Letter: Eagle County examining STR regulations
I read with interest Scott Miller’s piece on Eagle County’s effort to discover what action may be needed to regulate short-term rentals.
I was particularly intrigued by the “Four facts” inset with encapsulated overviews, especially since those “facts” don’t match up at all with what every full-time Eagle-Vail resident can see with our own eyes.
For example, since 2017, four “homes” have been built on my block by out-of-town investors that serve solely as short-term rentals. In that same time frame, four existing homes have transitioned from long-term rentals to STRs. Yet David Becher claims that the number of STRs has stayed relatively stable since 2017. Since there is no registration, regulation, or oversight of STRs in EagleVail, I wonder how he has made that determination.
Also, for Becher to say that most short-term units would stay out of the long-term rental pool if they weren’t rented on a night-to-night basis seems a specious position. Not only would I like to know what “most” means, exactly, but I’d also like to know how many full-time short-term rental units would be bought by full-time homeowners, for example, if the opportunity to commercialize that unit went away.
Ultimately, the question isn’t, “What would investors do with the homes they’ve turned into hotels if they couldn’t use them as hotels?”
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The question is, “Why are full-time short-term rentals allowed to operate in residentially-zoned neighborhoods, and how does this unregulated commercialization of homes hurt our housing market, our schools, our businesses, and our community?”
I look forward to hearing more about this study, and to having access to the hard data it’s based on.
Madeleine Berenson
EagleVail
