Recognizing a demand for affordable housing in McCall, Idaho, Whitetail Club and its nearby 77-room sister property Shore Lodge have recently completed a multi-million dollar construction of 13 new employee dorm units with 28 beds, bringing the total number of its employee housing beds to more than 100.
The new facility features a spacious commons area with a Wi-Fi-accessible lounge, couches and two large screen HD TV’s with full programming, a separate family living room and lounge, laundry room, and a cafeteria with seating for up to 50 people. In its full-service kitchen, shift meals and other affordable meal options will be prepared and served for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days per week. All employees also will have access to a new state-of-the-art gym with locker rooms, showers, free weights, spinning bikes, cardio equipment, a rowing machine and a fitness classroom offering spinning classes, pilates and other group exercise programs.
Each dorm ranges from US$150/person/month to US$250/person/month depending on the room type (single, double, triple).
“As with all top tourist destinations, rising home prices prove to be an ongoing area of concern in McCall,” said Whitetail Club and Shore Lodge President Dan Scott. “While offering employee housing gives us a competitive advantage, we have taken it a step further and provided additional amenities.”
Scott told HOTELS that an ROI for the project wasn’t calculated because the resort had to have the additional 28 beds of dormitory space and the cafeteria/kitchen to hire employees. “It was a business necessity, a cost of doing business and not a project where figuring an ROI made sense,” he said.
Designed by local architects Epikos Architecture, the 24,000-square-foot renovation project is giving new life to the former United States Department of Agriculture Payette National Forest headquarters building, conveniently located between Whitetail Club and Shore Lodge. In addition to the employee dorms, the building provides 26 new offices for the operations and administration teams at Shore Lodge and Whitetail Club as well as a data center, conference rooms and meeting spaces. The new facility will also allow many of the company’s administrative employees to relocate to the new offices, freeing up additional onsite space for both Whitetail Club’s and Shore Lodge’s team of employees.
But for the office/conference room portion, they could have looked at the cost of the space they were using in the hotel and club that could have been revenue generating if it wasn’t being used for employee uses (versus guest uses) and computed an ROI, but since it was just a portion of the total building (and buying just part of the building wasn’t an option), the ROI wouldn’t have been accurate.
The main challenge during the project was the timing. “From the time we received entitlement approval for the project from the City of McCall until the time we wanted to occupy the facility was less than three months,” Scott said. “This was a significant amount of work to do in that amount of time. From a construction standpoint the biggest challenge was that the building is concrete slab on grade. We built a commercial kitchen, two new dormitory bathrooms (each with three showers, three sinks and four toilets) and expanded two locker rooms. The amount of concrete cutting, trenching, etc. to install sanitary sewer for this was substantial.”