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Pinellas beach towns struggle with illegal home rentals

 
“We just want our neighborhood to stay a neighborhood,” Steve Curtis of Clearwater Beach said of the rentals, such as this home that has been cited. Restrictions vary by city.
“We just want our neighborhood to stay a neighborhood,” Steve Curtis of Clearwater Beach said of the rentals, such as this home that has been cited. Restrictions vary by city.
Published April 27, 2015

All the signs are there. Raucous parties. Strangers who stay up late. Cars parked everywhere. An ever-changing rotation of RVs with out-of-state license plates. Beer cans. Wedding tents. Different faces every week.

Residents of Pinellas County's beach neighborhoods say they're noticing more and more homes being illegally rented to tourists for a week at a time, or even on a nightly basis.

Places like Clearwater, St. Pete Beach and Madeira Beach all have laws forbidding short-term rental homes. But in practice, these laws tend to be loosely enforced. Cities just don't have enough staffers to keep checking on the rising number of beach houses and condos being rented out on the sly.

In response, a growing network of fed-up Clearwater Beach residents are taking matters into their own hands, banding together to monitor their own neighborhoods and feed tips to the authorities.

For the first time, violators are being hit with heavy fines — a whopping $8,500 in one case.

"It's gotten really bad. This is supposed to be a residential neighborhood, but it's like living in Motel City," said Sandy Britton, a Clearwater Beach retiree who walks around her neighborhood daily and maintains a spreadsheet of dozens of known and suspected illegal rental homes. "On my block we've got five — all illegally rented. On the weekends, there are cars everywhere."

A charming British lady, Britton chats up renters on her street and often learns they're staying for only a week. Other permanent residents take notice of the strangers who are toting beach gear through their neighborhood's beach access. Some snap cellphone photos of RVs with Michigan plates in driveways.

It's a fine line, though. Their intent is to prompt their government to take action, but they don't want to be too intrusive or Big Brother-ish about it.

"We have a little task force. But we want to make sure that we're not badgering or bothering the tenants," said Clearwater Beach resident Steve Curtis, who has repeatedly been kept awake by partying vacationers on the patio next to his cottage. "It's not the tenants' fault. We just want our neighborhood to stay a neighborhood."

Fueled by Tampa Bay's record-breaking tourism boom, the market for vacation rentals has exploded. Licensed vacation-rental homes here tripled in the past decade to more than 3,500, state data shows. The number of unlicensed ones has skyrocketed as well, according to authorities and industry watchers.

Under-the-radar rentals have existed in Tampa Bay for decades, but they really started catching fire during Florida's housing bust. That's when the practice gained popularity as an income stream for homeowners drowning in mortgage debt. There's also a proliferation of websites that make it easier than ever to rent out your home for cash.

Homeowners list their places on sites like HomeAway, FlipKey, BeachHome, VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner), Airbnb or Craigslist. They advertise under names like "One Fun Place," "Paradise Palms," "Coconut Breeze" or "Doc Brown's Beach Escape."

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Depending on their size and location, it appears that most locals are charging $1,500 to $3,000 a week.

This widespread practice happens to be against the law in a number of Pinellas beach towns, although the rules vary.

Clearwater bans home rentals that are shorter than a month. St. Pete Beach allows homes to be rented for less than 30 days only three times a year. Madeira Beach prohibits homes from being rented for less than three months in some neighborhoods, less than six months in others.

When it comes to actually enforcing these laws, local governments are heavily reliant on tips from irritated neighbors.

"We have brought this up repeatedly with our City Council, but they're overwhelmed. They say, 'You've got to mark down the dates of when you see people coming and going,' " said John-Michael Fleig, co-owner of Baywaters Inn in St. Pete Beach.

"Just go on Craigslist and you can see people blatantly violating the rule,'' he said. "We're soaked with sales taxes and bed taxes, and those people aren't paying it. They're stealing our business and they're doing it in front of everybody."

Last year, Madeira Beach mailed letters to nearly 3,000 homeowners, warning them of $500-a-day fines if they were illegally renting their homes to tourists. But City Manager Shane Crawford says enforcing the rule is "nearly impossible." The city has taken action in perhaps a half-dozen cases, he said.

In Clearwater, the situation is complicated by the fact that about 30 homes in north Clearwater Beach are legally open for short-term rentals. They were grandfathered in because they were doing it before the city banned the practice in 2003.

Clearwater's Code Enforcement Board has seen a recent uptick in short-term rental cases — three in December, six in February, and three more this month. In each case, a code enforcement officer collected evidence after getting tips from beach residents.

Violators are threatened with $250-a-day fines. Repeat violators are subject to $500 fines for every day that authorities can document that they rented their properties illegally. The heftiest fine so far: $8,500 for a Mandalay Avenue bungalow that a Realtor was renting to vacationers.

Most violators appearing before the code board say that they had no idea they were doing anything wrong, and that the Realtor who sold them the house told them that they could rent it out weekly. Many of these homes have gone up for sale right after officials summoned their owners to City Hall for a hearing.

"We've got a whole lot of people who are trying to skirt the law," said Mike Riordon, a member of the code board. "The odds of finding people who will rent for a month on a regular basis is not realistic. But the pool of people looking for weekly rentals is huge."