Rowdy Vacation Renters Cause Headache For Guerneville Residents
GUERNEVILLE (KPIX 5) – Is there a better place in the country for a rustic, romantic, relaxing vacation than Sonoma County? Vacation rentals are exploding.
Here's how hot it is in Guerneville along the Russian River. Tom Lowrie was offered $5,000 just to put his home on an out-of-state rental site.
"That's a chunk of change. Which indicated to me there's a lot of money involved with this," Lowrie told KPIX 5.
Quaint towns in the Wine Country and along the Russian River are seeing a flood of weekend vacationers. And that's leading to headaches, literally.
"It had weddings. And big three-day drumming parties," said 83-year-old Mickey Cooke, who watches every weekend the steady stream of overnighters from her Glen Ellen home.
"Bringing dogs and smoking and making a lot of noise. Sometimes we can have as many as 43 people on the road on the weekends that don't live here, so that's a little hard to take," Cooke told KPIX 5.
Tom Lowrie has problems almost every weekend.
"Sounds like they're having some sort of awards ceremony…and its 11 o'clock at night," Lowrie said.
It's a problem anywhere there are vacation rentals, especially now with Airbnb and aggressive out of state rental agencies. How to solve it?
"Sonoma County is just going to tax more people. And of course the vacation people are going to pay for those taxes, so that might just slow the process down a little bit," said Vince O'Neill, a landlord.
"Every one of the vacation rentals should have an on-site owner. That would keep people quiet. That would keep the order," Cooke suggested.
They don't do that at Russian River Escapes. But they do drive around to dozens of their rentals every night to make sure it's not too noisy.
"We've been doing that for years, just going by and checking on the rental and making sure they're not disturbing neighbors. They're our neighbors too," said Stacey Jardine of Russian River Escapes.
