My wife and I own 14 short term rentals in Carolina Beach, NC, and we also co-own a property management company that manages another 54 listings. We’ve tried to vertically integrate and we just signed on our own linen facility, we own our cleaning company, etc. One thing that we really noticed is that four or five times a week we have one of our guests reach out to us about where they might be able to rent a golf cart. There is one main golf cart rental company on our island, it’s a very golf cart friendly community, they have 150 golf carts and are at 100% occupancy throughout the season. We are completely booked with fantastic occupancy for the lion’s share of the year in our listings, and although I don’t want to compete directly in the golf cart space, I do think there’s some opportunity here for us with a little bit of a unique offering. This week I purchased three Moke vehicles, they are the small diesel cars popular around the Bahamas and the Caribbean that some of you may remember from one of the old 007 movies. There’s a new company in the US that produces them as electric vehicles, they have back up cameras, are street legal, Bluetooth radio, etc. A lot of our short term rental listings are on the high end, and so our plan is to direct market some of these vehicles to our guests. basically after someone books, an hour or so later they can get a text message with a link for them to be able to direct book an EV for their stay, we can offer pick up and delivery from their listing sites, its street legal, 45 mile range, top speed of 35 miles an hour. Looking at the comps of some other people that are doing it in Florida and California, adjusted for location, pricing in our market would be around $175 for the first day, and then pricing would go down from there depending on how long they were renting it for. First of all our company just needs to spend some money, so I’m happy to just buy some for me and our staff, but really we’re just going to be experimenting with them and see if it’s worth buying 10 or 15 more. Has anyone else experimented with doing electric vehicle or golf cart rentals? What kind of insurance was necessary, what are the pitfalls, is the juice worth the squeeze, etc.? We can figure it out on our own, but I would much rather learn from someone else’s mistakes if possible. In any input would be appreciated. Here’s one of the Mokes that we bought for reference
