Dune Lakes (the business)

What it is

Dune Lakes is a multi-cottage short-term rental compound that I help run. It’s a real operating business with real guests: $122K of confirmed revenue across the current booking window, a blended ADR around $1,550 a night for whole-compound stays, and a booking runway of about 107 days of average lead time.

What running it involves

• Channel strategy: the business books through Airbnb, Vrbo, and its own direct site. Because Airbnb’s fee load is 15.5% versus 2.8% direct, a big part of the job is moving demand toward direct bookings, which is worth about 13 points of margin per shifted booking.
• Operations: OwnerRez as the property management system, multi-cottage calendar handling, cleaning and turnover logistics, and guest communication.
• The direct-booking product: a live website at dunelakesltd.com with booking and merchandise, which is effectively a small e-commerce product I get to operate and improve.
• The numbers: I also built a full analytics pipeline on the business’s real booking data. That work has its own case study.

Why it matters for hiring

Running a real business, even a small one, means owning outcomes with no one else to hand problems to: pricing calls, margin trade-offs, unhappy guests, and revenue that either shows up or doesn’t. It’s the operating experience behind the analysis work on this site.

Skills demonstrated

Business operations, pricing, channel strategy and unit economics, e-commerce, customer experience, vendor and turnover logistics.