The Smoky Mountain Vacation Rental Forum

Tom Goodwin
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

The Smoky Mountain Vacation Rental Forum is a podcast for cabin owners, self-managers, management companies, and hospitality professionals who care deeply about how vacation rentals are done in the Great Smoky Mountains. Hosted by Tom Goodwin — CEO of Mountain Laurel Chalets, the oldest family-owned vacation rental management company in Tennessee — this forum exists to raise the bar for professionalism, hospitality, and community in one of America's most visited destinations. Honest conversation. Practical takeaways. No hype.

  1. 2d ago

    Episode 18 Family, Faith, and Stewardship with Matthew Shadle

    This week the series continues as Tom sits down with Matthew Shadle of Cabins for You, a direct competitor and a friendly face at conferences and meetups across the region. It's the second conversation in Tom's series with fellow Smokies operators, built on the belief that with more than 20,000 homes in the market, there is enough to go around. Matthew has been with the company for more than 13 years, starting at 18 while he was still finishing high school and going full time after college. Cabins for You was founded in 2001 by his in-laws, a pastor with a passion for real estate and his wife, who had honeymooned in Gatlinburg decades earlier. It's celebrating 25 years as a family-owned company, now managing roughly 300 homes in the Smokies after acquiring Chalet Village in 2020. Matthew shares the core values behind it all (faith, family, and integrity), why he sees owners as partners instead of contracts, and what stewardship means when none of it is really yours. Tom and Matthew get candid about the state of the market: guest, owner, and employee expectations that are still shaped by the COVID boom, why safety comes first and a great guest experience second, and why professionalism starts with the basics, including state licensure and trust accounting. They talk about the revenue numbers new buyers are shown, why Matthew believes you have to think small even when you get big, and how gratitude and a culture of ownership keep good people on the team. They also get into something bigger: whether the market can keep building at this pace. Matthew shares what he's seen as inventory has grown from about 12,000 homes to well over 20,000, his concerns about build quality and pool properties, and his hope for a return to small-town hospitality. They close with what real collaboration looks like in practice, from calling a competitor to find a comparable cabin for displaced guests to refusing to win an owner by bashing another company, along with honest advice for owners on reinvesting in their homes. Reach Matthew at matthew@vacations4u.com. Connect with Matthew on LinkedIn. A conversation for operators who want to compete well and cooperate more, and for owners who want to know what a family-run company at scale actually looks like.

  2. Oct 15

    Episode 17 Cooperation Over Competition with Jack Zoppa

    This week Tom sits down with Jack Zoppa of Haven Vacation Rentals, a friend and fellow Smokies operator he calls a pioneer and a renegade of sorts. This conversation kicks off a new series of talks with other operators in the market, built around one idea: raising the bar together. Jack was born and raised in East Tennessee, grew up camping in the Smokies, and spent time working in a church before partnering with a friend who had started Haven in Knoxville. Today he helps run Haven and a cleaning company launched last year, and he's part of Stayd, a bootstrapped collective of seven operators across the Southeast, Colorado, and Texas that shares technology, hiring, and accounting tools while every brand stays locally funded, led, and owned. Tom and Jack talk candidly about the state of the Smoky Mountain market: inventory that has nearly doubled since Haven arrived, investors who bought for the write-off and are now stuck, the glut of four-bedroom pool cabins with no view, and why $140,000 revenue projections deserve a hard second look. They get into what professionalism really means when owners trust you with a million dollar asset, why people have become the highest leverage investment in a growing company, and how AI can remove operational friction, including an agent that triages issues cleaners report and schedules maintenance routes, so teams can spend more time on hospitality. They also get into something bigger: why neither believes the Smokies is a zero sum game. With roughly 20,000 listings and homes that change hands over time, Tom and Jack make the case for cooperation over competition, for asking other operators for help, and for being honest with owners, even when that means recommending they sell. Jack doesn't claim a secret sauce. He says Haven does the basics consistently and lets that compound. Tom and Jack close with a look ten years out, Jack's hope that investors can cash flow again so managers can focus on hospitality, and an open invitation to every operator in the market to join them for a big breakfast. Details to come. Resources mentioned: Haven Vacation Rentals (havenvacationrentals.com), Stayd (stayd.co), and Jack on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackathaven/). A conversation for operators who want to do this business better together, and for owners who want a realistic picture of the market they're investing in.

  3. Sep 23

    Episode 16 An Open Letter to the Owner Who's Losing Faith in Their Management Company

    This week Tom steps away from interviews again for another open letter, this time addressed directly to owners. Most people don't leave their management company because the numbers went bad. They leave because they stopped trusting what they were being told, and this episode is about learning to tell the difference between a hard season and a relationship that's quietly already over. Tom walks through four patterns owners keep describing to him: chasing down their own invoices and answers instead of being kept informed, discovering a rate cut on a statement instead of hearing about it in a phone call beforehand, watching a company they once felt personally known by turn into a portal and a ticket number, and doing more of the actual coordinating themselves while still paying a full commission. None of it requires anyone to be dishonest. The math just stops matching the effort. But this isn't a permission slip to panic or a breakup script. Tom offers a short gut-check, five questions any owner can bring to their current manager before assuming they need a new one, built to separate a rough quarter from a relationship that's genuinely run its course. A conversation for any owner who's been quietly wondering whether it's them, their manager, or just a hard season, and a reminder that there's still a real difference between the three.

  4. Sep 16

    Episode 15 A Spreadsheet With A Roof On It: Proceed With Caution Before You Buy in the Smokies

    This week Tom steps away from interviews to talk through a phone call that's been keeping him up at night. A couple from the Bay Area, who had never once set foot in the Smoky Mountains, put a contract on a nearly million dollar spec home based on a realtor's promise of $140,000 a year in minimum revenue. They were closing in weeks. They had no plans to visit before then. Tom walks through the math nobody puts in the brochure: OTA fees, management commissions, cleaning costs, and maintenance, and shows how a "worst case" projection of $140,000 can realistically shrink to a net closer to $45,000 to $50,000. He breaks down why this particular home, one of twenty nearly identical spec houses on a single street with no view, a four foot deep balcony, and a basement pool, was never positioned to perform the way it was pitched, and why an oversaturated market with 25,000 competing properties punishes homes that don't stand out. Tom shares the questions every out of state buyer should be asking before they sign anything, walks through a cautionary tale of another family who invested $120,000 more into a home in its first year alone, and recounts his own attempt to offer the Bay Area couple an independent walkthrough, an offer they declined. It's a candid, at times frustrated look at what happens when buyers, realtors, and builders treat a vacation rental purchase like a guaranteed return instead of a real business with real risk. A conversation for anyone considering an investment property in the Smokies, and a warning for anyone tempted to buy one without ever seeing it.

  5. Sep 9

    Episode 14 Brooke Pfautz: Building the Platform Homeowners and Managers Both Need

    This week Tom talks with Brooke Pfautz, founder and CEO of Vintory, whose work speaks to two very different audiences at once: the individual homeowner trying to make a smart decision about their property, and the operator, co-host, or management company trying to grow the right way. It's a rare vantage point, built over nearly two decades in the short-term rental industry. Brooke's path started in mortgage banking before he stumbled into vacation rentals, founding Vantage Resort Realty in Ocean City, Maryland and growing it from zero to 500 properties in five years. From there he moved into purpose-built vacation homes in Orlando, then software, before launching Vintory seven and a half years ago to solve one of the industry's biggest pain points: growing inventory. Tom and Brooke get into what actually separates great rental programs from commodity ones: the real math behind commission structures (and why "what's your commission" is the wrong first question for a homeowner to ask), the four things every owner is really optimizing for, and why differentiation, not sameness, is the only way to avoid a race to the bottom. The conversation turns candid when Brooke shares the story behind Vintory AI: eighteen months ago, his own team told him AI was going to make Vintory obsolete, so instead of protecting the business he built, he assembled a small internal team with a simple mandate: build something good enough to put Vintory out of business first. It's a bold bet on staying ahead of disruption instead of getting caught by it, and a conversation about what legacy companies and brand-new operators alike can learn from each other as the industry changes faster than ever. A conversation for anyone building a rental business today, and for anyone wondering what it takes to keep building twenty years from now.   Links: Vintory Sign up for the live launch here. Connect with Brooke on LinkedIn.

  6. Sep 2

    Episode 13 The Long Game vs. Quick Wins: What We Can Learn from One Another with Travers Xanthos

    This week Tom steps outside the Smoky Mountains to talk with Travers Xanthos, a friend and now Guesty colleague who's spent the last ten years building, breaking, and rebuilding a short-term rental business in Nashville. Travers's path started with a cold call list pulled from Craigslist and a "maybe" from a landlord after 25 no's, and from there took him from rental arbitrage to backpacking Bali on early Airbnb income to nearly losing everything in the first weeks of the pandemic. Tom and Travers walk through it all: the scrappy early hustle, the pivot to housing construction workers when Nashville's tourism disappeared overnight, and the total reinvention that followed, culminating in a fully Dolly Parton themed property that outperformed market projections threefold. They get into the deeper lesson underneath the story: why "average doesn't cut it anymore" in an oversaturated market, why the four hour work week is largely a myth, and why staying ahead means genuine differentiation, not just a nicer paint job. Travers is candid about why he eventually sold off his portfolio, and what changed in his own thinking about legacy management companies once he got to know Tom and Mountain Laurel Chalets. The conversation closes with a look at Guesty, the property management platform Travers now represents and the one MLC recently adopted, and a conversation about what it looks like to blend decades of hospitality experience with the technology built for what comes next. A conversation for anyone chasing a new opportunity in this business, and for anyone wondering how to keep growing after ten years in it. Connect with Travers below: travers.xanthos@guesty.com LinkedIn Deep dive into Guesty + get an extra $500 off onboarding using the link below: https://join.guesty.com/bqg90onhelld

  7. Aug 26

    Episode 12 What to Ask Before You Trust Someone With Your Home

    This episode opens with a tribute — on August 25th, 2026, the Smokies lost Dolly Parton, and Tom takes a moment to reflect on what she meant to this community and this industry: someone who made it big and never stopped giving back to the place that made her. Episode 12 is dedicated to her. Then Tom picks up where Episode 11 left off. Building on Jodi Cleer's "five love languages" framework — revenue, property care, trust, communication, and pride of ownership — Tom walks through each one and hands homeowners the actual questions to bring to a prospective management company or co-host. This isn't the generic "what's your commission?" conversation. Tom digs into the real diagnostic questions: what's your all-in cost, how do you handle maintenance and who's actually doing it, how do you screen guests, who answers the phone after hours, and would your own staff want to stay in the homes you manage. Along the way he shares some hard-earned, occasionally hair-raising stories from the field — disconnected ceiling fans, sealed-off crawl spaces — that show exactly why these questions matter. The takeaway: no management company scores 100% across all five love languages, and that's okay. The real work is figuring out which one or two matter most to you, then finding the partner who actually delivers on it — and giving yourself the time to find that fit instead of rushing the decision. A practical, sit-down-with-a-notebook episode for any owner about to have that conversation.

  8. Aug 19

    Episode 11 The 5 Love Languages of Homeowners with Jodi Cleer of Away Day

    This week Tom steps outside the Smoky Mountains to talk with Jodi Cleer, industry leader and marketing veteran now with Away Day, a collective backing property management companies across the country. Jodi's path started with a front-row seat to property management growing up, then took her through reservation call centers, the hotel industry, and helping grow a portfolio from 235 to over 800 properties, giving her a rare, multi-angle view of what it actually takes to run this business well. Tom and Jodi dig into her framework for understanding homeowners through five "love languages," revenue, property care, trust, communication, and pride of ownership, and why speaking to an owner in the language that matters most to them changes everything about the relationship. They also talk about the shift happening in the Smokies and beyond, from the investor-driven buying surge of the COVID years toward a return to lifestyle-based ownership, and what that means for the future of this market. They also get into something bigger: the idea of "coopetition," building relationships with fellow operators instead of viewing them purely as competition, because when the industry raises its standards together, everyone, owners, guests, and managers, wins. Tom and Jodi close with a look at VRMA's upcoming conference in Nashville this October 5-7, and a reminder that there's plenty of room in this industry for those willing to lead with abundance instead of fear. A conversation for anyone thinking about how to serve homeowners better, and how to build a business that lasts.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

The Smoky Mountain Vacation Rental Forum is a podcast for cabin owners, self-managers, management companies, and hospitality professionals who care deeply about how vacation rentals are done in the Great Smoky Mountains. Hosted by Tom Goodwin — CEO of Mountain Laurel Chalets, the oldest family-owned vacation rental management company in Tennessee — this forum exists to raise the bar for professionalism, hospitality, and community in one of America's most visited destinations. Honest conversation. Practical takeaways. No hype.

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