Since 2016, Arizona has essentially retained the ability to regulate short-term rentals in the hands of the state government.
That changed during the last legislative session when Senate Bill 1168 passed through the legislature and was signed into law by Governor Doug Ducey. The law allows some municipal regulation of homes for rent on websites like AirBNB and VRBO.
Municipal governments can now require these homes to be licensed, which can mean collecting information about landlords, ensuring taxes are paid, and instituting a policy that would allow a license to be revoked if a rental home is reported to authorities. three times a year for rule violations such as noise ordinances.
But some lawmakers at the municipal level see the new law as lacking. They want more leeway to regulate short-term rentals so they can ensure they don’t take up too much local housing.
One of these cities is Sedona. Last month, its city council approved a plan that would pay homeowners up to $10,000 a year to rent a home for months at a time rather than days.
Mayor Sandy Moriarty said the city went this route because it was struggling to find anything else it could do to reduce the number of short-term rental properties within city limits. .
“I don’t know what we can do because the governor and the legislature have told us we can’t. We can’t ban them. We can’t regulate them. So we have no way to manage them. .”
Moriarty said the large number of short-term rentals in Sedona has made it unaffordable for many who would like to live in the city.
“In our last report, for July, at the end of July, we had 978 properties and I think the total housing inventory is maybe 6,600,” she said. This represents nearly 15% of the city’s housing stock.
Short-term rentals seem to be more common in high tourist locations. Arizona Public Media compared data from the AirDNA.co website, which monitors short-term rentals, and data from the Census Bureau in various cities and towns in Arizona. He found that Sedona was not alone.
Page, which sits near the shore of Lake Powell, has a similar percentage of short-term rentals as Sedona. And nearly a quarter of all homes in Lakeside-Pinetop, a popular summer getaway for residents of desert towns like Tucson and Phoenix, are listed on websites like AirBNB or VRBO.
With an economy largely based on tourism, Moriarty worries that Sedona’s workforce has moved to other places in the area.
“We don’t expect to be able to accommodate everyone, but it would be nice if we could accommodate more than we do,” she said. “Of the towns in the Verde Valley, and there are five of them, Sedona is no longer the biggest because we’ve lost population over the last 10 years.”
She said there had been talks in the legislature this year to allow cities more control than was given in SB 1168, but that didn’t happen.
One of the proponents of SB 1168 was AirBNB, the largest online marketplace for booking short-term rentals. His sponsor said he also participates in stakeholder meetings.
“That’s why we worked together on this legislation and really hammered out the details that we believe strike the right balance between allowing responsible hosts to continue, while giving cities these increased powers,” John said. Choi, head of public policy at AirBNB.
Choi said AirBNB follows as much legislation as possible at the state and local levels, but it was especially important to monitor developments in Arizona’s short-term rental regulations.
“Arizona in particular is an important market for us,” he said. “We have tens of thousands of hosts in the state who depend on this extra income from renting out their homes. They contribute to the state’s tourism economy and support thousands and thousands of small businesses in across the state.”
Asked about the impact of short-term rentals facilitated by AirBNB on local housing markets, Choi said the company is taking some action.
“It’s a debate going on across the country right now, not just in Sedona, not just in Arizona. I think what AirBNB has done is worked hard to be part of the solution.”
He notes that he has made permanent his rules limiting what he calls “party houses”, helps landlords weed out problematic tenants and does not allow houses to be listed on the site. recently released following deportation.
Ending the party’s house practice was the origin of SB 1168, according to its sponsor, State Sen. JD Mesnard, a Republican whose district covers Chandler, Gilbert and Sun Lakes.
“We got a lot of complaints from angry neighbors for the few bad apples that were causing a row,” he said. “It wasn’t new. We’ve seen it over the past few years as AirBNB, VRBO and others have become a mainstay.”
Mesnard was in the state House of Representatives in 2016 when the state blocked municipalities from regulating short-term rentals. He was part of a bipartisan group that voted for this bill.
“2016 was new. It’s amazing to think it was just six years ago,” he said. “So we wanted to make sure it wasn’t overridden by bureaucracy. We’d seen it before with other sharing economies like Uber and Lyft, people getting a little too bureaucratic a little too regulatory happy. I think it was the right call in 2016, but we always adjust and adapt as problems arise.”
He said the problems caused by short-term rentals in some places are “something to watch out for”, but the right answer is to work towards the best solution over time.
“I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that [Sedona having 14 percent of its housing stock on short-term rental websites] we have to monitor this, but I don’t want to have an immediate reaction. I want a bit more long-term picture before I act.”
Mesnard doesn’t see the need for a statewide law that puts some sort of cap on short-term rentals in certain areas, though he thinks changes to how the state regulates those rentals could return to the legislature in a few years.
Comments are closed.