We've been looking around at building a place in College Station that we'd use as a gameday home during the fall, and looking at renting it out during the spring / summer semester as a furnished house to offset some of the operating costs. Wanting to see if anyone else has experience with this or feedback. A lot of the newer neighborhoods are starting to put in 6 month minimum lease clauses in their deed restrictions and negating the use of AirBNB. Just trying to determine our options and what the market would be for a lease of this type.

It can be a neighborhood issue, but more of a city issue now and depends where the house is located if you can do short term leases anymore in CS. It has become hard to do this in the city limits since Aug 1 of this year.

Thanks for the heads up. Was there an ordinance or something passed for why it's been harder since august?

I may be wrong on the exact date, but for some reason that's what came to mind. The issue with the rule now is with non owner occupied properties. If you don't live in the property and want to make a single family house a short term rental, its consideted a short term rental 3 and it cannot be zoned general suburban, restricted suburban, or wellborn restricted suburban. The problem is most houses in CS fall into that zoning.

The way I read the rule, it seems like you'd want the renter to sign a lease for X months at market rate, and then have the lease payment balloon to 10x the market rate at month X+1, with no penalty for breaking the lease at X months. You will always be able to show a lease for longer than 6 months if the City demands documentation. And unless they want to get into the business of enforcing private leases, I don't know that they can do anything about renters deciding to "break" the lease early. Consult with your attorney just to be sure.

excellent catch!

I am not 100 percent sure, but I believe a short term rental is anything under a 30 day lease. If you have tenants that stay longer than 30 days you are good. But it's the 2 nights on GameDay weekends that get you.