Renting Land or Boondocking?

ebach00 wrote:

bigdogger wrote:

ebach00 wrote:

mlts22 wrote:
In any case, if you want to go forward with that, I'd highly recommend checking about an umbrella insurance policy. It is about a C-note or two a year on top of your existing insurance, and provides coverage for virtually anything that you might get sued for.

That's a great suggestion. I'm looking into it now. One of my main concerns is that I want to be able to protect the land owner as much as I can. For example, If I am renting out a portion of the landowners property, I put up a couple cabins and a guest gets hurt, how can I make sure that the actual the actual landowner (not talking about me here) won't be liable?

As a practical matter, you cannot, especially since it appears you are going to be running an off the record business. It seems to me your idea has limited upside and almost unlimited downside. The landowner can become responsible for everything (liability for injuries, environmental damage, land use violations, tax issues and on and on) if they knowingly allow an unlawful business to operate. If the landowner rents you the property for a business, that can cost them lots of special exemptions. For example, in California, property valuation for property tax purposes is fixed to the original purchase price. Should someone who bought a property 30 years ago lease the land to you and it legally changes the property usage from residential to commercial, the taxes on the property could increase 50 fold. If the property was in Texas, that rancher could lose their Ag exemptions or their homestead exemptions. Your plan has the potential to open a really ugly can of worms most people never contemplate until it is too late.

You bring up some really good points and it definitely seems like this will be an uphill battle. One thing I might be able to do is partner with an existing resort and use their commercial property to run the micro-cabins. I'm not sure how this would work out exactly, but I would think since the property they own is for commercial use, it may be possible to form some type of partnership in which we can work together to run a legit micro-cabin side business. Any thoughts on this?

Any lodging business will have to abide by increasingly strict environmental regulations, which means sewage. I cannot imagine those microcabins would pass muster with health authorities. It would also be a serious leap of faith for those resorts to risk their reputations and ratings they have earned over many years by letting an unproven operator put an unproven product under their resort's umbrella. Can you imagine reading a review about a Four Seasons Resort that stated the cabins didn't have flush toilets or reliable electricity?