What should I look into for city/county zoning for rentals?

[Greg Cooksey]

Greetings to all,

I'm currently looking into the possibility of beginning investment into one of two niches. I am tossing around the idea of Section 8 or student housing for buy and hold investments. Now, I have read some BP investors' stories of running into issues with zoning and renting to students. For example, some cities don't allow a single family home to be rented to more than two people who are not immediate family in an area zoned for student housing.

Assuming there is no HOA, and the property is either a single family home or no larger than a fourplex, where would I go to research the zoning requirements in the couple of cities I'm looking at these investments in? The cities I have an interest in doing this would be Spokane, WA, Ellensburg, WA, Boise, ID, Moscow, ID, and Eugene OR.

I'm not looking for someone to link a website for each city, but I don't know which agency I would be best served contacting about this issue. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance!

 - Greg

[Scott Ellis]

In Spokane, http://maps.spokanecounty.org/ allows you to see a zoning overlay of the city, or search by an address you're evaluating and see current zoning.

My understanding of Spokane is that any SFR can have up to six unrelated adults. My wife and I live in a portion of our house and rent out two rooms to students. I checked with city planning and did not have to do anything special. They were fine with it and we're a zoned residential neighborhood. We could move out and fully rent the SFR to students without issue, but we couldn't convert the house into a duplex. It must remain a SFR with multiple unrelated adults living in it.

Also, in Spokane at least, while they've rezoned a lot of neighborhoods to be only residential, there are still plenty of multifamily properties that were grandfathered in.  I'm in the middle of purchasing a triplex in a residential neighborhood that will be used for graduate student housing.   

Hope this helps a little with Spokane's lay of the land (at least from my own experience.)