By Sam Kmack | Arizona Republic
Vast majority of short-term rentals in southern Scottsdale
About 70% of short-term rentals in Scottsdale are “disproportionately concentrated” in 16 southernmost square miles of the city, near the Old Town area south of Indian Bend.
Scottsdale’s short-term rentals are on track to produce 60% more nuisance party calls to police and 46% more code violations this year than in 2022, according to new city data.
Despite those figures, they may indicate significant progress for the city.
Short-term rentals are typically houses where visitors book stays for less than 30 days using online services, such as Airbnb or Vrbo. The most recent figures from October show there are about 4,100 of them in Scottsdale.
City officials have pushed back against the proliferation of the industry for years. They contend short-term rentals have become a hotbed for loud parties that disrupt quiet neighborhoods and have played a role in making Scottsdale’s housing market the least affordable in the Valley.
But local governments were prohibited from restricting the industry until last year, when state lawmakers gave cities “limited” regulatory control, mainly by allowing cities to mandate short-term rental operating permits that can be temporarily suspended if violations occur.
Scottsdale was “flying blind” when it started trying to track and regulate the rentals in July 2022, Councilmember Solange Whitehead said. Staffers weren’t sure how many existed in Scottsdale, let alone where they were or how the city could crack down on violations.
But that’s changed dramatically over the past year. Scottsdale rolled out a robust system for residents to submit complaints about the rentals. It collected a massive amount of information on everything from how many people book Scottsdale short-term rentals each year to how the businesses are distributed within the community.
The effort allowed city staffers to cite nearly 2,500 properties for permit violations in the first few months of 2023, a 90% uptick in code enforcement cases related to short-term rentals when compared to the first three months of 2022.
That number of violations dropped back down below 300 for the next six months of 2023 because many permit dodgers “were captured in the initial proactive enforcement effort,” said Assistant City Manager Brent Stockwell, whose team has gotten more than 80% of Scottsdale’s short-term rentals licensed.
That information is why short-term rental nuisance party calls spiked, from 552 in 2022 to an estimated 883 by the end of this year, according to Scottsdale Police Commander Jeromie O’Meara. He contends the trend began because officers now know where the short-term rentals are and who owns them, not because the properties have gotten more rowdy.
City call-for-service data bears that out. While short-term rental nuisance calls are slated to surge by 60% this year, citywide those calls only increased by 5%, suggesting many of those calls just would not have been flagged as being related to short-term rentals in the past.
“What I again attribute this to is the licensing program … It has made it significantly easier on the enforcement side to identify the properties that are operating as short-term rentals, and to have that information available to us in terms of who was the owner,” O’Meara said. “That has been a huge asset for the police department to be able to use in our investigations.”
The Arizona Republic broke down five of the findings in Scottsdale’s data that help give shape to the city’s current short-term rental environment.
Scottsdale’s short-term rental industry grew 10% in 2023
It’s tricky to pinpoint the exact number of active short-term rentals that exist in the city. Some may go on the rental market one day and be pulled off the next, which is why Stockwell called it a “moving target.”
Scottsdale partnered with a company called Rentalscape, a group that tracks active short-term rentals for local governments across the country, to get monthly totals that are as accurate as possible. The most recent data ends October 2023.
That data shows the number of short-term rentals in Scottsdale was “rising steadily” this year until it hit its peak of about 4,400 in March. It’s been on the decline each month since then and now sits at around 4,100, which is roughly 340 more properties than were active last October.
But it’s not yet clear what trend will have staying power because of how often the total fluctuates, Stockwell said.
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