raison de arizona wrote: ↑Tue Sep 13, 2022 7:27 pm
After seeing the devastation airbnb does to local real estate prices, I'm coming around to the opinion that one should in general avoid them, but this is interesting. Who even knew airbnb checked that?
Bethany Hallam @bethanyhallam wrote:
Did I just… get a lifetime @Airbnb booking ban for a 9 year old possession charge?!?
Our local economy depends almost entirely on the short-term rental market, and most of the people advertise on multiple platforms, including airbnb and vrbo, as well as through local rental agencies. This is a reasonably busy tourist area but there are only few (mostly crappy) hotels; people who come here stay in rental cabins.
There used to be light industry around here, but that all got shut down because the businesses were not large or profitable enough to comply with evolving environmental standards. There’s also agriculture - chicken and beef cattle mostly, as well as the feed for them, and a few commercial apple orchards.
But the agriculture isn’t nearly significant enough to prop up the economy, which depends on tourists spending out-of-town dollars on goods and services without placing any additional strain.
I don’t know what kind of stress the short-term rental market has placed on local real estate prices, but my sense is that it hasn’t been that much. A house out here costs about a third of what a comparable house in Northern Virginia would sell for.
In Northern Virginia we paid a shit-ton per year in property taxes for a 2000 sq ft townhouse with no yard. Out here, we’re paying half that on 18 acres and 2 houses. If we put our cabin on the short-term rental market (which we plan to do in the next year or so), that will add to the local taxes, but I’m not sure how much.
We don’t have our cabin on airbnb yet, but we likely will in the next year or so.
"Hey! We left this England place because it was bogus, and if we don't get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we'll just be bogus too!" -- Thomas Jefferson