Kelly Kortman has been in the vacation rental business for going on 15 years. What started as simply wanting to have a second home for investment turned into a love for Leavenworth, for Vacation Rentals and for helping people who were in the business or who wanted to be in the business.
In or around 2018 Kelly started to notice a bit of a blacklash against Vacation Rentals. They were being blamed for everything that can happen in a small town. Garbage, pollution, heavy drinking, fraternity like atmospheres in vacation rental centric neighborhoods, skyrocketing prices, lack of housing and the like. Although it was true that there were isolated incidences that could be pointed to study after study pointed out that there were way more issues coming from long term rentals than from short term rentals, it was also determined that housing costs were skyrocketing due to market forces, not vacation rentals, there were also a few “party houses” out there but they were very, very few and far between. In essence none of the towns woes were really connected to the vacation rental industry but nonetheless vacation rentals were on the chopping block and certain members of the community were pushing hard to eliminate all vacation rentals as soon as possible and for a while it appeared that they had succeeded.
It was at this time Kelly jumped into the fray and began writing OP EDs and open letters to the commissioners and so forth and, some have said, completelys changed the trajectory of the Commissioner’s goals. After several of these letters were put into print in the local newspapers the Commissioners decided to create a task force to create a compromise so that vacation rentals could continue to exist, new laws were put in place to monitor them and so that no new vacation rentals could be built. Here are some of those letters. If you now stay at one of the properties you are going to notice new mandatory signage about neighborhood noise restrictions, parking restrictions, housing caps on how many people can stay and so forth. It is not our goal to “sign, sign everywhere’s a sign” you into oblivion but it’s something we have to do.
As we say it’s not our goal to be a “Buzz Killington” but please note that some have said that if it wasn’t for Kelly, the days of renting a home in Leavenworth might now be over.
If interested please read some of the articles that changed the course of Chelan County History.
