Letter: Tax short-term rentals as commercial properties

We have arrived in full panic mode about the housing “crisis”, accompanied by the irrational behavior that goes along with it.

As Howard Leavitt recently pointed out, housing has been an issue as long as Vail has been Vail, and points to a number of factors that have recently exacerbated the situation, not least the post-pandemic “zoom boom”. As with all booms, at some point this one will blow itself out and things will settle into some sort of equilibrium.

In addition to the post-pandemic boom, however, online rental services such as VRBO and Airbnd are a major cause of our current housing shortage. As a new tool for property speculation, the digital platforms have taken hundreds, if not thousands, of units from the long-term rental pool.

If treated the way they are for commercial purposes, lenders would treat these properties with much less generous loan terms. Most importantly, as commercial property, it would be taxed at three times the residential property tax rate.

One way to alleviate the housing crisis is to severely restrict, if not completely ban, online short-term rents. If the destruction of our neighborhoods by people who don’t care for them and the subsidization of property speculation in an overheated market doesn’t instill the political will to act, then at least we should recognize that homes that are more than 30 days a year are not residential – but commercial real estate more and are taxed accordingly.

We have to start looking at the VRBO problem and the associated housing crisis in a holistic and future-oriented way. Panic leads to bad decisions.

Jonathan Staufer

Vail