Selling our North Carolina mountain cottage and I have a question about selling my guest list...

My husband and I are selling our western North Carolina mountain cottage this summer. For twelve years I have run the vacation rental myself and I have amassed an email database of our 500 prior guests which I use for marketing purposes. My question is... if the person who purchases our home intends to use it as a vacation rental, what's the best way to approach them about the guest email list? My feeling is that it's a valuable asset I could sell separately, but having never done this before, I'm clueless and would love any input and opinions!

Thanks!

Wow I'm surprised to hear that! Even with my relatively small list I get a lot of re-bookings from my email communications.

We are not lawyers!!! But, generally speaking, a business is usually considered to be within its rights to contact its existing and previous clients.

A vacation rental property is obviously a business, and I think most jurisdictions would consider the guests of a specific property to be naturally associated with that property in its legitimate operation as a business. So if you sold the property to another person who was also operating it as a vacation rental, there shouldn't be any legal issues with the list of guests of that particular property going along with it.

Now, if you were to sell the guest list to someone else entirely, that would be a different matter. We wouldn't recommend doing this.