CoastRentals Beach Vacation Blog

Vacation Rental bans are becoming a hot topic in the industry. Recent occurrences in places like Encinitas and in Hawaii have drawn a lot of attention, and tons of isolated incidents of vacation rental owners struggling with their communities over renting out their properties are happening across the country. Why all the fuss?

Well, it’s been an ongoing problem for as long as the idea of renting out a vacation property to short-term travelers has existed. I think a big part of all the recent problems is the success people are having marketing their properties on the internet. More and more people vacationers are both aware and actively seeking lodging in vacation rentals over hotels, and the big websites have allowed them the ability to easily find thousands of potential places to stay. With that, there have been a lot less vacancies and a lot more people visiting these communities.

One of the complaints in the Encinitas filing was that short-term renters were loud and unrespectful of the beach and the community. That was lowering the quality of life for many of the permanent residents. I can understand the argument, but it seems that these are very isolated incidents no matter where you are - Encinitas, Myrtle Beach, Tahoe, or Mexico. Some people are loud and obnoxious and destructive. More often than not, however, these people are not the norm.

It’s tough to punish a vacation property owner by not letting them rent out their property because of a few bad seeds. The Encinitas motion failed, as have most of those around the country. I think there is a responsibility amongst property owners to try and weed out the bad seeds, but they can only do so much. Most have an age limit and do their best to get a ‘feel’ for a person before renting their property - after all, they are more directly affected by unruly behavior (especially if it leads to destruction of their property), so there is incentive there.

Together I think most of the communities that we serve her on CoastRentals will be able to keep allowing vacation rentals on a short-term basis. The fact that this is news is not going away though, as evident by our friends over at HomeAway launching a complete section of their owner community to notifying people of vacation rental bans and news related to them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under Beach Vacations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.