Our Story
We had a dream to create beautiful, high-end spaces where our guests could feel at home and enjoy a relaxing beach vacation while creating memories that would last a lifetime, so we came up with a plan...
Our story started one Saturday afternoon, sitting at Betty’s kitchen counter. We knew that our idea of focusing on quality, rather than quantity could work, we just had to come up with a plan and then make it come to life.
Our dream turned into reality when Saltwater Grande opened in June of 2019.
Initially, Saltwater Grande had only two companies - a Realty brokerage and the Vacation Rental company, which was solely focused on providing high end vacation rentals in an area that had been doing it the same way for years. We wanted to create something different; where we utilized the latest technology and adapted the old way of doing things into a more streamlined and functional process.
During that first six months, we fought our way through red-tape, licensing, setting up an office, establishing relationships with vendors and lots of schooling. In October, we finally had completed getting all the necessary licenses, creating our website and setting up the vacation rental property management software; it was time to start working on getting property owners to trust us and book their properties.
That first season we started with 4 properties. By the following spring we quickly grew to 14 and were gaining steam. Then, the world came to a screeching halt...COVID. The vacation rental industry completely stopped and we had no idea how long it would last or if we would survive. We had to cancel bookings and refund money. It was extremely scary for about 12 long weeks, but somehow we managed to hold on.
Then, in the middle of May, the world began to re-open and it was as if the flood gates had been pulled up. Bookings began pouring in and we began to get more inquiries about coming onto our vacation rental program. A lot of the inventory we were seeing was not the standard that we wanted to represent, so Saltwater Grande Design was born. We decided that in order to have the quality properties we wanted, we would have to convince the owners who were coming our way to update, renovate and redecorate in a way to make these properties desirable.
COVID taught us a valuable lesson; that we needed multiple cash flow sources, so we started Saltwater Grande Properties, our long term rental property management company, and began advertising and building that company to help generate a year round revenue source.
Since that time, we have worked hard to develop all the companies. We’ve expanded the long term rental property management company to include housekeeping and maintenance services for properties that are not involved in short or long term rentals, including estate properties that hire us to oversee day to day operations.
Since our beginning, we have grown to manage nearly 60 properties and employ around 40 awesome people, including cleaners, inspectors, maintenance technicians, Realtors, and support staff, who have all helped us to grow and live up to the standard of excellence we set for ourselves and our properties.
We can’t predict where the future will take us, but we do know that Saltwater Grande is becoming more diverse every year. We will constantly grow, change and expand to meet the needs of the community and customers we serve.
