Yearly sales at the 21-room hotel and restaurant have surged more than 500% since Soutiea bought the property in 2018, he said. Bookings this summer are already on par with the last two, when people’s discretionary “revenge spending” was booming.
But “housing has been a significant challenge for not only our staff but ourselves as restaurant owners,” said Soutiea, who employs about 25 people in the offseason and 50 during the summer peak. The issue limits the pool of candidates who “can commute in a reasonable amount of time and who can work year-round,” he said.
If we were to rent from anyone else, we both would have to work two jobs.
Shannon Dennison, head of housekeeping, craignair inn by the sea
About three years ago, Soutiea bought a four-unit building in downtown Rockland to rent to employees at below-market rates. He now owns three properties with a total of 10 rental units, eight of which are set at levels allowing someone earning 80% or less of the area’s median income to spend no more than a third of their pay on housing, a common measure of affordability.
Five of his rentals are occupied by full-time employees, with another four workers — three seasonal ones and a year-rounder — living in the Craignair itself.
Soutiea said becoming an employer-landlord has “definitely been a significant driver in staff retention.” Even so, he still has only enough workers to keep the inn’s 95-seat Causeway restaurant open five nights a week.
Shannon Dennison, 38, a mother of three who heads up housekeeping at the inn, has rented one of Soutiea’s two-bedroom apartments for $1,250 a month for about a year. Before then, Dennison, who grew up in the area, had “thought about moving out of state” as housing costs surged.
