We examine the new rules Clark County has passed regulating short-term rentals.
SEASON 5: EPISODE 1 | Airdate: 7/15/2022
For several years, Clark County banned short-term rental properties in its unincorporated areas, but last year the Nevada State Legislature passed a law that required the county to start regulating the popular industry.
Cities within the county, like Henderson and Las Vegas, had already regulated short-term rentals over the past few years.
The Clark County Commission recently approved an ordinance with new rules for short-term rentals available on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO.
One of those rules aims to dramatically decrease the number of short-term rental properties in the county. It caps the number of properties that can be licensed as short-term rentals at 1 percent.
According to the county, that equates to about 2,850 properties which is far below the 6,000 to 12,000 properties that the county currently believes are operating. The licenses will be given out in a lottery that starts taking applications in September.
Short-term rental owner Victor Paulo is concerned about his chances of getting a license. He has four rental properties right now. Two are in unincorporated Clark County.
He said that he employees between 16 and 18 people to maintain, clean and landscape the properties, and if he doesn’t get a license, those people will also lose their jobs.
Paulo may move his business to an area that is friendlier to short-term rentals like Florida or Mexico if doesn’t win a license in the lottery. He may also turn the properties he has into long-term rentals, which are not as profitable.
The Greater Las Vegas Short-Term Rental Association is not happy about the new ordinance. Co-founder of the group, Jackie Flores, told Nevada Week that the county didn’t listen to the input of the short-term rental owners when it was creating the ordinance. She believes much of what is in the ordinance has “no rhyme or reason.”
Beth Blackwood is with the group Nevadans for the Common Good. Her group supported efforts to regulate the industry. She said during the listening sessions her group conducted people complained of two main problems with short-term rentals. One was the community situations that arose on weekends like people throwing loud parties in a home. The second problem is that when homes or apartments are turned into short-term rentals they are no longer available for long-term renters or buyers who are part of the community.
She said it is a lucrative business that takes housing stock off the market, making the affordable housing problem worse.
Flores disagrees that short-term rentals are contributing to the affordable housing problems. She said most of the short-term rentals are not in affordable neighborhoods to begin with and she said if all the short-term rentals suddenly went away it wouldn’t mean there would be an influx of affordable housing units in Southern Nevada.
She also took issue with the idea that short-term rentals were “party houses.” She said the vast majority of short-term rentals did not cause any issues. She noted that rules against nuisance noise and other problems are already on county books but code enforcement is not enforcing them. She agreed that if homes are being used for parties and large events they should be stopped, but she believes that instead of going after those problems, code enforcement and police are playing “whack a mole” with properties owners that aren’t causing issues.
Blackwood admitted that not all short-term rentals are party houses and that many are used for a weekend or a few weeks with no problem. However, she noted that the new ordinance further strengthens those efforts by putting a limit on the number of guests allowed in a home.
She is also pleased that ordinance limits the number units in multi-family housing that can be turned into short-term rentals. It means that blocks of apartments and condominiums cannot be converted into short-term rentals.
Flores and her group are also not happy with the lottery system. She said they advocated for having all the operators be allowed to apply for a license. She said platforms like Airbnb already have a built in system to see who is a good operator because guests can rate their stay. She said with the lottery system bad hosts can still get a license.
Blackwood said the lottery system gives everyone a fair shot at a license and she noted that platforms now have to remove houses that aren’t licensed, which will help weed out bad actors. She also said that her group is not against mom-and-pop operators who rent out a room for a little extra money, but they don’t like corporations coming into neighborhoods to buy up properties and turning them all into short-term rentals.
Both did agreed that the county will struggle with enforcement of the new ordinance. Flores said when the more than 2,800 short-term rentals are chosen by the lottery system it does not mean the others who didn’t get picked will shut down.
