(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
People queued in front of the microphone to talk about short-term rentals in Saratoga Springs, Nov. 17, 2022. At the height of the meeting about 80 people were in the audience at the Saratoga Springs City Center.
Renting a home in Saratoga Springs during the annual horse racing meet from late July to Labor Day is as much a part of the city as spring water and Christmas candy pigs. Legally, a homeowner can rent during those eight weeks, but for the other 44 weeks of the year, renting a home short-term to a visitor is illegal.
Yet an estimated 1,800 homes in the city, as much as 20% of the housing stock, currently rent for short periods via web apps such as AirBnB and Vrbo. Companies outside the area are also buying homes just to rent them by the week or less, Commissioner of Accounts Dillon Moran said.
In the second in a series of meetings to address possible regulation of short-term rental homes in the city, Moran said he is looking for regulations that allow STRs to continue yet protect guests in case of fire or other emergency. The rules must also protect the residential neighborhoods that are not zoned for rental properties, he said.
“In large part, I believe the owner-occupied model is benign,” Moran said, indicating the model in which a local home owner rents his or her own home. But even that needs regulation, he said. “I believe we would all benefit from a modicum of structure.”
He admitted that the number of homes has moved beyond what the city’s three-person code enforcement team can handle.
“There has to be buy-in from the host community. There has to be self-regulation,” he told an audience of about 80 people on Thursday Nov. 17.
The people gathered included a mix of pro- and anti-STR advocates, home owners and landlords.
[Read our extensive STR coverage here.]
To offer a perspective of how much the STR market has grown in recent years, realtor Jo-Ann White said that a realtor and friend tried to rent a home in 2016 outside track season and within days of listing the property received a letter from the city demanding that she stop.
“We went from ‘cease-and-desist’ to 1,800 units in six years,” White said.
During public comment, the people who want the city to track and enforce laws against the STRs cited a number of concerns from “a revolving door of strangers,” to loud parties and beer bottles on front lawns, to the simple fact that residential neighborhoods are zoned for residential use, not for commercial rental use. Longer-term rentals of months or years, rather than days, are fine because the neighbors get to know one another, many of those who spoke said.
Many in the audience admitted that they rent short-term, have properties that they purchased specifically for short-term rentals or are in the service industry to help manage and maintain the properties that other people rent.
The landlords tended to say that they offer a necessary service at a price point below the local hotels and that they maintained their properties and were on hand in case of trouble with a bad tenant.
In part both Moran and Discover Saratoga President Darryl Leggieri said that STRs do help the local economy. Leggieri said that October was a strong month for visitors to the region, with hotels at 71% occupancy and a healthy dose of people in STRs.
“That trickled down to good business for everyone,” Leggieri said. Discover Saratoga promotes tourism in the county and Saratoga Springs.
The city has about 2,200 hotel rooms, but some of the events draw tens of thousands of visitors, Moran said.
“We need that surge space that STRs provide,” he said.
Dan Shilling, the manager of the Hampton Inn & Suites Saratoga Springs, asked for parity. STRs are different from hotels, he admitted. However without any regulation, they are not forced to contribute to the community, especially with the bed taxes that hotels, motels and full-time bed-and-breakfasts must pay.
A recurring question for all was the effect that STRs have on affordable housing in the city.
[Read our extensive coverage of affordable housing here.]
Out-of-town, and even out-of-state companies have been buying some of the properties in the city specifically for rental use. Their ability to buy at the asking price or higher is driving the price of homes up.
A number of home owners in the Geyser Crest neighborhood attended. They were particularly worried about the possible change in the make-up of a neighborhood that has long been a place where a family could buy a first home, a few speakers said.
Tim Coll, who said he lives in Geyser Crest, said he would want to see a 14 day minimum rental as he fears investment properties would shrink the workforce housing stock traditionally available in Geyser Crest, he said.
AirBnBs "must be regulated," he said.
Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce President Todd Shimkus was on hand to watch and learn. He said he knows that a small group of locally-based STR landlords in the city are working to form an ownership group. It is an idea he said the Chamber could support if they could put it together.
Assembly member Carrie Woerner is scheduled to attend the next meeting in January to talk about the state regulations on this issue, Moran said. Details are forthcoming.