Among record rise in rents and generally real estate market out of controlSouthwest officials are employing a new strategy to increase housing options: give Airbnb hosts a financial lure to ditch the platform and sign leases with locals instead.
The city of Sedona, Arizona, joins a small group of other American communities trying to stop the scourge of rentals used as short-term housing by offering money to landlords.
“Every day I get calls from people who are losing their homes because their landlord is turning their place into a short-term rental,” said City of Sedona Housing Officer Shannon Boone. told the insider the reason for the “Rent Local” program approved by the municipal council.
This program will pay $3,000 to those renting smaller units (such as single rooms in a shared home) and $10,000 to those renting larger properties to remove their listings from short-term rental sites, including Airbnb and Vrbo, and instead rent to workers in the immediate community for at least a year at a time.
This is just a sweetener for landowners to better serve their communities and not a ban on short-term rentals, Boone stressed. Currently, nearly 1,000 of Sedona’s 6,600 homes are used as short-term rentals, Insider reported.
“It’s not our goal to end short-term rentals, it’s our goal to house our local workforce,” she said.
Time will tell if the Sedona program is worth its budget, but similar incentives elsewhere have indeed worked. Summit County, Colorado, managed to house 140 local workers by finding legally licensed short-term rental hosts — those who are reluctant to continue operating vacation rentals — and offering them up to $20,000 to sign leases long term instead.
“There’s been a lot of positive feedback from hosts who may be considering a long-term rental. This was one way to try it out,” said Summit County Housing Manager Jason Dietz, to Insider, “It’s really just a tool in the toolbox. There’s no magic bullet for affordable housing.”
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