After an abrupt loss of income in 2009, Elaine and Mark Fekete faced a choice: either short-term rent their home year-round in Sandbridge Beach, a coastal neighborhood in Virginia Beach, or leave the community. Vacation rentals in Virginia Beach had not ever crossed their mind.
They chose to keep their home and their community and started short-term renting the house through Vrbo. While hosting guests in Sandbridge, they and their two children spent nights at a family home an hour drive away.
The catalyst for this lifestyle change came when the company where Mark had worked for 35 years suddenly went out of business. While the family had occasionally short-term rented their home for a few weeks in the summertime before, they now were committing to a nomadic existence.
Elaine stored their belongings in extra closets when guests stayed in the house. She would even change out the family photos on the wall with artwork.
For their 4-year-old and 6-year-old, Elaine reframed the back-and-forth travel into a fun game.
“Instead of saying, ‘Someone’s coming to sleep in your bed, and it’s not you,’ I got the kids involved in welcoming guests,” Elaine said. “They loved it when kids would come stay here. They would meet them when they came to check in and show them where all the toys were.”
The Feketes felt the sacrifice was worth the privilege of continuing to live near the beach and preserving their community ties.
“It makes life interesting, because one minute you’re here and the next minute, nevermind, pack up,” Elaine said.
Without the ability to short-term rent their house, the family would have had to move out of the area for different jobs or less expensive housing.
Having that choice reaffirmed the power of short-term rentals in allowing owners to create lives on their own terms, Elaine said.
Vacation rental tradition threatened in Sandbridge Beach
In 2015, city officials, seeking to address an increase in party houses in the community, introduced a series of proposals that would have prevented many vacation rentals from operating.
Vacation rentals have been a prominent feature of Sandbridge Beach since the 1940s, but most were small cottages that drew couples, families, and small groups. Then, developers started to build larger short-term rentals that attracted party groups and noise and other problems to the community.
“We thought, wrongly, that the city was just going to look at (regulating) the larger homes, limit the number of events per year, limit the amount of parking, you know, something logical to fix what was the only problem at the time,” Elaine said, “and instead it evolved into, ‘let’s just punish all short-term rentals in Sandbridge.’”
Ultimately, the Virginia General Assembly intervened, saying that the City Council had no authority to take away owners’ right to short-term rent their properties because Sandbridge was considered a special service district and had a different tax base than other communities. The city was only allowed to pass reasonable ministerial regulations such as requiring registration and paying a fee.
Short-term rental advocacy at Virginia Beach City Council
Unable to stop vacation rentals in Sandbridge, City Council turned its attention to regulating short-term rentals in other parts of the city.
The city issued a series of ever-changing regulations, from requiring labor-intensive conditional use permits (CUP) to creating overlays that prohibited short-term rentals from operating in some residential areas.
The CUP process involved mounds of paperwork and sometimes required the assistance of a lawyer. Each application was judged on its merit and location and had to be voted on individually by the Planning Commission and then the City Council. In 2019 and 2020, the city was overwhelmed with the number of applications. So instead, they started discussing overlays.
Even though Elaine’s vacation rental business was safe in Sandbridge, she joined the Virginia Beach Short-Term Rental Alliance to fight some of the proposals, which they considered overregulation.
Using data gleaned from other cities, VBSTRA created alternative proposals and suggested ways to enforce rules that would weed out bad operators without punishing responsible operators.
“We believe in well thought-out solutions that empower the respectful, law-abiding operators and weed out those who are not,” they wrote in one petition that was presented to the City Council. “Responsible hosts exhibit the best of Virginia Beach hospitality to visiting families and our neighbors.”
The alliance proposed initiatives such as density caps, a way to eliminate the CUP process, a registration process, and three-strikes rules and fines for noncompliance. They recommended an ongoing advisory board to provide guidance and recommendations on administration, technology-enabled enforcement, and other policies on STR permitting.
During this time, Elaine and other advocates were setting up one-on-one meetings with council members and provided resources and data to dispel some of the misconceptions about STRs that kept coming up during public debate on regulations.
For instance, some would claim vaguely that STRs were proliferating all over the city. Yet, Elaine noted, according to AirDNA and Census.gov, whole-home STRs made up just 0.7% of housing units in Virginia Beach. [Find out what vacation rental data is important for your advocacy efforts here >>]
Another favorite refrain by STR opponents was that vacation rentals bring more crime and noise pollution. Vacation rentals and party houses are not the same, Elaine said. Sandbridge, for instance, has the highest concentration of STRs in Virginia Beach but the lowest crime rate.
Meanwhile, only 0.01%, or 14 of 88,270 calls made to 311 in 2020 concerned STR nuisances. About 7% of zoning complaints the same year were directed at STRs, Elaine said, citing city statistics.
Many of VBSTRA’s and Elaine’s suggestions fell on deaf ears at City Council, but in 2018, Elaine and other advocates succeeded in getting council members to tone down the severity of STR regulations by suggesting maximum occupancy, a limit on cars per house, and other regulations instead of a ban on STR activity.
One of the biggest questions they faced was how would the city be able to enforce the regulations it was passing? Elaine advocated for using technology to lighten the city’s load in enforcing STR regulations. She noted that the technology used by the STR industry was light years ahead of the city’s methods and sought to educate council members on the technology available to them.
Through advocacy, “we were learning the process of city government, meeting with the planning commission, and constantly working with the city manager and the budget office trying to pull numbers and statistics and just seeing how all of it works together,” Elaine said.
Public office, the next step in leadership
Advocacy unearthed potential in Elaine that she wasn’t able to see until she started doing it. Soon after opening up a new career path in real estate sales, her experience in advocacy started to make her think about running for public office.
“It continued to evolve into a calling,” Elaine said. “I felt like I was the voice for Sandbridge every time any issue came up with Sandbridge because I had been a big advocate for short-term rentals.
“I just got really involved and really interested and started following everything that was going on in the city at the city council level. I got a little overzealous with a lot of different issues, and then I decided that I have to run because I want to help with these decisions.”
Elaine was frustrated by council members who refused to listen to their constituents and weren’t open to new, better ways of doing things.
After a City Council position in District 2 came up for election, Elaine decided to run for the seat. She is running against the incumbent and two other candidates for the position, which will be voted on in November.
“I never in a million years would have thought that this would be my path, but this is the path that I’m being led down now, just through short-term rentals,” Elaine said.
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