Home buyers routinely check a prospective neighborhood to find out where the nearest grocery store or coffee shop is located. Parents of young children are also interested in school attendance areas. Now add to the checklist whether the neighborhood you are considering has a large proportion of short-term rentals.
The growing popularity of renting a room, a granny apartment or a whole house to vacationers for extra income can result in communities with a high proportion of short-term residents on holiday.
If this is a concern, here are 6 ways to check out your prospective neighborhood.
An article in the February 26, 2021 Wall Street Journal outlines 6 ways to check out a prospective community.
- Search Vrbo and Airbnb for listings where you are considering buying. Locate the home you are considering and zoom into the cross streets on the sties’ maps, then zoom our looking for listings.
- Use airdna.co, the website used by the short-term rental industry. Click on “market minder” and input the ZIP Code where you are searching. This free site will show a map of short-term rentals, identify which are whole house rentals, which are shared houses, and how many days a year they are available.
- In a smaller municipality contact the city’s planning department and ask about the local short-term-rental laws. The gold standard in “platform accountability.” This is where platforms are held liable for listing rentals that violate local laws.
- Ask to read the Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&R’s) of any community in which you are home shopping. Look for policies that ban or limit short-term renting and that spell out penalties for non-compliance.
- If you are considering a condominium home, discover whether there are short-term rentals in the complex and how they address rental violators. If there is an all-volunteer board, consider joining or becoming active.
- Look through a community’s minutes over the past year to see how often complaints about short-term rentals came up in meetings, or talk to potential neighbors about whether they are an issue.
