Lauren Goes Rental

Hi! I’m Lauren. My husband, Patrick, and I invested in a second home / vacation rental property in 2024. In this post, I’m going to share our experience searching for and purchasing our Afton, Virginia cabin. PS you can find me on Instagram (@laurengoesrental) for updates on the renovation and more!

The Origin Story – kiddie pools and COVID

I can vividly remember the moment when Patrick and I first started daydreaming about buying a second home. It’s easy, because it was COVID summer. 2020. That’s the summer that we first got our pool…a blow-up kiddie pool that we put on our small back patio at our house in the city of Richmond.

We were sitting in the kiddie pool under the shade of an umbrella, sipping beverages, when one of us (can’t remember who) said that we should buy a river house one day. Like many people, COVID instilled in us a desire to have a place to get away to after months of being stuck and isolated in one place.

After casually (read: obsessively) looking on Zillow for a couple years, in early 2023 we finally got in touch with a realtor. But, nothing ever came up in our budget. Prices for waterfront river property had gone a little bonkers during and after the pandemic. 

Fast forward to October 2023 – when on a long weekend trip to Luray, VA for hiking in Shenandoah National Park, we realized how much we love being in the mountains. The hiking, views, nature, wineries and breweries, and nearby Charlottesville for great food. With all the activity options, its rental property potential is greater compared to the river. We originally weren’t planning on doing a rental, but for many reasons (maybe I’ll post about that another time), we had changed our tune.

Almost exactly one year later, we closed on our Afton cabin. 

The Search

Through friends, we got a referral to a great realtor and her team in the Charlottesville area. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a local realtor in the area you are searching – they understand the market, they have connections and insider information, and they are THERE. They can do drive-buys and view houses to see if it’s worth your time to take a whole day for a showing or not. 

There still was barely anything on the market. By this time, high interest rates had really pushed down inventory. Other than a couple homes that our realtor checked out for us, we personally only saw ONE other home in person. Part of me was tempted to just buy it, because who knows if we’d ever find anything else…but we resisted the urge to settle and kept being “patient”. 

Many months later…in September of 2024, we were getting ready to go on a 2-week trip to Portugal (amazing, btw!) when a house popped up into our “coming soon” realtor portal. It looked very promising from the pictures, and when on the way back from a trip visiting family in Roanoke, we stopped by to take a look. 

The first thing we both said once we got down the drive was “wow”. The views were much better than the pictures and the entire setting and house just seemed like exactly what we had been looking for. 

Buying the Cabin

The property listing was going live literally the day before we were leaving for Portugal – so we scheduled a showing for that day and squeezed it in amidst packing and trip prep. Long story short, we loved it, and ultimately negotiated the contract while we were abroad. Patrick couldn’t stop making jokes about telling everyone that we bought a house in Portugal. 

The contract negotiation was wild – there were initially no offers other than ours, and so we went in with a fairly low offer. Then at the last minute, another offer came in. We didn’t know the specifics, so we added a large escalation clause and adjusted the offer to an information-only inspection with the right to back-out. Everything was complicated by the fact that the seller was an 80-something man who would only do things on physical paper. (Again, so thankful for our local realty team.)

Ultimately we won and only needed to up our price by $6,000. We celebrated with a view of the Atlantic ocean from the cliffs of our Algarve resort.

We thought we were good to go, but we were wrong. Back in the country, the inspection process started. It turned up the usual slate of small issues, but also a couple big ones. Mainly a potential structural issue (turned out to be minor), and a leaking septic system. We were surprised because the house had been built in 2012…or so we thought. It was partly true – the current house had been re-built on top of the foundation of a house from 1979. So the septic system was also from 1979. 

We ultimately negotiated for a large ($30k) escrow to cover replacing the septic system (any remainder would go back to the seller). There was a good week or two where we really didn’t know if the deal was going to go through. But thanks to some grit and again, a great realtor negotiating on our behalf, it got done. On October 18, we were the new owners!

The crazier part is that the other offer had been for $6k less but with a fully waived inspection. The seller must still be kicking themselves. And, the other potential buyer dodged a huge bullet. I’d think twice about completely skipping inspections, especially on rural homes with septic.

It’s wild to realize that it has now been nearly five years since we first talked about our goal of owning a second home. (Oh, and we have upgraded our blow-up kiddie pool to a vinyl version complete with a filter pump.) The process has highlighted some super important things that if we do it again (and we might!!), we would not forgo:

1. Work with a boots-on-the-ground local realtor with good connections
2. Be patient and don’t settle for a house that doesn’t feel right
3. Negotiate for the deal and terms you want
4. Don’t skip inspections, especially not on septic for a rural home

We’re currently in the middle of fixing up the house, getting that septic replaced, and prepping to rent and enjoy it ourselves. More to come!