Once a week someone will call me up and ask about Sonoma County vacation rentals for sale or how to go about buying a vacation home in Sonoma County. While it has got harder with some of the restrictions that came into place last year, if you know where to look and how to navigate all the restrictions there are still lots of options.
If you are looking for a Healdsburg vacation rental for sale or a wine country vacation rental for sale, then it is still possible but you will have limited options. The question is how limited and how many vacation rentals come up for sale each year? The good news is that we have dug into the data to find the answer.
If you aren’t sure how to determine if a property is eligible then, here is a guide highlighting the seven checks that need to be completed to establish eligibility. Because we check the eligibility of every property that comes on the market we have tracked how many there are from November 2023 to October 2024 and the answer is 690 properties out of 7828 homes for sales across the county during that time which equates to just about 9%. It is probably not surprising to learn that the months where most properties came on the market that were eligible was April, May and June with 95, 86 and 84 properties coming on respectively.
Bearing in mind, pretty much every city in the county outlaws any new permits, then the vast majority of these are in Sonoma County unincorporated. It used to be the case that a large number of eligible properties were below the $1m because there were a lot in the Russian River area however with the rule changes that came in last August there were only 198 eligible properties for under $1m, 276 between $1m and $2m, 86 between $2m and $3m and then 84 properties over $3m.
So which areas contained the most eligible properties for sale? Santa Rosa is the area in Sonoma County unincorporated that has the most homes for sale so it makes sense that this also had more eligible properties than anywhere else with 146. However just behind it in number of eligible homes is Sebastopol which had 145 homes for sale. The challenge with this area is that, generally speaking, properties in the Sebastopol area just don’t produce the income numbers to match other areas of the county.
So how many eligible Healdsburg vacation homes for sale were there or Sonoma vacation homes for sale? Given how hard it is to find good ones in the either or Sonoma or Healdsburg it is perhaps surprising that there were 26 in Healdsburg and 56 in Sonoma. However when we look at the price point of these homes if you are looking for a home under $2m there were just 10 in the whole of Healdsburg which is an area of 184 square miles! In Sonoma there were 16 under $2m and 28 under $3m which explains why finding these is like trying to find a needle in the haystack.
Two other areas which perform well when you look at the ratio of gross income to median purchase price as explained in this blog post about our Vacation Rental Index, are Glen Ellen and Kenwood which had a total of 13 and 9 under $2m respectively.
Finding a Bodega Bay or Jenner vacation retinal for sale should be relatively easy because the rules in the coastal area are pretty relaxed when it comes to getting a permit. However because inventory turnover is pretty low there have only been 27 eligible homes that have come up for sale over the past 12 months and just 9 under $1m.
So what can we take from away from this data?
The short answer is that if you are looking for a vacation rental eligible property in an area that is popular you need to be super focussed and scour the listings because there is always a strong demand for good ones and limited supply. If you are looking for a second home where you have the option of being able to rent it out as an Airbnb when you are not using it, then you have a lot of options in some amazing places in the county.
If you are looking to find a Sonoma County Airbnb property for sale then we do have a website onto which we put every single property that is eligible for sale on within 24 hours of it coming o the market. If you do want to get access to that website then get in touch at contact@bruingtonhargreaves.com