Living in the old house, when it is so close to the new house, has always been a gamble.  We were betting that the cost of renting another house was more than it was costing us for the old house to be somewhat in the way of the new construction.

As construction marches forward, the old house is becoming more and more of an impediment to construction. Did I mention how close the new and old houses are?

Living in the old house has also been a huge pain at time, and we were getting really tired of walking across dirt to get to our cars every day.  The recent rain was particularly painful in that respect.

Since we knew our time in the old house was rapidly coming to and end, we’ve been steadily looking for a rental over the last several months, a task made more difficult by the transition of vacation rentals to the long-term rental market in Santa Barbara due to a recent ban.

The biggest justification for the ban on short-term rentals is that they remove housing from the rental stock, and drive prices up.  Interestingly enough, in our experience over several months of looking, it appears that, at least in our market for a larger 4+ bedroom home, the appearance of lots of former short-term rental houses onto the long-term rental market is having the opposite effect that it should; it is driving prices up.

Many, if not most, of the former vacation rentals that are appearing for long-term rentals are being listed at very high prices, as the owners try to make up for the high income they were able to generate as vacation rentals; in many cases, prices are 1.5 or 2x greater than normal market prices.  To us, this appears to have driven up the prices of even properties that weren’t vacation rentals.

But I digress.  We finally found a decent home at a decent price to carry us through to the end of our project, and we packed up our things and traveled over the dirt lot, and said good bye to the old house.