PROVINCETOWN — The town is looking for a real estate broker to help sell or lease the town-owned apartments at Harbor Hill, the 28-unit former timeshare complex where 55 people now live.
An invitation for bids from qualified brokers that the town issued in January had a deadline of Feb. 15. Two brokers applied, according to Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust chair and select board member Austin Miller: John Ciluzzi, owner of Premier Commercial, and Doug Grattan, president of the Christie’s International affiliate Atlantic Brokerage, which covers the Outer and Lower Cape and Nantucket.
Whichever broker is picked will have the job of recruiting outside parties that would rent units to “qualified applicants earning between 80 percent and 200 percent of the area median income” — the same income range the apartments are currently structured to serve. The invitation for bids also says any buyer would need to “maintain the property as a going concern serving the Provincetown community.”
The search for a new owner or leaseholder will be subject to Massachusetts 30B procurement laws, which means the rental housing trust will issue a request for proposals with “bids that will be public and openly debated, with no commitment to accept any,” said Miller. “The broker we are hiring will help to craft the RFP to meet our needs and attract a bidder at the right price, with the right commitment to the property and its mission.”
The bid invitation says that Harbor Hill would be conveyed with deed restrictions consistent with the legislation that created the Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust — but it does not include details about how the rents paid by tenants at Harbor Hill would be set. That legislation gives the trust the authority to establish “alternative or additional definitions for ‘market-rate’ ” rent, however.
Members of the trust have disagreed about how much rent the tenants at Harbor Hill should be paying. They rejected a proposal last November to raise rents by several hundred dollars per month. Town Manager Alex Morse weighed in on that debate, telling trustees that the town had “a lot of resources at its disposal” and that the town’s goals at Harbor Hill were “less focused on what the rents would be and more focused on the incomes of people who live and work in town.”
Morse suggested that the trustees look at the income of the town’s median earners and work backward from there to a rent schedule rather than using current listings of rental apartments to define “market-rate rent.”
For the 55 tenants at Harbor Hill, how much rent they would have to pay a new owner would almost certainly depend on the wording of the town’s deed restriction.
The Community Builders, the nonprofit developer that is constructing 65 apartments, including four market-rate units at 3 Jerome Smith Road, conducted a study that found a “market-rate” rent of $1,480 per month for a one-bedroom apartment in Provincetown.
Just down the street at the old police station on Shank Painter Road, a redevelopment proposal from Christine Barker and M. Tatiana Eck for 40 market-rate apartments includes a rent schedule of $2,500 to $2,750 per month for a one-bedroom apartment.
The tenants in Harbor Hill’s one-bedroom units are currently paying between $1,040 and $1,550 per month. That means their rents could go up by $1,200 per month and still be considered “market-rate” under Barker and Eck’s rent schedule.
The legislation that created the Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust gives it the authority to buy and sell property without a vote of town meeting. Miller said the trust will hold a public hearing to discuss any offers it receives to buy or lease Harbor Hill.
‘Lease to Locals’
The town is also moving forward with a program from Placemate.com called “Lease to Locals.” The company, founded by a former marketing director at Airbnb, provides subsidies to property owners to turn their short-term rental properties or vacation homes into year-round rentals.
“The idea of Lease to Locals is we are converting existing housing stock to new long-term rentals for the local workforce, and we are doing this in tourist towns around the country,” Placemate CEO Colin Frolich told the select board on Jan. 8. “Our strength is our ability to find vacation-home owners, second-home owners, short-term rental owners, property managers, and real estate agents and get them to do something that is different and that has a financial benefit to them.”
The subsidies are based on the number of tenants who sign a one-year lease and are funded by the town’s share of the rooms tax on stays in hotels and short-term rentals.
Placemates typically requires that tenants in their subsidized properties work in the county, but at their Feb. 12 meeting select board members said that people who work remotely but are involved in the town’s civic life should also be eligible.
Prospective tenants must earn less than 150 percent of the area median income in Barnstable County, which is $126,975 per year for a single person or $145,125 for a couple. The amount of the subsidy depends on how many working tenants are on the lease and ranges from $6,000 per year for one working person in a studio apartment to $20,000 for three working tenants in a three-bedroom unit.
The rent that property owners can charge for a property with a Placemate lease is also capped. Studio apartments may be rented for up to $1,600 per month; one-bedroom units may be rented for $2,200; two-bedroom units for $3,000; and three-bedrooms units for $3,800.
Select board members had initially worried that the rent caps were too high. At their Feb. 12 meeting, however, Morse said that using the “30 percent of income toward rent” rule — which derives from housing legislation introduced by U.S. Senator Edward Brooke III in 1969 — median earners would be able to afford those rents.
A person earning 80 percent of area median income would be able to afford $1,693 in rent, according to the 30-percent rule, while a person earning 100 percent of AMI could afford $2,116, Morse’s data showed.
The board accepted that argument and voted unanimously to move $348,500 in rooms tax money from the town’s Housing Fund to the Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust Fund to pay for a one-year Lease to Locals pilot program. Trust members were set to vote on the program on Wednesday, Feb. 21, after the deadline for this edition of the Independent, with the program itself set to begin on April 1.