This Is the Best City to Own a Vacation Rental

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 1, 9:55AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

This Is the Best City to Own a Vacation Rental — © alexeys / iStock via Getty Images

Owning a second home, whether as an investment or a vacation getaway, may seem like a luxury to most of us. However, a surprising number of American households (almost 8 million of them) do indeed have a secondary property.

Many of these are in rural areas or smaller towns, and the thought of retreating to a more tranquil and probably less crowded place has obvious appeal in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the vacation rental business is thriving right now, as private residences are seen as safer than hotels and better suited for working remotely.

Some locations around the country are particularly good places in which to own a vacation home, whether for personal use or rental, or both, and also good places to seek out a rental for a temporary stay.

Based on 14 metrics, including rental vacancy rate, median annual property taxes, number of local attractions, and rates of violent crime, property crime and natural hazards, the lawn care company LawnStarter recently compared 318 destinations to compile a list of 2021’s best cities in which to own a vacation home.
[nativounit]
We picked one as the best city to own a second home.

Some are small towns, though sometimes part of large metropolitan areas. Two are good-sized cities rather than semi-rural retreats. (These are America’s 50 best cities in which to live.)

As varied as they may be, any of the places on this list would be a nice place to live, at least some of the time, as well as a good potential source of extra income.

To supplement these rankings, we added the median home value for each city on this list in 2019 and noted how that figure compared to the value of a typical home nationwide.

Shelbyville, Kentucky, had a median home value in 2019 of $178,600.

This small Appalachian city between Louisville and Frankfort is near numerous bourbon distilleries and also in horse country. In fact, it is considered the saddlebred horse capital of America. KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders liked it well enough to make it his home for more than two decades. It offers great property investment opportunities.

Click here to see the best places to own a vacation home.
[wallst_email_signup]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.