By: Tammi Weed, Affiliate Broker at Compass RE
While most agents struggle to keep up with the city’s complex short-term rental market, Tammi Weed has built a business on knowing exactly where the opportunities are, and what to do with them.
Since 2017, Metro Nashville has steadily closed the door on new non-owner-occupied permits in residential neighborhoods. Today, legally operable Airbnb investment properties are concentrated almost entirely in commercially zoned corridors, purpose-built STR developments, and a shrinking pool of grandfathered inventory. For most buyers, that complexity is a wall. For Tammi Weed, it’s where she works.
Weed is an affiliate broker at Compass RE who works extensively in Nashville’s short-term rental investment space. Over the past 12 months, she has been highly active in the non-owner-occupied STR market, a category where the inventory exists but the knowledge to find what actually performs within it is in far shorter supply.
What sets Weed apart isn’t just deal activity, it’s the fact that she came to this work from the inside. Before entering real estate full-time, she spent 15 years as Head of Celebrity Talent for a national entertainment network. Even during those years in corporate America, she was quietly building her own Airbnb portfolio on the side, learning the business as an operator, not just an observer. What guests want. What makes a property perform. What can quietly undermine performance. That hands-on experience shapes how she advises clients today in ways that few agents could replicate, and if we’re being honest, few would want to.
Beyond the Closing Table
“I take a more hands-on, strategic approach to real estate, especially in the short-term rental space,” Tammi explained. “While many agents focus on getting a deal to the closing table, I focus on what happens after the purchase, because that’s where my clients actually win or lose.”
It’s a distinction that resonates particularly with a large segment of her client base: out-of-state investors who are purchasing Nashville real estate not just for rental income, but as part of a broader tax strategy. For these buyers, a short-term rental isn’t a lifestyle decision, it’s a financial instrument. And like any financial instrument, its performance depends almost entirely on the quality of the decisions made around it.
On paper, the case for STR ownership is compelling. Nashville’s tourism economy is one of the strongest in the country, with more than 17 million visitors annually. Demand is year-round, event-driven spikes are frequent and dramatic, and properties in the right zoning with a strong amenity offering can perform very differently from traditional long-term rentals. For investors managing a complex tax picture, the depreciation benefits and expense deductions associated with short-term rental properties can be equally relevant.
But the gap between what looks good in a pro forma and what actually plays out in the Nashville market is where investors get hurt, and where Weed earns her reputation.
Setting Expectations Early
Is walkability to Broadway the only thing that drives revenue, or do amenities like rooftop decks, private parking, and hot tubs move the needle just as much? Which commercially zoned corridors are producing the strongest occupancy numbers right now? Which developments carry permits held in an LLC structure that can transfer at closing? These are questions that don’t show up in a listing, and they’re precisely what separates a good investment from an expensive lesson.
“A lot of buyers come in saying they want an Airbnb, but one of the first questions I ask is why,” she said. “In today’s market, cash flow isn’t always immediate, and it shouldn’t be the only goal. Real estate, especially short-term rentals, is a long-term play.”
For out-of-state buyers in particular, the distance compounds every risk. They can’t drive the neighborhood on a Tuesday night. They can’t ask a neighbor what the parking situation is like during CMA Fest. What they can do is work with someone who already knows, and who has a stake in the outcome beyond the commission check.
“I see my role as bridging that gap,” Weed said. “Most of my out-of-state clients are sophisticated investors. They don’t need to be told that Nashville is a great market, they’ve already done that research. What they need is someone who can give them an honest picture of what the market is actually doing right now, not what they’ve read about it, so the decisions they make are based on reality rather than assumptions.”
That kind of ground-level intelligence, knowing not just the market’s reputation but its day-to-day reality, is what has built her practice in one of the most competitive STR environments in the country. And it’s what keeps her clients calling her back long after the closing documents are signed.
The Rise of Horizon
Perhaps the clearest example of that approach is Horizon, a resort-style short-term rental community designed from the ground up around the idea that guest experience is as important as location. Private rooftop terraces with outdoor kitchens, downtown Nashville views, a resort-style pool, hot tubs, and a pickleball court set the physical stage. But what distinguishes Horizon from every other amenitized development in the city is what happens once guests arrive. Every weekend through the summer, the community hosts a curated series of events, complimentary happy hours, live music, and more, designed to turn a one-time stay into a reason to come back. It is, in short, a property built to perform.
And it showed. Weed helped bring it to market as the official Compass RE representative on Nashville’s first townhome development to partner directly with Airbnb. Phase One sold out. Phase Two is already 30% sold, with every one of those transactions happening off-market before the project ever reached a public listing. In Nashville’s current STR environment, where sophisticated investors are paying close attention, that kind of demand doesn’t happen by accident.
“People are watching closely to see what we do next, and I take that seriously,” Weed said. “I never want to be out of ideas, we’re constantly evolving, refining the product, enhancing the design, and adding to the overall offering.”
She jokes that in a city where everyone’s chasing the next big thing, the trick is being the one who builds it. But behind the humor is something straightforward: a standard that keeps moving upward, because she believes that’s what the market, and her clients, deserve.
Winning When Clients Win
For Weed, none of this is abstract. She measures her success not by deals or closed transactions, but by whether her clients are actually winning, whether the property is performing, the management is working, and the investment is doing what they needed it to do.
“At the end of the day, I only win when they do,” she said.
In Horizon, she’s found a project that crystallizes everything she’s been building toward: a product that didn’t exist until someone decided to build it, in a market that rewards people who know the difference between chasing opportunity and creating it. But when she talks about what drives her, she keeps coming back to the same thing.
“I’m committed to doing everything I can to set my clients up for success,” she said. “From the day they sign to the day they start wondering what to buy next.”
