LESS THAN LOFTY
Mammoth Town officials found themselves in the hot-seat at the Mammoth Lakes Board of Realtors (MLBOR) annual meeting held October 24, facing a group of angry real estate agents in the wake of the rollout of the town’s new short-term rental certified property inspection program.
Mammoth Lakes Town Manager Rob Patterson, Building Official Tom Perry, and Nolan Bobroff, Mammoth Lakes Community Development Director spoke at the meeting.
For context, the Mammoth Lakes Town Council placed a moratorium on short-term rentals on October 18, 2023, which restricted the issuance of new transient occupancy tax certificates in specific areas based on zoning to reassess the short-term rental system.
Mammoth’s Town Council adopted a set of ordinances, which included a “Certified Properties” program on March 6, 2024 that went into effect on April 22 and requires safety and compliance inspections every four years.
The issue is that when short-term rentals were initially introduced to the town, some units were allowed to be rented without having been inspected. Those units may now have issues — particularly with their lofts not being up-to-code — which may affect the permitted occupancy of those units.
To understand how this happened, we need to rewind to 2015 when Council approved the Quality of Life Ordinance.
When the ordinance was drafted in August of that year, one of the updates requested was to allow lofts to be considered a bedroom, which would allow for more people to stay at the property at a time.
More capacity, higher rates, more money. Ka-ching.
Council adopted the ordinance on September 16, 2015, with the loft-inclusive language, but by November, it became apparent that those bedroom lofts could pose a fire hazard and were deemed unsafe for short-term rental purposes.
That news “caused quite the uproar,” Perry said, and the Town ultimately established building code safety standards for lofts, laying out the necessary head clearance, stair size, and emergency escape routes. The Sheet reported on those building codes in the May 18, 2016 issue.
The code was eventually approved with the distinction that units with lofts that did not meet this compliance could still be rented, but the lofts could not be used for sleeping purposes.
Most units built after the 1980s are code compliant, even with lofts, Perry said. However, he estimated that over half the town’s condominiums were built before the 1980s, when inspections were … lax, to say the least.
“The building department wouldn’t even drive down to Mammoth to do inspections; they would do approvals literally over the phone,” Perry said at the meeting. “The building department in Bridgeport would get a set of plans, make sure they looked professional, had the stamp of an architect or engineer, and approve them without actually reviewing them.”
Mammoth Lakes did not officially incorporate until 1984. Therefore, because there are no building records for properties built before then, those properties were considered “legal non-conforming” or “grandfathered” into legality, according to the Sheet’s reporting in 2016.
But that “grandfather” stipulation is precisely why the town decided to implement the “Certified Properties” program, Patterson said. The Town began seeing issues with the quality of experience and safety within short-term rentals in older units.
“If the building, when it was built, did not conform to the code that was in effect at the time, it never had status of being legal,” Perry said. “That illegal status, if you will, has carried forward all this time.”
That statement didn’t sit well with the crowd. One audience member, dumbfounded, asked if half the town had been built illegally.
Perry backpedaled, clarifying that most of these older buildings are broadly code compliant; it’s just that certain components of those buildings are not, particularly many of the lofts, and specifically those for short-term rentals.
“It all just seems so wrong,” one attendee said. “You’ve essentially said that it’s been a mistake on behalf of the inspectors, and now you’re going to correct that mistake by punishing the homeowners and devaluing the property?”
Because all the loft information has been codified in the Municipal Code, Patterson said this information has been readily available to the public since it was approved over eight years ago. But going forward, he said the Town is hoping to improve consistency and transparency surrounding the inspection process.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he said. “We’re taking ownership of how we can improve this process.”
Transient occupancy inspections are conducted by contract inspectors, not full-time town employee inspectors. Training for those inspections, until recently, was done once a year and provided only a broad overview of the code.
“I thought that the training we were providing was sufficient,” Perry said. “But in recent weeks or months, it’s become evident to me that that was not sufficient training.”
In the future, Perry plans to accompany inspectors to ensure they’re being thorough. He’s also begun developing a “really watered-down, easy checklist that inspectors can use for their inspections, rather than trying to have a copy of the code in front of them.”
“The building code is boring,” he said. “It’s hard to read for a lot of people—it’s tough even for inspectors.”
The dumbed-down checklist has been drafted and circulated among transient occupancy inspectors, Perry said. This checklist is in addition to the checklist that the town already gives to inspectors to use to assess an entire unit, Bobroff added.
The town is hoping to, in time, provide easily accessible information for realtors to use when there is a loft at a property so that buyers aren’t surprised down the line if they find out it their short term rental is out of compliance.
How buyers will react to this news right now, however, is a growing concern for realtors.
“In the real estate world, the first people that get attacked and sued are us,” one of the realtors said at the meeting.
Another attendee asked whether the town understood that these new inspections would change property values, to which Patterson replied, “do you understand this is building code?”
“I think we’re trying to do everything we can to support you,” Patterson responded. “But we’re also not going to go out and say something that is completely nonconforming, ‘yes, we are certifying that property for rental.’”
The loft code only applies to short-term rentals, so properties where the owner lives in the home or rents it out long-term are not under the same stipulations. The board ultimately decided to put together a task force with the town and come back with a drafted document based on their findings.
