Santa Fe makes rental applicants swear your covenants allow it — then mails your HOA the permit
Santa Fe makes rental applicants swear your covenants allow it — then mails your HOA the permit
2026-09-15 · New Mexico · Regulation
Santa Fe's short-term rental ordinance answers the “does a city permit beat my declaration” question three separate ways in a single section — and every one of them favours the association.1
The applicant has to swear your covenants allow it
Subsection 14-6.2(A)(5)(f) of the Santa Fe City Code requires an affirmation from the owner and operator “that they will operate the short-term rental unit in compliance with this subsection 14-6.2(A)(5) and all other applicable laws, city codes, and private covenants; and that no private covenants prohibit the operation of the short-term rental unit.”
Your association is a mandatory notice party
Subsection (j)(i): “Within ten (10) days after the issuance or renewal of a short-term rental permit, the owner or operator shall mail notices by first-class mail to the homeowners association within which the unit is located (if applicable); to the owners of residentially zoned property within two hundred (200) feet of the subject property… and to the land use department.”
The notices “shall contain the name and phone number of the local operator,” and a fresh notice must go out within ten days of any change in that contact information. The owner must then give the land use director “copies of all required mailing lists and an affidavit of mailing signed by the person who mailed the notices.”
And the ordinance says covenants win
Subsection (m), headed “Restrictive Covenants,” is one sentence: “Private restrictive covenants, enforceable by those governed by the covenants, may prohibit short-term rental units.”
There is a buyer-side disclosure duty too, at subsection (n): “A real estate broker listing property in Santa Fe shall provide prospective buyers with a current copy of this ordinance.”
The caps, which do work an association's amendment process usually cannot
Santa Fe caps permits citywide and inside buildings. Subsection (c): “The land use director shall issue a maximum of one thousand (1000) short-term rental permits… If the number of permits reaches the one thousand (1000)-permit limit, then the land use department shall stop processing applications and shall add applicants to a waiting list.” And: “The land use director shall issue permits to natural persons only, and each natural person may possess a maximum of one (1) permit.”
Proximity: no new permit where the property “is located within a fifty (50)-foot radius of a residentially zoned property that has a permitted short-term rental unit.”
And the provision that reaches condominium boards — in a multiple-family dwelling development of four or more units, the director “shall not issue short-term rental permits for more than twenty-five (25%) of such dwelling units, rounded down to the nearest whole number, and shall not issue more than twelve (12) short-term rental permits within a single building.”
That is a City-imposed ceiling on short-term rental conversion inside a condominium building — an outcome many boards have tried and failed to achieve by amending their own declarations, because amendment thresholds are high and investor owners vote against.
What changes for a Santa Fe board
Treat the arrival of a notice as the trigger. Because notice is mandatory on issuance and renewal, a compliant owner tells the association every year. A board that files those letters has a register of permitted units in its community without doing any investigation.
Note the leverage in the affirmation. If the declaration prohibits short-term rentals and an owner in the community holds a permit, the owner's application contained a false affirmation. That is relevant both to the private enforcement action and to a complaint to the land use department — a second route that does not exist in Albuquerque, Ruidoso or Las Cruces, none of whose ordinances mention covenants at all.
Check what the declaration actually says. Subsection (m) protects a covenant that prohibits short-term rentals. It does not create one. An older Santa Fe declaration that speaks of “single-family residential use” or “no business or commercial activity” may or may not reach a nightly rental, and that is a question of the instrument's language.
The operational rules, briefly
A local operator must be available around the clock, reachable by phone and physically present within one hour. Off-street parking is one space for a one-bedroom and two for two or more bedrooms. Fixtures must meet the city's water-conservation requirements. A certificate of occupancy is required before issuance. Three years of records — reservation start dates, nights rented, rent by month, taxes by month — must be produced to the city on request. Penalties “may include civil or criminal penalties or revocation.”
Permits held when the 2020 amendment was adopted are grandfathered against the proximity rule and the one-permit-per-person limit.
One more Santa Fe covenant layer
Owners building an accessory dwelling unit in Santa Fe must record a restrictive covenant in the City's favour, binding “all future owners of the Property” to the City's ADU standards “as the same may be amended from time to time.” So a title search inside a Santa Fe association can now turn up City covenants on individual lots — something resale packages should account for.
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