From Magazine Page to Micro-resort

Janice Stitzer was flipping through a Dwell magazine one afternoon when she saw it:

A stunning A-frame — perfect proportion, beautiful materials, just the right size.

Some folks might tear it out and pin it to a wall to stare at for a while.

She built it.

That’s Janice. When something inspires her, she immediately wants to reverse engineer. She’s quiet and doesn’t have a big following on social media, but her story will inspire you.

the a-frame

The Stitzers run a small roofing company north of Denver. When that photo caught her eyes, Janice started hunting for land.

(Side note: I just realized that it was this exact same A-frame design that first ignited me to build Live Oak Lake five years ago this week. Janice and I wouldn’t meet until years later.)

She found 12 acres way up in the Colorado backcountry, bought it for $111,000, then split off five acres for $70,000, leaving her with beautiful Rocky Mountain land with a fraction of the original basis.

She spent $350k building, but it appraised for $600,000, so the loan was easy. She refinanced once the project was complete, pulled all her money out, and has netted around $20k/year ever since. Again, with zero dollars invested. The property has appreciated substantially, but more than that, she gained proof that you can build extraordinary value by layering creative real estate with hospitality.

She also saw a risk. One standalone short-term rental — even a gorgeous one — is exposed. Many states (including Colorado) and counties have cracked down hard on STRs: licenses, caps, residency requirements, outright bans in some jurisdictions.

And when your property's worth is tied to residential comps, your upside is someone else's ceiling.

So she started thinking bigger.

the big idea

Around this time, I’d just launched Live Oak Lake — seven cabins around a dug-out pond, surrounded by Live Oak trees. And I’d just started telling that story publicly.

Janice noticed. It seemed like just the right kind of next project.

She found a one-acre parcel and, before anything else, reversed-engineered the zoning. Hotels, motels, campground uses — permitted by right. Multi-unit was possible. She hired engineers, worked through entitlements, got a site plan approved. All of this cost her around $50k, but she was now shovel-ready.

And a shovel-ready project, to a bank, is a fundamentally different thing than a raw idea.

Here's the piece I think most people miss.

Most people finance off cost. She found a way to finance off value.

The bank offered to lend on loan-to-value rather than loan-to-cost. One different word with a very different outcome.

Loan-to-cost: the bank lends against what you're spending. Need $1.7M to build? They lend 75% of that, and you come up with $425,000 in cash from some place else.

Loan-to-value means the bank looks at what it's worth when it's done.

Janice needed the appraisal to come in at $2.3M. But she couldn’t find the right appraiser — someone who understood experiential short term rentals, who had relationships with her specific bank, who could make the numbers speak the right language.

As fate had it, she joined my Experiential Hospitality community right at this critical juncture. We only had about two dozen members at the time. She posted her problem. One of those members knew an appraiser in Denver who had already worked with her bank in Chaffee County.

She hired him herself, preemptively. Got to present her project on her own terms.

The appraisal came back at $2.7M. The bank walked it to $2.3M, exactly the number she needed.

Her all-in capital: $180,000 for the land, $120,000 in construction interest. $300,000 total for a seven-cabin development in the Colorado Rockies, arguably worth more than ten times that today. And now she’s actually completed not only the project, but also the refinance to permanent financing. She’s just opened the doors to Front Country Micro-Resort.

the vision

Janice designed these seven cabins around a specific guest — the kind of person who summits a 14er at dawn and wants somewhere beautiful to come back to. Active. Wellness-oriented. The type who measures achievement in vertical feet and still wants clean design and a cold plunge waiting at basecamp :)

The property sits on the frontage road heading up to a ski resort, ringed by five fourteeners. Nobody in that market was building what she built. Modern, minimalist, intentionally communal. A place that photographs like a magazine and functions like a real retreat.

And now on her horizons: 40 acres outside Buena Vista, zoned for agrotourism. Seven units, an event space for up to 50 guests, full buyouts. She already owns the land. Permits for the first outbuilding just approved.

everything compounds

Each project fed the next. The A-frame revealed the limits of standalone STRs. The seven-cabin project taught her to control valuation through entitlement, work the appraisal from the inside, and think in terms of the full capital stack. Buena Vista layers the event model on top of all of it.

She's not just building properties. She's building expertise — and deploying it at higher leverage every time.

The magazine she flipped through that afternoon five years ago didn’t have a seven-cabin Colorado Rockies retreat in it. But one thing led to another. That’s how life works when you’re paying attention and doing the simple, hard work.

I should mention that I actually hired Janice to help me personally coach our program members inside my Experiential Hospitality program. She was a student of this work before she became a teacher of it. Now she’s helping scores of other folks realize their own version of this dream.

I'm grateful to call her a friend.

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