S o m e Re g u l a t i o n s t o C o n s i d e r While renting out a room or your home when you are not using it to make extra income is not a new concept, when it went highly main stream with sites like Airbnb, HomeAway and VRBO, regulators started to take notice and spurred by complaints from the neighbors and the hotel industry, home owner associations, cities and states are taking steps to create regulation. If you are considering offering a room for let in your own home, converting a rental property or purchasing property for the purpose of short- term rental, then you need to put on your business person hat and do your research to find out what you can and can’t do.
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With regulations changing on a regular basis and many cities having no online information, this can be a daunting task and with every city having different rules, it’s not possible to list out a set of rules. Our goal with this article is to give you regulatory considerations in general so you can do the home work on your particular property or location.
Home Owner Association: Some HOA’s have rules about rentals in general, some have rules about short-term rentals and some have no rules at all. It is important to verify with the Home Owner Association or the Property
Owners Association what their rules are be for a home, condo or apartment unit. Some HOA’s are retro actively changing their rules to prohibit short term rentals and have been challenged. You don’t want to buy a property in an area governed by a Home Owner Association only to find that it’s against the rules or to have the rules changed on you. Other associations in vacation areas may have built the entire area as a resort and then sold units to home owners with the plan that the association would manage the entire resort, offer amenities and property management of the units when the property owners are not
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