By Christina Rexrode, The Charlotte Observer, N.C. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Jun. 15--As newly issued high-school graduates from around the county flock to Myrtle Beach, Monroe Baldwin is in on the action.
He's the founder and owner of Myrtle Beach Tours in North Myrtle Beach, which rents housing mainly to high school and college kids. Last year, Baldwin estimates, he found 6,000 students a place during spring break and graduation weeks. He rents 84 houses and apartments, two-thirds of which he owns.
The Lynchburg, Va., native started booking beach digs for students in 1988, when he was a sophomore at George Mason University and his fraternity charged him with finding housing for its graduation party. He had such a knack that by senior year he helped almost 800 students find housing.
Now married, 37, and with four young kids, he talked about his place in the beach week tradition.
QUESTION: You traveled to Myrtle Beach each summer in college. Why?
ANSWER: It's just a great place for kids to come and party, and the town's very friendly, and it's very inexpensive. When I came down here in 1988, there was a bar called Crazy Zack's, and pitchers of beer were $4 and the place held two or three thousand people. The bars stayed open until breakfast time.
You can imagine, I loved it; it was right up my alley.
Q: So when did you decide to make this a full-time job?
A: (I graduated during) the recession of 1990, and there were not a lot of prospects, and by that time my phone was ringing off the hook for houses. It just grew from there. I didn't plan on it being a business until probably '91 or '92, when I realized I could earn a living doing it. I was doing it because I loved to come down here for the parties.
Q: One-third of your units are other people's investment properties. Do you have a hard time convincing them to rent to students?
A: No, it's not hard. You have people who just want the maximum amount of income out of the house, and that kind of person will accept students. (But) if you are sentimentally involved with a property, you're not going to want to rent to high school students, because things go wrong.
Q: Tell us some good stories about things your tenants have done.
A: One is that they use dish soap instead of dish detergent. High school kids don't know the difference, so that's a huge mess. Another thing is that I saw a hose going into the front door on check-out day, and they were hosing out the house to get it clean. I'm like 'A' for effort, but that is stupid.
There was one time several years back that we were going to have to tear a house down at the end of the summer, and the kids found out. All of a sudden the doors would be gone, or they'd pull down the ceiling fans, and their excuse was, 'Well, you're gonna tear the house down anyway,' and our response was, 'Well, what about the kids that are gonna come next week?'
Q: So most kids are pretty wild?
A: Ninety-nine percent of the kids who come down here are great. Almost all of them have good manners, and every now and then you get a yahoo who will break something.
Q: What's the most noticeable change in your business in the past decade?
A: It's gone to an Internet-driven business. That's true for every business, but that actually has been very significant for us. We pull kids from much further locations. We got our first Web site in 1995 or 1996. Before that, we did some traveling to campuses, some classified advertising in campus newspapers. We still do our newspaper advertising and direct mail.
Q: So how many kids come to you because they found you on the Internet?
A: Eighty-five percent of our business is either one of two things -- either they've stayed with us before, or someone has told them to call us.
Most of (the remainder) is coming from the Internet, and the rest of it is coming from the college ads. It's funny -- you put an ad in a college newspaper, and it doesn't necessarily generate a (new) customer, but it creates a buzz on campus and everyone goes and calls where they've stayed before.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: The next thing is to expand the spring break business into the summer break business, out of the traditional (student) time frame from March to June. We have a new division called the Ocean Surf Club, and that focuses on family reunions, church groups, sports teams. They're mostly July and August or weekends in the fall and winter.
We're updating or replacing some of these houses, designed with high school and college kids in mind. We're trying to replicate some of the styles that you may see on MTV. They're very contemporary, very young-person oriented. That's called our University Line. I've got several units like that, and we're going to continually switch those over.
Q: What do you do for vacation?
A: I try to take advantage of ski vacations in the middle of the winter, and if I do travel I go up to Maine, where it's cool. We travel around and go hiking. I'm not looking to go sit on the beach somewhere.
For more information:
Check out www.myrtlebeachtours.com. or www.oceansurfclub.com.
Depending on the season, rates range from $99 to $275 per person per week.
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