Burt Gulnick, Ulster County’s Commissioner of Finance, said that he’s not heard of any specific properties registering as Airbnb or VRBO rentals so they can pay the county’s Occupancy Tax, reinstated in 2010. And he couldn’t look up any figures, given the laws.
“I’m sure Tourism and the Health department are aware of this,” he said. “All I can say for certain is that the Occupancy Tax has been rising since it was reintroduced, with a peak last year and the fourth quarter looking ok, if a little down, for 2014.”
“Just getting whispers about it all,” added county Comptroller Elliott Auerbach.
Woodstock supervisor Jeremy Wilber said it was a subject he didn’t know much about, and the town’s building department refused to talk about it, or any inspections that might be tied to such rentals. Similarly, the county commissioner for tourism said he couldn’t talk about anything without permission from County Executive Michael Hein, whose office, like that of the county health commissioner, never returned calls in time for this story.
$50 To $1000
But veteran building inspection professor Paul Andreassen, former building inspector for Saugerties, Ulster, New Paltz and Woodstock, and a member of the county planning board, did address local laws concerning short-term rentals. “What you’re dealing with here are normally one family homes, and code is quite silent on use of such buildings,” he said. “I grew up in a family with 11 children; it’s not easy to regulate the number of people in a house, or the nature of their relationships.”
As for local zoning restrictions, Andreassen said that he had seen much addressed to the outdoors of structures, or the manner of review and permitting for accessory apartments. Yet nothing preventing rentals of any sort, excepting in regards to multi-unit dwellings.
“Rooming houses and apartment buildings are a different thing altogether,” he said. “In the village of New Paltz, for example, there’s a landlord registration process they’re pretty strict about, and the same in the Town of Ulster wherever there are four or more units.”
In the Village of New Paltz, building inspector Holly Esposito said she’d heard of such rentals but not yet come across them; most of her time was spent with student housing and its own inspection needs.
Realtors we spoke to said they didn’t deal much with the Airbnb/VRBO phenomenon other than that many home hunters used them while looking for their own places to buy, and considered the option a means of sometimes affording a bit more than they may have originally been looking for.
A search through what’s available in our local communities reveals rentals ranging from $50 dorm-like rooms in Hudson to $1000 a night homes in Kingston, Stone Ridge and Woodstock. The lures used to attract renters are many, and the mini-pictures of who’s renting show’s a who’s who of each community. Friends we know in Woodstock live in Rhinebeck for long stretches of time because the money works out when they let their “streamside country idyll with pool” go for big sums each weekend.
Travelers can be lured to town by such attractions as “Magical Chalet w/spectacular views;” “Sioux Tipi on the Waterfall;” or “Architectural Zen Oasis…”
And our own experience doing it with our own guest rooms over recent years, as well as our rental apartment’s tenant’s 25 percent kickbacks as she traveled over the past summer, fully demonstrated the “easy money” aspects of Airbnb.
Quick and professional
How does it work? You sign up online, making images and descriptions of your place available. It helps to get a good head shot; we include the whole family, including my 8 year old son. Then you get queries, via the central website, at the price you’ve asked. The query includes pictures and information on the would-be renter, including reviews of their past stays. All personal phone or email details are scrubbed by the central office, and you get chided, downgraded, and even penalized if you don’t answer in a quick and professional manner.
I stopped doing Airbnb because I got sick of making beds and restocking our mini-apartments fridge and toiletries every weekend, and sometimes several times during a week. But it was nice getting direct deposit of our funds, minus an Airbnb pittance for administration, and having tax information provided at year’s end for simple filing to the state and feds. Now we use those extra rooms, when we can, as a mini artist’s retreat for city writers looking for two to three month getaways. And we asked our regular tenant to cool her own Airbnb rentals for a while, given that we started to feel a bit crowded out in our own home.
Nevertheless, we use it, and its totally free cousin Homeexchange.com (not counting an annual fee) whenever we travel…because we have learned to trust the system. The reviews work and it proves to be a fun way to travel.
How is the phenomenon affecting our communities here in the Catskills and Hudson Valley? Look around any weekend and you can now get a sense of where many of those new faces are staying, and getting a sense of what it’s like here before plunking down for long term rentals, or even local home purchases.
“My big picture sense of it all? I like to see reasons for keeping places fixed up. It gets something going,” said Andreassen, who pointed out how his own community of Malden, just north of the Village of Saugerties, filled with visitors to HITS renting local homes each summer. “A man’s home is his castle…”
But also his rental, when push comes to shove.
Maybe my next vacation will be truly local. I’m curious about some of the mansions I’ve seen, and now have a legal means of checking out how the neighbors actually live.
