IF you do weddings, you need to theme the venue. You could have several areas on your land to cater to the taste of the bride and groom - i.e. Hawaiian, Western , Tropical, Southern bell, Elegant garden party, lake waterfall, etc. etc. You should be able to get about 5K for the use of the wedding site. Now if you have an area for the reception that's another fee for the dinner etc. You can make extra from rentals, tent, tables, linen, flowers etc. or just a usage fee.
Liability would be HUGE. If someone gets drunk and kills someone on the road, you will be brought into the suit as will the car manufacturer, booze maker, caterer, bride, groom, everyone's Uncle etc. but then again any business is open to shyster.
This is along the line of what we are thinking. Where the pond is and the gazebo that I'm building now, we will build a lodge designed for weddings and events that looks out over the water, but is also next to a 20 acre preserve with a few elk, fallow deer, axis deer and maybe something else that does well in my area. Then on the other side of that preserve, we will build another wedding pavilion and lodge that also takes advantage of the view into the wildlife preserve. This one will be in the pines and have a more East Texas feel to it, but very fancy. The gazebo/pavilion I have in mind is going to be amazing!!! Then near the front of the land we have already cleared a few acres for what was going to be storage units. This will become pasture and increase in size to 20 acres. We will have cattle in there and I will build a Texas themed barn overlooking the pasture. These three different venues will be what we have to offer. Each one will have a honeymoon cabin, lots of parking and include tables and chairs for a couple hundred people each. They are separate from each other so you cannot see them or hear what's going on. Bottom end pricing is $3,000 each and it goes up from there. From all the searching I'm doing on places to get married, they are all booked up for the year and from their comments on FB, they are starting to book up for next year already!!! One of them is just amazing and their price is double what everybody else is getting. It's a multi million dollar building that looks like it came from Italy. It's really nice. Everything else is fairly plain to run down looking. You either get a hall at the church a hotel or rent from one of somebody who has converted a shop or their house or a barn into a reception hall, which are not done very well without much planning to them.
My thought is to build the hall with a large room big enough for 300 people, a kitchen that is caterer friendly, a bar, his and her bathrooms, and dressing rooms for the bride and groom that include private bathrooms with showers, along with a big storage area. Open beams, nicely finished out with lots of stained wood.
One of the advantages to this piece of land is that I'm 2,700 feet from a manhole where I can get to city sewer. Cost of the lift station to do this is about a hundred grand. This would have unlimited capacity and would easily handle 200 RV sites and 60 plus cabins, several laundry mats and a store with a restaurant. Now I'm wondering if I should just spend ten grand and go septic?
Roads for the RV's where going to start out as gravel and eventually get paved. 40,000 pound RV's are going to tear up the roads pretty quickly and it's easily a six figure expense to build them. If there are no RV's, then car traffic is easily handled with just a few gravel roads and a gravel parking lot. Down the road I can pave them, but there isn't a rush for that expense.
Water and power to three locations is pretty simple compared to hundreds. I have natural gas, so going with an instant hot water system should save on heating water when the buildings stand empty. Same with heating the buildings compared to an electric furnace.
My location is ideal for an RV Park based on several considerations. Most important is access. I'm half a mile off of Interstate 20, half way between Dallas and Shreveport. Tyler State Park is a rural campground five miles away and it's booked up from spring until fall. They have a list of local RV Parks that they send their overflow to that are fairly run down and lack anything to do when you get there. The wildlife preserve was going to be 8 acres if I do the RV Park. Add fishing, a swimming pool, hiking trails, and two acre off leash dog park and restaurant with a store to it and I feel it should attract people. The expense to build all that is HUGE!!!! To maintain it and keep it nice is also going to be a big expense.
According to the National Association, bathroom's are the biggest complaint of RV'ers. They have to be cleaned constantly!!! They want big pull through sites and the first thing they do when they park is hook up the TV. WiFi is a must. The number one thing that people do on vacation is go shopping. It's so high up the list that number two doesn't even get half as many votes as what they want to do. Eco tourism is the biggest draw to people on vacation, whether it's seeing animals, photography, nature, water or anything outdoors.
If I do the wedding thing, then I feel it's going to be more about creating an amazing setting. As an armature photographer, I also think it's about creating spaces for beautiful pictures. Karen has a green thumb. People at the hospital give her dying plants all the time and she brings them back to life. She buys the almost dead plants at Lowes for a buck and I can't think of a single one she couldn't save. She plans on enrolling in the Master Gardner course and landscaping everything.
More land has to be cleared, but if we go this route, it's the fun type of clearing where we are taking advantage of what's hear and not taking out what's in the way because we need a road or RV site. Slopes and angles are now good, where flat and straight is more important for RV's.
Eddie
