Complete Guide to Short Term Rental Regulations in Summit County

Thinking about investing in a short-term rental (STR) in Summit County, Colorado? Candice De and Amy Nakos break down everything you need to know about STR regulations in this must-watch video! 

⏳ One of the most common questions we get is: 

"Can I short-term rental up there?" – and the answer isn’t always straightforward. 

📍 In this video, we cover: 

✅ The 7 jurisdictions that govern STRs in Summit County 

✅ Their specific rules & regulations 

✅ How likely you are to get a short-term rental license in each area 

✅ Maps & helpful links for further research 

🏡 Whether you're looking at Breckenridge, Frisco, Dillon, Silverthorne, Keystone, Blue River, or unincorporated Summit County, we've got you covered! 

📌 Get expert insights, avoid costly mistakes, and make informed real estate decisions! 

📩 Contact us for more info! 

📞 Call/Text: 303-870-9300 

📧 Email: candice@candicede.com 

💻 Website: amynakos.com 

🔔 Don't forget to LIKE, COMMENT & SUBSCRIBE for more Summit County real estate insights! 🚀 #SummitCountySTR #ShortTermRentals #BreckenridgeRealEstate #InvestmentProperties 

Transcript

Welcome to Mountain Real Estate, where we bring you the latest insights on real estate from Denver to Summit County, Colorado. I'm your host, Candice De, a realtor, investor, engineer, mom, and Colorado native. 

All right, welcome today. We have myself, Candice De and Amy Nakos here to talk about short-term rentals, which is something that's been a little bit quieter over the last year or so. It's not quiet, it's just quieter than what we were hearing about, but that doesn't mean that rules aren't still changing and people aren't still trying to figure out what's going on. 

So we in our office have... had a lot of clients call and say, can I short-term rent? Or which properties can I short-term rent? And while we want that to be an easy answer, we've learned it's not an easy answer.  Amy, do you wanna talk about kind of the approach we've taken and what we're gonna go through today? 

Absolutely.  we get asked this question often, I want to buy a property that I can short-term rent. Which ones can I short-term rent? Well, Our MLS doesn't have a way of separating what can be rented short-term versus what can't.  We also are subject to seven different jurisdictions, and they all have different rules.  What we did is we created this document, which we think is going to be very valuable for you. We're going to talk through it today, but it is the analysis that we go through when it's time for us to see, can this property be short-term rented or not? And it also explains the entire landscape of the county and our short-term rental regulations.  We're going to share the document with you and Candice and I are just going to talk through it and hopefully this is going to be a great resource for anybody out there looking for information on Summit County short-term rentals. 

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for the intro.  I'll kind of give an overview lay of the land and then we'll talk through each jurisdiction.  Like Amy said, there are seven different jurisdictions. We'd like to say, well, if you're in this area, here's what you're subject to, but it's not that straightforward.  We have unincorporated Summit County, and then we have our six different towns.  We have Silverthorne, Dillon, Keystone, Frisco, Breckenridge, and Blue River.  In this screen, you can see the pink areas that reflect the towns. But the tricky part is those pink areas don't necessarily cover all of the town as you would imagine.  We'll talk through each one, but you can see within each of them there are parts of the town that are governed by the town and there are parts that are governed by unincorporated summit county which has different short-term rental rules.  

We'll start with the county and I'll start here and then Amy feel free to jump in, but unincorporated Summit County probably has the most strict rules. And it's also the hardest to figure out if you're in unincorporated Summit County.  It's broken out into these four basins.  We have Lower Blue, Upper Blue, Snake River, and Ten Mile. And then each of the basins has its own cap. One of the things that was laid out back in 2022 was the cap limits. They were all over the cap. And so they said, we're not gonna do any sort of rules or regulations around short-term rentals other than you cannot get a type one license which is if you want a short term rent and it's not your primary residence.  There still are exceptions if it's your primary residence and you have a separate unit or room that you're trying to short term rent. But in general, we have not seen new licenses for short term rentals in unincorporated Summit County in the last couple of years. Lower blue is under the cap and upper blue is within 10% of the cap.  The county is now coming up with a process for how to get a short-term rental license. We're supposed to hear about that in March. We're recording this in early February of 2025.  More to come on that. But really, it's been kind of a full stop lately. And now we have an opportunity to start introducing the potential for new short-term rental licenses. 

Let's just keep moving. Okay.  Within this document, we have a bunch of links because obviously these maps are very big and it's much easier to zoom in and out. One thing that I didn't mention is that we have neighborhood zones, which is most of these areas. And then we have resort overlay zones.  Copper Mountain, for example, is in unincorporated Summit County and you can get short-term rental licenses in those resort zones. We'll talk through some of the other areas that are more specific. All right, Amy, you want to cover Breck? Let's talk about Breckenridge.  Just to recap, one of the first things you do is when you're looking at a property, you determine, am I in a town or not? If you determine that you're not in a town, then the rules that we just discussed apply. You are an unincorporated summit county. 

If you are in a town, we're going to start to talk about the town rules. The first town we're going to talk about is Breckenridge.  Just because you're in the town limits of Breckenridge doesn't mean you can necessarily get a license. Breckenridge split their town into four zones. As you can see here, most of it's blue, but the resort zone, which is yellow on this map, there is no cap on STR licenses. Anybody who owns a property within these zones can get a short-term rental license. Zone 1, also very generous in the short-term rental licenses, there is a cap, I think it's a 90% cap. 1,680 properties is the total cap, but we're only at 1,216, so there's plenty of licenses there. If you're in zone 2 or zone 3, there are less licenses available with the cap. Now, we don't have the percentage cap on here, we just have the number. But in zone two, the cap is 130. And we're currently at 134. We're only four over. That's more the historic district that you can see in Breckenridge.  We may have some licenses becoming available there relatively soon. If you are in zone three, the cap is 309. And we're currently at 1,109. The time frame for you to get a short-term rental license is some people are predicting 30 years. I don't actually know. But it's going to be a very long time for that attrition to happen. There is a map, an interactive map on the Breckenridge website, where you can put in an address and actually be able to see what zone that property falls in.  If you are looking in Breckenridge in town and you want to understand if the property can get a short-term rental license, we do have the links on this document that will take you to their website to determine if you can get a license or not, along with the rest of their rules. Am I missing anything there, Candice? I think you have it covered. I just want to highlight again, like in this map where you have like this blue area, that's zone three, hard to get a license. But right across the street in your neighborhood is unincorporated Summit County.  This is why when people reach out and say, am I in a short term zone, am I in a zone that can get a short term rental license? We have to really understand the address, like you were saying and look up specific areas. This is just the first example of how they interplay between the towns and the county. Yep. All right. 

And then I'll start with Dillon and then Amy, maybe you can talk about the other side of the highway.  Town of Dillon is actually quite friendly to short-term rentals. There's some occupancy requirements, but right now you can get a short-term rental license for a new property in Dillon. And really in this map, it's the pink area that you can see.  A lot of our lakefront properties.can be short-term rented. But Dillon is a little bit of a unique animal.  similar to Breck, there are some areas that are unincorporated, Summit County.  Amy, you wanna talk about those? Yeah, I'd be happy to.  When people think about Dillon, there's a geographic area in their mind that they think is Dillon, but it might not necessarily be Dillon.  The town of Dillon actually includes the central core town along the lake. But once you cross the highway, the area called Dillon Valley, highlight here is unincorporated Summit County. It is a neighborhood zone. It falls within the Snake River Basin. And so there's no licenses available in this neighborhood. This neighborhood includes all of the Dillon Valley East and Dillon Valley West condos, which are some good entry level condos. We have people asking us often if they can purchase one of those and put them in a short-term rental pool. The answer is there's no new licenses for that.  

Once ownership changes, you cannot get a short-term rental license. And I think I'll bring that up now real quick. Short-term rental licenses are not grandfathered in and they are not transferable. Once a property changes hands, the short-term rental license that exists is gone and a new one must be applied for.  because you're maybe purchasing a short-term rental, this is true everywhere in the entire county. that short-term rental license will not transfer if there is a sale of the property.  

Again, Dillon, in our MLS area, if we are to run a search in Dillon, the Dillon Valley units will show up as in Dillon, but they're not in the town of Dillon for short-term rental licensing purposes. Yeah. Well said. And I think Summit Cove is another one that's kind of in this basin and subject to the same neighborhood zone unincorporated Summit County cannot get a short-term rental license.  That's true. It's not on this map, but again, in our MLS, Dillon and Summit Cove are combined in a search area. They're considered the same geographic area.  It'll have a Dillon zip code, it'll have a Dillon address, but it is not town of Dillon.  Yes, Dillon Valley, Summit Cove, are Summit County unincorporated neighborhood zones. Not Town of Dillon rules. Yeah. One other thing that I want to mention here and applies across all the towns is that certain HOAs also have restrictions or limitations, and we'll touch a little bit more on that in other specific areas, but it's definitely relevant in Dillon and Breckenridge as well. All right, I think we covered Summit Cove and Dillon Valley. 

Now Frisco. You want to take this one, Amy? I'll talk about Frisco. Yeah, I think what you need to notice here in Frisco is if it's pink, it's in the town of Frisco, you're going to see some green patches. And those green areas are, you got it, Summit County unincorporated neighborhood zones that are within the geographic area. of Frisco but are not in the town of Frisco. This is in the 10-mile basin.  you are subject to the Summit County unincorporated neighborhood zone 10-mile basin. There are no licenses available here. In Frisco, the town of Frisco within the pink limits, short-term rentals are restricted to 25% of the total amount of properties in the town. That's about 900 licenses right now, or it's at 900 licenses. There is currently a wait list.  All 900 licenses have been taken, and we estimate the wait list to be between about six to nine months.  It's not very long. It's not like a neighborhood, or it's not like a zone three in Breckenridge, where you will not be able to get a license immediately. You're going to get on a list. They have a list. It goes in chronological order from the time that you applied. And as a license becomes available, as a property sells or as somebody gives up their license, that license is very quickly given to a new owner. That is not the case in Summit County. Yes.  Frisco, I think, is one of the places where there's some clear expectations, even if you can't get a license right now.  There's some areas where you can certainly get a license right now. Frisco, you can't get it right now, but there's at least some hope for the future. versus some of the other areas where there's very little hope for the near term anyway. One other thing to note is that Frisco, the cap currently is at 25%, like you said, Amy, and there are some workforce housing projects planned that would bring in several, a significant increase in our housing stock.  There might be some fluctuation. I think they said last year, the short-term rental housing stock went up by like six, so our short-term rental licenses went up by like one and a half allowed.  There is some flexibility at that 25% based on our housing stock. There's not a lot of room to develop, but there are some workforce housing developments that are high density that might change that number, but we don't see that necessarily changing the six to nine month wait list at this point. And I don't know whether they're gonna apply workforce housing to the total number either. Like I don't know the policy on that. Yeah, good point. Yeah. All right. 

Take it away. I'll start. I'll start with Keystone.  Keystone recently is the state's newest town. I think it still is. Keystone was part of unincorporated Summit County before, and then they incorporated into their own town.  It was part of Resort Zone previously.  You were able to get short term rental licenses. The town of Keystone has basically said, we're still trying to figure this out. We're still working with Summit County. You can still get short-term rental licenses. We're kind of still applying those same regulations that were there before because they're trying to figure out everything like taxes and how to run a town and government.  They basically grandfathered this in. But one of the things to note in Keystone is that there are areas where HOAs are restricting short-term rentals and they have for a long time. Even though it's a new town, time will tell what the overall governance is, but there are certain areas and complexes where short-term rentals are restricted. And the big one to note is Keystone Ranch, which is kind of tucked back, but is part of our Keystone area. And they do restrict short-term rentals. I do want to clarify that, though. There's a number of subdivisions in Keystone Ranch and not every single subdivision restricts short-term rentals, but a few of them do.  If you are interested in Keystone Ranch, you have to dive into that separately. Yes. Well said. All right. 

Now we'll jump to Silverthorne. You wanna take this one, Amy? Yeah, so Silverthorne, the town of Silverthorne put some caps on the rental licenses that are available and split the area into three different zones. A lot of us in the real estate community thought, gosh, this is going to be a problem, but there's still licenses available. I think what we learned about that is that Silverthorne doesn't have the density of short-term rental licenses that, let's say, Breckenridge does or Frisco does. Despite the fact that they put caps on them, we still do have some licenses available. Area 1, which is yellow on the map, that's 10% of all of those can be. can be short-term rented. Area two, I need the reference. I'm not really sure. I think it's 50%. Yeah, Town Corps, that's 50%. And so 50% of those properties can receive licenses. Again, we still do have licenses available.  that's Town Corps, Riverfront and Summit Sky Ranch, a little more denser zoning, and many of them built specifically for rentals. Area three is deed restricted, and there are no short-term rentals available there.  That is an area that is designed and built for locals who live and work in the community. And those projects are often government subsidized. There's rules that cap their appreciation, et cetera.  They are not allowed to have short-term rental licenses in Silverthorne. Yeah. One other thing I just wanted to mention when I think of Silverthorne, often I think of Wildernest. And that seems like a great area for short-term rentals. And I think it has historically been Wildernest is subject to unincorporated Summit County, because you don't see it in this map for town of Silverthorne. And so that is one area that I think really we've seen hit hard in prices amongst other things. There's other insurance and HOA issues happening in our Wildernest neighborhoods. But... not being able to get a short-term rental license in Wildernest, we've seen has had an impact on number of sales and prices. But the silver lining here is that wilderness area is lower blue.  One of the things we anticipate in March is that there is a waitlist process for properties in this lower blue area basin. And so hopefully some of those can start to see short term rental licenses, although I anticipate they'll probably be few and far between. But I don't know. Yeah. Right now, I think there's 16 available and I don't know how many people are waiting for a license in Wildernest. That's a great point.  Silverthorne again, in our MLS area, is a Silverthorne Wildernest area. It appears that Wilderness is connected to Silverthorne, but it is unincorporated Summit County. Also, when you look at this map, while you can't necessarily see outlines of other areas, you're going to see that Ruby Ranch isn't highlighted, not in Silverthorne, Hamilton Creek, not in Silverthorne, and Ptarmigan, not in Silverthorne. Those are Summit County unincorporated neighborhood zones. Ruby Ranch does have its own restrictions on STR.  That's another example of an HOA that would have its own restrictions on short-term rentals. Yeah.  Hopefully you're starting to see the point of why we can't just say yes or no based on a town. Exactly, exactly. 

All right, Amy, you wanna take Blue River? I'm happy to take Blue River. You've heard it before, you're going to hear it again. Blue River is not everything that is south of Breckenridge up to Hoosier Pass. Blue River is actually a town, an incorporated town with specific boundaries, and you can see them here in pink. Within Blue River, short-term rentals are allowed. There are going to be occupancy limits and tax requirements, but there is no cap on the number of properties that can be rented in Blue River.  If you are looking to buy a property and you are in the town limits of Blue River, you can get a short-term rental license. But I'll let Candice talk about areas that are not in Blue River. Yeah, so if you continue down Highway 9 and go towards Quandary, you are not in Blue River and you're back in unincorporated Summit County in a neighborhood zone and short term rental licenses are not available. And is this, Amy, this is upper blue. Upper blue. And technically, so it's getting close to the cap.  It's within 10%. In theory, there's potentially going to be a waitlist. Again, this is a pretty big swath of our housing supply.  We have other like Frisco or Copper are pretty small inventory areas, but Blue River is actually a pretty decent size. And so time will tell of how those wait lists or those unincorporated areas begin to see short-term rental licenses. But I think right now when we're working with clients within the town, we say, great, you can use this as an investment, but outside the town, we're saying there's a lot of unknowns and uncertainty around the short-term rental regulations there. That's true. And Candice is correct with the amount of inventory in this area. When we have clients who only want a single-family home, and they're looking for more of a cabin in the woods, this subsection of our market is high, high density of single-family homes. And so it does attract a lot of buyers because of that. The pricing is also more competitive as you start to go further south. Down Highway 9, you gain altitude.  It's, you know, you're living at a higher altitude.  That's a thing. But the pricing is more competitive in these homes. But remember, there's a point at which you are outside of Blue River and you start to hit Summit County Unincorporated as you go south. Yeah.  that's... 

This is our document that we are happy to share with everyone. We tried to summarize it as well as we could. There's obviously a lot of intricacies in each neighborhood has its own HOA rules or town rules or county rules. But I guess in general, Amy, as we wrap up, do you want to talk a little bit about kind of what you see as the future for short term rentals in the county? And. if you see any regulations loosening or tightening or changing, or if we'll stay the same. 

Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to talk about that. I mean, I think the first thing I want to let everybody know is that the Summit County GIS website covers all properties in Summit County, and we have a link to that in the document. And if you're curious and you don't want to reach out to somebody, you can start on the GIS website. There's an overlay that shows whether you're in a town or not. If you click that, you're going to see whether you're in the town or whether you're not in the town. Start there. In terms of what's going to happen with the regulations, there's still some pending litigation on Summit County.  The Summit County unincorporated rules are unlikely to change because I have heard from the commissioners and their legal counsel that they're not making any decisions until the litigation is resolved.  I don't anticipate that anything in Summit County is going to change in terms of the rules. What we are seeing though is that there is some attrition with these licenses and that we are having some become available. Certainly not a lot, but some.  That process is moving. Everywhere else, it's probably going to stick the way it is unless we get new leaders in place. And it would really take somebody to examine the rules carefully and say, we need to revisit these. But I think as long as we have the current people who continue to stay in charge. I don't know that it's going to be revisited. I think we're just kind of where we're at with it right now.  That would be my crystal ball. Yeah. And as far as like the impacts, I know there was a Facebook post where there was a lot of healthy debate amongst our locals that like to talk on Facebook about, have these regulations actually changed anything? Like, are we seeing more workforce housing? And I think it's a little bit too soon to tell. I think there's a couple of macro economic factors of like our prices went up and some people's opinion on that may differ. There's probably some correlation, not causation with short-term rentals and have these restrictions then helped our pricing. I think the data would say no, like our prices are still going up. I don't know that our houses are getting more affordable. I think one of the things that we've seen anecdotally with our clients is people still want the ability short-term rent and use it.  It helps offset costs when you want to use it without having to long-term rent. And the financials are such that this is not a cashflow winning game for most people, unless you're bringing a lot of cash down, but it really allows that flexibility of use and some income to offset costs are important. And so we are still seeing that there's a market for that, where there's short-term rental licenses available, we're seeing more desirability there. 

But it's not necessarily easily to cull out the data to say, like, are these higher prices or lower prices? Are there more workforce housing units because of this? Yeah. And we also, this STR regulation sort of came at a perfect storm at the time of a perfect storm was put in place after COVID because the COVID, the people moving here and the pricing that happened during COVID across the country with people wanting to move to more resort areas, people working from home, we just had a higher demand, it pushed prices up, it pushed sales up. The STR regulations were kind of reactionary to that, right? And so that happened. And then two other things happened. One, interest rates went up, right? So we think that interest rates could be a reason for why things have slowed down too. Number two, we've had a huge increase in insurance costs.  Insurance has made a lot of homeowners association fees more expensive.  If we're to say, oh, did the STR regulations push down pricing? Did it slow sales? Did it change the market in a way? It's one factor of a number of factors. But the two other large factors we have were higher insurance premiums and higher interest rates.  We can't really allocate blame, if you will, to the short-term rentals. What we can say overall is that it does not appear that more properties became available at a cheaper price for locals to purchase. I think the other thing we can say is that it certainly contributed to a slowdown in the lower price point properties like Dillon Valley and Wildernest with no short-term rentals. It certainly contributed to a slowdown in the sale of those because without the ability to offset any of that income, those entry-level buyers who wanted to use short-term rental income to offset their expenses are out. They're gone.  That's affecting the sale of those. But gosh, we haven't really seen prices drop too much. I did an analysis on this, like maybe 10% to 15%. But is that STRs only? You know, we don't think so. Yeah.  

I think it's good to understand, like we tried to talk through all of the regulations that govern it. If we have people interested in short term rentals, where you can and can't get a short term rental license. And then I think just some anecdotal facts about like how short term rentals play into our overall real estate market are helpful, but everything continues to change and evolve. And like Amy said, it's one factor in the robust market that's affected by a lot of different changes. 

Any final parting thoughts, Amy? I don't have any final parting thoughts other than please reach out if you would like an individualized consultation on this. You're also going to find more resources on our website about how to analyze a short-term rental property financially, how different factors such as whether you have a property management company or how much money you put down, how those change your ultimate income. And we're also going to be providing, we continue to provide trends on the market so you can see where things are going. Yeah.  there's lots of resources out there and the data tells a pretty good, pretty transparent story right now.  Hopefully this was helpful for everyone. We appreciate you all listening. And we'll talk to you next time. Thank you. 

Thanks for joining us today on Mountain Real Estate. I'm Candice De. If the mountains are calling you, reach out to me. See you next time.