How I Got Over 40 Tiny House Parking Offers

I went tiny back when most people weren’t familiar with tiny houses. When I bought my tiny house in 2013, I lived in a 2,600 square foot house on a half-acre lot on a river in Tampa, Florida, and the tiny was parked by the dock in the backyard.

A lady who came to look at all the furniture and household items I was selling off in order to downsize to the tiny house thought it was a chicken coop! A chicken mansion, I guess! So when I started looking for parking, my first obstacle was educating people on the subject of tiny houses.

What the heck IS a tiny house? You want to put WHAT on my property? And you want to live in it?! My then husband had found a job in Asheville, North Carolina, and I only had about six weeks to find a parking spot.

At the same time, we were being courted by the producers of the very first tiny house show, Tiny House Nation, and the producers of TLC’s Risking It All, a show about families choosing to leave their city lives and move off the grid, which was my original goal. This was back when TV shows actually paid you, because as an outgoing introvert who needs breaks from social situations, I would not choose to have my life filmed otherwise.

I also hate phone calls, and no one wants to get a surprise call from someone who wants to park their weird, small house on wheels on their land anyway. However, I can write and send emails like a champ! So I started an online blog to introduce us to potential landowners and farms that I planned to approach about parking, as well as all of the producers who wanted to know our story and pay us to be on TV. It had pretty pictures and a detailed description of my tiny house, my family and my pets.

I also created a digital one page flyer with a photo of my family in front of the tiny house, short biographies, and a description of what we were looking for in a parking spot. I gave my tiny house a memorable name, The Bumbleshack (for the bees!), and I explained the reasons I wanted to go tiny (mostly environmental) on the blog.

Basically my blog was one big, pretty résumé with pictures and the bonus of being an online diary to remember our adventures.

Then I contacted the major tiny house websites and social media sites, such as Tiny House Listings and Tiny House Talk, and asked them to post about our land search near Asheville. Our builder was very popular, the second tiny house builder to acquire RVIA certification, and he posted about our land search on his social media pages. I also posted and shared on my own blog and social media pages and asked people to share. And they did!

In 2014, the temporary parking options for tiny houses were RV parks and larger tracts of private land in rural areas and farms. Obviously, there were no tiny house communities yet. Farms, in my opinion, afford the best option as their zoning laws are more liberal and typically allow temporary housing with a composting toilet.

They are also beautiful and have the added bonus of access to fresh veggies and fruit. I received many of my 40 parking offers from farms, including the very popular Hickory Nut Gap Farm in Fairview, North Carolina, and the rest came from private landowners. Today, RV parks and tiny house communities are a great option if you want to be sure you are legal and don’t mind being around other people or actually want to live in a community.

They are typically more expensive than parking on private land because they include amenities such as internet or cable, septic hookup, and community centers with laundry machines.

There has been a lot of progress in recent years to change the laws regarding legal housing in many areas, especially with the passage of Appendix Q of the International Building Code in 2018 which covers tiny houses on foundations under 400 square feet, however tiny houses on wheels are still considered recreational vehicles in most areas.

This means that you can put a tiny house on wheels wherever an RV is legal, which is typically an RV park, private land with a permitted RV spot, farms and in the tiny house communities that are popping up in lots of places. For a permanent parking spot, it is possible to buy land in some rural areas to place a tiny house on wheels, as long as you install a septic system and a well. It was my intention to find temporary parking for six months or so while we looked for land to buy. 

When looking for tiny house parking on private land, I think it is important to have photos of your house or house in progress. People want to see what will be parked on their land, and they aren’t going to save your spot while you build or acquire a tiny house, unless you start paying rent to hold it, of course.

Securing a parking spot before buying or building is very difficult. It is also important to give some details about yourself so that people feel comfortable sharing their land with you. If you are willing to move to a rural area, maybe even a rural area outside of the city you currently live and work in, you will find a landowner or farm to host you.

Here in Western North Carolina, there are way more landowners looking for tiny housers than the other way around. It is a win-win situation, as long as you and the landowner have a mutual respect for each other. I have been parked on my rented land for over seven years now, and at $300 a month for me (cheap), the landowner has made over $25,000 with little to no effort on their part.

Other than making sure there is water and electricity, which they need anyway for the main house, they never have to deal with me. 

So back to my 40 parking offers! They just came rolling into my blog’s contact form and my Facebook page after I did all of the things I mentioned above. We were only able to make one quick weekend trip up to Asheville from Tampa to look at all the offers we had, so I was forced to narrow all the choices down to two properties without ever seeing any of them.

The first one I chose was on Bee Tree Creek (how appropriate for the Bumbleshack tiny house, eh?), and it was really lovely. Besides a place to park the house, we would have had the use of an art studio and a nice yurt…but there was one big catch. No potable water.

Bee Tree Creek feeds from a City of Asheville reservoir, which is what the previous property owners used when they were there, along with rain barrels. So we would have to set up a cistern and filter with a pump, which would have cost us a little bit of money.

The second was 23 wooded acres all to ourselves bordering the Biltmore Estate property, which is over 200 acres. We would only have to share it with the horses that graze there. There was an old, small sawmill on the property that was being used as a hay barn for the horses.

There was also a 14-foot deep spring fed pond/swimming hole with a diving dock. We could park the tiny house next to the cute tiny cabin that used to be the sawmill office and fix up the cabin to use as an office/schoolhouse/art studio. There was electric and well water, and we would have an unlimited supply of sawdust for our composting toilet. How convenient is that? 

We ended up choosing the second option because of the potable water issue at the first property. We were also told that the previous owners had to sell the property because they were unable to occupy it due to no septic or well, so despite its beauty, the risk of flying under the radar and being forced to move wasn’t worth it to us.

In addition to the parking offers, I received lots of well wishes, compliments on the cute tiny house, my cute family, and many people said we were an inspiration to them. Some of those people still follow us, and I have become friends with many of them.

There were also a lot of internet know-it-alls and Negative Nancys who said we would never make it. Not only did we make it, we are still living tiny seven years later. 

This process also made me an expert on tiny house parking in the Western North Carolina area. I get so sad when I see people choose not to go tiny because they heard and believed the hype that there is no parking out there anywhere, so I have continued to search for and post tiny house parking spots on my Facebook page as a service to the tiny house community…and the environment!

I have earned a reputation over the years, and now the landowners, tiny housers, and

new tiny house communities reach out to me to make posts for them too.

So where do I find these parking spots, and what do I suggest other tiny housers do to find parking now?

• Create a digital flyer with a photo of you in front of your tiny house, a little info about yourself and your parking needs (aka electric, internet and septic if you don’t have a composting toilet) and send it to all the tiny house social media sites and ask if they will post for you, such as Tiny House Listings, which has a parking section in addition to lots of tiny houses for sale. Tiny House Talk and Tiny House Blog would also love to hear your story. There is a Tiny House Hosting Facebook page, which is the sister group to Tiny House People, and the Tiny Houses/Land/Lots for Sale/Rent Facebook group. Search the words “tiny house” on Facebook and post everywhere! Look for tiny house resources in your specific area. There are many local groups on the web now, such as Tiny House NC and Tiny House Asheville here in Western North Carolina.
• Write an article about yourself, your tiny house, tiny goals, and parking needs and submit that to tiny house publications and websites.
• Check Craigslist! There is a parking and storage section of Craigslist where I frequently see tiny house and RV parking on private property.
• Contact all the farms in the area you wish to live and send them your digital flyer.
• If you purchased your tiny house, ask your builder to post for you. 
• Check Airbnb, Hipcamp, Harvest Host, Dyrt, Campspot, VRBO, HomeToGo, etc. for vacation rentals in your area on larger tracts of land. Chances are you will find someone willing to host you if they are already hosting a vacation rental and have the extra space.
• Look for land for sale that is sitting and waiting to be sold, and volunteer to be the caretaker and pay rent to park there.
• Print copies of your flyer and ask to put it up at local farm and feed stores, libraries and even grocery stores with bulletin boards. 

Written By: Lisa Karen Ward for Tiny House Magazine Issue 110