ABOUT
ME
Passionate About Inspiring Others to Create Legacy Wealth
I'm Shannon Swenson, a successful Entrepreneur in Short Term Rentals with a niche toward luxury cabin rentals. Our family real estate journey didn't start in this space, we took the hard way, but feel so blessed for all that we have learned and to have a great business model that is creating legacy wealth for our family.
My primary career is as a restaurant franchise executive. I love my job and love what I do on a daily basis, but I knew that my career wasn't going to create legacy wealth for my family. I had been considering real estate investing since my early 20s, I knew it was the path but didn't have the resources, knowledge or courage to take the leap. I wish I knew then what I know now, I absolutely would have started in my 20s. I hope to inspire young adults to become entrepreneurs or like me having waited later in life, suburban soccer moms to jump in and create more for your family.
While I wish I had started younger, life always happens when it is supposed to. I spent my life as a career professional but never thought I would get into real estate. When my husband and I started dating 4 years ago, he mentioned he had always wanted to flip a house. I told him I had dreamed of doing the same. So 6 weeks later, we found a house for $40,000 that we bought with hard money then fixed it up and rented it. This was our first venture into real estate investing. Over the next year we would do 2 flips, 2 seller finance notes, and even purchased a mobile home park. We ran the gamut of trying to learn real estate. We learned some hard lessons of getting in with bad contractors that stole money from us, dealing with difficult tenants and so much more. Without the mistakes, we might not have learned where we really wanted to be in real estate, which was vacation rentals.
My goal through sharing experiences and designing a course is to help others skip those mistakes and go straight to the wonderful and profitable business model with short term or vacation rentals. In 2020, we purchased our first luxury cabin in March then our second in July. Even with the pandemic, it was highly profitable and booked at 88% occupancy. Many of the other cabin owners in our area all used property management and paid 30%, I decided to skip this route and learn self management. I quickly learned how to streamline processes out of necessity, as soon as I did this, I took my management time of the 2 cabins down to about 1 hour a week. We love this business model, there is so much joy in providing vacation memories to others and receiving 5 star reviews. We are now building another 7 cabins on 19 acres that we purchased at the beginning of 2021.
I've used my past corporate experience to create a business model that works and is easy to manage. I want to share these experiences with others, so they can enjoy creating a legacy for their family too.