Repost as it was in the wrong community.
He is selling two cottages because of a $300 fee? Drama much?
Guessing its the extra inspections/requirements for these rentals to meet codes that he’s grumbling about - a likely sign his septic is undersized, or there’s a safety concern that would be expensive to fix.
Then this new law is working as it should.
Good. Being a landlord is not a real job.
Good.
I say this as someone who recently stayed in a brand new cottage built largely for VRBO in Manitoba. It’s one thing to use the empty cottage to generate a little extra cash. It’s another when cottages are built solely for temporary rental on these sorts of services. Hotel legislation was written in blood. This is people doing a end run around those legal protections.
Eh. I think it’s quite hyperbolic to cite that hotel regulations are written in blood, when talking about rental cottages. Hotels are heavily regulated primarily due to their scale. A single hotel burning down could kills hundreds of people. If the cottage catches on fire, you just walk out the door or break a window. A poorly managed hotel can also turn into a source of substantial blight to a community. You can end up with drug dealers using hotel rooms as storefronts, sex traffickers using them for involuntary sex work, etc. But a cottage? There’s only so much blight that can fit into a tiny cottage. A cottage intrinsically needs far less regulation than a hotel.
Is it possible an owner will neglect maintenance of a cottage and let it go to hell? Sure. But we’re talking about cottages rented on vacation sites where people can leave reviews. And it’s not like anyone is going to get stuck in a year lease living in one of these things. If it’s a rat-infested hellhole, you’re only there a short time. Short-term rental owners have a lot more incentive to keep their properties in decent maintenance than regular landlords do.
Protections aside the hotel industry simply can’t offer this type of experience. I don’t mind it at all.
There is (or was) once a pretty nice industry of “cabin resorts” – basically a facility with a bunch of cabins for rent. They are functionally hotels, and subject to all the regulations. Now you rent a VRBO and show up and there’s rotten food in the microwave and you have no recourse.
Yes, this actually happened to us. Yes I have pictures. You can’t smell it in the picture.
Yeah. I don’t really get how single cottage rentals are economical vs a proper many unit business.
But, I’m biased, I would prefer to stay in a cabin resort than some strangers cottage that has no real reputational risk.
I actually tried to work out the economics of it based on the rate we were paying ($200/night) in a place that was clearly worth at least half a million.
$200 per night. Assuming they only get occupancy on the weekends, and use some weekends for themselves. Then you could reasonably presume they can get maybe 150 rental-days in a year. More likely to be 100. Let’s use 100 because it maths easy.
That’s $20000/yr. If you were only paying for your place with short term rentals at that pace, and interest wasn’t a thing, it would take 25 years to break even. If you include interest at a trivial 4%, then you’re looking at a 40 year mortgage.
And that’s not including all the cleaning, repairs, etc.
So if you’re using the place as an income stream, yeah, that ain’t happening. Not unless it’s in a high-demand location that you can charge a lot more for.
Unless you’re looking at it like a retirement-home-in-waiting or something.
It makes sense if you use realistic occupancy rates. Apparently they’re up to 70% in many cases. But even 50% occupancy changes the numbers completely. The thing to remember is it’s not all about weekends. People book week-long trips all the time. And AIrBnBs cater better to those longer vacations than hotels do. It’s nice to have some room to spread out if you’re going to be there for a week.
The other thing is that many of these properties were bought before the most recent property price boom, and the owners have low interest rate mortgages locked in. That property you stayed at might have been purchased for $300k with a 30 year mortgage at 2.75%. In that scenario, the owner put $60k down and has a payment of $980/month without taxes and insurance. Maybe $1300/month with? So that would be $15,600 per year. And if they manage a 50% occupancy rate at $100/night, that would be $18,200 per year in income. They would need some for maintenance and cleaning, but the property could still easily be cashflow-positive or nearly so. Even if they get no net monthly income on the property, they now have an expensive appreciating asset that they’re not making net monthly payments on. And in the few years since they bough the $300k property, it’s now appreciated to $500k, earning them $200k in pure profit. If they bought five years ago, they might have turned their $60k investment into $260k in equity in just 5 years. That’s one hell of a rate of return.
How much did the real estate value of the property go up during your experiment? Even if there’s no cash flow, helping to pay the mortgage while you sit on an appreciating asset might make sense monetarily.
Can’t believe it took this long.
All rental units should require the landlord to be licensed. Your life is in their hands to some degree. For some reason we understand this for restaurants and apartment buildings but not landlords?
On the flip side I hope there are still many available for renting. I don’t want to own, but renting a cottage with friends is usually a great time. It’s a vacation rental not a living rental, I see the two categories in wholly different ways.
Depends - the area you see as vacation property is an area that people live in, unless its on seasonal roads only, or water access only.
I live in an area where vacationers from a big city come out and cottage here. Often its a family cottage they’ve been coming to for decades, so I don’t really have a problems with them renting.
But through covid tons of people from the city bought cottages and drove homeowning out of the grasp of any locals. These are full, four season structures on roads serviced by the township. The average housing price ~doubled, and most locals can’t buy.
If people aren’t using the cottage so often that they can rent it out regularly, then I don’t have a problem with them having to give it up or be more heavily regulated.
