Professionals in the vacation rental industry received unique insights on Summit County’s lodging landscape, including up-to-date stats on the demographics of short-term rental owners at a Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers event on Tuesday, Dec. 17. 

Executive director Julie Koster said she and the team at Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers spent the last few months making open records requests, acquiring information from the state and combing through databases to create what they call “a 10,000-foot look at the state of Summit County’s vacation rental industry.” 

Koster said the stats she was presenting encompassed nearly every part of the vacation rental lodging industry.

She said data shows 57% of Summit’s vacation rentals are owned by Coloradans and around 10% of those Coloradans are Summit locals. Among the 43% of owners that live elsewhere, only 1% are international. 

Koster said ownership demographics play a significant role in the organization’s advocacy for the industry in conversations with local leaders and lawmakers. She explained the bulk of the out-of-state owners are from Texas, Illinois, Florida, New York and California. Arizona is also emerging as a market trailing behind those states. 

She said she also obtained data which shows 90% of short-term rental owners only own one vacation rental property. 

“That’s not just one in Summit County — it’s one total,” Koster said “They don’t own one anywhere else — not in Maui, not in Florida, just here.”

Around 7% of short-term rental owners in Summit own two vacation rentals and around 3% own three or more. 

“This was a huge part of our conversations over the last several years during the ordinance development and the regulations that came forward in Summit County — is how many units do people own here,” she said, looking to dispel rumors that most of Summit’s short-term rental owners are wealthy and own numerous properties.

She said a majority of Summit County’s short-term rental properties, around 79% for the county at-large, are managed by professional property managers as opposed to the owners themselves. 

Koster pulled stats on Sept. 5 from the Key Data platform, an analytics platform that provides data on a majority of Summit’s short-term rentals. The data showed there are 7,544 active short-term rental licenses in Summit County. The data also showed the average daily rate from Jan. 1 to Sept. 5, 2024 was $355 and the average length of stay was 3.7 nights. The current average daily rate increased from $347 in 2023, and length of stay increased from 3.6 nights in 2023.

While a complete outlook on 2024 won’t be available until the year ends, Koster presented the revenue and complaints spurred by short-term rentals in 2023.

She said tourism in general netted roughly $1.3 billion for the Summit County economy in 2023 and resulted in around $96 million in tax revenue for the county, its municipalities and the state. She said town-specific data shows Breckenridge collected around $7.2 million from short-term rental licensing fees, Frisco collected around $225,000 in licensing fees, Dillon collected $241,500, Silverthorne collected $157,200, Blue River collected $61,200 and unincorporated Summit County collected $526,400. Since Keystone became a town in 2024, its numbers for 2023 are grouped in unincorporated Summit County.

These fees go toward initiatives such as workforce housing, childcare facilities and infrastructure. 

Koster said Summit Alliance of Vacation Managers used the Colorado Open Records Act to acquire every short-term rental complaint launched since 2021. Unincorporated Summit County, Breckenridge, Blue River, Dillon, Frisco, Keystone and Silverthorne all have their own receptive hotlines dedicated to fielding these complaints. 

From 2021 to 2023 the county at-large received and issued the following: 1,641 complaints, 265 warnings, 235 notices and 70 violations. Breckenridge received the better part of those complaints with 877, followed by unincorporated Summit County with 370 complaints, Silverthorne with 201 complaints, Frisco with 131 complaints and Dillon with 62 complaints.