get to where we were. So we're about$35 ,000 there. We added a hot tub because we knew that there's a major selling point for we wanted to rent, you know, we we wanted to rent at a luxury price. Yeah. A hot tub is it's a little more work, but it increases your revenue by about 36 percent just by adding this one simple amenity. Wow. It's almost like you have to have that. It pays for itself right away. More with Garrett in just a moment, including how the Geodome generated nearly$100 ,000 last year, plus the creative partnerships that got him a$129 ,000 cabin for free, coming up right after this.

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13:05Just go to Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash side hustle show. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need. For people that are listening and thinking the same thing as you about like, oh, well, I don't know if I can get things like this permitted in my area because, you know, rural Texas is a lot easier to build in. Just simply find out a county that you're interested in and call that permitting department and talk to them. And I've called about three or four different counties before I even figured out the county I wanted to go to because I would just call them and I would say, hey, like, would y 'all allow this?

13:49And if a county is like, absolutely not, never, we would never do that. Then you go, okay, that's not somebody I'm going to want to deal with. Cross that one off. Yeah. Yeah. You know, most of these smaller counties, they have like one or two people that work in their permitting department. So you just need to reach out and ask them. And I also would ask local contractors. I started calling some local contractors in areas and I was like, hey, you know, what do you think of County A versus County B? Have you, you know, are they more strict there? And every single contractor was like, hey, go to County B.

14:19I promise you they're way, way easier to deal with on this type of build. Oh, interesting. Because we've got like Mount Rainier National Park. We've got Olympic National Park. We've got Lake Chelan and East. Well, there's like some decent destinations here that people are coming to from out of state. And they're not super close proximity wise to like, you know, go visit on a day to day basis, but it could be feasible. You find something in proximity there following your 60-30-10 rule. Yeah, there's a lot of really cool stays in the Pacific Northwest area that have already been established. So if you find some areas that maybe have one or two kind of unique, you know, there's like some immaculate tree houses and like floating Airbnbs I've seen in the trees up there.

14:59Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like a famous treehouse that's here by us. Yeah. Maybe piggyback a little on some of those stays and say, call those counties and go, hey, I have a project I want to do. Is this feasible? Or, you know, even the worst case scenario, quote unquote, would be you build something a little more traditional built, but then figure out a way to make it really, really cool with some of the amenities you add. And, you know, like you can have a base. I have friends that have very basic cabins, but they made, you know, they had a hot tub, but then they maybe built a little outdoor grilling area.

15:31They put some like LED lights and just some like really cool features to it. And they still just cash flow like crazy because they built an experience. You know, that's the whole thing here is you want to build an experience for that. when somebody comes out into, you know, your place that you're thinking about building, that they're going to leave there like going, wow, that was, you know, I can't get that type of, you know, vibe anywhere else. So I even have a friend in the UK who has a glamping site, who's one of my mentors. He has 11 cabins on three acres and he is booked out for two years in advance and he built them all himself.

16:09And, you know, he spent maybe$30 ,000 to$40 ,000 on each structure. And so you don't need 10, 12, you know, 40 acres to do this. A lot of it is building the experience and then building it right. You could easily have a very profitable glamping site with a couple acres, a few acres in a good area, you know, similar to we did. We got the first one going. It started renting out. We probably were all in for about$60 ,000 by the time we did flooring, we did an inside bathroom, like everything top to bottom. Garrett, the number keeps going up. First, you said 30, then you said 35, but now you're telling me 60.

16:46Like there's a little, there's some scope creep here as it goes. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I'm going through the levels of what you have to add, you know what I mean? Because you could slap one up for 30 ,000. I'd have friends that have done it. You can do it. I'm speaking on how high I went with it, but anybody could do a much more basic setup and still run into a business. I have friends that have put up a safari tent with a fire pit and maybe$5 ,000 per tent, and they're still getting a few thousand dollars a month. It's all kind of dependent on what your goal is and how high of a luxury item you want to go to.

17:21What does the Geodome rent for? So my Geodome now, two years in, it rents for about, we get about$422 average daily rate with cleaning fees and everything included. And we're booked about 88 % of the year, 88 % occupancy. Wow. So we made about$95 ,000 gross last year. You know, there's operating expenses to this. You have cleaners. Sure. We have our mortgage. The cash flow from our Geodome is paying the mortgage on the house. So we don't have any living expenses. You have some utilities, but we still profited about$60 ,000. So our first year, we covered all the expenses back in. And then it's all gravy.

18:03Isn't that crazy? That's what's nuts is the nightly. If you can figure out the marketing and the occupancy side, and we should get into that. But like 400 bucks a night is crazy. Like you should be in like a luxury hotel. But it's like you said, building that experience that we're going to go out into the country. We're expecting a certain thing. It's like the Instagram worthy, you know, cover photos and everything else that make people want to make that trip and spend that kind of cash for what is not a Four Seasons downtown. Yeah, I think it's crazy all the time. Well, other people, when I tell them how much we do and, you know, spoiler alert, we built more tiny cabins on that same land that do even better than the Geodome because of everything we learned.

18:45It costs a little more to build, but the cash flow we had coming in from the Geodome, we rolled it into more tiny cabins. I've got enough space here where I could basically lather, rinse, repeat, add something. It sounds like a slightly different build or kind of a, you called it like a tiny cabin or almost like a kit build where it's, you know, find a place, plop it down. And it's not necessarily hammers and nails and foundation, like building something completely from scratch. Yeah. The second tiny cabin we built on site, I got creative with it. We planned how we were building. So we built in phases.

19:17We built the geodome closer to the house because it's cheaper to get the utilities there. Okay. And then we kept expanding some on the land. The second build that we did, I found a company, they're called Ood. They're from Eastern Europe, Estonia, but they make mirror cabins where there's this really cool tiny cabins that have these like mirrors all surrounding them basically. And you can see outside, but can't see inside. They were running for$129 ,000. I want one, but I don't have$129 ,000. I reached out to the company and I said, hey, I have a profitable site that I'm wanting to expand on. Would y 'all be interested in a partnership or anything along those capacities?

19:56They had just brought their first few houses to the United States. And surprisingly, well, they said yes. And they gave me a$129 ,000 cabin for essentially free in return for me giving them a revenue split. So that way I didn't have to put any money down for this cabin, except for the small infrastructure we built with more utilities, all that, which is about$20 ,000. They gave me the sauna and the house, brought it, dropped it on a crane. And that cabin alone is doing$498 average daily rate for two years has been booked. I want to say we're about 90 % occupancy on that, but it grossed$115 ,000 in its first year when I didn't have to put any money down for it.

20:41That's nuts. And I'm looking at the pictures. I'm on the OOD website. It's like Umlat, Umlat, D, O-O-D kind of. These things, they're tiny. Like they're smaller than like a kid's bedroom. Oh, yeah. They're 221 square feet. People tell me all the time, like, we've had people stay four or five days before, but most people come in for two nights, one night on the weekdays. We get a ton of birthday celebrations, anniversaries, romantic getaways. That's kind of our target demographic. But I tell people that just to, like, spark people's ideas on the creative side of things. Like, you don't have to have cash all the time to get things started.

21:19Yeah, there's tons of tiny home companies out there that build them. And as I expand, I reach out to tiny home companies all the time saying, hey, do you want to do a revenue split? Because it's almost like an infinite cash on cash return for me when I get a free place and then I'm able to just split profits with people. That's like someone's a cheat code. Yeah, keep your risk super low. What kind of split do they expect if they're going to rent for almost 500 bucks a night? Yeah. So they get 30%, which is, yeah, like we're talking about the risk. I would have been so nervous to buy one of these.

21:49Is anybody going to want to come and stay here? Yeah. Yeah. They're going to want to see you have some skin in the game. The one reason why they were fine with this, because I had my geodome already. Yeah. And I owned the land. And so they're like, OK, you've obviously invested some money into this. But I have friends in areas, even not far from me. There's a lady I know. She bought, I think, four or five acres. And this is kind of what I was alluding to earlier with the safari tents, which I personally am not a big fan of. But I know people do really well with them. You can get them for a few thousand dollars.

22:19And she put up seven or eight safari tents on just a little piece of land, just had basic utilities, no real big amenities. And she's probably, you know, she's probably making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year collectively across all of them now, you know, as gross revenue. So there's a lot of levels and levers you can pull to, you know, depending on your situation and where you're at. And even now that she's built up that business, she could replace one of the tents with her cash flow and maybe, you know, get a more unique tiny home or something that will bring in a higher average daily rate as she keeps reinvesting back to her business.

22:55And the really, I mean, cool thing to me about this, and, you know, I'm hoping other people can see this as a, like, this is how I've planned to build generational wealth is that property that I took that was worth$550 ,000. But now we have four tiny homes. I have tiny homes in other cities as well. But that land value and everything I've added to it, appraisal wise, it's worth about$1.5 million now because of all the utilities I've added, all of the infrastructure I've added. and because I've built out a business on the land, I could sell everything with the assets, the house included everything, as a total business one day if I wanted to.

23:33And when you're selling a business with assets, they're not worried as much about the asset value. They're worried about how much income the business is bringing in. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to be generating that type of nightly rates, that type of monthly cashflow, and to have added a million dollars in equity to the property in just a few short years. I think that's really, really inspiring. And I like this creative financing aspect. Well, I don't want to buy this thing for$130 ,000, but like it's almost kind of a glorified owner financing type of deal where like, hey, why don't we see what a cash flow that I'll pay you a percentage of the proceeds, stuff like that.

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