Luxury home rentals down from last year

Luxury vacation home rentals bring in thousands of dollars in occupancy taxes for Coachella Valley cities, especially during festival season. But this year, at least one leasing agency is struggling.

Rosy Reyes has been a leasing agent for luxury homes in the valley for more than 15 years. She says this year there are fewer people renting large vacation homes.

“It’s been a lot slower. In October and November of last year, we got hit with a lot of cancellations, a lot of people that were here for three months lowering to one month, some of them actually just two weeks, and it is definitely hurting us,” said Reyes, who works for Luxury Leasing out of La Quinta.

Luxury Leasing has plenty of homes available for the second weekend of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival and for Stagecoach, but it’s not just festival season. For the past few months rentals have slowed.

“The economy’s just tough and it has been hurting us, especially with Canadians,” said Reyes.

The Canadian dollar, which is closely tied with oil prices, is way down this year and is worth about 75 cents compared to the U.S. dollar. Apps like Airbnb could be attracting more people to find vacation properties here in the valley, but Reyes doesn’t see it as competition just yet.

“I don’t see that as the main reason would be probably because it’s newer competition for us and it is more oriented towards European people,” said Reyes.

KESQ reached out to the cities of Indio and La Quinta to see if they noticed a drop in transient occupancy taxes, but no one has gotten back to us.

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