Rentals, hotel rooms booked by Joplin spillover

The 2011 SAE Kansas Baja competition drew more competitors than the hotels in Pittsburg could handle two weeks ago. So well in advance, many teams had booked rooms in Joplin hotels.

And while Joplin hotels helped Pittsburg with the spillover from the Baja competition, Pittsburg and surrounding areas have been providing help for the spillover from Joplin in the wake of the devastating tornado late last month.

“When you stop to consider that probably 4,800 families either lost their primary home or residence, and you add to that the several thousand individuals who come into town for relief and emergency work, that’s a 7,000 to 8,000 demand for guest rooms,” said Pete Hall, president of the Southwest Missouri Lodging Association. “The fact of the matter is Joplin has about 2,000 rooms. The demand is four times higher than what the supply is capable of in the immediate [Joplin] market.”

Hall said that has led to many people wishing for guest rooms to be displaced to surrounding areas, including Carthage, Pittsburg, Neosho, Springfield, Lebanon, northwest Arkansas, and even as far away as Tulsa.

Pittsburg has not only seen its local hotels receive an increase in demand, but has also seen many changes in the number of available rental properties as displaced Joplin families look for a temporary residence, as well as emergency and relief workers.

Hotel situation
When the tornado blew through Joplin, many plans changed in the blink of an eye.

A Baja team from North Carolina A&T, upon arriving in Joplin, called to Pittsburg a day before the competition and canceled their involvement in the competition, deciding that they could do more by volunteering in Joplin than competing in Pittsburg.

Similarly, the plans hotel operators had for the summer months are changing rapidly.

Hall said his hotel, the Residence Inn by Marriott in Joplin, has four notepads full of names and numbers of people wanting to get a room when a vacancy arises. He said this type of business is much higher than expected in the summer, even when one takes into account the series of sporting events and festivals that often take place this time of year.

“Even in a normal busy summer, our average occupancies in Joplin and Pittsburg are about 70-75 percent. That’s between the highs and the lows, the average,” Hall said. “Now, the situation is we have four times the demand more than the capacity. Safely, we can probably anticipate the next three months, including June, July, and August, are probably going to be between 95 and 100 percent, depending on the property.”

Even in Pittsburg, that’s the case. And although some tournaments and sporting events have been canceled or delayed, many are continuing on as if nothing has changed, which has created some booking issues for teams and families from outside the area looking for a place to rest their heads.

“I spoke with some general managers after the Bajas were over,” said Craig Hull, Crawford County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau director. “I was informed that [the Joplin spillover] will keep the hotels packed through July. That’s with rescue, recovery crews. The outlying areas [from Joplin] will be pretty booked at least through June. I’m having daily contact with others since the tornado. We’re trying to keep as many of those events going, and see if we could host some of their teams.”

For example, there is a triathlon scheduled for Joplin later this summer, and Hull said that a lot of the competitors have been pushed to stay in Pittsburg because all of the rooms in Joplin are booked.

Hall noted that the hotels across the region are not only booked, but are also more densely packed than usual, noting that entire families may be sharing one room along with any pets, whereas normally they might only have two people in a room. He noted that the extra business comes at an extremely high price, however.

“I love to be busy. Every hotel does,” Hall said. “But none of us want to do business under these conditions. This is not the happy side of what we do. Other than the opportunity to make a big difference in people’s lives. We’re glad we’re here, and God was smiling on us when the tornado did not hit the hotel district. We were ready to put people in rooms, and we took care of them.”

Rental properties
In the immediate aftermath of the tornado, Blake Benson and other Pittsburg Area Chamber of Commerce members went to Joplin to help their brethren answer phones and do whatever else they could. Benson said that a few days after the tornado, the calls began to pick up about finding temporary housing in Joplin.

“It picked up by Wednesday or Thursday after the storm,” Benson said. “I think for a couple of days, people were not sure where to go. But it filled up in Joplin that quickly. There was nothing available there for rent thant quickly. Every three to four calls, we’d have people looking for rentals.”

Once Joplin filled up, some of that demand for housing has made its way to Pittsburg, Benson said. Now, Benson is answering many of the same questions for rentals from his own office in Pittsburg.

“In conversations with local realtors, they’re answering a lot of calls looking for rentals,” Benson said. “Whenever I pass calls on to property managers, I’ve heard the response is that many don’t have anything available. We’ve seen an increase in people coming in to the community.”

One of those property managers, Brian Jones of Jones Heritage Realty, said that he has received some calls, but he’s not run out of properties yet.

“We’ve had quite a few phone calls for rentals, and a lot are from Joplin,” Jones said. “Most are looking for a short-term residence, for three to six months, and it’s a wide variety. Right now, we’ve been giving them information on what we have on anything available to rent... It’s not as booked as some would lead you to believe. We still see a lot of for rent signs. We still have two left to rent.”

But with displaced Joplinites taking up rental properties potentially through the start of Pittsburg State classes in August, could that leave some students out in the cold when they come back?

“I don’t think it will be that way at this point. I had a conversation with a few different folks,” Jones said. “The only ones who might get caught are the students who didn’t think they needed to come down before Aug. 1 or before school starts.”

Benson said the temporary Joplin residents could provide a summer boost to the local economy, as he noted that some will probably be eating in Pittsburg restaurants and shopping in Pittsburg grocery stores.

“But it’s hard to think about that in terms of the disaster in Joplin,” he said.

Andrew Nash can be reached at andrew.nash@morningsun.net or by calling 231-2600 ext. 140.