Yes, you can make bank renting your home during Coachella. But here's what you need to know.

Fifty weekends a year, Nick Miller’s house in Palm Desert is a humble home.

But for two weekends in April – three, if he’s lucky – the ranch-style house and casita might as well be a plush hotel.

During the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Miller’s casita alone can bring in $1,000 a weekend, he says, $300 more than what he usually charges students and traveling nurses for a full month in the detached dwelling.

“There’s no other weekend during the entire year that even comes close,” Miller said.

People staying at vacation rentals in the Coachella Valley spend $900 million in the desert each year, a good chunk of it during festival season. Last year, 125,000 people flooded Greater Palm Springs for each weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, overwhelming a region where there are roughly 16,000 hotel rooms. 

For some homeowners – or anyone with a bed, backyard or camper trailer to spare, really – the festivals represent the chance to earn some welcome pocket change. Comparing a sample of online vacation rental listings during the first weekend of the month to those same listings during Coachella, The Desert Sun found hosts who had doubled their prices or more. 

Counting Stagecoach, the three festival weekends are also a good deal for property managers, who say the concerts have extended their busy season through the end of April, filling in a gap as many snowbird renters depart the desert. 

Cities see a boost to their bottom lines, too. The bed tax revenue from short-term rentals alone in Palm Springs, for example, bumped up 26 percent between March and April 2017.

But in the Coachella Valley, tourism is rising year round, and communities are trying to strike a balance when it comes to short-term rentals. The challenge is to ride the wave of tourism, while making sure it doesn't wipe out longtime desert residents, many of whom say their neighborhoods are overrun with visitors – no matter the season. 

In response, desert cities have tightened the rules for hosts, limiting where short-term rentals can operate and for how long. Palm Desert has banned vacation rentals from single-family residential neighborhoods. And in Palm Springs, voters will weigh another stringent proposal in June: a ballot measure to ban vacation rentals in single family homes.

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The short-term rental side-hustle

A four-bedroom house with a pool in La Quinta asking $3,200 a night. An RV that sleeps six in Indio listed for $350. A mid-century modern home in Palm Springs on the vacation rental market for $1,600.

For visitors who had waited until the first week of March to plan a last-minute Coachella getaway, these were some of the listings still available.

Then there's Nick Miller's house. Built to be blue-collar housing in the late 1950s, the property lacks amenities like a pool or tennis courts, things that would make it stand out to the usual tourists and snowbirds. 

“For the bulk of the year, it’s not an ideal rental,” Miller said.

But during Coachella, Miller’s house has a distinct advantage: it’s about half a mile from the nearest shuttle stop to the festival grounds. Miller usually only leases out the casita –but to make the most of the festival boom times, he rents out his entire property during Coachella.

Eli Rector, another Palm Desert resident near a Coachella shuttle stop, is a festival weekend host, too. Once a year, he and his wife list some bedrooms online and run their home like a bed and breakfast, putting out fruit, coffee and bagels for guests to enjoy in the mornings.

The nightly rate this April is $280 – money the family plans to save up for a vacation.

“We’re going to go on a trip to Europe this year, so we’re definitely going to apply it toward that,” Rector said.

Richard Fox and Steve Fisher have been renting their Palm Desert condo to snowbirds since 2011, and in 2014, they decided to open their home to Coachella attendees, too. The three-bedroom, 2.5-bath home fetches $450 a night during the festival – up to $260 more than the rest of the year.

“We started doing it very hesitantly (during festivals) due to all the red flag warnings we heard,” Fox said, "but the extra income from the higher rates that can be charged really helps us out."

Both retired, Fox and Fisher spend much of the year on the road, traveling in their RV, bicycling and gathering information for guide books they write. The added revenue from festival season carries them through the summer months, when they struggle to find renters willing to pay $190 per night.

Fox and Fisher say sharing their home with people from all over the world has been a great experience – even during the festivals. They remind guests that they live in a quiet country club community, try to screen for heavy partiers and find that the wear and tear on the condo is no worse at festival time than the rest of the year, when families with children are the primary renters.

“Sometimes (Coachella attendees) are even lighter users, just using the place to relax after the festival,” Fox said. 

From snowbirds to songbirds

Festival season is a boon to the management companies that run vacation rentals, too.

Rental managers say festival-goers stretch their busy season a little bit longer, allowing them to charge higher-than-usual rates over the course of a few nights instead of lower rates for a full month, as snowbirds leave and music lovers arrive.

But they also say local lore exaggerates the benefits – and the risks – of renting out a home during the music festivals.

Vacation rentals on the website HomeAway, which only advertises whole homes, will boast an average nightly rate of $1,140 during Coachella 2018, according to the company. 

One company that has built a business around the festival grounds is Travlr Vacation Homes.

Spencer Wampole, the company's founder, said Travlr only manages properties near the polo fields, and only if they have amenities like pools and putting greens as well as technology like thermostats, sound systems and locks that Travlr can monitor and control remotely.

The company depends on booking guests year round, but Wampole said having homes designed to be rented for short-term stays pays off during busy times like Coachella.  

“A lot of people end up booking properties that are not specially designed vacation rentals, and they book it because it’s a lower price and not professionally managed," he said. "But those same people are calling us when they check in,” he added, and realize the house they rented isn't what they expected. 

The typical nightly rate – the median price booked by customers – for an entire house on Airbnb during the first weekend of Coachella 2017 was $285, according to the company.

Dan Urie is the local licensee of a vacation rental management franchise called iTrip, operating a territory that covers La Quinta, Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes and Indio. He said listing prices can triple during Coachella. On any other weekend, a four-bedroom property under his care will rent for $1,000 a night. Come Coachella, the same property will set you back $3,500.

“We have rentals that rent out for $15,000 for a weekend,” he said.

Mia Melle is president and broker of Modern Real Estate Shop, a firm that manages about 100 vacation rentals in the valley, many of them in Palm Desert Resort Country Club. A typical rental can ask $350 or $450 per night during the season, she said, and increases to $600 a night during Coachella. Melle cautions hosts from expecting to net a huge profit on festival weekends.

“For the most part, you can’t just pitch a tent in your backyard and think you’re going to get all of this money,” she said.

But Melle also thinks there's a tendency to exaggerate horror stories of festival weekend guests that trashed tranquil homes.

“People who are spending thousands and thousands of dollars are not coming for the sole purpose of ruining your furniture, if you know what I mean,” she said.

Still, if hosts are nervous about opening their doors during festival season, they can follow the lead of Jim Pearce, whose company Fairway Vacation Rentals manages about 125 units in the desert.

Pearce charges festival weekend guests a higher security deposit of $1,000 instead of the usual $250 or $500. And he's thankful to have the younger customers.

“We’ve found they’ve been very responsible renters,” he said.

The impact of short-term rentals – and their critics

It's not just the festivals. The impact of tourism on the desert economy – and on residential neighborhoods – is growing. There are more passengers flying into Palm Springs International Airport, more people coming to Modernism Week and more transient occupancy tax revenue flowing into valley cities.

Vacation rentals are a piece of that larger picture.

Counting guest spending inside and outside of vacation rentals, the short-term rental industry has an estimated $900 million economic impact on the valley every year, according to Palm Desert-based Development Management Group.

Michael Bracken, DMG managing partner and chief economist, served for five years as CEO of the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership. At DMG, his clients include the vacation home industry and Goldenvoice, which produces the music festivals.

"It is fair to say that vacation homes are an important part of the Coachella Valley's economy as it relates to being a tourist destination," he said. The valley hosts roughly 2.3 million visitors annually.

That includes visitors who come for Coachella and Stagecoach. Around the valley, many cities report a boost in transient occupancy tax – or TOT, the tax charged on travel accommodations – that seems to track with festival season.

In La Quinta, TOT from STRs more than doubled in 2017 between the months of March and May, when the city finishes collecting TOT for the previous month.

In Indio, TOT revenue from vacation homes crested $200,000 in March ($211,586) and April ($209,329). The city's TOT revenue peaked at $243,703 in January 2017, when Coachella tickets go on sale and online reservations for vacation rentals are first being made, said city spokesperson PJ Gagajena.

“We recognize that there is a hotel shortage in our city," Gagajena said, a gap that is attracting hotel developers. "We recognize that one option is providing short-term rentals to festival goers or visitors.”

Short-term rentals have become a lightning rod for debate in Palm Desert, where last year TOT climbed from $192,000 in February to more than $301,000 in April.

In an hours-long hearing on whether to ban short-term rentals from certain neighborhoods in October 2017, the city's council chambers were visibly divided.

Opponents of the ban wore pink shirts. Supporters of the ban wore blue shirts – and came armed with stories of quiet weekends routinely disrupted by neighboring rentals.

One described hearing drunken pool parties late into the night. Another said he had taken to wearing earplugs to bed to block out the noise from revelers. Still others described neighborhoods where the streets were crammed with tourists' cars and living in a private home has started to feel more like a Motel 6.

“Where we once knew our neighbors, we are now living in ‘strangerhoods’ where 15 to 20 percent of the homes are full-time hotels, 80 percent of these are owned by out-of-towners. The majority of them never spend a single night in them," said Stephen Rose, a Palm Springs resident, who has campaigned for tighter regulation of vacation rentals in his home city through the organization Palm Springs Neighbors for Neighborhoods. "It is tearing our neighborhoods apart."

"Out-of-control short-term rentals are a cancer on your neighborhood," a Palm Desert resident, Jim Kane, told council members.

The city ultimately voted to ban vacation homes in single-family and mixed residential zones.

The arguments against short-term rentals don't sit well with Nick Miller, the Palm Desert resident who rents his casita year-round. Palm Desert is an expensive place, he said — a Phoenix climate with Los Angeles prices. 

“Renting rooms through Airbnb has enabled me to stay in my home,” he said.

Amy DiPierro covers real estate and business. Reach her at amy.dipierro@desertsun.com.

Desert Sun reporter Sherry Barkas covers tourism and families. Reach her at sherry.barkas@desertsun.com.