Lisa Womak leads a double life. During the week, her neighbors spot her picking up the mail, working in the garden or walking the dog; come Friday night, she’s nowhere to be found. In her place, gaggles of good-natured Cavalier fans pop up on her property. There are old ones, young ones, even furry ones, “but they never leave a mess,” boasts Womak, “only leftovers.”
During UVA home games, Womak cheers on her alma mater from a hotel room, while total strangers pack her fridge, let their dogs run in her back yard and apply face paint in her powder room. More and more Charlottesville residents close to Scott Stadium are handing their keys over to tailgaters who need room for more than a cooler. Why settle for a seat cushion when you could have a leather couch and four bedrooms? Depending on proximity to the field, and amenities offered, residential dwellings turned party rentals go for between $300 and $500 a night.
 While the football team hasn’t offered too much to get excited about so far this year, those diehard fans who want more than a night at the motel are coughing up $300 to $500 a night to stay in local homes on game weekends. |
The trading spaces phenomenon in Charlottesville seems to have taken off two years ago when Gordon Sutton, then a college junior, launched www.collegeweekends.com. Designed to match ticket holders with local homeowners, the site had humble beginnings; a small sign at a gas station is what caught Womak’s eye. Today, dozens of property owners harness the website—and pay Sutton a small fee—in order to cater to ‘Hoos on holiday. Sutton, a native of Charlottesville, is planning to expand the breadth of his website to accommodate other college towns. First on the list is the mountainside city of Boulder, where Sutton is earning his master’s degree in business administration at the University of Colorado.
The Collegeweekends.com formula can work in any college town, says Womack, because regardless of the how diehard the sports fans are, other standard university happenings will reel in families and alums. Abbey Yates, who rents her Rugby Hills home to parties as big as eight, sites graduation, parents’ weekend, film fests and concerts as some other draws outside of the football season. Even those who come for Foxfield, which Yates dubs “a big drunk fest,” always leave their weekend digs squeaky clean for their short-term landlord.
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