HOAs and Short-Term Rentals with Attorney Patrick MacQueen

This article is transcribed from Episode 44 of The Accidental Landlord. Listen to the full episode here.

Today we have Patrick MacQueen with us! Patrick is a guy who is not just an attorney but is also the author of Nasty Neighbors. Can you give us a brief introduction about yourself?

My name is Patrick MacQueen. I am a real estate attorney in Arizona. I have been doing this for about 20 years now. Our firm handles everything real estate-related. Whether it is from the commercial side, the residential side, or transactional litigation, we handle them all. 

I also teach. I am a certified teacher with the Arizona Department of Real Estate. I also wrote a book called Nasty Neighbors about how nasty it can get whenever there’s a real estate dispute. My practice covers a wide range of things, including what we are going to talk about today. 

Real estate can get really nasty. Can you give us a quick story?

We had one situation where it got so bad, the bad neighbor ended up putting up concrete bags into somebody's pool and completely ruining their pool. I’ve also seen situations where people destroy portions of their neighbors houses intentionally, guns pulled, police called, I’ve honestly seen a lot. All of these situations are written in my book, which  I honestly had fun writing about, however, it wasn’t fun actually living those situations. All of the stories you will read in there, actually happened. 

In this podcast we are trying to guide newly landlords, specifically accidental landlords. So we wanted to know, do you mainly represent landlords or tenants?

All of the above. A lot of what we do right now is related to short-term rentals, helping owners navigate through those situations, and honestly, these are the situations where the nasty neighbors usually come up. Some people are happy living next to short-term rentals, but other times people cannot stand it. 

What do you think some of the biggest issues are for some of the people who want to turn their property into a short-term rental?

Here in Arizona we had this very interesting reverse of power or reverse of the laws, particularly in 2022. For the longest time around 2015-2017, cities and municipalities here in Arizona did not have the authority to request short term rental licenses. Since those years, we had a lot of people from other states investing in short term rentals in Arizona. However, now the government has their authority back and they are requesting to have everything aligned and legal when owning a short-term property. This is one issue we are dealing with in Arizona. It's such a new law, and we need to understand how it is going to work.

Issue number two is because in 2016 we had this law that said “cities, towns and municipalities cannot regulate short-term rentals." What happened was that HOAs began regulating short-term rentals and they got very aggressive. They did not want short-term rentals in certain neighborhoods, because they said they were nice neighborhoods and they did not want to allow these types of things. For many years these HOAs had power over these decisions, however in April of 2022 the government took that power from them and started regulating these properties. These are the things that people should really look into. What are the regulations whether it's state or county wise? Are there limitations on what I can do and how I can do it? Etc. All landlords should be aware of these things regarding the state they live in. 

If you want to hear more of Patrick's valuable insight, listen to the complete episode here.