HOLMES BEACH – A new website invites owners to place portions of their property for rent at an hourly rate, but city officials say that’s not an allowable use for residential properties in Anna Maria Island’s largest city.
The issue was brought up to Mayor Judy Titsworth by a group of concerned residents after a local vacation rental owner put a pool up for rent on the site Swimply.com. The website allows property owners to rent out anything outside of their house or vacation rental, including parking, pools, backyards, sports courts and even experiences, like a home art studio, for an hourly fee.
The Holmes Beach pool rental popped up on the website the week of July 24. The listing, which was removed by July 29, offered the use of onsite parking and a backyard pool in Holmes Beach for $50 per hour. The host, simply identified as “Craig” in the listing, offered the use of the residential property’s pool area on Swimply.com when not in use by the owner or vacationers renting the entire property.
When The Sun spoke with Titsworth on July 28, she said she had recently been made aware of the website and that renting pools and other amenities without renting the entire property was not allowed in the city. She added that the city’s code compliance officers had been alerted to the situation and were responding. There were no other listings on Anna Maria Island on the website at press time for The Sun.
In Holmes Beach, Titsworth explained, city codes do not allow for only a piece of a property to be rented, such as a pool, for an hourly rate. The city’s vacation rental regulations allow for residential properties in the R-1 residential zone to be rented for a minimum of 30 days to the same renter. In other residential zones in the city, properties can be rented for no less than 7 days. The city’s code defines a “day” as a 24-hour period for property rental purposes. Only hotels and motels are exempt from the regulations and are allowed to rent daily. And while part of a property, one half of a duplex for example, can be rented independently from the rest of the property, owners are not allowed to rent out single bedrooms in their homes to different groups of people or rent only amenities, such as pools, without renting the rest of the property or unit.
