He was good for his word
The summer season at Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine runs roughly sixteen weeks. When you are operating three oceanfront cottages on the shore, those sixteen weeks are not just high season; they’re the whole ballgame. Miss a turnover standard, absorb a bad review, lose a cleaner on a Saturday morning in July, and the damage compounds faster than you can contain it.
I understood this math the way that any long-time rental operator should. I’d been running short-term rentals on the Maine coast for decades, and I’d built something genuinely difficult to replicate: a multi-decade, five-star review record that functioned less like a rating and more like infrastructure. Guests booked because of it. They returned because of it. It was, in practical terms, the engine of the business.
And that engine had a key component. His name was Rich.
Rich had come on board through a local newspaper ad, the way reliable workers in small towns often do — through a notice placed in the right place at the right time to the right spec. His role was caretaker: light maintenance, property checks at every turnover, quality control after the cleaners had come through. On paper, that sounds straightforward. In practice, it meant being the last set of eyes between whatever had happened during a guest stay and whatever the next guest would walk into.
Window shades left askew. Furniture rearranged and not restored. Countertop crumbs the cleaner missed. A broken side table the departing guests had quietly relocated to a closet rather than report. A garden bed going to weeds. These are not catastrophic failures individually but, accumulated across a season and left unaddressed, they could erode the value that had taken me years to build. So I hired Rich, and he took care of those little things — and, sometimes, the not-so-little things, too. Week after week, he showed up, swept through the cottages, weeded the garden beds while the cleaners worked, then walked each room before signing off. He was also the backstop when the cleaners didn't show — which happened twice — and when it did, he covered the gap.
In the pandemic years, I implemented an upgraded sanitation protocol that added UVB lamp treatments to every post-cleaning turnover — a procedure designed to sanitize air and upholstery beyond what surface cleaning could reach. Each lamp required placement in every room, a thirty-minute cycle, then a return visit to retrieve them. It was time-intensive and required someone who understood why it mattered and would execute it without shortcuts. Rich did it throughout the pandemic. In a period when rental income was fragile and guest trust in cleanliness was a genuine booking variable, that protocol held.
Then his car broke down.
The vehicle needed a new engine. Rich could handle a lot of mechanical repairs himself, but this one was going to run several thousand dollars. He didn't have it, and the usual routes weren't available to him: insufficient credit for a commercial loan, no mechanic shop offering terms. He and his fiancée were also managing serious medical issues that required consistent access to care — which meant they needed a functioning vehicle, or they simply couldn't go.
So I made a decision. I loaned him the money.
He proposed a repayment schedule, and I agreed to it. The car got fixed. This happened twice over the course of our working relationship: each time a significant repair cost, each time the same structure: we agreed on terms, and the problem got immediately solved.
To me, the risk of either loan not being repaid was less than the risk of the impact to the business if Rich were absent. Especially mid-season. The Acadia area in the years Rich worked with me was, and remains, a community under considerable labor pressure. Acadia National Park set a record of 4.07 million estimated visits in 2021 — an increase of roughly 15 percent over the previous record — and visitation remained elevated throughout the years that followed. The tourists kept coming. The workers who served them had few places to live. Between 2012 and 2022, the town of Mount Desert’s population shrank by 20 percent while the median home price reached $903,000 by 2023, doubling in five years. Finding a place to live as a seasonal worker had only gotten harder, and caretakers and cleaners are the scarcest resource in the local rental economy. Rich himself commuted in from an hour away.
Finding someone reliable is hard enough; finding someone who showed up every week, knew the properties, held the standard, and could be trusted with keys and judgment calls was not a problem one quickly solved with a new hire, if you could find one. Meanwhile, we were dependent on the rental income to retain the properties, especially my folks’ retirement home now that they had moved to assisted living. I was determined to do so: my parents’ former home held generations of love and laughter in memories. And I did not want to be the one to lose it.
So I viewed the contribution that Rich made as effectively irreplaceable in the practical, near-term sense. Making him a loan was worth the risk.
Our occupancy ran at 100% in season. Without Rich’s standard of care, I truly believe that there would have been lower review scores, and there would have been direct costs added, as well, like meals comped, nights discounted, or damage missed from the maintenance and cleanliness gaps that would have accumulated without him. My five-star review record, in which guests repeatedly noted that the properties exceeded their expectations, held because someone was there every week making sure that it did. Sure, we discussed how to handle various situations in real time, as a good rental owner always does, but his being there to make them happen was the key.
Eventually, Rich’s health declined to the point where the physical demands of the work were no longer manageable, so we parted ways then. By that time I had sold 2 of the 3 cottages to repurpose the funds to other priorities, and was managing just the one treasured family home. The timing just about worked out perfect.
Net value
The calculus I’d run when Rich’s car broke down was not sentimental. It was operational. I had a worker who had demonstrated reliability and competence in a role where those qualities are genuinely rare, in a market where replacing him would have been slow and costly, connected to a person whose ability to function outside of work was directly tied to his ability to show up for it. I don’t view it so much as an act of generosity as one of practicality; it’s a bonus to me that I can know that it also helped him and his fiancée maintain their health.
Some months after Rich had moved on, I got a notice from Venmo that another payment had come in. And then another. I’d forgotten about the balance due on the final loan, but he had not. And he’d followed through. It may have taken him a little longer than anticipated, but he was good for his word. And that means something to both of us, especially in a world where reliability can’t be taken for granted on either side of the equation.
Our rental business succeeds in large part because we recognize that the people who help keep it running are just that: people. They have real needs, real concerns, and they deliver real value. Sometimes just showing up is 9/10 of the battle. I’m certainly happy to support people who make a valuable contribution to keeping the engine running – whether that’s their car or my rental business: it’s all the same in the end.
Sources
National Park Traveler / Friends of Acadia. "What Does Four Million Visits Mean to Acadia?" May 2022. https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2022/05/what-does-four-million-visits-mean-acadia
Portland Press Herald. "Acadia National Park numbers were down in 2023 for second year in a row." January 29, 2024. https://www.pressherald.com/2024/01/29/acadia-national-park-numbers-were-down-in-2023-for-second-year-in-a-row/
The Maine Monitor. "How 7 wealthy summer residents halted MDI workforce housing." March 2025. https://themainemonitor.org/mdi-workforce-housing/
Portland Press Herald. "Some of Maine's seasonal businesses are going to extremes to house workers." May 15, 2022. https://www.pressherald.com/2022/05/15/some-of-maines-seasonal-businesses-are-going-to-extremes-to-house-workers/
Island Institute / Working Waterfront. "Short-term gain, long-term pain?" May 2024. https://www.islandinstitute.org/working-waterfront/short-term-gain-long-term-pain/
