Short term rentals in Summit County. It’s complicated. And controversial.

I have this conversation almost daily with clients and potential clients.

Here’s the silver lining: if you want to own a property that can be short term rented, you need to purchase in Keystone, Copper Mountain, Dillon or within two zones in Breckenridge.

Frisco has limits, which are being reached quickly, and Silverthorne is going to be implementing caps which will make renting in much of the town very difficult. And remember, you do need to distinguish between actual town limits and Summit County unincorporated areas which will be without STR licenses for many years if the BOCC passes their proposed rules.

For an up to date report of STR’s in Summit County, check out our document of resources and news articles.

Wait Time for Summit County STR Licenses Under BOCC Proposed Rules

I submitted the following letter to the editor to the Summit Daily News on January 3, 2023. We shall see if it gets published.

In November 2022, I completed an in-depth analysis of the wait times for obtaining STR licenses in Summit County’s unincorporated neighborhood zones with the BOCC’s proposed caps in each basin. The wait times for the first new STR license are approximately:

• Lower Blue Basin (Wildernest and Silverthorne) – 5.75 years
• Snake River Basin (Dillon Valley and Summit Cove) – 11.8 years
• Ten Mile Basin (Frisco) – 18.1 years
• Upper Blue Basin – (Breckenridge Area) – 4.4 years

On Wednesday, November 23, 2022, I sent my analysis to the Board of County Commissioners and Summit County staff member Jessica Potter. I offered to be a resource and give them notice before I went public with the information in case they didn’t know the lengthy wait times and disparity of wait times in each basin. I received no response and still have not. On November 30 I published the article on my website and social media. On December 1, 2022 shared it with the local real estate community. My colleagues were shocked and some re-shared the information with BOCC members for whom they had personal relationships. Still no response. On December 5, I sent the same analysis to Eili Wright at the Summit Daily News and still have received no response. I now feel like I have no choice but to write this letter to the editor to bring awareness to the community since our leaders and media are not being transparent about what the BOCC STR license caps will mean in practice. Is this what the BOCC actually wants? I don’t know – they didn’t respond. Also, SDN is no longer publishing letters to the editor as individual articles on the Facebook page, so the dialogue of the community has been shut down.

–Amy Nakos

Nationally

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a slow down in rental income for AirBNB hosts. Turns out, there aren’t less rental bookings, but more AirBNB units. See the article here.