Colorado bill to quadruple STR taxes fails in committee

[James Carlson]

Colorado vacation rental owners can breathe a sigh of relief. A bill that would have increased property taxes 400% on all STRs failed by a wide margin on Tuesday. 

The plan would have reclassified Colorado short-term rentals as commercial properties, thus going from the 6.8% residential rate to the 29% commercial rate. (I'm personally happy this failed because I have two clients under contract on homes they plan to short-term rent -- one in the mountains outside of Colorado Springs and the other right near Breckenridge.) 

In retrospect, this shouldn't have been surprising. The same exact measure has failed two other times with largely the same legislators. I know there's a lot of discussion on here about blue-state Colorado coming for your STRs, but in the end it was three Democrats and three Republicans who voted against it. Only the bill's sponsor supported it.