Gorge Journal · Market Data
If you want to know where the Red River Gorge cabin economy actually sits in the federal housing data, the answer is Menifee County, and it is not close. Census estimates put 15.7% of every housing unit in Menifee County in the “seasonal, recreational, or occasional use” category — 531 of 3,387 units. In neighbouring Powell County, the same figure is 0.9%.
Which Red River Gorge county has the most seasonal housing?
Menifee County, by a wide margin. An estimated 15.7% of its housing units are classed seasonal, recreational or occasional-use, against 2.7% in Wolfe, 1.7% in Lee, 0.9% in Powell and 0.5% in Estill.
Here is the whole five-county picture from the same table, so you can see the spread rather than take my word for the headline. All figures are American Community Survey five-year estimates for 2023, the most recent five-year release at the time of writing.
| County | Total housing units | Seasonal / recreational / occasional | Share of all units | Share of vacant units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Menifee | 3,387 | 531 | 15.7% | 53.1% |
| Wolfe | 3,043 | 81 | 2.7% | 16.3% |
| Lee | 3,227 | 56 | 1.7% | 9.0% |
| Powell | 5,619 | 52 | 0.9% | 5.3% |
| Estill | 6,847 | 37 | 0.5% | 3.9% |
The last column is the one I find most useful. In Menifee County, seasonal and recreational units are 53.1% of all vacant housing — more than half of everything the Census counts as unoccupied there is a second home or a cabin, not an empty house waiting for a local buyer. In Estill County, that figure is 3.9%, which tells you almost all of Estill’s vacancy is ordinary residential vacancy. Two counties sharing a border, two completely different housing markets. You can read more on each in the Menifee County real estate overview and the Powell County real estate overview.
What does the Census mean by “seasonal, recreational, or occasional use”?
It is a vacancy category: a unit with no one living there as a usual residence at survey time, held for seasonal, recreational or occasional occupancy rather than offered for rent or sale.
That definition matters more than the number, and this is the part I would not want you to misread. The category is a proxy for a cabin-and-second-home economy, not a census of short-term rentals. It will capture a family’s own weekend cabin, a seldom-used inherited house and a nightly rental that happened to be between guests, and it will class all three the same way. It does not capture a cabin that is somebody’s full-time home, and it is not a permit count or a tax record. If you need an actual short-term-rental count, that comes from county and city records, not from here — the Gorge short-term rental rules by county page is where the regulatory side of that lives.
These are also estimates, with sampling error, published as five-year averages precisely because single-year samples in counties this small are too thin to be stable. Treat 15.7% as a strong signal about the character of a market. Do not treat 531 as an inventory.
More than half of everything the Census counts as vacant in Menifee County is a cabin or a second home. In Estill County, one unit in twenty-five is. Same region, different business.
Why would a buyer care which county the cabins cluster in?
Because the surrounding stock sets your comparables, your competition and your service availability. A cabin in a cabin-dense county is appraised, booked and maintained in a different environment from an identical cabin twenty miles away.
Three practical consequences follow from the table, and they cut in both directions.
- Comparables. An appraiser needs recent sales of similar property. In a county where seasonal units are 15.7% of stock, cabin comparables exist. In a county where they are 0.5%, an appraiser may be reaching for dissimilar property or crossing a county line to find anything — which is a slower appraisal and a less predictable number.
- Competition. Density that helps your appraisal also means more cabins competing for the same weekend. Cabin-dense is not automatically the better buy; it is the more established one.
- Trades and services. Septic pumpers, well drillers, cleaners and caretakers go where the work concentrates. The Gorge services and trades directory is thinner the further you get from where the cabins actually are, and that is a real carrying cost, not a convenience question.
The professional habit I would pass along is to stop treating “the Red River Gorge” as one market. It reads as one place on a map and in the marketing, and buyers arrive thinking in those terms. But the five counties that touch the Gorge are not interchangeable, and the federal data says so plainly: a thirty-fold spread in seasonal housing share between Menifee and Estill is not noise. Before you compare two asking prices, check whether you are comparing two listings or two different economies. Where to start looking is the subject of where to buy in the Red River Gorge.
Does a high seasonal share mean cabins there are a better investment?
No, and I would not read it that way. It means the market is established — comparables exist, trades are available, buyers understand the product. It also means more supply competing for the same guests and the same resale buyers. The data describes the character of a market. It does not forecast a return, and I make no prediction about one.
Why is Powell County so low when Natural Bridge and the Gorge are right there?
Powell County has the largest total housing stock of the five at 5,619 units and the Stanton and Clay City population centres, so its seasonal units are diluted by a much larger base of ordinary year-round housing. A low percentage is not the same as a low count of cabins — though at an estimated 52 units, Powell’s count is genuinely small as well.
How current is this data?
These are 2023 American Community Survey five-year estimates, which pool survey responses collected from 2019 through 2023. That is the most recent five-year vintage available and the right one for counties this small, but it is an average over a window, not a snapshot of today. It will lag any recent change in the market.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey table B25004, with totals from table B25002, 2023 five-year estimates.
Last updated October 17, 2026.
By Marcos Gil, REALTOR® — Keller Williams Commonwealth · KY Real Estate License No. 296259 · Call or text (859) 310-1209.
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