When Janna Harris found her personal and work life abruptly disrupted by Covid-19, the Dallas resident realized she desperately needed time to decompress. She didn’t care to fly or undertake a long road trip, and she wanted to avoid conventional hotels and inns with shared spaces such as elevators, lobbies and dining rooms.
A wellness coach who loves the outdoors and camping, Ms. Harris was browsing Instagram one day when up popped an advertisement for a rental from a company called Getaway House Inc. that instantly appealed to her. It was for a so-called tiny house on its own sequestered space in a rambling wooded compound near LaRue, Texas. Even better, it was just 90 minutes southeast of her Dallas home by car.
She booked it immediately and says she spent a blissful long weekend soaking up the serenity.
Tiny houses—typically dwellings smaller than 500 square feet but defined by some as “living simply in small homes”—aren’t new. The “tiny house movement” has been in bloom for more than a decade, a rebellion against a perception that American homes had grown too large, too expensive, too bland and too environmentally unfriendly.
Now, tiny homes are surging in popularity as havens for travelers seeking safe and interesting harbors during the pandemic.
Getaway, which operates tiny-home rental complexes within a two-hour drive of 11 major cities, says it has never been busier and attributes much of the surge to Covid-weary, Covid-wary travelers. It says bookings for May, June and July surged 260% from the previous three months. It reported 99% occupancy across all of its properties in July and August, 97% in September, 99% in October, and November was tracking at 98%.
The 5-year-old company has about 500 rentals spread across its properties, with rates ranging from $99 to $299 a night, depending on location and size.
Ms. Harris’s rental was one of 40 tiny houses in the Getaway Piney Woods compound. The homes offer the amenities of a conventional cabin—kitchen, private bath, outdoor fire pit and Wi-Fi—but the appeal of an architecturally hip and environmentally friendly space.
As for Covid concerns, the compound purposely omits communal gathering spaces and offers keyless, no-contact entry to homes.
“I didn’t encounter another guest the entire time I was there,” Ms. Harris says. “You can’t get more distanced or safer than that.”
Getaway isn’t alone in offering tiny-home rentals. At Tiny Estates, a 50-unit tiny-home vacation complex near Lancaster, Pa., CEO Abigail Hobson says the resort, whose rentals run from $75 to $175 a night, was near peak occupancy in July and August, with September tapering off slightly. Many bookings came from people seeking “quarantine getaways” that allowed them to stay in “fully contained homes configured in a way that allowed them to avoid interacting with others and staying safe,” says Ms. Hobson.
Safety and privacy aren’t the only thing driving demand. When Austin, Texas, resident Sean Clancy and a friend—after quarantining for two weeks—decided on a monthlong road trip to Maine, Mr. Clancy scoured Craigslist, Airbnb and Google for tiny-home listings that would allow them access to their passions for running, hiking, biking and kayaking.
They also were mindful that in booking a tiny home they were aiding local economies that have been hammered by the pandemic. “We wanted to both travel safe and support local,” says Mr. Clancy, the community-development director for Marathon Kids, an Austin nonprofit that promotes childhood fitness.
Like many tiny-home seekers, they were attracted to what some call the “tiny home spirit”—the fact that so many tiny homes are architecturally novel and fun and set in interesting places. One of Mr. Clancy’s finds put them in a railroad caboose transfigured into a tiny home on the banks of the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pa.
As Mr. Clancy and Ms. Harris learned, finding tiny-home rentals is pretty easy. Getaway advertises exclusively on social media like Facebook and Instagram, while Tiny Estates uses social media but also posts its listings on travel site Expedia, which puts it on platforms such as Orbitz and Hotels.com.
Both Ms. Harris and Mr. Clancy say their tiny-home rentals were posted with reassuring notes about the Covid cleaning and sterilization regimens between tenants.
The surge in tiny-home interest isn’t confined to just rentals, however. Jason Francis is a partner in Tiny Heirloom, a Portland, Ore., high-end tiny-home construction company who also offers consulting services to would-be tiny home buyers and builders. He says, “We’ve definitely seen a spike in search inquiries and general interest in tiny homes since Covid.” Top-end Tiny Heirloom homes go for more than $125,000.
Some analysts who have been following the tiny-house real-estate market say the surge in interest since the pandemic began is real and an indication that it may time to invest in the tiny-house market. According to a June blog by Mashvisor, a San Francisco Bay Area real-estate investment data-analysis firm, “During the current pandemic, some tiny home builders reported a doubling in the demand for their services.”
Chris Schapdick, a Hackensack, N.J., tiny-home builder, says business is booming for his tiny homes—which range from about $10,000 for a basic shell to about $50,000 for a completely finished model—and Covid is definitely a factor. He constructs most of his houses on trailers that render them mobile, which he says is an attractive feature for people who may want to vacate virus hot spots either permanently or as second homes.
“That basically turns them into luxury campers that you can pretty much take anywhere,” he says. With so many people working from home during the pandemic, mobile tiny houses become mobile tiny offices that let people work anywhere there is an internet connection, he says.
Mr. Schapdick says a group of nurses who treat hospitalized Covid patients recently expressed interest in buying his budget tiny houses to park in the driveways of their conventional homes. The idea is to use them more or less as decontamination/quarantine stations so they don’t risk spreading the virus to their families.
“Covid is getting people to think very creatively about tiny houses,” says Mr. Schapdick, who got into the tiny-home business after building one for himself in 2013.
He still has that tiny home—a 150-square-foot cabin nestled in the woods in upstate New York. When he built it, the house seemed like something of an indulgence. Now, he says, “it’s become my retreat from this tumultuous year.”
Source: WSJ
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