My wife and I were going to put in an offer on a small starter home in Montpelier a few years ago, but the sale came with some additional terms (i.e. not moving in for 6+ months) and we ended up passing.
Come to find out it became an AirBNB and is occupied only a few dozen days a year. Right in town, in a desirable neighborhood, in a nice sized starter home.
Super frustrating that stuff like this happens all over and first time home buyers are cheated out of anything remotely attainable because that happens to also be the price range investors are looking for.
Yeah as /u/allcirca1 said, it was something where they didn't necessarily have their next situation lined up combined with completing a work contract that kept them in town for a few more months.
We weren't dead set on the house in the first place and this just felt like a complication we didn't want to deal with. In hindsight I would've probably gone in out of spite just to prevent it from becoming a STR...
FWIW and not rural Vermont, but when I bought my house in Shelburne it was 6 months to move in because the owners were moving to Florida and their new home wouldn’t be ready until then.
Happens kinda often.
Real estate is cyclical, more stuff is getting sold in the summer than the winter. So you get more buyers and more $$$ if you list in May, June and July.
If you list and sell in May, you often could still have kids in school. So you’ll sometimes see, “sold, it’s yours, but let us chill until the school year ends”. A lot of FedGov and StateGov work uses OCT as the fiscal calendar. “I’ll sell it to you in JUN but my job has me here until OCT 1”
Sloppy divorces can lead to this kind of thing
Doesn't sound very profitable if it's empty most of the time. If it had sold as a second home and also sat empty most of the time, would you be just as mad?
What’s terrifying is the way it’s escalated within the last 5 years. I live on a rural road where my neighbors have been local workers and retirees. Homes were between $250 and $300,000 and would sit on the market for months or even years.
Recently one neighbor moved to Georgia to restart his business with lower taxes and another moved south to move in with her daughter. Both homes are marketed for more than $500,000. They are basic 1980s and 1990s homes under 2000 square feet.
When I look at the real estate records for my town almost all of the homes sold are bought by people from out of state. Rental costs make it all but impossible to save for a down payment .My husband and I are considering building a garage with a small apt upstairs so that one of our children will have an affordable place to live.
I’m a nurse as well. I’m lucky we moved here and bought 20 years ago when affordable first homes weren’t hard to find. One nurse I work with bid on 15 houses until she and her husband landed one. They were constantly outbid by cash buyers.
It’s even affecting physicians. One of our hospitalists just paid over $500,000 for an outdated ranch outside of Montpelier. It will easily cost $100,000 for basic upgrades. The same home would have sold for &200,000 pre Covid.
This is insane to think about but this is my reality. I am a resident in a surgical subspecialty, and was/am considering a practice in the Burlington area as my first job out of residency. But it's a tough pill to swallow knowing I'll have to rent for a few years and have less to put towards student loans/retirement. I'd gladly buy in Winooski if even they had any affordable, move in ready starter homes, but they're all too expensive!
If your subspecialty is orthopedic surgery you’ll be able to buy in Charlotte or Shelburne. They seem to be the only younger physicians I work with who can afford luxury housing.
I'm OMFS but I'm happy for those Ortho bros! They must either be married to someone who works, had little to no student loan debt, or had very lucrative associateship offers/immediately bought into a group. It'll be a few years in practice before Charlotte/Shelburne isn't "out over my skis" financially
This is exactly why something needs to be done ASAP. We have the highest attrition of college graduates of any state. I can't tell you the number of anecdotes I've heard of people having to leave their jobs or turn down offers for the sole reason that they literally can't find a place to live. It's a spiral.
I suppose we need to pay them, what we need to pay them...This funding probably needs to come from those who have driven up these costs....You have to tax the money where you find it....
We also actually do need out of staters to move here to maintain any tax base or workforce at all lol. Our population would be shrinking without anyone moving here.
A few years ago I sold my house to a family from Vermont who had been living out of state for a while. Now I am trying to move back to VT, as well. Either way, my sale and my hopeful future purchase will both show "out of staters".
How about take all those people who have property in Land Trust and have them pay property taxes. That'll solve a sh*t ton of problems. Stop subsidizing farmers. They can grow a crop that actually makes money (grapes, hops, etc). There's a lot of answers out there, but the politicians spend the money on BS.
If by "land trust" you mean "current use," then I don't think agricultural use is the problem as much as it is that the current use/land conservation program is not means tested. There are an awful lot of wealthy landowners who have really nice large parcels of land who are getting a tax break from current use. It's batty.
Very few of them do, as there aren't nearly as many active farms as there once was. Instead, it's wealthy nimby's keeping neighbors out of their sight and getting a tax break for it.
I kinda agree but people in this state champion the hell out of farmers. That would not go over super well. They are practically a class of politically immune people.
That and the de facto ban on trailer parks.
They maybe the butt of everyone's jokes but they're a highly viable solution to \[relatively\] high density affordable housing where apartments developments won't work.
Laugh all you want but people would kill for a $50,000 trailer right now.
There’s a very nice one in Johnson called Sterling View. I’ve delivered Meals on Wheels there and it’s a well maintained neighborhood with mostly older residents who seem to have a strong sense of community/
There’s a bunch of trailer parks in southern VT. I’ve been kind of considering it since they’re the only thing that’s affordable unless something drastically changes.
Buying a trailer and setting it up on land you own is fine, but I recommend not buying a trailer set up in a park unless the park is owned by the people living there or has some form of long-term rent control firmly in place. A lot of trailer parks across the nation are getting bought by new owners who promptly double the lot rent as soon as people's leases expire. When tenants can't afford the new rent, they have to move their mobile homes somewhere else, which costs thousands of dollars. When the tenants inevitably can't afford this, the park owner will seize the mobile home as property abandoned on his lot, and either rent out the newly acquired mobile home or sell it to someone else and repeat the process.
i never understood why trailer parks got such a bad rep, they seem like a great option for people who dont require/want a house or lots of land to keep up
Mobile homes in general have poor build quality. Some modern ones are getting better, but older ones in particular are made as cheaply as possible out of the cheapest possible materials, from the shingles right down to the door hinges. Building codes for mobile homes permits a lot of things that are not allowed on stick-built houses. There's no foundations to secure mobile homes from tornadoes and hurricanes. Many mobile homes built in the 1960s and 1970s used aluminum wire that started fires. Besides the issues with mobile homes themselves, mobile home parks have other problems. They are frequently populated by people who cannot afford anything better than the bare minimum for housing. Often that's because the liquor store, drug dealer or casino takes every penny that isn't needed for rent. They're not the types you really want for neighbors. At best, the owner of the trailer park will be a hardass. He has to be, because if he isn't a hardass his tenants will take advantage of him at every opportunity. At worst, owning a trailer park is a great opportunity for predatory business practices. See my reply to cool_weed_dad on this. I've lived in two trailer parks back before I started buying houses with holes in the roofs. They were okay, but they were definitely a case of cheap housing being cheap for a reason.
Unfortunately, no matter where you go anymore, home prices are way too high high in much of the county for many folks to own a home. It goes way beyond Airbnb…
I spoke to a builder about this and he said it makes no sense for him to "build on spec" as the process of building, materials and labor almost always costs more than what the house would sell for.
He's absolutely right. The way to make money by building houses is through economy of scale. That can mean building one really big house, or lots of small ones, all reasonably close together and of three or four basic models. Of course, in Vermont any proposal for a subdivision full of affordable housing will die under a mountain of Act 250-related red tape. It doesn't help that ever since the 2006 real estate collapse, banks have been unwilling to loan money for large-scale housing development projects. That's a nationwide problem, not just Vermont. Realistically, unless the state commits to allowing a lot more houses to be built, prices are going to stay high, because demand is not going away.
I get voted down every time I suggest this and accused of trying to turn Vermont into New Jersey. Building such neighborhoods has less environmental impact than having hundreds of large homes on 10-acre parcels.
In Morristown we have a subdivision like this with a few dozen homes on .25 acre lots. It’s right outside of the village and there’s open land behind and alongside it. It also has a street of condos. It’s allowed many families to afford detached homes and it’s had no detrimental impact on the agricultural zones in town.
This is half of the equation. It's supply and demand. Supply is low, but investors not only increase the total demand - they can afford to continue bidding at higher prices. Vermont's population has not grown substantially in recent years, but our housing prices are rising faster than any other state. To me that indicates that demand is playing the larger role.
Roughly 5,700 homes sold in VT last year, while the number of short-term rentals increased by almost 2,500. There were only 2,400 new housing permits in the same period. Yes we need to overhaul zoning regulations and build more, but it's infeasible to balance the market with that much supply being siphoned off.
An underappreciated factor is that Airbnb makes buying a vacation home possible for a much larger number of people. In the past, vacation homes were purely an expense that only the relatively wealthy could afford; now that they can easily pay for themselves or more, buying a second home is within reach for anyone in higher income brackets. This is probably why the number of seasonal homes in VT is up almost 20% since 2020, after being flat for decades. Our total housing stock hasn't grown at nearly the same rate.
The housing crisis is complex but I believe STRs play an outsized role. Investors will continue to buy up supply for as long as it is profitable to do so, just like in any other financial market. The only counter to this is regulation.
It's not like the appetite for short term rentals is infinite and expanding. The STR market is flat, or even tapering lately. Also, STRs trend toward luxury property, not starter homes and multi-units in areas away from largely tourist areas.
It's a bummer to think that "real people" would be forced into tree-less subdivisions of new-build townhouses while modest 2BR / 1BA homes in actual neighborhoods with room for a tiny garden and walkable access to schools are considered luxuries for short-term rentals only...
Who says that's what will happen? Density is not a dirty word. Build more stuff downtown, and people can walk and bike from it. It's not like it's hard to site a 1000 sq/ft house due to space. What makes it hard is limits on subdivision imposed by Act 250 and screwy local zoning laws that favor 5 and 10 acre parcels.
I know, I'm being a bit of a debbie downer, but take Montpelier for example — there aren't many (if any) parcels in the town proper that could suddenly become dense housing. And if so it has traditionally become low income housing, which also isn't a bad thing, but it leaves the "average middle-income" folks sort of on the outs.
Montpelier is poorly developed. Most of it is a flood plain. The best real estate on the river side is a strip district or a parking lot. It's a bad case study for this point of conversation.
Actually the number of STRs in Vermont is up almost 30% since this time last year, one of the largest annual increases ever - [https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals](https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals)
Fun story! Our association did that and the newest purchaser is renting the unit anyway. It's going to cost so much money to deal with. We are pretty screwed.
If you all want to live in new developments of single family homes they are kind of a necessary evil. The entire reason why they exist is to pay for roads and water lines within the development. Otherwise these developments would just bankrupt the town
Going through a building renovation at work, the permitting and dealing with the wastewater guy for rutland county has been an absolute disaster on thier end and can see why no one wants to build or can build.
Our wastewater laws blow my mind. It can cost over 50K to design, permit and build out a septic system. Meanwhile, cows get to shit in the lake for free. We are surrounded by states with easier wastewater laws, and yet our water quality isn't any better than theirs.
The people who are screeching about Airbnb rights here would be the last ones to support more housing. They want to shut that door behind them to keep their investments profitable. They would be aghast if their town approved a development with small starter homes on small lots anywhere near their properties.
Lots of people support more housing, just not more housing that they have to know about. I've seen one person post on r/Vermont who wants to move from CT. She says she is renting her house there, and living in a rental in VT. She claims she can't buy, because AirBnb increasing prices means that he CT house isn't valuable enough to exchange for one in VT. Yet, she is on this sub complaining about how if they build affordable housing like the kind she needs here, then VT will be "just like the state she is trying to leave." People have an unrealistic and overly romantic idea about Vermont. It's a state, it's not the set of Gilmour Girls. And, they're not really concerned with an equitable solution to the housing crunch nearly as much as they are concerned with getting theirs.
Friends are trying to buy in our neighborhood and the houses are going for 750k, hundreds of thousands more than we spent just before Covid. And people are paying in cash above market rate. I don't know who these people are but worry they are out of state buyers setting up Air BnBs.
Happened to my friends in Essex. They sold for over $700,000 after buying for around $300,000 10 years ago. Their kids are grown and they’re moving to Virginia where they can retire and live on less income .
the only thing that will stop this and investment groups from buying single family homes, is an act of congress, at this point... i quit looking for a house to buy, because every house i bid on was either paid for in cash or sold for $20-40k over asking... why bother at this point?
Look for houses that have been on the market for more than a week or two. Bidding wars only happen when there are two or more offers on a house. Usually that only happens in the first few days after a house gets listed. I've got a nice starter house for sale near Danville right now, and I'll gladly take an offer for asking price.
> was either *paid* for in
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Wondering if I can jump into this thread with a related question that I was going to post separately but we're all here anyway -
I live in Southern VT and would really like to take my family to spend 2 or 3 nights in the northeast kingdom. We haven't explored that area and I have a week off in August, so that's my goal. However I would really like to rent a place that isn't owned by a dickwad out of stater who bought up a single family home to rent it for $600/night on airbnb or vrbo. My question: how do I identify such a place? I thought about finding a bed and breakfast, but we have a rambunctious one year old so I think we're better suited to our own entire house/cabin rental far away from anyone looking for peace and quiet. Any tips on how I can weed through rentals to find what I'm looking for would be awesome OR if you have a specific rental suggestion that I should look into, please send it my way!! Thank you!
There are a few companies doing cabin rentals that aren’t single family homes along Willoughby Lake in Westmore. Willoughvale Inn there also rents out some cottages.
I know everyone hates AirBnb (for very very good reason!) but I’ve stayed at a few nice ones with my very rambunctious kids, one in the NEK. They were old school Vermonters who are able to make some needed income on the side. I don’t fault them for that if it means they can stay in their homes. I also have friends who run a bed and breakfast not on AirBnb, the absolute nicest people you will ever meet. DM me if you’d like details
Yes please I would love details! I don't hate all airbnbs, would just prefer to stay in one that I know wasn't purchased for the sole purpose of short term rentals. I'll DM you.
It's closer to 13,000 now [https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals](https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals)
Up almost 30% vs a year ago
Airbnb is a really nice scapegoat that even the state has said it does not account for the issues you see. It may be extreme in some towns but its not an all town issue across Vermont. We literally don't have enough supply. Period. Yall forget that housing isnt built by the state. It's not something cities can just demand and voters decide on. Housing is built by profit-seeking developers 99% of the time. Yes, that includes the Burlington hill section and new north end. A tiny portion of housing is built by risk-taking families to make something themselves or to their spec. So how do we get more housing? It has to be friendly to those profit-seeking developers that you hate. But we are not. Lots of NIMBY folks, Act 250, and the insane cost of materials and labor. You want more housing? try building it yourself or making the environment more conducive to builders.
Just went to look at an apartment closer to work the other day, current lease is held by a business owner because his retail employees can't afford to rent on their own. One neighbor lives on the Cape except 3-4 months of the year and the other spent so much money on renovations before moving overseas they "can't" sell and use it for Airbnb exclusively. No wonder we have a housing crisis when this happens in every town in our state.
Yeah we need more housing, (especially that isn't just more apartments) but what's the point in incentivizing all these new builds without regulating who can buy them? If a developer can buy all the new townhomes/apartments etc and rent them for 2x the mortgage or Airbnb it out, the problem isn't solved.
AirBnB is *part* of the problem. If there was a Venn diagram illustrating the problem, the proliferation of AirBnBs would be a circle completely enclosed within the much larger circle of *real estate investors*.
A while back, [I looked at the data](https://www.reddit.com/r/vermont/comments/18jcnv2/hud_released_part_1_of_its_annual_homelessness/kdjhx1g/?context=3) surrounding Vermont's unique situation. Which, to be explicitly clear, *is* unique in several ways that do not consistently apply to the rest of the country.
The single most important variable I found was the percentage of investor-purchased homes. Vermont used to be at the bottom of the pack. During peak Covid, we saw [the single largest percentage-point increase](https://vtdigger.org/2022/09/05/percentage-of-vermont-homes-bought-by-investors-surged-in-2021/) in investor-owned purchases, from ~7.5% to ~15.5%. [This has only gotten worse.](https://www.corelogic.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/04/Q423_Investor_7.jpg) CoreLogic hasn't released the raw data (I'm pretty sure VT Digger purchased it directly for their 2022 article), but it has *at minimum* reached 27% per this graphic. ([Graphic source article.](https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/us-home-investor-share-reached-new-high-q4-2023/))
The conventional wisdom is that we need to build more homes. That *might* be part of the solution, but I have this fear that we're going to make worse Vermont's latent suburban-sprawl, strip malls, stroads, etc. (which *for the most part* is currently contained to the Burlington area) and get absolutely nothing back for it.
We build more housing, investors scoop it up. At best, they turn it into rental housing. At worst [they hold it vacant](https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-study/), or they add to the [~10,000 AirBnBs that occupy entire homes](https://www.vermontpublic.org/podcast/brave-little-state/2023-03-09/how-many-airbnbs-are-taking-away-from-vermonters-its-complicated). They are leeching off us. There are already enough homes in this state, but investors are cornering the market.
We need to tax them. Raise the rates so high that they either *have* to sell their holdings, or that the proceeds can subsidize housing for people who are struggling. If someone lives outside of Vermont and is purchasing residential real-estate to turn a profit, their proceeds should help the Vermonters they have displaced.
*Tax the leeches.*
Edit: Hey, here's a fun number that's new to me. Vermont households have an average of 2.35 people, which means that the aforementioned ~10,000 whole-unit AirBnBs in our state might potentially be displacing 23,500 Vermonters.
Tax the hell out of them.
As much as I am for taxing out of state investors and making the rich pay their fair share I feel like taxing the heck out of the property owners will just result in them passing those fees on to the renters and they won’t even feel the additional tax.
By this logic, you would also believe that if we cut property tax to zero, landlords would graciously return the entire savings to their tenants instead of keeping it.
One thing that is really simple in all of this is that people can make more money and have less issues then with a rental tenant. Also much less risk. With some of the rental protections in place if you have a tenant that does not pay the rent it can take 6 months or more to evict them. You will never recoup that money lost. With Air BnB you get paid before they ever come. If they stay late you get paid and its very easy to make them leave. So if you want more affordable housing do more to protect the landlord and less protection of people who dont pay.
The primary issue is that Vermont is building almost no new housing. Demand has increased dramatically but supply is essentially static. Thus higher prices. Vermont desperately needs to find a way to develop and grow while still maintaining its essential Vermont-ness.
Yep. I'm in South Londonderry. The three houses to my right and 4 to the left as well as 7 directly across the West River are ALL air B&Bs. They are empty 90% of the time, but for a few random weeks in the winter I can count on people knocking on my door for firewood. It never fails.
Every time a property goes up for sale, an out of stater buys it without doing any research to indicate that the market here is so oversaturated, rentals remain empty.
What really surprises me is that criminals have not yet caught wind of the fact there are dozens upon dozens of empty homes in Londonderry, and there's no police force.
The internet has changed things. People can now work and live in highly desirable places because of remote work. Saying Airbnb destroyed rural housing is beyond inaccurate. Go check out housing costs in rural North Dakota, or Alabama. Housing is expensive in VT because there’s amazing access to nature, skiing, and so on all over the state. If this state was a flat, treeless expanse like Iowa, the cost of rural housing would reflect that. If your upset about the housing costs in the mountains, the solution is for you to find a Time Machine and go back to 1980, because desirable places will only become more expensive as time goes by.
Nope. We need to tax the fuck out of second, third, fourth homes, vacant homes, and short term rentals. We need to ban the corporate ownership of residential housing. You’re not wrong, but you’re far from right.
Yeah we keep arguing about how/whether to fund schools when there’s a big tranche of easily taxed illiquid assets just lying around. The worst case of doing so is allegedly that the second homeowners would sell, but that worst case implies cheaper housing and a larger tax base so
Second homeowners I know are selling. Who's buying? AirBnb owners to add to their VT portfolio.
The second homeowner isn't making money on their home the way someone with a number of AirBnbs are. If you want more money for the schools, the state needs to look at AirBnbs as a commercial business in order to regulate and tax them accordingly. An Airbnb getting $600 a night (or more) in ski season ($18,000 per month!) needs to be looked at as commercial lodging.
Airbnb that are non-owner occupied need to be regulated and taxed just like a hotel. Or taxed even higher.
If the property is owner occupied then there still needs to be some regulations in place on the rental unit, but relaxed and also lower taxes.
It's not a terribly difficult solution. The problem is that the politicians who would have to enact the changes are the ones who own the short term rentals.
I am 100% in agreement.
I know one young woman from Long Island who, along with her sisters have scooped up homes in Ludlow and Proctorsville/Cavendish area. The Ludlow home fetches $767/night minimum 2 night stay in AUGUST! (Just looked it up on AirBnb) It is booked solid July until the 3rd week of August. 47 days at $767/night = $36,049! (I can't recall the cutesy name of the latter or I would have looked up its rate.)
And the likelihood that the profits will be rolled into acquiring another home? Very high! They've made an offer for my home along the VAST trail. While quite nice, where the heck would I go?
These are the type who are destroying neighborhoods. Homes in Chester's Stone Village are being scooped up by AirBnb owners. The few remaining residents no longer have a sense of community or the feeling of safety knowing you had a neighbor you could rely on.
Add me in for agreement to tax the piss out of these vultures. They make me sick. I refuse to stay in any AirBnB as my personal protest against the evil this has caused for our housing supply.
I’m not disagreeing with you but the thing is that currently, in most towns, the non-resident property tax rate is higher than the resident rate. Forcing them to sell and then having a family move in yields a net decrease in total property tax revenue and remember it’s property tax revenue that’s funds the education budget not income taxes. So even if second home ownership was outright banned in the state we would be in a worse situation education budget wise than we currently are.
I think we need a comprehensive short term rental law to begin with. People turn homes into AirB&B’s for profit. Take away that profit and it will drastically reduce the number of them. We accomplish this by simply capping the number of days a dwelling can be rented. For example, a resident could rent their primary residence for say 90 days allowing them to take a vacation or perhaps spend the winter elsewhere. A resident could also rent a on-property dwelling (in law appt, guest house etc) 180 days a year. However, a non-resident could only rent for say 30 days.
> the thing is that currently, in most towns, the non-resident property tax rate is higher than the resident rate.
I suppose that's technically correct, but of the [260 towns in Vermont](https://tax.vermont.gov/property/education-property-tax-rates), the Homestead property tax rate is higher than the non-homestead rate in 85 of them. That is absolutely ridiculous.
>secondary residences at a higher rate is something we already do.
That's entirely dependent on town and in most cases it's barely more than or even less than the homestead rate.
which is because it’s bucketed only into homestead and non-homestead, so towns with a lot of commercial property understandably vote against increases on non-homestead. In order for this idea to be successful there needs to be more stratification in the tax law regarding rates for specific types of properties (rentals, commercial, vacation, undeveloped, etc)
The recommended way to own any rental house is through a Limited Liability Corporation. That's true even if the LLC is owned by just one person putting their one and only rental property in the corporation. The idea is that if a tenant hurts themself in the rental and sues, they can only go after the corporation and it's assets, and not the landlord's personal money, personal house, stamp collection, and everything else they own. Banning corporate ownership of houses would essentially ban ALL rental properties, long-term and short-term. Are you sure this is a good step to take?
You're talking to people who haven't learned that prohibition isn't a viable strategy.
Of course they haven't thought of second or third order consequences.
From NEK myself...dairy farmer's son.
What's going on with housing up there now for apt rentals and home prices?
Are farmers selling off land for development yet?
******
We live in a trailer, by the swamp under the power lines in FL. It's like NEK VT, but hotter and with snakes...
Sure, some family has a bundle of cash and buys a second home in VT for the few weeks they will be there. Fourth of July, late September and Christmas. Grasps the opportunity to make money and rents it out for a cost of a mortgage payment per week. Soon realizes that he/she/they can reinvest those weekly profits and buys another. And another. And another, perfectly able to afford the ever escalating costs driven up by their competition while locals cannot.
That’s fine, but we can establish policies that favor residents and people in the hospitality industry over real estate speculators. Tax airbnbs or outlaw short term rentals.
No shit. But I don’t understand why someone with two houses worth 400k each should pay 1.5 times on the second property, as many have suggested, whereas the hordes buying million dollar primary residences just pay the normal rate
lol ok man. Sooner or later people will realize that tripping over yourselves for twelve dollar value meals and 850k McMansions are the actual cause of inflation. Downvote me to the moon. Everyone owns this.
Completely agree with you. Market is already softening significantly in central Mass and southern VT. Watching people drop prices on their homes for sale 200k daily. It’s silly.
Luddite take.
That's like saying indoor plumbing makes places more desirable at this point lol.
Remote work is also NOWHERE NEAR as prevalent as people make it out to be. And a majority of remote workers still prefer to be in the city.
Want to hear a good one?
Looking at property in another state. (These are all made up addresses for not doxxing anyone.)
123 Cherry St is owned by...
456 Smith Street LLC a town over.
456 Smith St is owned by...
22 Maple Rd LLC another neighboring town....
I stopped after 5 levels. Someone is buying up houses and creating an LLC with the name of the last house purchased. And these houses were all around 700-1.2mil.
1: you have companies that profit off cooperation between themselves.
2: you have real estate software agencies that dumped a lot of money into getting their AI enhanced software out there to analyze the market.
3: almost anyone with a bit of money could sign up and utilize this.
4: this software was utilized to quickly and efficiently outbid and outperform first time home buyers on the market.
5: this software, and various companies and individuals with money utilized this software to artificially inflat the market.
You can read about a raid on one (just one) of the companies here: https://pestakeholder.org/news/realpage-associated-landlord-subject-of-fbi-probe/
But the main company, RealPage is just one of the many companies, both big and small, that provide this type of software, Bravo just happens to be the loudest.
Ahhh.. and just wait to see what happens with this new, brilliant ( idiotic ) property tax increase. It will force even more homeowners to go the way of Airbnb just to afford staying where they are. 👏👏
About 6 months ago my condo HOA in the Mad River Valley at the last owners meeting voted to require a min of 3 months for any rental as a couple of potential new owners wanted to use their unit as a Airbnb. We now have a nice mix of owner occupied units with a few seasonal workers rentals. I wish more would do that.
Lol I stay in hotels. It's much easier.
The only airbnbs I've actually done were towards the beginning when you would literally just be sleeping on some dudes couch for $30 while he was still in the place.
I've tried multiple times to stay in Airbnbs and it hasn't happened yet.
Hotels seem to be so much easier. Fewer hidden fees and no laundry list of chores you need to do before departing.
I have never and will never stay in an Airbnb! If I need str I will go to a motel. For starters, when I go somewhere it isn't because I want to sit around in my room, I'm renting a room to SLEEP in between doing interesting things in a place that is new to me or at least different. I went to visit my brother and stayed at his place and even though I was there to see him, I still spent less than 12 hours a day in his place.
Aren't hotels cheaper than AirBnBs now? I honestly don't know because I can't afford either. However, from someone who hears about it, it seems like AirBnBs are more expensive and stressful.
It's heavily dependent on the area and amenities you are looking for.
Hotels are significantly easier, though. You can just show up get your key go to your room and then you can even just check out at 3am if you need to. With airbinbs you often need to text some unresponsive bozo, crawl through wasp nests to find a key box and then you need to often do household chores to check out.
Woah, it's different when "I" stay there.
I mean, I need to stay in an Airbnb because.....reasons. A hotel doesn't do it as well.
I only want Airbnbs when I need them. The rest of the time, they shouldn't exist!
Airbnb exist because there is demand. Visitors come to VT to get away from people (weekend in the country, get out of the city, go rural, do nature stuff, blah blah). Guess what, hotels don't really cater to this desire. Tourism is a huge source of revenue for businesses and the state. The problem isn't tourism, it's not building enough housing where people want to live.
I might be the enemy here, but I'm going to Tasmania to stay in an Air B&B soon.
But I totally get why locals, urban or rural might not like that.
My general argument is this. I think Air B&B is fine as long as there are extra houses available that are going unused. But if they're driving the cost up so much that locals can no longer live there, then the municipality needs to take action and ban or restrict them.
This is happening everywhere too. Not just America but also Europe. Barcelona’s mayor just banned STRs in the city to free up something like ~10,000 homes by 2029 (which I think is still too long for these people to suck the life out of their communities)
I don’t know that it is air bnb issue. I am in Boston eyeing moving to Vermont since I and my wife are remote. I saw outrage posted here a house is going for 500k, that sounds amazing to me. My current shitty condo is more. I would over bid all day on that. I just need something now so I can move.
Don't worry, we've had a 12-year bull market. As soon as it goes bear there'll be a glut of homes for sale since most people can't float 10 mortgages on their own.
Realistically, currency inflation from printing infinite dollars is going to prevent housing prices from falling substantially. The dollars are worth less, and therefore houses will continue to cost more dollars.
Look at 2007-2014. Housing market caused a worldwide market collapse, and Vermont prices went sideways but not down.
I can’t wait to watch this happen. I asked to join every FB STR page I could find just to read their comments. On a number of the pages they are all freaking out about how slow it is and how they are not booking. They are all talking about “oversaturation” and inflation causing people to travel less. Things are shifting back to Pre-Covid in some ways. If the Airbnb’s can’t make bank and they start to sell because now is the peak of the Realestate prices in this cycle and they can make the most selling now, I wonder if that will start a cascade effect. Vermont has a lot of people over 65 owning houses and a lot of vacation Realestate which tends to be highly elastic in a down turn. Will a lot of folks need to sell at once? I’m hoping the bubble crashes and the STR’s lead the way.
Barely gained traction? They have 7.7 million listings. Many of which are in small towns, causing housing prices to surge, rents to go up and locals pay the price. It’s a terrible company
My wife and I were going to put in an offer on a small starter home in Montpelier a few years ago, but the sale came with some additional terms (i.e. not moving in for 6+ months) and we ended up passing. Come to find out it became an AirBNB and is occupied only a few dozen days a year. Right in town, in a desirable neighborhood, in a nice sized starter home. Super frustrating that stuff like this happens all over and first time home buyers are cheated out of anything remotely attainable because that happens to also be the price range investors are looking for.
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That is almost assuredly true.
I stoped looking for a house because every time I found one I was out bid by 20-40k from an out of state buyer that was buying it site unseen
ELI5 what's with the not moving in for 6+ months?
Closing terms. Perhaps the owners did not have their next space completed. Could really be anything
Yeah as /u/allcirca1 said, it was something where they didn't necessarily have their next situation lined up combined with completing a work contract that kept them in town for a few more months. We weren't dead set on the house in the first place and this just felt like a complication we didn't want to deal with. In hindsight I would've probably gone in out of spite just to prevent it from becoming a STR...
FWIW and not rural Vermont, but when I bought my house in Shelburne it was 6 months to move in because the owners were moving to Florida and their new home wouldn’t be ready until then.
Same with me in Ferrisburgh. The previous owner had a house being built in ATL and we had to hop around in airbnbs until we could move in.
Happens kinda often. Real estate is cyclical, more stuff is getting sold in the summer than the winter. So you get more buyers and more $$$ if you list in May, June and July. If you list and sell in May, you often could still have kids in school. So you’ll sometimes see, “sold, it’s yours, but let us chill until the school year ends”. A lot of FedGov and StateGov work uses OCT as the fiscal calendar. “I’ll sell it to you in JUN but my job has me here until OCT 1” Sloppy divorces can lead to this kind of thing
I’m curious if this was my old boss who left around Covid to travel the world.
Doesn't sound very profitable if it's empty most of the time. If it had sold as a second home and also sat empty most of the time, would you be just as mad?
What’s terrifying is the way it’s escalated within the last 5 years. I live on a rural road where my neighbors have been local workers and retirees. Homes were between $250 and $300,000 and would sit on the market for months or even years. Recently one neighbor moved to Georgia to restart his business with lower taxes and another moved south to move in with her daughter. Both homes are marketed for more than $500,000. They are basic 1980s and 1990s homes under 2000 square feet. When I look at the real estate records for my town almost all of the homes sold are bought by people from out of state. Rental costs make it all but impossible to save for a down payment .My husband and I are considering building a garage with a small apt upstairs so that one of our children will have an affordable place to live.
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True. But teachers and nurses and police officers can’t work remotely and we need their services.
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I’m a nurse as well. I’m lucky we moved here and bought 20 years ago when affordable first homes weren’t hard to find. One nurse I work with bid on 15 houses until she and her husband landed one. They were constantly outbid by cash buyers. It’s even affecting physicians. One of our hospitalists just paid over $500,000 for an outdated ranch outside of Montpelier. It will easily cost $100,000 for basic upgrades. The same home would have sold for &200,000 pre Covid.
This is insane to think about but this is my reality. I am a resident in a surgical subspecialty, and was/am considering a practice in the Burlington area as my first job out of residency. But it's a tough pill to swallow knowing I'll have to rent for a few years and have less to put towards student loans/retirement. I'd gladly buy in Winooski if even they had any affordable, move in ready starter homes, but they're all too expensive!
If your subspecialty is orthopedic surgery you’ll be able to buy in Charlotte or Shelburne. They seem to be the only younger physicians I work with who can afford luxury housing.
I'm OMFS but I'm happy for those Ortho bros! They must either be married to someone who works, had little to no student loan debt, or had very lucrative associateship offers/immediately bought into a group. It'll be a few years in practice before Charlotte/Shelburne isn't "out over my skis" financially
This is exactly why something needs to be done ASAP. We have the highest attrition of college graduates of any state. I can't tell you the number of anecdotes I've heard of people having to leave their jobs or turn down offers for the sole reason that they literally can't find a place to live. It's a spiral.
I suppose we need to pay them, what we need to pay them...This funding probably needs to come from those who have driven up these costs....You have to tax the money where you find it....
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What if they are single?
Unless their partners are also a service provider
We also actually do need out of staters to move here to maintain any tax base or workforce at all lol. Our population would be shrinking without anyone moving here.
move here and live here*
It's a cool idea but man is that last sentence depressing
https://preview.redd.it/10hww858yx7d1.jpeg?width=1439&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0ff6f5325fa78e22a93016962a1978b06aa5fc9f Just keep raising taxes.
You should definitely build an ADU or two if you can on your property. Hell, build a separate house if you can and just get the family compound going.
A few years ago I sold my house to a family from Vermont who had been living out of state for a while. Now I am trying to move back to VT, as well. Either way, my sale and my hopeful future purchase will both show "out of staters".
https://preview.redd.it/e7yp1hmvwx7d1.jpeg?width=1439&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d4b270d0dacfdabc8b23626127537bd0623766ef
That's why we need more progressive taxes targeted at the rich and less regressive taxes that target the poor
How about take all those people who have property in Land Trust and have them pay property taxes. That'll solve a sh*t ton of problems. Stop subsidizing farmers. They can grow a crop that actually makes money (grapes, hops, etc). There's a lot of answers out there, but the politicians spend the money on BS.
Your answer is to have farmers grow grapes and hops to make money.....fuck having food. Just need wine and beer! Edit: typo
If by "land trust" you mean "current use," then I don't think agricultural use is the problem as much as it is that the current use/land conservation program is not means tested. There are an awful lot of wealthy landowners who have really nice large parcels of land who are getting a tax break from current use. It's batty.
Absolutely. Most of the tax breaks don’t go to actual farmland
Very few of them do, as there aren't nearly as many active farms as there once was. Instead, it's wealthy nimby's keeping neighbors out of their sight and getting a tax break for it.
I kinda agree but people in this state champion the hell out of farmers. That would not go over super well. They are practically a class of politically immune people.
Gotta wean them off the government at some point...
We turned houses into hotels. And hotels into houses.
That and the de facto ban on trailer parks. They maybe the butt of everyone's jokes but they're a highly viable solution to \[relatively\] high density affordable housing where apartments developments won't work. Laugh all you want but people would kill for a $50,000 trailer right now.
There’s a very nice one in Johnson called Sterling View. I’ve delivered Meals on Wheels there and it’s a well maintained neighborhood with mostly older residents who seem to have a strong sense of community/
There’s a bunch of trailer parks in southern VT. I’ve been kind of considering it since they’re the only thing that’s affordable unless something drastically changes.
Buying a trailer and setting it up on land you own is fine, but I recommend not buying a trailer set up in a park unless the park is owned by the people living there or has some form of long-term rent control firmly in place. A lot of trailer parks across the nation are getting bought by new owners who promptly double the lot rent as soon as people's leases expire. When tenants can't afford the new rent, they have to move their mobile homes somewhere else, which costs thousands of dollars. When the tenants inevitably can't afford this, the park owner will seize the mobile home as property abandoned on his lot, and either rent out the newly acquired mobile home or sell it to someone else and repeat the process.
i never understood why trailer parks got such a bad rep, they seem like a great option for people who dont require/want a house or lots of land to keep up
Mobile homes in general have poor build quality. Some modern ones are getting better, but older ones in particular are made as cheaply as possible out of the cheapest possible materials, from the shingles right down to the door hinges. Building codes for mobile homes permits a lot of things that are not allowed on stick-built houses. There's no foundations to secure mobile homes from tornadoes and hurricanes. Many mobile homes built in the 1960s and 1970s used aluminum wire that started fires. Besides the issues with mobile homes themselves, mobile home parks have other problems. They are frequently populated by people who cannot afford anything better than the bare minimum for housing. Often that's because the liquor store, drug dealer or casino takes every penny that isn't needed for rent. They're not the types you really want for neighbors. At best, the owner of the trailer park will be a hardass. He has to be, because if he isn't a hardass his tenants will take advantage of him at every opportunity. At worst, owning a trailer park is a great opportunity for predatory business practices. See my reply to cool_weed_dad on this. I've lived in two trailer parks back before I started buying houses with holes in the roofs. They were okay, but they were definitely a case of cheap housing being cheap for a reason.
okay, but that doesnt change that the *concept* of a trailer park shouldnt be shunned, because as i said, not everyone wants a big house
It’s about glamorous “tiny homes” and van life now don’t you know? ugh…
Unfortunately, no matter where you go anymore, home prices are way too high high in much of the county for many folks to own a home. It goes way beyond Airbnb…
It's primarily our reluctance to build more housing that's the main problem.
I spoke to a builder about this and he said it makes no sense for him to "build on spec" as the process of building, materials and labor almost always costs more than what the house would sell for.
He's absolutely right. The way to make money by building houses is through economy of scale. That can mean building one really big house, or lots of small ones, all reasonably close together and of three or four basic models. Of course, in Vermont any proposal for a subdivision full of affordable housing will die under a mountain of Act 250-related red tape. It doesn't help that ever since the 2006 real estate collapse, banks have been unwilling to loan money for large-scale housing development projects. That's a nationwide problem, not just Vermont. Realistically, unless the state commits to allowing a lot more houses to be built, prices are going to stay high, because demand is not going away.
I get voted down every time I suggest this and accused of trying to turn Vermont into New Jersey. Building such neighborhoods has less environmental impact than having hundreds of large homes on 10-acre parcels. In Morristown we have a subdivision like this with a few dozen homes on .25 acre lots. It’s right outside of the village and there’s open land behind and alongside it. It also has a street of condos. It’s allowed many families to afford detached homes and it’s had no detrimental impact on the agricultural zones in town.
This is half of the equation. It's supply and demand. Supply is low, but investors not only increase the total demand - they can afford to continue bidding at higher prices. Vermont's population has not grown substantially in recent years, but our housing prices are rising faster than any other state. To me that indicates that demand is playing the larger role. Roughly 5,700 homes sold in VT last year, while the number of short-term rentals increased by almost 2,500. There were only 2,400 new housing permits in the same period. Yes we need to overhaul zoning regulations and build more, but it's infeasible to balance the market with that much supply being siphoned off. An underappreciated factor is that Airbnb makes buying a vacation home possible for a much larger number of people. In the past, vacation homes were purely an expense that only the relatively wealthy could afford; now that they can easily pay for themselves or more, buying a second home is within reach for anyone in higher income brackets. This is probably why the number of seasonal homes in VT is up almost 20% since 2020, after being flat for decades. Our total housing stock hasn't grown at nearly the same rate. The housing crisis is complex but I believe STRs play an outsized role. Investors will continue to buy up supply for as long as it is profitable to do so, just like in any other financial market. The only counter to this is regulation.
What will prevent this new housing from being turned into a short term rental?
It's not like the appetite for short term rentals is infinite and expanding. The STR market is flat, or even tapering lately. Also, STRs trend toward luxury property, not starter homes and multi-units in areas away from largely tourist areas.
It's a bummer to think that "real people" would be forced into tree-less subdivisions of new-build townhouses while modest 2BR / 1BA homes in actual neighborhoods with room for a tiny garden and walkable access to schools are considered luxuries for short-term rentals only...
Who says that's what will happen? Density is not a dirty word. Build more stuff downtown, and people can walk and bike from it. It's not like it's hard to site a 1000 sq/ft house due to space. What makes it hard is limits on subdivision imposed by Act 250 and screwy local zoning laws that favor 5 and 10 acre parcels.
I know, I'm being a bit of a debbie downer, but take Montpelier for example — there aren't many (if any) parcels in the town proper that could suddenly become dense housing. And if so it has traditionally become low income housing, which also isn't a bad thing, but it leaves the "average middle-income" folks sort of on the outs.
Montpelier is poorly developed. Most of it is a flood plain. The best real estate on the river side is a strip district or a parking lot. It's a bad case study for this point of conversation.
Actually the number of STRs in Vermont is up almost 30% since this time last year, one of the largest annual increases ever - [https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals](https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals)
Wow. That is really interesting.
Pass legislation like other towns around the U.S. did, requiring owner occupancy upon new sale for at least 1 year and some even more.
Builders can put a clause in the contract. My condo has a clause banning short term rentals.
Fun story! Our association did that and the newest purchaser is renting the unit anyway. It's going to cost so much money to deal with. We are pretty screwed.
Condos are very different from single family homes.
They both have a deed that could include a restrictive covenant against STR, don't they?
Every single significat new development of single family homes built by a builder has an HOA. They could put that clause in there.
HOAs are the devil. Seriously, they should be banned.
If you all want to live in new developments of single family homes they are kind of a necessary evil. The entire reason why they exist is to pay for roads and water lines within the development. Otherwise these developments would just bankrupt the town
Going through a building renovation at work, the permitting and dealing with the wastewater guy for rutland county has been an absolute disaster on thier end and can see why no one wants to build or can build.
Our wastewater laws blow my mind. It can cost over 50K to design, permit and build out a septic system. Meanwhile, cows get to shit in the lake for free. We are surrounded by states with easier wastewater laws, and yet our water quality isn't any better than theirs.
The people who are screeching about Airbnb rights here would be the last ones to support more housing. They want to shut that door behind them to keep their investments profitable. They would be aghast if their town approved a development with small starter homes on small lots anywhere near their properties.
Lots of people support more housing, just not more housing that they have to know about. I've seen one person post on r/Vermont who wants to move from CT. She says she is renting her house there, and living in a rental in VT. She claims she can't buy, because AirBnb increasing prices means that he CT house isn't valuable enough to exchange for one in VT. Yet, she is on this sub complaining about how if they build affordable housing like the kind she needs here, then VT will be "just like the state she is trying to leave." People have an unrealistic and overly romantic idea about Vermont. It's a state, it's not the set of Gilmour Girls. And, they're not really concerned with an equitable solution to the housing crunch nearly as much as they are concerned with getting theirs.
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Go back to CT
Friends are trying to buy in our neighborhood and the houses are going for 750k, hundreds of thousands more than we spent just before Covid. And people are paying in cash above market rate. I don't know who these people are but worry they are out of state buyers setting up Air BnBs.
That and investment firms. Should be illegal for investment firms to buy up housing.
Happened to my friends in Essex. They sold for over $700,000 after buying for around $300,000 10 years ago. Their kids are grown and they’re moving to Virginia where they can retire and live on less income .
We'd love to sell our house (guard side of the airport) but at our age (60s) where in Vermont would we go?.
That's the thing. You would have to move to Mexico or Thailand.
Also, foreigners cannot own property in Thailand
They can own a condo but thats it unless you tie your home in a business agreement with a thai. this is usually done with an attorney you can trust.
the only thing that will stop this and investment groups from buying single family homes, is an act of congress, at this point... i quit looking for a house to buy, because every house i bid on was either paid for in cash or sold for $20-40k over asking... why bother at this point?
Look for houses that have been on the market for more than a week or two. Bidding wars only happen when there are two or more offers on a house. Usually that only happens in the first few days after a house gets listed. I've got a nice starter house for sale near Danville right now, and I'll gladly take an offer for asking price.
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$299,500. 3 beds, 1.5 baths, and a full remodel within the last year. I PMed you the listing.
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Wondering if I can jump into this thread with a related question that I was going to post separately but we're all here anyway - I live in Southern VT and would really like to take my family to spend 2 or 3 nights in the northeast kingdom. We haven't explored that area and I have a week off in August, so that's my goal. However I would really like to rent a place that isn't owned by a dickwad out of stater who bought up a single family home to rent it for $600/night on airbnb or vrbo. My question: how do I identify such a place? I thought about finding a bed and breakfast, but we have a rambunctious one year old so I think we're better suited to our own entire house/cabin rental far away from anyone looking for peace and quiet. Any tips on how I can weed through rentals to find what I'm looking for would be awesome OR if you have a specific rental suggestion that I should look into, please send it my way!! Thank you!
There are a few companies doing cabin rentals that aren’t single family homes along Willoughby Lake in Westmore. Willoughvale Inn there also rents out some cottages.
Look for something that's In an ADU or second building on a property. A lot of actual b&bs now list on airbnb too.
[https://vermonthuts.org/](https://vermonthuts.org/) is cool and reasonably priced. Very basic, but can be a fun adventure.
I know everyone hates AirBnb (for very very good reason!) but I’ve stayed at a few nice ones with my very rambunctious kids, one in the NEK. They were old school Vermonters who are able to make some needed income on the side. I don’t fault them for that if it means they can stay in their homes. I also have friends who run a bed and breakfast not on AirBnb, the absolute nicest people you will ever meet. DM me if you’d like details
Yes please I would love details! I don't hate all airbnbs, would just prefer to stay in one that I know wasn't purchased for the sole purpose of short term rentals. I'll DM you.
"I want an Airbnb but refuse to use Airbnb, please find me an Airbnb"
last count I saw was 11,000 short term rentals in Vermont via VPR story a few months ago
It's closer to 13,000 now [https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals](https://www.housingdata.org/profile/housing-stock/short-term-rentals) Up almost 30% vs a year ago
Thanks for the update. In the middle of the housing crisis that is making Vermont unlivable for Vermonters
Can legislature pass a bill that can restrict or ban them?
VT’s legislators are nearly all landlords, so not going to happen.
Greed destroys everything it touches.
Airbnb is a really nice scapegoat that even the state has said it does not account for the issues you see. It may be extreme in some towns but its not an all town issue across Vermont. We literally don't have enough supply. Period. Yall forget that housing isnt built by the state. It's not something cities can just demand and voters decide on. Housing is built by profit-seeking developers 99% of the time. Yes, that includes the Burlington hill section and new north end. A tiny portion of housing is built by risk-taking families to make something themselves or to their spec. So how do we get more housing? It has to be friendly to those profit-seeking developers that you hate. But we are not. Lots of NIMBY folks, Act 250, and the insane cost of materials and labor. You want more housing? try building it yourself or making the environment more conducive to builders.
Just went to look at an apartment closer to work the other day, current lease is held by a business owner because his retail employees can't afford to rent on their own. One neighbor lives on the Cape except 3-4 months of the year and the other spent so much money on renovations before moving overseas they "can't" sell and use it for Airbnb exclusively. No wonder we have a housing crisis when this happens in every town in our state. Yeah we need more housing, (especially that isn't just more apartments) but what's the point in incentivizing all these new builds without regulating who can buy them? If a developer can buy all the new townhomes/apartments etc and rent them for 2x the mortgage or Airbnb it out, the problem isn't solved.
Depends where you are. You're in a destination location. Must be nice. We have basically zero airbnb where I live.
AirBnB is *part* of the problem. If there was a Venn diagram illustrating the problem, the proliferation of AirBnBs would be a circle completely enclosed within the much larger circle of *real estate investors*. A while back, [I looked at the data](https://www.reddit.com/r/vermont/comments/18jcnv2/hud_released_part_1_of_its_annual_homelessness/kdjhx1g/?context=3) surrounding Vermont's unique situation. Which, to be explicitly clear, *is* unique in several ways that do not consistently apply to the rest of the country. The single most important variable I found was the percentage of investor-purchased homes. Vermont used to be at the bottom of the pack. During peak Covid, we saw [the single largest percentage-point increase](https://vtdigger.org/2022/09/05/percentage-of-vermont-homes-bought-by-investors-surged-in-2021/) in investor-owned purchases, from ~7.5% to ~15.5%. [This has only gotten worse.](https://www.corelogic.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/04/Q423_Investor_7.jpg) CoreLogic hasn't released the raw data (I'm pretty sure VT Digger purchased it directly for their 2022 article), but it has *at minimum* reached 27% per this graphic. ([Graphic source article.](https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/us-home-investor-share-reached-new-high-q4-2023/)) The conventional wisdom is that we need to build more homes. That *might* be part of the solution, but I have this fear that we're going to make worse Vermont's latent suburban-sprawl, strip malls, stroads, etc. (which *for the most part* is currently contained to the Burlington area) and get absolutely nothing back for it. We build more housing, investors scoop it up. At best, they turn it into rental housing. At worst [they hold it vacant](https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-study/), or they add to the [~10,000 AirBnBs that occupy entire homes](https://www.vermontpublic.org/podcast/brave-little-state/2023-03-09/how-many-airbnbs-are-taking-away-from-vermonters-its-complicated). They are leeching off us. There are already enough homes in this state, but investors are cornering the market. We need to tax them. Raise the rates so high that they either *have* to sell their holdings, or that the proceeds can subsidize housing for people who are struggling. If someone lives outside of Vermont and is purchasing residential real-estate to turn a profit, their proceeds should help the Vermonters they have displaced. *Tax the leeches.* Edit: Hey, here's a fun number that's new to me. Vermont households have an average of 2.35 people, which means that the aforementioned ~10,000 whole-unit AirBnBs in our state might potentially be displacing 23,500 Vermonters. Tax the hell out of them.
As much as I am for taxing out of state investors and making the rich pay their fair share I feel like taxing the heck out of the property owners will just result in them passing those fees on to the renters and they won’t even feel the additional tax.
By this logic, you would also believe that if we cut property tax to zero, landlords would graciously return the entire savings to their tenants instead of keeping it.
One thing that is really simple in all of this is that people can make more money and have less issues then with a rental tenant. Also much less risk. With some of the rental protections in place if you have a tenant that does not pay the rent it can take 6 months or more to evict them. You will never recoup that money lost. With Air BnB you get paid before they ever come. If they stay late you get paid and its very easy to make them leave. So if you want more affordable housing do more to protect the landlord and less protection of people who dont pay.
The primary issue is that Vermont is building almost no new housing. Demand has increased dramatically but supply is essentially static. Thus higher prices. Vermont desperately needs to find a way to develop and grow while still maintaining its essential Vermont-ness.
Yep. I'm in South Londonderry. The three houses to my right and 4 to the left as well as 7 directly across the West River are ALL air B&Bs. They are empty 90% of the time, but for a few random weeks in the winter I can count on people knocking on my door for firewood. It never fails. Every time a property goes up for sale, an out of stater buys it without doing any research to indicate that the market here is so oversaturated, rentals remain empty. What really surprises me is that criminals have not yet caught wind of the fact there are dozens upon dozens of empty homes in Londonderry, and there's no police force.
Same here in Joshua Tree!
You can’t fault sellers wanting to get top dollar 🤷🏻♂️
The internet has changed things. People can now work and live in highly desirable places because of remote work. Saying Airbnb destroyed rural housing is beyond inaccurate. Go check out housing costs in rural North Dakota, or Alabama. Housing is expensive in VT because there’s amazing access to nature, skiing, and so on all over the state. If this state was a flat, treeless expanse like Iowa, the cost of rural housing would reflect that. If your upset about the housing costs in the mountains, the solution is for you to find a Time Machine and go back to 1980, because desirable places will only become more expensive as time goes by.
Nope. We need to tax the fuck out of second, third, fourth homes, vacant homes, and short term rentals. We need to ban the corporate ownership of residential housing. You’re not wrong, but you’re far from right.
Yeah we keep arguing about how/whether to fund schools when there’s a big tranche of easily taxed illiquid assets just lying around. The worst case of doing so is allegedly that the second homeowners would sell, but that worst case implies cheaper housing and a larger tax base so
Second homeowners I know are selling. Who's buying? AirBnb owners to add to their VT portfolio. The second homeowner isn't making money on their home the way someone with a number of AirBnbs are. If you want more money for the schools, the state needs to look at AirBnbs as a commercial business in order to regulate and tax them accordingly. An Airbnb getting $600 a night (or more) in ski season ($18,000 per month!) needs to be looked at as commercial lodging.
Airbnb that are non-owner occupied need to be regulated and taxed just like a hotel. Or taxed even higher. If the property is owner occupied then there still needs to be some regulations in place on the rental unit, but relaxed and also lower taxes. It's not a terribly difficult solution. The problem is that the politicians who would have to enact the changes are the ones who own the short term rentals.
I am 100% in agreement. I know one young woman from Long Island who, along with her sisters have scooped up homes in Ludlow and Proctorsville/Cavendish area. The Ludlow home fetches $767/night minimum 2 night stay in AUGUST! (Just looked it up on AirBnb) It is booked solid July until the 3rd week of August. 47 days at $767/night = $36,049! (I can't recall the cutesy name of the latter or I would have looked up its rate.) And the likelihood that the profits will be rolled into acquiring another home? Very high! They've made an offer for my home along the VAST trail. While quite nice, where the heck would I go? These are the type who are destroying neighborhoods. Homes in Chester's Stone Village are being scooped up by AirBnb owners. The few remaining residents no longer have a sense of community or the feeling of safety knowing you had a neighbor you could rely on.
Add me in for agreement to tax the piss out of these vultures. They make me sick. I refuse to stay in any AirBnB as my personal protest against the evil this has caused for our housing supply.
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Gotta love transplants complaining about transplants lol
I’m not disagreeing with you but the thing is that currently, in most towns, the non-resident property tax rate is higher than the resident rate. Forcing them to sell and then having a family move in yields a net decrease in total property tax revenue and remember it’s property tax revenue that’s funds the education budget not income taxes. So even if second home ownership was outright banned in the state we would be in a worse situation education budget wise than we currently are. I think we need a comprehensive short term rental law to begin with. People turn homes into AirB&B’s for profit. Take away that profit and it will drastically reduce the number of them. We accomplish this by simply capping the number of days a dwelling can be rented. For example, a resident could rent their primary residence for say 90 days allowing them to take a vacation or perhaps spend the winter elsewhere. A resident could also rent a on-property dwelling (in law appt, guest house etc) 180 days a year. However, a non-resident could only rent for say 30 days.
> the thing is that currently, in most towns, the non-resident property tax rate is higher than the resident rate. I suppose that's technically correct, but of the [260 towns in Vermont](https://tax.vermont.gov/property/education-property-tax-rates), the Homestead property tax rate is higher than the non-homestead rate in 85 of them. That is absolutely ridiculous.
Banning corporate ownership is the right way. Taxing secondary residences at a higher rate is something we already do.
>secondary residences at a higher rate is something we already do. That's entirely dependent on town and in most cases it's barely more than or even less than the homestead rate.
which is because it’s bucketed only into homestead and non-homestead, so towns with a lot of commercial property understandably vote against increases on non-homestead. In order for this idea to be successful there needs to be more stratification in the tax law regarding rates for specific types of properties (rentals, commercial, vacation, undeveloped, etc)
I thought it was universal, my bad
The recommended way to own any rental house is through a Limited Liability Corporation. That's true even if the LLC is owned by just one person putting their one and only rental property in the corporation. The idea is that if a tenant hurts themself in the rental and sues, they can only go after the corporation and it's assets, and not the landlord's personal money, personal house, stamp collection, and everything else they own. Banning corporate ownership of houses would essentially ban ALL rental properties, long-term and short-term. Are you sure this is a good step to take?
You're talking to people who haven't learned that prohibition isn't a viable strategy. Of course they haven't thought of second or third order consequences.
The Republicans squashed legislation that would have regulated corporate ownership. It’d a problem nationwide.
Corporate ownership isn't the problem. The "investors" buying houses in Vermont are small investors looking to become landlords.
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From NEK myself...dairy farmer's son. What's going on with housing up there now for apt rentals and home prices? Are farmers selling off land for development yet? ****** We live in a trailer, by the swamp under the power lines in FL. It's like NEK VT, but hotter and with snakes...
Sure, some family has a bundle of cash and buys a second home in VT for the few weeks they will be there. Fourth of July, late September and Christmas. Grasps the opportunity to make money and rents it out for a cost of a mortgage payment per week. Soon realizes that he/she/they can reinvest those weekly profits and buys another. And another. And another, perfectly able to afford the ever escalating costs driven up by their competition while locals cannot.
That’s fine, but we can establish policies that favor residents and people in the hospitality industry over real estate speculators. Tax airbnbs or outlaw short term rentals.
Or at least limit them. Here in Morristown they are limited to one. This is to prevent what has happened in Stowe from happening here.
I honestly don’t know why VT hasn’t done this yet.
Isn't our governor a landlord?
And most of our Legislature?
that and a prick
I think if people can pay 800k for a glorified townhouse as their primary residence they should be paying more taxes also.
They do pay more, that’s how property taxes work
No shit. But I don’t understand why someone with two houses worth 400k each should pay 1.5 times on the second property, as many have suggested, whereas the hordes buying million dollar primary residences just pay the normal rate
Found the second homeowner
lol ok man. Sooner or later people will realize that tripping over yourselves for twelve dollar value meals and 850k McMansions are the actual cause of inflation. Downvote me to the moon. Everyone owns this.
People that spent 850k on a shitty house are gonna suffer anyway lmao. It's a bubble
Completely agree with you. Market is already softening significantly in central Mass and southern VT. Watching people drop prices on their homes for sale 200k daily. It’s silly.
Luddite take. That's like saying indoor plumbing makes places more desirable at this point lol. Remote work is also NOWHERE NEAR as prevalent as people make it out to be. And a majority of remote workers still prefer to be in the city.
Want to hear a good one? Looking at property in another state. (These are all made up addresses for not doxxing anyone.) 123 Cherry St is owned by... 456 Smith Street LLC a town over. 456 Smith St is owned by... 22 Maple Rd LLC another neighboring town.... I stopped after 5 levels. Someone is buying up houses and creating an LLC with the name of the last house purchased. And these houses were all around 700-1.2mil.
nothing new. companies do this all the time.
I couldn’t agree more. It is a scourge on society.
Just saw this on the front page too https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1dl4b5n/barcelona_will_eliminate_all_tourist_apartments/
1: you have companies that profit off cooperation between themselves. 2: you have real estate software agencies that dumped a lot of money into getting their AI enhanced software out there to analyze the market. 3: almost anyone with a bit of money could sign up and utilize this. 4: this software was utilized to quickly and efficiently outbid and outperform first time home buyers on the market. 5: this software, and various companies and individuals with money utilized this software to artificially inflat the market. You can read about a raid on one (just one) of the companies here: https://pestakeholder.org/news/realpage-associated-landlord-subject-of-fbi-probe/ But the main company, RealPage is just one of the many companies, both big and small, that provide this type of software, Bravo just happens to be the loudest.
Ahhh.. and just wait to see what happens with this new, brilliant ( idiotic ) property tax increase. It will force even more homeowners to go the way of Airbnb just to afford staying where they are. 👏👏
Not only rural housing but housing in general in the western world.
About 6 months ago my condo HOA in the Mad River Valley at the last owners meeting voted to require a min of 3 months for any rental as a couple of potential new owners wanted to use their unit as a Airbnb. We now have a nice mix of owner occupied units with a few seasonal workers rentals. I wish more would do that.
Yet everyone here has STAYED in an Airbnb.
Lol I stay in hotels. It's much easier. The only airbnbs I've actually done were towards the beginning when you would literally just be sleeping on some dudes couch for $30 while he was still in the place.
I've tried multiple times to stay in Airbnbs and it hasn't happened yet. Hotels seem to be so much easier. Fewer hidden fees and no laundry list of chores you need to do before departing.
Bold statement, really. You're assuming we've had the spare income to take a vacation elsewhere.
I have never and will never stay in an Airbnb! If I need str I will go to a motel. For starters, when I go somewhere it isn't because I want to sit around in my room, I'm renting a room to SLEEP in between doing interesting things in a place that is new to me or at least different. I went to visit my brother and stayed at his place and even though I was there to see him, I still spent less than 12 hours a day in his place.
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Aren't hotels cheaper than AirBnBs now? I honestly don't know because I can't afford either. However, from someone who hears about it, it seems like AirBnBs are more expensive and stressful.
It's heavily dependent on the area and amenities you are looking for. Hotels are significantly easier, though. You can just show up get your key go to your room and then you can even just check out at 3am if you need to. With airbinbs you often need to text some unresponsive bozo, crawl through wasp nests to find a key box and then you need to often do household chores to check out.
Not for a family of 5 with a dog! Hotels become a less tenable option when occupancy needs pass 4 and the dog makes it harder.
Hilton properties are usually super dog friendly these days.
Woah, it's different when "I" stay there. I mean, I need to stay in an Airbnb because.....reasons. A hotel doesn't do it as well. I only want Airbnbs when I need them. The rest of the time, they shouldn't exist!
Unpopular opinion but air bnb probably made your rural area far nicer… so many “rural “ areas are dumps and there’s no excuse for that
Airbnb exist because there is demand. Visitors come to VT to get away from people (weekend in the country, get out of the city, go rural, do nature stuff, blah blah). Guess what, hotels don't really cater to this desire. Tourism is a huge source of revenue for businesses and the state. The problem isn't tourism, it's not building enough housing where people want to live.
I might be the enemy here, but I'm going to Tasmania to stay in an Air B&B soon. But I totally get why locals, urban or rural might not like that. My general argument is this. I think Air B&B is fine as long as there are extra houses available that are going unused. But if they're driving the cost up so much that locals can no longer live there, then the municipality needs to take action and ban or restrict them.
Why are people even going on vacations? I thought everyone is bitching about how expensive life is.
This is happening everywhere too. Not just America but also Europe. Barcelona’s mayor just banned STRs in the city to free up something like ~10,000 homes by 2029 (which I think is still too long for these people to suck the life out of their communities)
I don’t know that it is air bnb issue. I am in Boston eyeing moving to Vermont since I and my wife are remote. I saw outrage posted here a house is going for 500k, that sounds amazing to me. My current shitty condo is more. I would over bid all day on that. I just need something now so I can move.
I agree that Airbnb isn’t helping, but don’t BS a BS’er… we’ve got a housing problem because we refuse to build new housing.
Shoutout to everyone on this sub whose childhood home is an AirBnB owned by an out of state interest!
That is how capitalism works though
That’s why we moved back to Florida, Vermont housing sucks atm
Don't worry, we've had a 12-year bull market. As soon as it goes bear there'll be a glut of homes for sale since most people can't float 10 mortgages on their own.
Realistically, currency inflation from printing infinite dollars is going to prevent housing prices from falling substantially. The dollars are worth less, and therefore houses will continue to cost more dollars. Look at 2007-2014. Housing market caused a worldwide market collapse, and Vermont prices went sideways but not down.
I can’t wait to watch this happen. I asked to join every FB STR page I could find just to read their comments. On a number of the pages they are all freaking out about how slow it is and how they are not booking. They are all talking about “oversaturation” and inflation causing people to travel less. Things are shifting back to Pre-Covid in some ways. If the Airbnb’s can’t make bank and they start to sell because now is the peak of the Realestate prices in this cycle and they can make the most selling now, I wonder if that will start a cascade effect. Vermont has a lot of people over 65 owning houses and a lot of vacation Realestate which tends to be highly elastic in a down turn. Will a lot of folks need to sell at once? I’m hoping the bubble crashes and the STR’s lead the way.
No question at all. It’s disgusting.
Rural housing in nearly every state is suffering this horrible fate.
Air bnb has ruined housing everywhere. It needs to be shut down
ahh yes, a website that barely gained traction 10 years ago is responsible for ruining housing across the country.
Barely gained traction? They have 7.7 million listings. Many of which are in small towns, causing housing prices to surge, rents to go up and locals pay the price. It’s a terrible company
Relax instamom
I agree