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Hello again, and welcome to the Bend Real Estate Minute!  I am Thom Gardner, Bend Oregon real estate buyers’ broker at Bend Brokers Realty. You can find me at BendBrokersRealty.com, call me at 541-480-7554, or email me at Thom—that’s T-H-O-M—@BendBrokersRealty.com.  This video is How to buy Bend Oregon vacation rentals.

One of the biggest questions I get every year and especially in the summertime when people are here recreating, and tourists are having a great time in Bend, I get all these last minute calls—I probably get 10 a year—saying, “Hey, can you come meet us for a beer and talk about something?” And I say, “Sure!”  I’m always up for going out for a drink. If you want to take me out for a drink on your dime, call me!

So I go and meet folks, and the question is often the same.  “We want know how to buy Bend Oregon vacation rentals?” It sounds like a great business idea… and it is! It’s just unfortunately not an original one.

Bend Oregon vacation rentals have become very saturated over the years. In 2012, the city of Bend passed a law saying that, for one thing, they had to be 300 ft. apart because they were ruining neighborhoods. You want to live in a nice, quiet neighborhood, and you’ve got people coming and partying for the weekend, leaving trash and parking up the street, et cetera, and suddenly Bend Oregon’s West side is not so good as a permanent place to live.

So, they passed that rule. Now there are very heavy fees. You have to pay a hotel tax on vacation rentals in the city of Bend. They have code enforcement people looking at VRBO and AirBnB all the time and fining people—and the fines are pretty hefty. And there’s a $2,000 application fee.

So, because of that, if you’re looking for Bend Oregon vacation rentals on the west side, they’re very saturated, very hard to get, almost impossible to get a permit. You’ll find there is an eligibility map (I put a link up here on the video). It will show you either red or yellow for a certain address. You type in a certain address, and it will show you on the map. You can see a red or yellow box. Red means it’s not eligible.  Yellow means it might be eligible. Usually, there’ll be two or three yellows together. What it means is, “Hey, your neighbor might have already applied for that permit. It just hasn’t gone through yet.”

But don’t get seduced by a yellow box either. My house is one of the few on the West Side of Bend that have a yellow box. Wonderful, right? No, my neighborhood forbids vacation rentals; so do many others here in town. So, that’s a very difficult nut to crack.

Vacation rentals are an easier game if you want to buy some property along the river or something that has some really great attraction for a tourist outside of the city limits because there, there are no rules. But in the city of Bend, very hard.

And you can occasionally by one that already has a permit attached. Bend Oregon vacation rentals that existed prior to 2012 were grandfathered in. And some of those homes have transferable permits—many don’t, many you have to reapply for. Usually, you’ll get it, but not if your neighbor beats you.

So, those go for a premium. Here’s an example. A few streets over from me on Awbrey Road, the average price on that road is probably about $600,000. An average home there a couple of months ago went for nearly $1.1 million. We’re talking the same house as the $600,000 house next door. It went for almost $1.1 million because it was one of Bend Oregon’s vacation rentals with a transferable short-term permit.

There you go! There’s a big premium in those simply because there’s big money in those. I had people last year—several of them actually—come and say, “Hey, we’ve got about $250,000 or $300,000 to spend. We’d like to buy a Bend Oregon vacation rental!”

No, I’m sorry. Them’s the breaks. That’s the situation. I’m going to put the link up for the short-term Bend Oregon vacation rentals eligibility map on the video. And if you have questions, hey, I can help you! Thom Gardner, Bend Brokers Realty, BendBrokersRealty.com, 541-480-7554 or 1-800-GO4BEND or Thom—T-H-O-M—@BendBrokersRealty.com.

See you on the next one!