“Worst month of the Year: February. February has only 28 days in it, which means that if you rent an apartment, you are paying for three full days you don’t get. Try to avoid Februarys whenever possible.” - Steven Rubenstein

As I have discussed in the past, the New Hampshire Legislature has not yet addressed the issue of whether using a condominium for short-term rentals is a commercial enterprise, which would illegalize them in most associations, or whether they are not so different from a tenant in a condominium with a six-month lease. In both cases the occupant lives and sleeps there and uses it as a residence.

The difference is the high turnover, the clear use of a unit to make money versus any intent to actually live there, and the ability to make much more money on short-term rentals than long-term ones, all of which gets one closer to the line of a commercial enterprise. But no one has yet sued in New Hampshire, at least not in a case that has reached the New Hampshire Supreme Court. And so we wait.

But that’s not all unit owners rent at associations. Around the nation, clever people have been using their condominium unit or home in an HOA for extra money, some of which your association may want to use or allow and others not.

This is not necessarily a strange or bad idea. By definition, community associations are a shared economy. They share roads, a clubhouse, insurance, landscaping, perhaps a pool, a dog run area, a picnic area, nature trails, and more. The use of these shared item help create a community, which is one of the objective of any good condominium association. The question is whether an association wants to go further and open these items, either to individual homeowners or to its association.

Here are few examples. 1

Swimply. It allows owners with an underutilized or idle pool (where kids have grown up and moved away) to list private pool rentals by the hour to other Swimply users. This is big business. Since October 2020 Swimply has raised $62.8 in funding.

And Simply has now expanded beyond that to allow for the renting of sports courts (tennis and pickle ball), gyms, unused docks and more, so it can be a revenue generator for an Association, something to think about at your association.

Neighbor. This program allows owners to rent out unused or underused spaces such as garages, basements, driveways, sheds, parking spaces, closets, attics and more to other Neighbor users for short and long term personal property storage.

1. Thanks to the Community Association Institute and Attorneys Rea C. Franck, Matthew Gardne, and 1 Maria Kao for their presentation at the 2023 CI Law Institute entitled “Can I Rent Your Pool? Practical Strategies in the Ever-Evolving Gig Economy” from which much of the information in this article was acquired.

Attorney Robert E. Ducharme is a former teacher whose civil practice is limited to condominium law, primarily in Rockingham and Strafford counties. He can be reached at red@newhampshirecondolaw.com and Ducharme Law, P.L.L.C., found at www.newhampshirecondolaw.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Condo Column: Alternative short-term uses