Summit County has not formulated policies at this point to deal with short-term rentals. The county’s director of economic development, Jeff Jones, said they’re still getting their arms around the topic.
In a recent interview with KPCW, Jeff Jones said that the county, in partnership with Park City and the Chamber/Bureau, is trying to get some numbers on how many short-term rentals they have, and whether they have a business license.
“We want to make sure that those are also safe,” Jones continued. “That we don’t have something where people don't have fire extinguishers and meet basic fire codes for those types of uses. Last Friday I took my first training on the host compliance software platform and we have some preliminary numbers that were released on how many short-term rentals they’ve been able to identify. In this particular software application, they use reviews in order to sort of grind down the data and locate those. We have I think it's Summit County I'm just kind of spit balling the numbers here, but I think was about 430 that are licensed and then through the preliminary sweep we were able to identify another 400 that are not licensed.”
Jones said they’re sending letters to rental operations they discover, telling them they need to get in touch with the county to be in compliance.
Jones had some other notes on housing. In league with the Mountainlands Housing Trust, the county is buying back some units in Bear Hollow Village that were planned to be affordable. He said their history goes back almost a dozen years.
“When those units were first set apart as affordable workforce units that was very early I think it was like 2005, 2006ish somewhere in that time frame,” Jones said. The deed restrictions that were prepared for those they weren't nearly as articulated as the ones that we put in place today. For example, having an owner be required to occupy the property. A restriction on nightly rentals. So, many of those properties have not been really serving the community the way in which they were intended to.”
He said they are using some of their in-lieu housing fees to make the purchase.
“We will sometimes buy down the units a little bit because even with the cap 3% appreciation a lot of times that still is pushed up above the 80% AMI target that we're trying to hit. So, buy those down put new deed restrictions on and then put those back out for sale. So Mountlands has completed one of those, we've completed one, we both have another one under contract and we should be closing on those towards the end of the month,” Jones explained how many there are in total. “There are probably between as targets between 40 and 60. Now we won't have the dollars to go that far into it, but we're going to see if we can probably do between five and eight of these.”
