(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Washington County has no major hotels, so it relies on places like the Springs Motor Inn on Broadway in Fort Edward for hosting tourists and others. The county is helping people manage their short-term rental properties, which are often single-family homes.
At a time when other villages and towns in the Adirondacks are instituting stricter guidelines on short-term rental operators, Washington county is taking the opposite position.
The county held a roundtable meeting recently with 40 STR operators plus representatives from local venues and retail outlets to facilitate more interaction between the different entities and to learn how the county can help better support their collective success.
“The intent of the roundtable was to help connect the dots,” said Laura Oswald, Director of Economic Development in Washington County. “We wanted to make attendees [STR operators] aware of what there is to do for visitors and encourage venue operators and retail shops to help market short-term rentals.”
The proactive approach to the STR market is driven in large part by the fact that Washington county has no major hotels. Occupancy tax from the handful of bed and breakfasts and motels in the county totals just $15,000 per year. Short-term rentals offer a platform to support area tourism while boosting tax revenues.
In 2020, Washington county negotiated a 4% occupancy tax with Airbnb, the online marketplace focused on short-term home stays. The agreement generated $115,000 for the county in the first year, and officials project that figure will increase to $120,000 for 2022. The county has had discussions about a similar arrangement with Vrbo, another popular website for vacation rentals, but no agreement has been reached.
“We want to eventually get to the point where we can self-fund our tourism industry in the county and not put that burden on the taxpayers,” says James Griffith, the White Creek Town Supervisor who also helps manage STR properties. The county’s annual tourism budget ranges from $150,000 to $200,000.
Short-term rentals have been on the rise for several years, but demand skyrocketed during the pandemic, and it has held steady in most places. According to the Adirondack Explorer, in the nine-month period from January 2021 to September 2021, Airbnb hosts inside the Adirondack Park received $52.8 million— $31 million more than 2019.
The influx of short-term stays has led some municipalities in the region to institute, or at least explore, greater restrictions on STR operators.
Often the STR property is a home or summer home in a residential area. Sometimes, the owner lives in the home some of the year, and sometimes the owner is an out-of-town company that has bought the property to be run only as an STR.
Starting Jan. 1, 2023, the Town of Queensbury will prohibit short-term rental operators from renting their properties for more than 120 days per year and will require operators to rent properties for a minimum of five days at a time during the peak season (May 15 to Sept. 15).
[Read our extensive STR coverage, here.]
Saratoga Springs and Lake Placid are among the other popular destinations considering new or expanded regulation of STR’s.
Despite the influx of dollars from the Airbnb agreement and the county’s support of STR development, Washington County’s overall tourism budget pales in comparison to the multi-million-dollar budgets in places such as Warren and Essex counties.
Officials recognize that they are unlikely to compete financially with these counties which is why they want to equip STR operators and other local businesses with the tools to facilitate their own success.
“The goal is to not do everything for them,” Oswald said. “We don’t have the funding. We want to help them understand what resources are available so they can do it themselves.”