Vacation home rental company testing the market with boutique motel in Newport’s Nye Beach neighborhood

By QUINTON SMITH/Lincoln Chronicle

Todd and Kate Korgan have a growing vacation home rental business on the central Oregon coast, but it was the 2022 purchase of a cluster of tiny, run-down cottages in the Nye Beach area of Newport that led them into their first boutique motel.

Some 2½ years and $2 million in restoration later work they are in the motel business with the “The Louie” – six stylishly decorated one-bedroom units clustered around a large courtyard in the heart of the Newport’s tourist, retail and residential neighborhood.

“Our plan has always been to test the water with The Louie,” said Kate Korgan, who splits time between their home in Yachats and her full-time job as interim executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “Do we like it? Does it work?”

The couple, who own Sweet Homes Vacation Getaways, say The Louie likely won’t be their last and is just one way to diversify and grow their tourist-oriented operation.

Sweet Homes has 55-60 employees, most of them employed year round, says Todd Korgan, and manages 125 houses along the coast for their owners. That’s 30-40 more properties under their portfolio following the height of the coastal vacation rental conflicts from 2019-23 and as national companies downsize many of their more far-flung operations.

“There’s a fair amount of folks who don’t like us or what we’re doing,” Todd Korgan says of the vacation rental business. “But like it or not, tourism is the base of the economy on the Oregon coast.”

But the Korgans are done with arguing with people about vacation rentals. They believe their company’s standards and local operations help prevent many of the problems that beset companies with remote operations or far-flung call centers.

They also have purchased two buildings in downtown Waldport that have six apartments for employees working at their large operations center in Waldport or others in the industry. It has rental offices in Yachats and Newport.

“We agree there needs to be affordable housing …” Todd Korgan says.

A family in the business

Todd Korgan comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His parents, Mike and Carol Korgan owned a popular restaurant and real estate in Portland, and his father was a well-known Portland radio personality and who later gained fame as producer of The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie. Mike Korgan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 and died in January at the age of 85.

Mike and Carol Korgan retired to Yachats in 1998 and later were chosen as managers of the Heceta Head Lightkeeper’s House, which they developed into a well-known bed and breakfast.

But it was his parents’ small house in Yachats that sealed the deal for Todd Korgan and Kate Hausbeck, who had come to the coast on a first date in 2007. They were headed back to Portland when Yachats realtor Wendy Snidow called Korgan to tell him of an oceanfront house just north of Yachats that had come on the market – and wouldn’t be available long.

They turned around, met Snidow there – and made an offer.

“Yes, he bought a house on our first date,” Kate Korgan now says with a laugh.

They managed that house and his parents’ house as short-term rentals and then added houses of friends and others as word of their fledgling business spread.

Todd’s sister is Michelle Korgan, owner of the upscale Ona Restaurant in downtown Yachats and who took over the Heceta Lighthouse concession contract from their parents when they retired and returned to Portland.

The design — and future

The property on Northwest Coast Street was in disrepair when the Korgans purchased it in December 2022. They first considered a simple remodel and conversion of the six cottages but stopped and committed to a near-teardown and complete re-imagining of the property.

Instead of a parking lot out front, they bought a vacant lot next door for vehicles and created a courtyard in front of the cottages. Then Kate Korgan and Sweet Homes vice president Kasey Baker went to work on a full redesign – developing themes around “Louie” for each cottage.

“We could have gone larger, as many as 12 cottages,” Kate Korgan says. “But we said we’d keep the look and design. We think it fits the neighborhood.”

The mayor of Newport, Jan Kaplan, lives next door to The Louie and agrees.

“We’re a neighborhood that has tourist facilities in it,” he said. “Nye Beach was designed as a mixed-use neighborhood. That’s why you have this mix of commercial and residential.”

Kaplan said the recently remodeled and renamed Allred Motel nearby and The Louie bring a little more high-end design to the neighborhood but have a low impact.

“For me, it fits within the character of the neighborhood,” he said. “Nye Beach was designed to be an urban village, and it works within that concept.”

So the question now for the Korgan’s is what’s next. They’re pondering that as well.

“The Louie was sort of our Beta test,” Kate Korgan says. “We’re taking a pause to reset and rest … but we’re looking at other properties. We want to stay in the boutique space and we think we can go larger than six.”

• Quinton Smith is the editor of Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com