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Investigation
How a Columbus Startup Turned Hobart's Crackdown into a Business Model
It started with a listing. A single room attached to a combination gas station and fireworks shop on Route 3, posted to a platform most people in Hobart never heard of. The photos were bad. The description was worse. “Rustic Riverfront Lodging Near…” it began. Near what, exactly, was left to the imagination. In Hobart, everything is near everything. That’s not a selling point. That’s a village of 999 people.
But the listing went live. Status: LISTING PENDING. And within days, the Department of Civil Control and Enforcement issued its first Notice of Non-Compliance to a private citizen in recent memory, and the wheels of a bureaucratic machine that hadn’t moved this fast since the 1991 water moratorium were grinding into motion.
What no one in Hobart understood, not the Village Council, not Chief Code Enforcement Officer Ray Doolin, and certainly not Dale Robert Adkins, Jr., the man who posted the listing – was that the platform behind it had been waiting for exactly this kind of fight.
SortOfHome, Inc. is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, roughly 90 miles north of Hobart by highway, two hours by car on a good day, and a world away from it in every way that matters. The company operates out of Gravity, a tech campus development in Franklinton, one of the city’s growing constellation of startup incubators and corridors that have turned Columbus into what boosters call “the Silicon Valley of the Midwest” and what everyone else calls “Columbus.”
The company was founded in 2021 by Nate Calloway and Mira Doss, both Ohio State graduates who met through the OSU New Ventures startup weekend. The pitch was simple enough: build a short-term rental platform for the places that big platforms forgot. Not beach houses or downtown lofts. The other America. The small towns. The places where a spare room attached to a store or a finished basement with its own entrance might be the only lodging option within county lines.
“We saw a gap,” Calloway told an industry trade publication in 2022. “There are thousands of small towns in the Midwest and Appalachia where there’s literally nowhere to stay. No hotel. No bed and breakfast. But there are rooms. There are spaces. People just don’t have a way to list them.”
The platform launched with 340 listings across Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Growth was modest. The app was clean – soft sage green, rounded sans-serif type, the kind of interface that looks like it was designed to be inoffensive. SortOfHome’s slogan, “Feel at home. Sort of,” carried the faint whiff of a company that knew exactly what it was selling and didn’t want you to think too hard about it.
But the company had one thing its competitors didn’t: a legal team that had spent months studying the municipal codes of small towns. Not the big cities with sophisticated short-term rental ordinances. The small ones. The ones where zoning code hadn’t been meaningfully updated since the original adoption. The ones where the definitions were vague, the enforcement mechanisms were thin, and the loopholes were wide enough to drive a truck through.
Or, as it turned out, wide enough to reclassify an entire village’s economy overnight.
The timeline, as reconstructed from Village records and documents obtained by The Herald, goes like this:
The Village of Hobart first acknowledged the situation. An Interim Statement was posted, not addressed to anyone, not referencing any platform by name – noting a “period of increased activity within municipal limits involving temporary facilities and associated operations.” The statement concluded that “the matter is considered addressed for administrative purposes” and that “no further public action is required at this time.”
It was not addressed.
Dale Robert Adkins, Jr., known locally as DBJ, owner and operator of the Route 3 Pit Stop at 101 Court Street, had listed the former fireworks room attached to his shop on SortOfHome under the category “Unique Stays.” The room, which had been sealed with plywood and evidence tape following a State Fire Marshal raid earlier in the year, was no longer being used for fireworks. DBJ’s logic, as best the Herald can reconstruct it, was straightforward: it’s not retail if nobody’s shopping. It’s not a fireworks room if there are no fireworks. It’s just a room. And people will pay money to stay in a room.
The Village responded with escalating precision. First, a Notice of Clarification was posted at Village Hall, taped over a previous notice, corners already curling, defining “short-term residential occupancy” as a stay of any fewer than thirty consecutive days. The language was clearly written by committee and included the stipulation that “short term status does not renew automatically.” Residents added their own annotations in ballpoint pen. “WHAT ABOUT COUSINS,” one read. “RV???” asked another. “SINCE WHEN?” demanded a third.
Then came the formal notice. The Department of Civil Control and Enforcement, through the Office of Zoning and Code Compliance, issued a Notice of Non-Compliance to the Pit Stop property, stating that it was “not zoned for hospitality, lodging, or transient accommodation.” DBJ received the notice by both email and by Interfax, the Village’s preferred method of official communication, which routes exclusively through the Pit Stop’s own routed print line – a detail whose irony was apparently lost on the sending office.
An emergency council session followed, with a public comment period that the Herald has described elsewhere in these pages. The session was contentious. The minutes are extensive. At least one resident asked whether the Village definition of “occupancy” applied to people who fell asleep at the laundromat. The question was entered into the record without comment.
And then, silence. For approximately six weeks, nothing happened publicly.
What was happening was happening in Columbus.
There is no public record of communication between SortOfHome and Dale Bob Adkins, Jr. during the enforcement window. Adkins has declined to discuss the matter with the Herald. SortOfHome’s communications department responded to a written inquiry with a single paragraph stating that the company “empowers hosts to make informed decisions about their listings in compliance with local regulations” and that it “continuously evolves its platform to serve diverse communities.”
The language read the way the company’s brand guidelines intend it to read: calm, inoffensive, and slightly hollow.
What the Herald has been able to confirm is this: on or around February 9, SortOfHome rolled out a new feature to a limited number of markets, including the Hobart, Ohio area. The feature was not announced in a press release. It did not appear on the company’s blog. It was not discussed on any of the proptech industry forums or newsletters that cover the short-term rental space.
The feature reclassified SortOfHome from a short-term rental platform to what the company internally describes as a “membership-based hospitality network.”
On paper, the change allowed hosts to convert their listings from rentals to private membership clubs offering overnight access to a space. Guests would not be “renting” a room. They would be “joining” a membership – a membership that happened to include, among its benefits, the use of a physical space for a limited period of time.
The distinction sounds absurd. It is absurd. But it is also, according to at least two municipal law attorneys consulted by the Herald, potentially effective – because the Village of Hobart’s Civil Control Codebook, adopted in 1828, revised through 2019, and widely considered the most exhaustive municipal codebook in the country for a town of its size, a distinction Hobart has never once sought and would probably dispute, does not define “membership organization,” does not regulate private club access, and does not address the overnight use of commercial spaces by members of a private entity
The Code regulates rentals. It does not regulate memberships.
And SortOfHome knew it.
You can view the archived version of SortOfHome here: https://archive.is/JBNuc
What happened next in Hobart has no precedent that the Herald is aware of.
Within days of the membership reclassification going live, businesses across the Village began posting signs – handwritten, printed, laminated, and in one case professionally bannered, declaring themselves to be membership organizations. None of these businesses had any connection to short-term rentals. Not one of them had any listings on SortOfHome. Not one of them was facing enforcement action from the Village.
They did it anyway.
The Rusty Spoke put up a “PRIVATE SOCIAL MEMBERSHIP CLUB” sign on the front door. This changed nothing about how the biker bar already operated. They were basically a membership club before. The sign just made it official. Sort of.
Big Al’s Fireworks and Floor Coverings went furthest. A large professionally printed banner appeared across the storefront: “BIG AL’S MEMBER ACCESS FACILITY.” Big Al went way too hard on this. It was even laminated.
Hobart Video & Tanning placed a small sign in the window: “NOW A MEMBERSHIP VIDEO & TANNING EXPERIENCE.” Nothing about the business changed. You still rent VHS tapes and tan in the back. That was already membership in every way that mattered.
MawMaw’s Fried Bologna Hut taped a handwritten sign to a stick near the ordering line. It read, simply: “MEMBERS.” Same shack. Same line. Same question. Thick slice or thin slice. But now it was exclusive.
The question the Herald has spent six weeks trying to answer, is how they all knew to do it at the same time.
SortOfHome did not send a mass communication to Hobart-area businesses. The company confirmed this in writing. The membership feature was available only to active hosts on the platform, and as of February 9, there was exactly one active host in the Hobart market: Dale Bob Adkins, Jr.
Adkins did not distribute flyers. He did not post on social media. He did not take out an ad in this newspaper.
And yet.
The Herald spoke to seven business owners who posted membership signs. Of those seven, three said they heard about the idea “from someone.” None could name the specific someone. Two said they saw another business’s sign and followed suit. One said they “just figured it was the thing to do.” One said, “It felt like it was in the air.”
It was in the air. That is how things work in Hobart. Information does not travel through official channels. It travels through the line at MawMaw’s. Through the laundromat. Through the particular frequency of small-town talk that operates faster than broadband and leaves no metadata behind.
But somewhere, at some point, someone understood the legal architecture of what SortOfHome had built – the specific, narrow, deliberate gap between “rental” and “membership” – and translated it into a language that every business owner in a village of 999 people could understand and act on within days.
Nobody would say.
Ray Doolin, Chief Code Enforcement Officer for the Village of Hobart, did not respond to three requests for comment over a two-week period. A records request filed by the Herald for any correspondence between the Department of Civil Control and Enforcement and SortOfHome, Inc. returned zero documents.
Evie Trask, Village Clerk, confirmed that the Council had “taken the matter under advisement” and that “additional review of the Civil Control Code is ongoing.” She declined to elaborate.
The Herald has learned that Doolin was observed at the Village Hall records room on February 14, requesting access to the original Civil Control Codebook – the full unrevised edition, adopted in 1828, revised through 2019, published by the authority of the Village Council through the Office of the Village Clerk. A Village Hall employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Doolin as “quiet” and said he spent approximately four hours with the document.
The Codebook is not a casual read. It is, by reputation, one of the most comprehensive municipal codes in the country, which makes it even more interesting that this wasn’t covered. What Doolin found in it, or what he was looking for, is unknown.
But the cease-and-desist letter from the Office of Zoning and Code Compliance, the one that started all of this, was still on his desk when he left.
Hobart is not the first small town to encounter a short-term rental platform. It will not be the last. But it may be the first where the platform’s response to a regulatory challenge was not to fight, not to lobby, not to withdraw – but to quietly, without announcement or fanfare, hand its users a legal framework that made the regulations irrelevant.
SortOfHome did not break any laws. It did not advise anyone to break any law. It simply changed what it called itself. And in doing so, stepped outside the vocabulary of a code written in 1828 and never updated to account for the possibility that a fireworks room on Route 3 might one day become a membership experience.
The membership feature remains live. It has since expanded beyond the Hobart market to markets across Southern Ohio and West Virginia. SortOfHome’s most recent funding round, a $14.2 million Series B led by Olentangy Capital, closed in 2024. The company now lists 2,400 active spaces across 11 states.
In Hobart, the signs are still up. MawMaw’s is still a membership. The Video and Tanning place is still an experience. Big Al’s facility is still accessible to members only, assuming you can find parking near the carpet.
And somewhere in Columbus, in that impossible, seven-ring-structured, jurisdictionally fragmented sprawl that calls itself a city, the quiet pivot continues.
Victor Harlan is a staff reporter for the Hobart Herald. Contact: vharlan@hobart-herald.com. Tips can be submitted anonymously through the Herald tip line.
This investigation is ongoing. If you have information about SortOfHome’s operations in the Hobart area, contact the newsroom.
I read this whole thing and my one question is whether the Little League Raffle is considered a membership organization now because if so we have been doing this for YEARS and nobody ever told us we could just call it that. Karen Ferrell owes me an apology.
DALE BOB JR HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MENACE JUST LIKE HIS DAD I SAID IT IN 2019 WHEN HE PUT UP THAT SIGN AND I’LL SAY IT AGAIN MEMBERSHIP IS JUST A FANCY WORD FOR MENACE WITH A SIGN ON IT.. RAY DOOLIN NEEDS TO DO HIS JOB
Hollis, Ray Doolin IS doing his job. That’s literally what the article is about. He spent four hours with the codebook. That is more than most people spend on anything.
OK so nobody is going to mention that this “Columbus startup” has two Ohio State grads founding it and Ohio State has a DIRECT pipeline to the state legislature going back to at least 1987 and probably before. This is not random. SortOfHome was not an accident. Follow the money back to Franklinton and then follow it further. I have been saying for two years that the Gravity campus is not a tech incubator it is a regulatory capture operation with exposed brick and free cold brew.
Dale, you have been saying that about literally every business that has opened in Columbus since 2019. The Gravity campus is where people go to start companies. That’s what it is.
and who funds the companies Marvin. Who funds them.
Venture capital firms, Dale. That is how startups work.
Olentangy Capital. Look into Olentangy Capital Marvin. I am not going to do it for you.
Using this account because Dale blocked me on the other one somehow. Dale the Olentangy River is a RIVER. Olentangy Capital is named after a RIVER. That is not a conspiracy. That is geography.
Why do you have a second account Marvin.
It’s a long story.
I’ve said from day one that this wasn’t about DBJ or the Pit Stop. DBJ was just the foot in the door. You think a company 90 miles north of here spent months studying Hobart’s codebook because of one fireworks room? They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew exactly where to do it. Hobart’s code is famous in certain circles. You don’t accidentally find a loophole in a document that specific. Somebody pointed them here.
My husband Gene has been on the council for eleven years and I can tell you for a fact that he has never once been contacted by anyone from Columbus about anything and I think this article raises a lot of questions that it doesn’t answer about who exactly was talking to who and when. That’s all I am going to say about that.
Brenda, I think what the article is saying is that’s the point. Nobody was talking to anyone officially. That’s how it spread.
Big Al’s has a banner. A PROFESSIONAL BANNER. Laminated. You don’t get a laminated banner printed up overnight. I’m not saying anything. I’m just noting the timeline.
ok so i actually went and looked at the archived version of the website and the before and after are genuinely wild. they just… changed what they called it. that’s it. the whole thing is still the same. they just called it something else and now the code doesn’t apply. i don’t know if that’s genius or the most depressing thing i’ve ever read
mawmaws has always been a membership to me because you gotta know to ask for thick slice or they just decide for you and that is a members only kind of knowledge if you ask me
I taught civics at Hobart High for twenty-two years and I want to say that this article is exactly the kind of local investigative journalism that communities need and that Victor Harlan should be commended. That said, the codebook being written in 1828 is not an excuse. It has been revised through 2019. Someone had the opportunity to close this gap and did not. That is a failure of governance and I say that with respect for everyone involved.
My dad doesn’t talk about work at home so I can’t say anything about what he does or doesn’t know. But I will say that I drove past the Pit Stop last week and the sign is still up and the light in the back room was on and I don’t know what that means but it felt like something.
A community is defined not by its codes but by its character. I will leave it at that except to say that MawMaw’s calling itself a membership does not make it a membership in any sense that matters to the people who built this village. Thick slice. Always thick slice.
This is a fascinating legal situation and honestly the whole concept of a membership-based access model has me thinking about the practice. Has anyone considered that a dental office could operate on a similar framework? Just thinking out loud. New patient consultations available M-F. Ask about our whitening package.
I contacted Karen Ferrell this morning and she says the Little League Raffle has always been a “community giving initiative” and not a membership organization and I said Karen that is not the point and she hung up. I am going to the next council meeting.
I spent thirty-one years at the Hobart Public Library and I want everyone to know that the original second copy of the Civil Control Codebook is available for reference at the circulation desk. You cannot check it out. You cannot photograph it. You may read it in the building between the hours of ten and four. Four people have asked to see it in the last two weeks. That is more than the previous decade combined. Something is happening in this town.
i tried to declare my truck a membership organization and my girl said that is not how any of this works and I said read the article and she said she did read the article and it still doesn’t apply to a truck and I think she is wrong.
Speaking purely as a private citizen and not in any legal capacity, the distinction between a rental transaction and a membership benefit is well-established in Ohio case law and SortOfHome’s legal team clearly did their homework. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s not obviously wrong. Those are different things.
Ronnie Darnell said “not obviously wrong” about the company that helped Dale Bob Adkins Jr. run a fireworks room as a hotel and I want that on record.
Tammy Jo I said I was speaking as a private citizen.
You put Esq. in your email address Ronnie.
The HVFD Ladies’ Auxiliary has been a membership organization since 1962 and nobody ever gave us a laminated banner. I’m just noting that.
The Sheriff’s Office has no comment on this article or its contents at this time. This is a personal comment posted in a personal capacity during my lunch break.
wait so is hobart itself a membership now. like the whole town. because it kind of always felt like that
Cabbage that is actually the most accurate thing anyone has said in this whole thread.
I am a Hobart by name and I can tell you this village was not built to be a loophole. My grandfather would be sick. That said I went to MawMaw’s on Thursday and the sign is still up and the bologna was good so I don’t know what to tell you.
someone just told me the Rusty Spoke has been carding people at the door for “membership verification” and charging a $2 initiation fee. that’s just a cover charge. that’s always been a cover charge. they just gave it a name.
Following up on my earlier comment – I’ve done some research and a dental membership plan is actually a real and recognized model in the industry. This article may have changed the trajectory of my practice. Thank you Victor. New patient special still running through April.
NOBODY ASKED SORTA HOME OR SOROF HOME OR WHATEVER IT IS CALLED TO COME TO HOBART. WE WERE FINE. THE PIT STOP WAS FINE. THE FIREWORKS ROOM WAS AN ISSUE BUT THAT IS A SEPARATE THING. GO BACK TO COLUMBUS.
Gary, the company didn’t come to Hobart. That’s rather the point of the article. It reached Hobart from a distance of ninety miles without ever sending a single representative. That is worth sitting with.
i know who told the businesses about the membership thing. i’m not going to say.