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Hello everyone. Welcome to Friday morning’s Google Hangout. This is a live conversation
discussing short-term rental regulations. And if you are joining us… The website is
Vacationrentalmag.com/strgooglehangout and I probably should have that in a form that
I could put up on the screen. If you are joining us either through Facebook or through Youtube
you are welcome to keep watching there. If you want to join the conversation, we have
a live chat roll on that website, Vacationrentalmag.com/strhangout and join us over there if you want to participate.
Looks like we already have some questions coming up. Michelle, we see your question.
So, we are gonna go through just a very brief agenda. I’ll introduce my esteem panelists
and we do have a Q&A and we want to make sure to answer everybody’s questions and we’ll
get to that very shortly. Let me jump in to this and introduce my two guests. I’ve worked
with these guys quite a bit, just great respect. These are fun folks but also they are probably
the two best resources in the industry right now when it comes to understanding short term
rental regulations. So, our first guest is Matt Curtis. Matt say hello. You’re on camera
now.
Matt: Hi everybody, good to see you.
Joel: Matt is the director of government relations for HomeAway and he was also recently elected
to the board of the Vacation Rental Managers Association and he is just fresh from a flight
back from Nashville. So, Matt, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Our other guest is Tim Doyle
who is a spokesperson for STR Advocacy Center. That’s STRadvocacy.org. And STR advocacy…
he is gonna give us a more complete…Well, Tim, I’m gonna give you the floor. Give
us the fifty-thousand level view and in the third segment we can go into more depth into
about what great resource STR Advocacy is.
Tim: Sure. Good morning. Good afternoon. STRadvocacy.org provides resources to any stakeholder looking
for information about short term rental regulations. Specifically, we work with a lot of policymakers
and people operating short term rentals to help them better understand what the laws
are locally and how they can advocate for fair and reasonable regulations. It is a platform
for folks that are trying to learn more, trying to organize locally and trying to learn how
they can advocate for fairer and reasonable rules.
Joel: Outstanding. Alright. So, a brief look in the agenda. We gonna break these essentially
into three segments and then we have a Q&A. First segment, Matt is gonna talk about the
current state of regulations. So, we gonna look at what’s happening not only here in
the US but around the world. There are conversations that are happening in a number of different
places -- in New York, in Madrid, all over and there are some great examples of communities
that are doing the right thing but I think the evidence really bares this out. There’s
a way to look at short term rentals and what regulations that are beneficial to all the
parties involved and some really bad things that just end up hurting everyone involved.
So, Matt’s gonna talk about that for about ten minutes. I’m gonna give a case study
of what it actually looks like on the ground if you’re a manager or an owner. I think
most people just want to do their business and not be concerned with all these regulations
stuff. I think the number one thing that both Matt and I heard and probably Tim as well
when we talked to people about regulations, when they end up facing them, they always
thought it could never happen to them, you know, not here -- we’re not gonna face unfair
regulations. So, we gonna talk about what it really looks like on the ground when those
things start to happen and we’ll give some pretty good examples of what we did in Austin
that was done well and some things that we definitely could have done a lot better. And
then the third segment -- and man do I wish that there had been resources like STR Advocacy
when we were having our battle here. The third segment, Tim is gonna talk about what new
resources are out there particularly this online clearing house but also some… just
some great case studies for how you can build your constituency locally, how you can find
some common natural allies, and how you can just walk yourself through this process. So,
we are looking at somewhere around 30 minutes for the program part and then we’ll open
up for the questions, and then… we’re already seeing a bunch of questions pop up
on the chat roll. So, we will try to answer every single one of those. Our Hangout today
is sponsored by Vacation Rental Magazine. Hopefully, if you signed up through the registration
you got your coupon for a free three-month subscription. We’re pushing the boundaries
here technologically so we have a couple of clips here from our sponsor. We don’t have
any audio because we’re not able to work any audio working today but today’s hangout
is sponsored by Vacation Rental Magazine. It’s a gorgeous magazine. I hope you pick
up a subscription. Every issue takes you around the world. We highlight beautiful, interesting,
unusual vacation rentals around the world and there are also travelers stories. Any
of these properties that are highlighted you can actually click right through and find
a listing on HomeAway, VRBO or FlipKey. And there are also stories for owners about how
to better manage your properties, everything that is happening in the industry is covered
in the magazine. So, that’s the bit from the sponsor. But let’s jump right here into
this. Matt, I’m gonna hand you the floor and you kinda give us the rundown of what’s
going on with regulations around the US and around the world.
Matt: You know it’s fascinating and thanks so much for having me on Joel. This is just
really fantastic. It is just fascinating situation because when you look at it there is clear
best practice and there’s clear sweet spot for a regulatory framework that can work for
most communities and every community just can augment it just a little bit to work well
for them but what is very clear is that the regulatory framework that would best work
for all stakeholders involved would have to be something that is fair and reasonable,
easy to follow and allows the vacation rental owner or manager to easily understand the
rules and easily follow. And to achieve that I think there have been some discussions that
have worked very well and some well-thought out regulations have come together but at
the same time I think there have been some discussions where the regulatory atmosphere
got a little bit maybe down the wrong path and the regulations that came together just
don’t really work. So, want we want to do is talk about regulations that worked well.
At HomeAway and with Short Term Rental Advocacy Center, within the industry all around the
world it seems that every time we have this conversation, the best way to look at having
a regulatory discussion is for it to start with the managers or with the owners, you
know, with the stakeholders involved in that community. In one case, we actually had a
situation wherein a former owner, a woman who didn’t even own a home currently, she
just got so involved in this conversation that she actually put together the local alliance
of stakeholders to go down to her local town council and have this conversation. So, what
make cities that are small, medium and large? There are some regulatory discussions that
have happened in small, medium or large communities that have happened outside of working with
the stakeholders; so, not working with the managers, not working with the owners, not
working maybe with the travelers or other people who are invested in short term rentals.
Then there are some communities that have done great job of bringing all those stakeholders
to the table. And I think Austin is a really good example of that. And to come and brought
all those stakeholders from sort of outer ring back into the inner ring, it actually
included not just travelers and owners and managers, I guess to start with the outer
ring. It really started with the economic development professionals in Austin and the
creative community -- the music, film and gaming community who used short term rentals
-- the people who put together fast roles and other events that use short term rentals.
They got involved; the travelers were involved; and all of these were organized by a local
alliance of owners and managers. That brought all the stakeholders to the table to have
the best possible conversation that we could have in Austin. And we see that in some other
communities as well and sometimes it has worked out in advance enough so that the regulation
that was able to come together was the best regulation that could be. In some circumstances
like the Cuchara Valley. So, these are towns like Palm Spring, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage,
Indio and Cathedral City, they had some pretty significant regulations that were… which
directly were short term rentals from the late 1990’s to early 2000. So, they did
not allow for rental or rent properties for less than 30-day stays. In the Cuchara Valley
cities locked to this over a period of time. This is just to generalize lots of those communities.
Some of them even double down on that heavy heavy restriction and created even more owner
restriction or even stronger fines to oppose rentals of less than 30 days. In about 2009
or 2010, I think it was Palm Desert was the first one… I’m sorry, it was Palm Spring
was the first city that come along and say, “Hey, wait a second. We are trying to eliminate
the ability for people to rent out their rental property for less than 30-day stays to be
able to do rent out vacation rental opportunities for people for less than 30-day stays but
at the same time what we’re missing out on is the opportunity for this industry to
be transparent and above the radar and for the industry to be able to pay their necessary
hotel or transient occupancy taxes.” So, they came along, they created a regulation
and you can find them on the Short Term Rental Advocacy website where people are allowed
to register and pay their taxes. And what did you know? They started to make more money
than they were in fines and they were not spending as much in compliance aspect trying
to regulate an activity that is… or restrict an activity that is very difficult to restrict.
So, one by one, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Palm Spring and the other cities have created
good regulations that allowed folks to rent out properties for less than 30-day stays
and each of those communities are benefiting greatly from the transparent activity and
from the taxes that are generated from the activity such as transient hotel occupancy
tax. That’s a small city example. Mid-size city example if you want to look at maybe
an example where this conversation got a little bit more challenging is Galveston, Texas.
In Galveston, these conversations are going on right now and early on when I talked to
some of the different stakeholders in Galveston -- people from the city or people from the
community down there or owners and managers. Everybody seemed to think that clearly this
is a common sense opportunity and they will find a common sense solution and they develop
a regulation that will work well but unfortunately the conversation got a little bit out of hand
and later an owner and manager alliance, an owner alliance and manager alliance were part
of Galveston did form and has had some strong positive response from the county to local
town council and helping them to see what’s the best practices are from around there and
the rest of the country. There is an existing vacation rental manager association chapter
in Galveston and they have done a good job in their area of Galveston prior to this conversation.
And in big cities a little bit weird. In urban cities you can look at some examples and probably
one of the most glaring ones is New York City. In 2010, New York banned short term rentals
and was a state law. Since 2010 there seems to be multiple short term rentals that are
in operation. You can find then in Craigslist and different sites but those folks now are
operating under the radar and not paying their taxes. In Paris, the conversation has been
very difficult. There is currently heavy restriction against short term rentals and there are some
conversations to restrict that activity even further. However, we would see the same effect
happen that activity would go under the radar, people would not be paying their local taxes
and of course not being in compliance means greater other issues that could become even
more apparent like maybe not providing good service because they don’t have to worry
about reviews because they are operating below the radar. So, looking backwards we’ll break
about cities that have been regulatory discussions recently are Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt
-- all if which are talking about some restrictions right now. We are hoping that the owners and
the managers’ groups that are coming together there can help us convince those folks to
find a best practice that could work for those communities where the activity can start operating.
In Spain there is a potential for a national law but Madrid, the Canary Islands and the
Balearic Islands were looking at restrictions on short term rentals. In Catalona, however,
there is a very good example of a regulation that works. They put together a regulation
that allows folks to register and pay their taxes. They allow them to operate above the
radar and we use that example often throughout Europe. In the United States… I’m sorry,
I skipped over France. In France there is a discussion about a national law that would
probably primarily affect Paris. However, several different groups of owners and managers
and stakeholders have been working on that to try to positively affect that regulation
as well. It seems that if you can get in front of the decision makers early and discuss with
them the positive effects of having a transparent industry vastly outweighs the negative effects
of having an industry that would probably still operate under the radar. Joel, I wonder
if I could just go through a real quick with the US. In the US there are several cities
that are discussing regulations. Many of them are discussing regulations that would work
and would be good for the community. Many of them are very restrictive. And I think
a good place to look at the Short Term Rental Advocacy Center website is to look at the
US Conference Affairs Policy that they unanimously passed in 2011, I believe. Basically, what
that said was key cities there is economic benefit that comes from short term rental
activity; there is a level of tourism and business travel that comes through the short
term rental activity that won’t come through our hotels the same way. These are people
who are staying for longer periods of time with a larger group and it goes on talking
about the value of having a transparent and above the radar industry in the community
that you can work with rather than trying to pretend it doesn’t exist, allowing it
to go under the radar. So, in the United States we have some communities that are a little
surprising that they have tried to restrict short term rentals like Sandusky, Ohio or
Atlantic City, New Jersey or Saint Joseph, Michigan or even Page, Arizona. But for several
communities they have had these discussions and are finding positive results and I think
some of them can be found in some discussions… I think working positive in action in Oregon.
In Monterey, California there’s a conversation that has been going on for a while I think
some people quite described as have been challenging but at the same time everyone has been open
to the idea that there are best practices and there is a common solution out there,
a common sense solution. So, I hope that answers at least some of the regulatory discussions
that are happening around the country yet my biggest challenge that I see, as Joel alluded
to, the number of owners or managers or travelers who have said that “this will never happen
in my town.” I usually hear that just a few months or a few weeks before they call
me back and say, “hey, guess what?” The number of people who said, “We knew it’s
gonna happen. We just thought we had more time,” is also a big challenge for us. The
best thing we see is to organize your local owners and managers alliance early, become
an active part of your community and define the message rather than let the message define
you. Alright Joel, I turn over to you.
Joel: Yeah. Well, it’s tough. Well, I mean as an owner myself and I help manage a couple
of properties and now have friends in Austin, a pretty large group of people that have vacation
rental properties, I think everyone would prefer just to manage your business day to
day, bringing your guests in, giving great service and the idea that you are gonna spend
a bunch of time running around city hall, you know…The natural tendency is just to
hope that it just goes away. In my segment I’ll talk pretty specifically what it kinda
feels like on the ground as you should be paying attention to those signals. But before
we let you go Matt, I want to get a perspective from you because I know what those conversations
look like, specifically in Austin, you were talking about when the conversation can start
to go the wrong direction, starts to go a little bit or maybe very negative. What are
some of the commonalities throughout the places that you are seeing that are having a challenge
or talking about owners’ regulations. What are the objections or what are the complaints
that start this process rolling that people are looking to, you know, crackdown? There
are problems. I think there are some commonality to the perceived challenge of this type of
rental property.
Matt: You know, I think that you are absolutely right. I think that there is. Well, I feel
these conversations, whether it is in the Canary Islands or in Page, Arizona this conversation
starts with typically start with what people refer to as NIMBYs -- not in my backyard folks.
And they tend to be people who -- I just saw some last night in Austin City Hall -- people
who do hang around in city hall usually are very active in these discussions. And so when
they hear about this going on in their community or they see a regulatory discussion happening
in another community they start that conversation in your community. The three probably common
places where people seem to be settling are discussions of how this is a commercial or
spot zoning in a residential area that is a commercial activity in a residential area.
Another place might be how it affects affordable housing and that could be two different ways.
One is how it affects the overall cost of your neighborhood, the value of your neighborhood,
and then two, in some communities, how it takes away from affordable or from housing
stock thus driving the cost of housing loan and then the other one, is oftentimes, you’ll
hear folks “we’re okay with primary home owners renting versus people who own a secondary
property, vacation property and renting out their home or vice versa.” That seems to
be the three places where this gets started and where often it goes bad is when the conversation
goes for far too long. There are best practices out there. There are places where both government
decision makers can go to find information. And I think our Short Term Rental Advocacy
Center is one of those and then, of course, the stakeholders involved in this discussion
can go and find that information. And I think the more quickly people can educate on “hey,
here’s what best practices look like. Here’s what works, here’s what doesn’t. Here’s
the economic value,” and maybe do a little education on what the industry is. I think
the decision makers can more quickly find their answer but it’s one way operating
in a vacuum that don’t have anyone giving them education, they don’t know anything
about the industry at all that maybe they might turn to say, “hey, let’s form a
working group or a task force or put this into a committee of the sub-committee of the
city council for the next six months.” And that allows for the conversation to be far
more negative and a lot of misinformation to fester. I was gonna say very quickly the
easy places to go against some of these arguments are these are still residential use and that
many people who are renting out their homes for short term rents aren’t always running
out for short term periods of time. I know in a lot of cities when we talk to owners
and managers they will point out that their properties that they are renting, they are
renting for sometimes 60 days, sometimes 45, which is typically a long-term rent but also
sometimes less than 30 days. So, this is a residential use that is not even a short term
activity. There’s no study that says anything other than almost for that fail the short
term rental investments that people make in their properties actually helped the property
value. And of course, in communities where folks think that it’s taking away from the
housing stock, especially that argument might be laid at the feet of secondary homes. Remember
these are secondary homes. These are homes that people use for vacation not some investment
property. It’s not going back to the housing pool or else they are empty otherwise and
not be contributing to the local community. And then finally, the primary versus secondary
arguments, you know, we see the professionally run secondary homes operating very well. They
see people renting out their primary homes works well too. There is no example wherein
if you try to have them restrict one or the other that they are still going to operate
which is underground and then they are not contributing to the community and paying their
taxes.
Joel: Perfect segway. Thank you Matt. So, I’m gonna talk just briefly and kinda share
with the audience what happened on the ground on Austin and I’ll just give it… I’ll
give the ending away by telling you right now the number one mistake we made, if I had
to do it all over again, is that we didn’t get organized quickly enough and take these
threats seriously enough and we also did not have a resource like STR Advocacy. And I’m
just so thankful that it’s out there now for the people that are facing conversations
about regulations. But those are the two big ones. We had no model to look to but we also
just did not take it seriously as I’ve said, you know. Everyone at the... members of our
ad hoc group at that point were having conversations with one another. Thankfully, we had a group
of people online. Thanks to a woman named Cindy Hill here in Austin. She had formed
I think it was a Yahoo group and so vacation rental owners and managers had discovered
each other online and we were sharing best practices -- How do write your contracts?
Who do you use for cleaning? Does anybody know a good plumber? -- those sorts of things
were the focus of that ad hoc group but we started to… most of the neighborhoods in
Austin had some sort of a neighborhood listserv and we started to see through people finding
these conversations on their neighborhood listservs.. There were a couple of little
neighborhoods that were having an issue with party houses and so just as a heads up that's
typically one of the ways that this will appear. There is a property that you know an owner
may not be acting responsibly we certainly have to allow for that possibility. There
are people who run furnished rentals, short term rentals who are bad neighbors, they’re
bad actors. They're typically a very ,very small number. I think the whole controversy
in Austin really stemmed from about five properties out of you know who knows how many hundreds
of really good operators. But there were a couple of bad eggs and so we started to see
these pretty angry posts thrown upon our neighborhood lists, parties until three in the morning
and this is a residential neighborhood. There's trash in the yard. There are people you know
and some of them were pretty outrageous. Guys drunk late at night peeing on somebody's car.
Not something that anybody wants to experience and our group response was to... I think we
did a fairly good job of finding the owners of these properties finding the neighbors
who were affected, trying to mitigate the situation, trying to help the owner be a better
neighbor. But those neighbors who were upset connected with one another and we just didn't
pay close enough attention to realize that this was a dialogue that was starting to gain
momentum until we started to hear from our city council that they were going put together
a working group because there were people who were asking to the council to do something
about these problem properties. And what they were asking was for the city council simply
ban the process or ban the practice of renting short term. Hey, Matt looks like I’m gonna
mute you for just a second... So that was what was happening on the ground. It sort
of burst in neighborhood online lists but then it made its way to city council and suddenly
we had to deal with what was now political problem. And I think I have told Matt before
I think the low point for me was meeting one of our council members and we had laid out
a very clear argument about what these properties contributed to the local economy, how short
term rental is almost invariably the nicest house on the block. How the use is without
exception residential use. It’s not a commercial use. It’s no different than a long term
rental. And he looked at me and he said , “Yes, absolutely I understand your arguments. These
are all great points and your problem Joel is now you have a political issue. It has
gained momentum and you need to solve it politically. So what we ultimately had to do was form a
real organization, you know an official non-profit. We formed the Austin Rental Alliance. We brought
in owners. We brought in managers and then we had to mount what ended up being a year
and a half long campaign of going to all of these stakeholder meetings but also going
in meeting individually with each one of the City Council members. Meeting with the Planning
and Zoning Commission and laying out a very clear argument for all of these different
folks about again how much short term rental contribute to the economy, how the uses is
not commercial no matter how many times our opponents tried to characterize it that way.
Know what people were doing in the house we demonstrated was sleeping and eating and watching
TV and that it’s a residential use. We had to go make those arguments in front of the
council in front of all these different constituencies and it was really a long process. And so again
what I’ve been telling people consistently if you are if you are starting to hear these
things take it very seriously and get organized. Find the other owners in your area if you
don’t have an organization form one. If you do, make sure that you’re communicating
and that all of your members are paying attention to your local listservs. Because it really
just takes one or two problem properties for a group of people to get together and decide
that this is their next cause l'assureur. Mat talked about people who are here in Austin
who frequently go down to our City Hall. Those same people are down there protesting something
new now. We just happened to be their cause at that particular point in time but they’re
dedicated. I mean they are, they were down there at every meeting they had people lined
up. They had talking points, they had scheduling, they were absolutely very, very involved locally.
And I think probably every city around the world has people who are to their credit they
are very concerned about their community but I think they fundamentally misunderstand what
short term rentals are because the arguments that they kept bringing to City Council were
you know these are cover for drug runners, these are you know really just a cover for
brothels. They’re nothing but party houses. And we had to, you know the other piece that
I think we did really well and I’ll see if I can I might be able to bring out some
of these videos. See if I might even be able to bring out some of these videos . The other
piece that we did very well was bringing in some of the people who use short term rentals.
And it was grandmothers visiting their kids in the neighborhood who didn’t have enough
room. It was, you know, professionals who were coming to either do business in Austin
or they’re looking to relocate here. It was UT alumni coming back for a long game
weekend. It was really everything except the kind of bad actors and party crew that we
kept on being characterized as. So to sum again, to sum again have your feelers out
there, be paying attention, paying very close attention on what’s happening on your neighborhood
listservs . Organize all of your owners. Get some sort of a group together; if you don't
have one, the short term rental advocacy, I going to turn the table over to Tim in just
a moment, but STR Advocacy is a phenomenal place to find other owners and to start a
local chapter if one doesn’t exist . And then there are a number of different case
studies up there that will walk you through in much more specificity than I can go into
in a you know 15 or 30 minute hangout about the tools that are available to you and the
steps that you can take. The last piece that I am going to share here and again we're pushing
the edge technologically I am going to see if I can make this happen. Do you guys see
a video here on your screen, Matt and Tim?
Matt: No.
Joel: No you do not. Allright. I going to hit play and we’ll see if this works or
not.
Matt: Hey Joel, while you do that I am going to shout out that we formed a local alliance
where we get other people rally together. It just means less work on you. All of a sudden
you've got, you've got you know depending on the size of the town you've got four, five
, ten other friends who are working with you to help you know find out what's going on
at City Hall. Hear about things, to rally support. It's just more help for you so it’s
a great thing to do.
Joel: Absolutely. I'm going to give this a shot here and see if I can play this video
back. Just a couple of examples and one of the things that I think really had an impact
on our council members was bringing in examples of who's actually using these property, who
would be affected by the regulations that were being proposed and so those were four
to five videos that we shared that had you know highlights from the neighbors, highlights
from business travellers who were coming in to town. And then there were even some videos
that we did with the local art community. Just showing the support for the art community
and also highlighting with those natural allies. The hotel occupancy tax that we’re collecting
as vacation owners goes to directly support that community so that's just a quick overview.
I think Tim has a bunch of more in-depth and great examples on the STR advocacy site so
I am going to hand the floor over to Tim.
Tim: Sure. Well can you see my screen Joel and Matt?
Joel: Yeah. Absolutely.
Tim: So the Short Term Rental Advocacy Center is again really meant to be sort of a resource
center for policy makers and specifically short term rental operators and we have three
sort of big pillars in terms of trying to work with people, trying to educate them and
trying to help them organize and win fairly reasonable regulations in their community.
So the first pillar hear would be Learn. So you just click on the Learn tab. This is at
STRadvocacy.org. So here we have at the top our Fact Sheet, very useful to show people
our best practices, these are some of the best. It has some specifics about you know
presenting this to policy makers, gives them some specifics about you know what are in
terms of the creation of legislation and ordinances. What thing sort of work the best and then
we have a series of case studies here that all connect to a presentation that walks through
some places and some approaches that have been incredibly effective and this is Palm
Desert, California being one of them that Matt talked about earlier. We also have some
videos here. This is the video here that Joel was just referencing of some very short clips
from folks in Austin, Texas talking about the use or their use of short term rentals
or this guy specifically appears as a neighbor who of the house next door he was very much
in favor of being a short term rental and then we also have some previous webinars and
here a great example of the Blue Ridge Lodging Association in Blue Ridge, Georgia that sort
of has done a tremendous job in terms of organizing the short term rental operators in that community.
We also have some stories from policymakers and folks on the ground about you know bringing
about really effective legislation and ordinances. The next pillar would be Connect that is and
this goes back to what Joel talked about you know the number one thing you can do, you
know. whether you are concerned about short term rental regulation in your community or
you’re facing an imminent threat is to form a local group of folks this is typically not
a very large group but somewhere between anywhere from 6 people to 2 or 3 dozens and what happens
there is... and that is really how you would go about through the organizing and approaching
your city about through the value of short term rentals. So here we have maps you can
punch in your zip code and look up if there is a group near you. We only have about 22
on our site right now but are looking to add more and more every day. And then here we
have if you click on this and you will see a guide about how to start a group. Typically
these groups are formed typically as Google or Yahoo groups which give people a very easy
ability to email everyone in their group strike up conversations and then once people create
groups they can submit them here. We put them on our map and then we work with HomeAway
and other companies that are in our group to make sure everyone locally knows about
it. And, lastly we have just a feature here where people can submit their email address
we send out a monthly newsletter that sorts of highlight things going on, how to implement
these steps better so on and so forth and just give you some good tips and tricks. Lastly
we have Act. Once your group is formed what do you do? How do you approach your city?
What are the most important things? We have a 6 step advocacy guide here. So this about
how you learn about short term rentals you know for instance step 1 and step 2 how do
you learn about the laws near you and how do you calculate the impact of short term
rentals. So this, you click on this right here give you more detail. The one example
we cite here is a small community in Florida called Lake Worth. They calculated that just
50 short term rentals created $3.5 M in spending every year. Once they formed get that number
together and try to advocate to the local government. They're incredibly effective in
terms of having those numbers having them some materials together. So again here we
go through how do you craft your argument, what materials do you need to get together
once you approach h your city? Here are the 5 things we suggest but by no means you can
follow them. And then we have some more information about how you talk to local officials, how
do you deal with the media, how can you leverage up ads and interactions with the local newspapers
or broadcasters and then six it's just sort of sum everything up in terms of the need
to really be persistent and as Joel alluded to, how to cultivate champions for your cause,
try to find third party voices that can speak about the importance of short term rentals
and what they bring to our local community. So that is sort of a quick guide if you ever
have any questions about you know forming a group or some of thespecific steps we are
always here to sort of work with folks on the ground. We work with people all the time.
The easiest way to get in touch with us is just to email us at info@stradvocacy.org and
we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
Joel: Outstanding. And there are definitely questions right now. So I think we should
you know perhaps go ahead and jump in into the Q and A and I’ll just try to open this
up and you guys both jump on them or take one that seems to appeal to you. One of the
first questions is, what is the first step to fighting owner's regulations that are already
in place? So for cities that already have passed either an outright ban or maybe they
just made it very, very restrictive, they’ve made it difficult to get registered to comply.
What are, what are the first steps?
Tim: I would say you know obviously forming a group again is always sort of the first
step. When there are laws in the books that are owners restrictive or an outright ban
I think that some of the steps we have in our guides still sort of apply. It is important
for you to get your materials together, try to figure out what the impact is on your community
and the importance of it. Obviously it is a more difficult situation than if you’re,
if it’s something your town's considering or something that’s you know far down the
road. But you know Matt spoke about this earlier you know presenting and talking about some
of the case studies of places that had restrictive rules and then went out and created something
that is a little more fair and reasonable such as Palm Desert, Palm Springs, California
are great examples of, you know, these are cities that have laws that didn’t work.
They made some changes and they started to reap some humongous economic benefits and
frankly that was a solution that worked a lot better in terms of, you know, wrapping
their arms around the issue what they perceived as an issue with short term rentals.
Matt: You know, I just want to chime in for a quick second because I think that's very
important. I'll make out an example. It will be a far-fetched example but what to say have
Scranton, Pennsylvania. I have no idea if they have restriction or not. I can imagine
they do but to Tim's point organizing is the best first step in finding even this one or
two other people like yourself. The Short Term Rental Advocacy Center, HomeAway, and
other companies like ours will email people who list in that area as a way of notifying
them that that group like yours has formed and we have seen in some communities groups
grow from just a couple of members one or two to groups having dozens of members a week
later after receiving that email and finding a place online where they can organize with
you may be on Facebook or if you create a website. So that would be the first step is
to organize and just quickly go into what the immediate next step would be is you have
all these information out there for you. Now that I am a new member of the Vacation Rental
Managers Association, there is a lot of information on that website if you are a main website.
Of course the Short Term Rental Advocacy Center, HomeAway itself and you can look at Joel’s
website of how they kind of got organized from the Austin Rental Alliance and many other
places and I think finding the US Conference of Mayors Resolution. Here's the largest group
of elected officials that get together and vote on policy that are facing urban areas
around the country and they agreed unanimously that this is the best way to handle short
term rental. This is hundreds of mayors who voted on this. So I think the idea of organizing
and gathering your information should quickly move into how do you use it. That’s one
thing we did not mention. But I suggest everyone put every decision you make through a very
simple filter of are we being transparent? Are we being positive? Are we being solutions
oriented? And are we being data driven? And the reason for that is as Joel discussed your
opponents are almost without fail going to be negative, they are going to obfuscate for
their real purposes, they’re not going come with the solution. Their solution is going
be just ban the activity which is not a realistic solution. And they are going to operate from
a point of emotion and not from data. And one quick last thing is if we can have fun
with this. We’re frankly getting organized early really helps is if you do want to use
data add a little of anecdotal information to sell your point and you are from Scranton,
Pennsylvania, you are organized , you’ve been somewhat active with you know maybe Chamber
of Commerce issues that relate to housing or anything you may care about. Maybe somewhat
active with the local real estate council on any issues that they are discussing. Well
then you may know that the end of the budget season what to say that the Scranton City
council got to the end of their budget and they were starting to really cut into the
bone on the budget there and they are saying we cannot fund this $150,000 improvement to
this park or you know this $ 290,000 improvement to our local civic arena.What’s great about
that is when you use your data and use some of the information that Tim has talked about
or Joel has talked about and you develop your own economic analysis. Now you are able to
come back and say, “You know what we do as vacation short term rental owners and operators
who bring people into this community as far as paying taxes and the direct and indirect
economic impact of our activity? It’s millions of dollars. So when you were discussing the
$ 290,000 budget item or the $150,000 budget item proper regulation of our industry and
proper partnership with our industry can benefit this community to the tune of millions of
dollars.” And it always does.
Tim: And to that point I do not want to take too long but it's sort of an amazing transformation
too when a local city official hears that in the context of keeping their job or not
keeping their job because that's often what people, it's on the table given how constrained
local and state government policy is.
Joel: Yeah. And there’s just aren’t many industries where the constituents come in
and ask to be regulated but I think that has happened enough times now. There's clearly
a trend of that because there is such a benefit to good regulations. There are so many clear
examples of that. One of the other questions is: Can you provide an example of good ordinances?
That's a question for both of you. Tim does STR Advocacy have sample regulations?
Tim: Yeah. I would encourage folks toI was going to pull it off for a quick start. If
you see on our main page I talked about the Lessons Learned presentation we have. So this
is a presentation that walks through, has some general information about the short term
rental industry but has very specific examples. Here's one about Palm Desert, about how they
passed owners’ rules and then sort of switched and cared for something that was much more
strict before. We have a quote here from the principal planner about why that was such
a good change. Yes, we do have examples of good regulations here. We also talk about
just get to know a little bit about the ruling in Atlantic City that basically found that
the city was wrong to try to go after "absentee" owners. Some great resources here and there’s
also an example here, this is not really about the regulation but about a group of owners
in Blue Ridge, Georgia that organized created a very formidable organization and also includes
the Professional Association of Innkeepers International about a favorable decision they
made about short term rentals and finally the US Conference of Mayors Resolution that
Matt talked about earlier.
Joel: Wow. Those are great examples. Okay one question that stands out. Briefly it says
can we show a YouTube of this hangout we are having right now to our constituents right
now? Absolutely so... There will also be an email about a replay but this will also live
on YouTube. So, I will make sure that all of the participants probably post upon this
page if you are watching on Vacation Rental Magazine page. I was going directly to that.
I suppose Tim you may also do something. Put a link up.
Tim: Yeah. Yeah. It will definitely be posted within the next few days or week at stradvocacy.org/learn.
Joel: Great. Okay. One of our next questions is about HOAs. How can we have influence over
HOA boards that rewrite the by-laws in order to restrict short term rentals?
Tim: HOAs are definitely a different and a bit more difficult of a situation but I would
say some of the principles in terms of how you know approach these board members. Approach
them and talk about the value of short term rentals is very similar to the way you should
do that with local policymakers. Unfortunately typically those in many scenarios HOAs have
boards that sort of rule a bit more firmly I would say and not sort of in line with the
principles of our democracy but I think that you know gathering a group in your HOA that
is in favor of short term rentals you know providing some good examples of what they’re
doing to the community. You know, a lot of times getting some testimonials from the neighbors
saying they never had a problem with noise or anything along those lines I think all
of those things would help tremendously to finding and getting to some rules that everyone
can live with.
Joel: Yeah, I know they’re tricky. Matt we are talking about HOAs and the question
is for HOAs that are trying to rewrite their by laws or maybe they already have their by
laws that are very restrictive to renting for less than 30 days any insight there into
how somebody can deal with that. I know when we had the panel in Las Vegas at RezFest Cindy
Goslin had so much interesting things to say about HOAs from your perspective any thoughts?
Matt: You know one of the things, I don’t know if we’ve been given adequate background
of Cindy Goslin but she was a former city staff for Palm Springs who helped rewrite
their ordinance and helped all the... valley rewrite their ordinances to become far more
effective. One of the things that she said I think was like with HOAs just like with
cities , over-restriction of this is just going to drive the industry underground. People
will to participate in the activity. So, you know, I don’t know what the right answer
is but you know some HOAs have such pretty interesting thinking on this. They made a
lot of policies some policies internally that draw a lot of people to essentially register
with the HOA. Just to file the little thing and say, “Hey, I am gonna be renting my
property for short term rent and if you need to get hold of me for any reason here’s
a contact number.” And the HOAs also came together and said, “Look, if you gonna to
rent your property for short term rent then you must realize that we may have an issue
with increased need to monitor and be concerned about the maintenance of the facility and
potentially the security we’ll ask for a $ 50, $ 200 a year fee for registering your
property within that building. We heard great success from that particular property. The
people said, “Hey, that’s great we had a little fee we had to pay to participate
because of there were some members of the community that were concerned. Those concerned
didn’t have any real data to support them but they were willing to pay a small fee to
placate those concerns and then of course you know being able to continue to register
their home and provide a 24-hour or have some type of contact number or have a manager who
had a contact number. A lot of homeowners feel comfortable in fact with that activity
was going to occur. They wind up working for that particular HOA. I think what’s Cindy’s
point is, what my thought is that it still happens anyway. It’s been incredibly difficult
and very unbelievably expensive to try to enforce this activity so the easy thing is
to create a program that is very easy for people to participate.
Joel: That makes perfect sense. One of my favorite programs now is Boardwalk Empire
because its partly because Steve Buscemi is very amazing but we brought out the Volstead
Act with City Council and I think a few of them laughed. But there’s a lot of validity
to that. When there’s an activity whether you like it or not if there is an activity
that the seller is going to benefit from financially and that the buyer is very interested in and
that is certainly the case with short term rentals, vacation rentals then it’s going
to happen whether cities want to be involved or not it’s going to happen and just like
prohibition people didn’t stop drinking it just gave power to criminal elements it
basically made a bunch of law abiding citizens into criminals. And I think from the examples
that I have seen and talking to vacation rental owners around the US and around the world,
the cities that have tried to enforce a ban fail miserably but they also completely lose
the money. So I think the money is not only a piece when you are talking to cities that
already have owner’s regulations in place it’s certainly something that you can bring
in as your supporting evidence for why good regulations make sense. Again into Matt’s
point in the situation of an HOA I have several owners that I have worked with that have been
facing issues with their HOAs, HOAs have even threatened to sue her they have actually initiated
a lawsuit and they lost. I am not providing legal advice but I have certainly seen a number
of situations wherein an HOA is trying to limit the rights that someone has in terms
of how they can rent their property almost invariably those lawsuits end up being very
expensive lawsuits and the HOA ends up losing. So had Cindy talked about it for a little
bit we might have another hangout and have her involved. One let’s see a couple of
other questions that have come up here. Sorry I didn’t see the name, Michael: “As a
management agency we’ve seen a lot of underground rentals in our community that are not [I am
going to paraphrase a little bit around here] they are not following local regulations,
they are not paying their taxes. They list with VRBO and FlipKey and other websites how
can we work with these listing sites to ensure that everyone that rents through them, how
do we help them ensure that their customers are following regulations”.
Matt: You know I’ve had a lot of thought on that one and a lot of success with it too
and my suggestion to Michael again is to go back to our suggested first place to start
which would be to organize a local alliance. I think what Joel will tell you is they have
had a whole lot of luck with compliance in Austin and self-regulation among the industry
by forming an alliance and then people tend to say, “Hey I know Joe down the street
who is doing this or I know my cousin has a best friend who is engaged in this activity.
We can get him involved and then of course we can make sure they are following all the
local regulations. So step 1 would be to form that alliance and the other step is to go
out there and gather the information and resources that are available to you and that would mean
HomeAway, VRBO, TripAdvisor, Flipkey and other companies that are willing to email their
listings in that area and let them know if there are regulations in place here’s maybe
a link to those regulations and there’s local owners and managers alliance that has
formed and here’s how you can find out more about it. That usually has the great benefit
of driving a lot of people who probably are justunaware to being aware. And then from
there that’s a good place to start. You know we want people to abide by local regulations,
that’s very important to us but the unfortunate aspect of a lot of regulations are that they
don’t always make sense. They’re hard to read, they’re hard to understand. There’s
not a lot of uniformity in this industry at the local level around the world to the language
that’s used for that sort of things so I think a good place to start is organize that
local alliance and then you can start with the information gathering, the resources and
the self -regulation.
Tim: Yeah I want to also I want to just quickly add I think places that have enjoyed the best
compliance are also… this is more sort of about the local regulatory environment. The
places that have sort of the simplest again and easiest to understand rules, and then
governments that are proactive in reaching out to folks about paying taxes, the need
to register are the ones that sort of usually have the highest compliance. One quick example
there would be Okaloosa county Florida that is the area in northwest Florida known for
its very nice beaches. The town Destin is there which is something people are familiar
with and they’ve been doing this since 2005. They have one employee who just works on this
issue and spends one day every week going out in the field to go into people’s houses
telling them about the laws, telling them about the need to register. This has to happen,
this has to happen. It’s not hostile. It’s not you owe for the last five years but they
get everyone to start paying and I think in that time span I am ball parking these figures
here they went from a million or two dollars of revenue in 2005 to over 13 million dollars
revenue from transient occupancy taxes I believe in 2012 we have that information up on our
site if you want to check it. It is in the presentation I have just talked about. But
I think it’s a great example of being proactive, being easy to understand local government
and that kind of outreach in general is what leads to best results.
Matt: You know Joel, I don’t want to expand on this too much but Tim had a really good
point about Okaloosa.It reminded me of something you know the woman who is in charge of the
Okaloosa situation recognizes that a heavy hand and strong enforcement will not raise
what she calls the lawn money in the hotel occupancy tax and the compliance that you
get from people being engaged in her program. When I talked to her about other communities
around the world that feel like heavy fines, hiring more enforcement officers to try to
enforce heavy restrictions they wind up saying really strong negative, negative in the overall
cost of the owner of the program because of the salaries that are included for those enforcement
officials and the cost of running that program in a very heavy handed manner. She has found
a whole lot of luck as Tim laid out about by being far more positive promoting the industry,
promoting the activity but at the same time bringing people in their regulatory environment
in a very positive manner.
Joel: And as alluded to that I think we certainly saw that here in Austin as we were going through
our challenge. Once we were organized as an official non-profit one of the things that
we had to do was phone tree simply putting down lists of people we knew out there who
are renting and then we would sit down and each of us would make 4 or 5 phone calls.
It was very positive supportive and just letting people know that they needed to be involved
and that they needed to be also you know for us at that point the number one thing we had
going for us was that the prerequisite for membership in the Austin Rental Alliance was
being compliant with your hotel occupancy tax and just making people aware. And there
was a pretty astounding level of I don’t want to call it ignorance you know misunderstanding
about hotel occupancy even within our city officials but also to people who were operating
as hotel rental owners. So that educational effort was probably the best things that we
did to bring people into the fold and also grow the ranks of the Austin Rental Alliance.
So, hopefully that was an answer that you can take... actually that was an answer. We’re
coming up on top of the hour here. I think we just have one or two more questions and
I think we have kind of addressed this one them was what is being done internationally
regarding regulations? I think Matt you have given a pretty good rundown of you know the
challenges that you are keeping track of and Tim talked about some groups that are forming
around the country. Anything else you want to discuss about what is happening internationally?
Matt: Well, internationally there are actually a couple of interesting things happening.
These are strong enforcement right now in Panama of the not less than 45-day rental
regulation. Again what we gonna do is try to help people organize local owners and managers
alliances there and why that is because we know people who are on the ground locally
who are voters, property taxpayers involved in their community are gonna have much better
luck with their local elected officials than people who come from another town. We’ve
seen some regulatory discussion in Columbia, in the Philippines and of course I had the
discussion about Europe. Europe is probably the most dense area with the most activity.
That’s why we have seen the most owner manager alliances in each of these major cities formed
and then of course even a pan European association has formed called the EHHA. Don’t ask me
what that stands for but they have been helpful wonderful people. It’s the European Holiday
Homes Association if I remember correctly. And the VRMA frankly is also very engaged
in that discussion at the pan-European level. Again the regulations on the local level but
we are trying to organize and discuss in the pan-European level because then we can identify
best practices.
Joel: Tim, anything else?
Tim: No, I have nothing to add to that, Matt is the expert on international.
Joel: Very good. We just have one last question that popped up and I don’t know that we
can offer a lot of help here. Jason says, “I have a legitimate short term rental.
It’s licensed. I am paying my taxes but it’s currently anything less than twelve
months is not allowed by my HOA. Jason if you just joined us we had talked a fair amount
on how you can talk to HOAs. It really is probably something that you‘ll have to engage
an educational process with that HOA because it’s you know there are by-laws for every
HOAs some of them it just depends on you know how I guess how enthusiastic they are about
enforcing. But you can certainly use the tools that are available on stradvocacy.org. An
earlier part of this hangout there was a pretty long discussion about how to deal with HOAs
so we encourage you to grab the replay and take a look at that. All right we’re exactly
on the hour here and I think we’ve answered all of our questions. This hangout will be
available as I said we’ll put the link up on this page there’ll also be a link that
Tim going to put out on stradvocacy.org. I will just quickly acknowledge my two guests
here and we’ll wrap this up. Tim, thank you so much for joining us and any final words?
Tim: Thank you. This has been great. Again I encourage people to check out our site and
again if you have any questions about what’s going on locally and your campaign feel free
to email us at info@stradvocacy.org.
Joel: And man I wish that resource had been around when we were going through our challenge
here in Austin. Mr. Matt Curtis you are a board member STR guru extraordinaire any final
words?
Matt: Yeah. Organize, organize, organize. Use the free resources that are out there
starting with stradvocacy.org and the US Conference of Mayors Policy is written as if it was written
from somebody within the industry. And when you look at each individual line feel free
to quote from each individual line and use that to present to your local decision makers
about how these regulations can be formed in such a way that it is good for everyone.
Joel: And I will steal this directly from you Matt, positive, data-driven, solutions
oriented and transparent. That’s it for our hangout. We are hosted today my Vacation
Rental Magazine if you did not get the link please just send me a not to joel@vacationrentalmag.com
and we’ll make sure that you have a complimentary subscription. We thank you for joining us.
All right. Have a great Friday.
Matt: Thank you everyone.