Quote:
Originally Posted by lzppjb
A guy on surlyhorns mentioned a friend owning 2 condos downtown in different towers. He was told they're pretty empty, and the rooms are rented out via Airbnb. He said his 2 had about an 80% occupancy rate.
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Nearly all of the condo buildings downtown (and I believe all of the larger ones) ban short-term rentals entirely and severely limit the number of units occupied by long-term tenants (typically to around 25% of all units). This is driven by insurance premiums—it's much cheaper to insure a building when most of the owners are residents. Obviously, some people still rent out their condos despite these restrictions, but in absolute terms the numbers are pretty small. If you check airbnb, you'll find that there are very few high-rise rentals available downtown compared to other large cities that have much older/smaller housing stock, and their locations are generally described in vague terms to avoid HOA detection and fines. I don't doubt that a non-zero fraction of downtown housing stock consists of rich people's second or third homes, and sits vacant much of the year, but I don't think downtown Austin has a meaningful investment property/short-term rental problem compared to most other large cities. Probably the opposite, actually, given the high property tax (i.e., it's proportionately much more expensive to maintain an empty home in Texas than in most other states).