How To Prepare For Short-Term Renters Next Door

My neighbour Bill just told us he is going to rent out his home on a short-term-rental site. Our neighbourhood has always been quiet and peaceful and filled with year-round, full-time residents, so this is new and sort of scary to all of us. How concerned should we be?

Signed, Bill’s Neighbour (a fictitious human)

Dear Bill’s Neighbour:

It was nice of Bill to mention that he was going to be renting the house. I note, however, that you did not say he asked if you would mind, so we have to assume he doesn’t care. Is Bill a little bit of a jerk? A “shovels his driveway but not the old lady across the street” kind of a guy? It doesn’t matter because Bill is now dead to us. You and your neighbours have to worry about yourselves.

The amount of concern you should have about the new, rotating cast of renters next door ranges from “none at all” to “Why is there a car in our pool?” To assist you and your community in dealing with this uninvited incursion by unknown vacationing-type people and other itinerants into your peaceful neighbourhood, here are the various types of short-term renters, and a colour-coded threat level and action plan for each.

Renter type: Invisible

Identified by: Nothing. You literally won’t know they’re there. They are quieter than the neighbours who own the house. This type of renter most likely represents the vast majority of short-term renters; people who just want a quiet family vacation somewhere cool in a nice house. Maybe some porch beers. Wave if you see them, which you won’t.

Threat level: Cellophane. A complete absence of threat. You don’t need to do anything unless you want to, which you won’t.

Renter type: Cool New Friends

Identified by: Musical selections—be it Lizzo, Kenny Chesney or The Carpenters—that coincidentally match yours and are played at socially appropriate hours and decibel levels. They beckon you to come over for drinks when they see you because they want to learn more about your interesting home town. You dig them. You swap emails and make plans to connect when you’re in their home town.

Threat level: Pink… for—LOVE them!!

Renter type: Gang of Inconsiderate Clods

Identified by: Large groups who you can hear talking even when inside your own house because they are always talking at the top of their lungs, though standing mere feet apart. Their cars fill your neighbour’s driveway, part of the street, and will, at some point, block you from leaving your driveway. They give you stink eye when approached about moving the cars. Their music and parties are not quite loud enough and not quite late enough to force you to call the cops, but you’re always a few seconds away from dialing those three magic numbers.

Threat level: Chartreuse. Ignore them to the extent possible. They will be gone in a week.

Renter type: Only People on the Planet

Identified by: Late night parties with music that appears to be entirely bass, screaming fights on the front yard, toddlers meandering aimlessly and unchaperoned on the street, animals of all sorts running off leash, at least three appearances by the cops. Hammering on your front door at 3 a.m. by confused/lost renters demanding to be let in or else they’ll “kick in your teeth.” These renters have zero respect for, indeed seem unaware of, the fact that they are not the only people on Earth.

Threat level: Red mist. Before you wake up in the backyard of Bill’s house with a gas can and a lighter, with no idea how you got there, have a heart to heart with him. Tell him his renters are not only destroying the fabric of the community and violating the town noise ordinances, but they are trying to saw up his wooden patio furniture for the fire pit, have dumped a bunch of green Jello powder into his pool, and are turning his garage door into a mural of some sort. Don’t feel bad about lying. It’s the least of the sins currently occurring on or near your property.

Renter type: Rave Advertised on TikTok

Identified by: Thousands and thousands of people. Unconscious or tweaking partiers everywhere, including your bathtub. (Does it matter at this point how they got there?) SWAT team response with National Guard unit on standby.

Threat level: For Sale. Move out as soon as you can. Then list with a local real-estate agent who is a good liar (redundancy alert), or find out which short-term-rental site Bill is using.

A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.

The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.

“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”

The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.

It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.

In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.

“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.

The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.

“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.

He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.

The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.

“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.

His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.

“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.

When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.

They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.

The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.

For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.

“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”

As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.

“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”

Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.