Eddie's Colorado Property Roster: The Three Mountain Towns We Hold

The phone rang at 4:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in January and the message, when Eddie listened to it half-awake, was: the water in unit 3 in Steamboat is not turning on, the guests have a 7 a.m. flight, please call back.

This is the work. This is what people do not know about owning a small mountain-rental conglomerate. They picture the website photos: the hot tub steaming on the deck, the elk on the lawn, the woman in a robe holding a coffee mug at sunrise. They do not picture the 4:47 a.m. call about the frozen pipe.

What we own (and don't own)

Let me be precise, because the word "conglomerate" makes it sound bigger than it is. Eddie's family — meaning Eddie, his brother Marcus, and his mom as the silent partner — owns or co-manages five short-term rental units across three Colorado mountain towns:

• Crested Butte: Two units. A two-bedroom condo at the base of Mt. Crested Butte (the one we stayed at during Wildflower Festival in July; see that post) and a small three-bedroom cabin a few miles out of town that they bought in 2019 when prices were briefly merciful.
• Steamboat Springs: Two units. A four-bedroom ski-in/ski-out townhouse near the gondola, which is the workhorse of the whole operation, and a one-bedroom condo in the old town that they manage for a family friend on a revenue-share.
• Our own town: One unit. A small two-bedroom cottage three blocks from our house that Eddie's mom bought twenty years ago and that we now run as a summer-and-shoulder-season rental. It is the most casual of the lot. It is also the only one we can drive to in five minutes when something goes wrong.

Five doors. That is the conglomerate. It is not a portfolio. It is barely a business by Colorado mountain-town standards — there are operators in Crested Butte alone running fifty-plus units with full-time staff. We are not that. We are a family operation with a part-time bookkeeper, a co-host service for the units we don't live near, and a long list of trusted plumbers, plow contractors, cleaners, and handymen whom we treat very well at Christmas.

The seasonal rhythm

You do not run a mountain rental year-round at the same intensity. There are two real seasons, two shoulder seasons, and a couple of dead weeks.

Ski season (Dec–March). This is sixty percent of annual revenue. Bookings come in for the next year by August. Christmas/New Year and Presidents' Week are the peak. We pre-buy ice melt, snow shovels, plowing retainers, and approximately fourteen industrial-strength Apple AirTags that we slip into the keychains we leave for guests, because skiers lose keys. Every season. Without fail.

Spring shoulder (April–May). Dead. We do maintenance. We replace what broke in ski season. We repaint the deck. We host friends at cost.

Summer (June–Aug). Thirty percent of revenue. Crested Butte books for Wildflower Festival. Steamboat books for the rodeo and the bike weekends. Our local cottage books for weddings and family reunions.

Fall shoulder (Sept–Nov). Light bookings for leaf-peepers, then nothing.

Why we don't list on the big platforms exclusively

We list on Airbnb, Vrbo, and one regional site that I will not name because it is small and good and I don't want it overrun. We also have a direct-booking website that Marcus built in a weekend that handles approximately twenty percent of bookings — overwhelmingly repeat guests who learned to book direct after their first stay. The repeat-guest channel is the entire business strategy. Platforms charge fifteen percent. Direct bookings are loyalty.

If you are reading this and thinking about starting one of these operations: the platforms are a customer-acquisition channel, not a long-term plan. You want every booking to either come back direct or recommend you to a friend.

The honest math

I will not give you the gross or the net because that is Marcus's department and he would prefer I not, but I will say this: five doors does not make any of us rich. It pays Eddie a part-time-ish salary. It pays the mortgages and the property taxes, with some left over. It will, eventually, build equity. It is a long-game business, not a get-rich business.

It is also a business that takes Eddie's phone at all hours. There is no calendar quarter without an emergency. Last summer the cabin lost power in a storm and the guests' food spoiled and we comped them a night and gave them a generous gift card. The summer before that, a guest at the Steamboat townhouse drove into the garage door, and we ate the deductible because they were a four-time repeat guest and we wanted them back. These are line items. They are also the texture of the work.

What it has in common with the SMA B&B

More than I expected, less than I assumed.

In common: the hospitality muscle. Eddie spent five years in restaurants before we bought the B&B, and the B&B was four years of that same muscle, and now this is the third iteration. You learn to anticipate. You learn to leave a handwritten note in the kitchen. You learn that the cleanliness of the bathroom is not negotiable, ever, in any property, anywhere. Eddie also outfits every kitchen, in every unit, with the same starter pan — a 12-inch Lodge cast iron skillet. Guests will accept many flaws in a rental, but they will not forgive a kitchen that cannot fry an egg.

Different: in SMA, we lived in the building. Don Luis was upstairs. Our guests ate breakfast with us. The B&B was twelve feet from our bedroom. This work, by contrast, is remote. We see most of our guests only as a check-in email and a check-out review. The hospitality is at arm's length, which is more scalable but also less of what made the B&B feel like a vocation. Eddie misses cooking the breakfasts more than he will admit.

If you are going to stay in any of these towns and you don't want to stay with us (which is fine — we are small and often full), the broader Crested Butte and Steamboat Springs lodging markets are solid. Book early for any peak week. Bring layers. Tip your housekeeper.

Would I do it again

Eddie would. He is, fundamentally, a hospitality person. He likes the choreography of turning over a unit. He likes the puzzle of the booking calendar. He likes the negotiation with the plow contractor in November when they are setting the season's rates.

I would, with caveats. I would not do it as my primary identity. I did that in SMA and it ate me. I will do it as a part-time involvement, two days a week of bookkeeping and guest correspondence and an occasional drive over the pass to receive a new mattress, while keeping the rest of my life — the writing, the parenting, the slow rebuild of my Spanish, the household — intact.

It is not glamorous. The internet photos lie. The reality is the 4:47 a.m. call about the frozen pipe, the December weekend when both the cabin and the townhouse turn over on the same Saturday and you eat takeout in your car between cleanings, the slow accumulation of small repairs into a livable life.

But the aspens in September. The wildflowers in July. The repeat guests who name their kids in their Christmas cards. The rhythm of a mountain town that you are now part of the infrastructure of. That part, I would not trade.

That part is the reason.