My Failed Vacation Rental Cabin Sale: What Really Happened and What I Learned

I ended up taking wild ride with the potential sale of my vacation rental cabin in Tennessee, so I figure I owe you guys an update. When I last wrote about it back in October (see that post here), we were debating whether to accept a lowball offer after having the cabin on the market for the past 9 months. (I appreciate everyone who replied to offer feedback and weigh in on the situation!) The quick backstory is we bought the property in 2022 for $486k, have either lost money or barely broken even on it each year since (mostly due to the high interest rate), and finally received an offer for $355k. It would be locking in a huge financial loss for us, but we’d also have a clean break to just move on.

Probably despite my better judgment, we decided to play ball with the buyer, and after a lot of back-and-forth and also negotiating with the realtors to lower their own commissions, we ended up at $385k (including $20k in repair/renovation concessions), which was as low as we could go and still have enough to pay off the remaining loan. But it turned out those tough negotiations were only the start of the saga.

The potential buyer started reaching out directly to me, wanting to stay in the cabin during the inspection days and requesting my entire list of vendors. After her one-night stay in the cabin, I could tell her opinion had soured; she sent me a very negative message complaining that the driveway had too many leaves and she was going to have to cut down all of the trees around the mountain cabin. She continued to complain about odd things, and then came back to us asking for another $15k in concessions on top of the $20k she had already asked for. At that point, neither one of us was budging.

In one last final retribution-laced move to either force the sale or screw us over, she called the county to “check on” our short-term rental permit – we had paid the fee, but it turns out the property manager we were using last year hadn’t completed all of the renewal paperwork, so we got a lovely letter from the county with a $250 fine.

We told the buyer to send over a termination letter, which we all signed, and they were able to keep all of their escrow money while we were on the hook for the fine from the county.

We took the cabin off the market the next day and have actually continued to have pretty solid rentals through the fall. We’ve decided to do some minor renovations in January to bump up our rental rate and hopefully command a higher sales price if we get brave enough to list it on the market again. I’m glad this saga is over for now, and I look forward to showing you guys the before and after photos once the renovations are done!

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