After much study, debate and money spent, the town of Telluride town council looks to be trending towards allowing the 2 year moratorium on STR (short term rental license) licenses to sunset with the 2 year expiration date of November 21, 2023.
For a quick remember, there was a contingent of people in town who felt that short term rentals were hurting the availability and number of long term rental options for the local work force. At face value, this didn’t seem overly plausible, but as one would expect, in the height of the pandemic the town placed a moratorium on issuing STRs for two years to noodle on the subject.
After spending money to pay professionals to study the effect of this moratorium, the numbers were crystal clear that STRs really have no effect on long term rentals and matter of fact the moratorium was hurtful to the town of Telluride in numerous ways, one being overall rental numbers and another being real estate sales and income generated from those sales.
The real issue at hand is that past councils and P & Z really did the damage by not being friendly to hotel developers the last 30+- years who desired to develop hotels on raw land that was zoned for such usage. By making the world so difficult for developers and denying approvals, town has been grossly lacking hotel hot beds for guest visitors, which proved to be a springboard for condo, town home and single family homeowners to rent their properties when not using for personal enjoyment and in doing so make a solid return on their real estate investment while also offering lodging options to guests.
Sounds pretty fair market and capitalistic to me. In the end, the results of the study proved all of the pro- moratorium crowd wrong and with really no leg to stand on denying STR licenses to property owners who desire them.
With that, the town council then went through all kinds of exercises debating how many rental nights should be allowed, what areas of town could have rentals and if so how many nights, etc., which resulted in nothing concrete.
In the end, like many governmental and legislative entities they decided to simply raise rates and fees for STR licenses. New rates will be the highest in ski country, with an average of $850+- per bedroom annual renewal rate, not to mention other miscellaneous fees.