By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
Sweet Home Rentals, the Yachats-based vacation rental company, is continuing its expansion into Waldport with the purchase of a downtown building containing three businesses and three apartments.
The purchase includes the area’s only public laundromat, which Sweet Homes will manage during the day and use at night to do laundry for its vacation rentals.
Sweet Homes bought the building from Critter Creek Acres, a company owned by Elaine Correia of Waldport. The sale closed this month. The purchase price was not disclosed.
The purchase follows Sweet Homes buying a vacant 4,400 square foot warehouse in downtown Waldport in early 2019 from Pioneer Telephone. The company then moved its maintenance, operations, interior design and property management from Yachats to that building.
Sweet Homes, which started in Yachats in 2008, is owned by Todd and Kate Korgan of Yachats. It has grown to 45 full-time employees managing 75 properties from the Tenmile area south of Yachats to Gleneden Beach in the north.
When Sweet Homes started it leased the former public laundromat in Yachats to do its laundry at night. When ownership of that building changed, it moved laundry operations to the back half of the office building it owns along U.S. Highway 101 in Yachats. Now that laundry operation will move to Waldport, said Jamie Michel, vice president of business development and operations.
Michel said the move was necessary because it needed more laundry capacity as the company grows. The new facility is also closer to the warehouse operations one block away.
Michel said Sweet Homes’ owners, who have been outspoken opponents to the city of Yachats’ cap on vacation rentals, also said the city’s approach to regulating vacation rentals played a part in the decision to expand elsewhere. Michel has also been involved with vacation rental discussions by Lincoln County and when the city of Newport changed its regulations last year.
“With all the stuff going on in Yachats (with vacation rentals) … we decided not to double down in Yachats with our expansion,” she said.
Michel said the company will spruce up the Waldport building, which needs attention. The two other businesses operating in it – a pet supply/grooming store and a computer repair/printing company – should not be affected, nor will the three attached apartments.
“It will be really good for the businesses along Highway 101 and the community,” she said. “And, we want to participate in the local community.”
Great news ! Hopefully you can reprogram the washing machines so that some water actually flows into them . Also a full time day attendant would be advisable . I have witnessed extreme overloading of the washing machines . There is no way your clothes would come clean with the limited amount of water that fills those machines with them stuffed completely full of clothes . Also find the machines with mud , grease and pet hair . Pretty gross . Good luck !
Congrats Jamie And crew! Excellent business decision and so proud to know ya! Kat