Broken Arrow capped short-term rental owners at four, and told the platforms to delist
Broken Arrow capped short-term rental owners at four, and told the platforms to delist
2026-09-15 · Oklahoma · Legislation
The largest municipal short-term rental change in Oklahoma this year happened in Broken Arrow in February, and it appears to have received no press coverage at all.
Ordinance No. 3905, adopted February 17, 2026, rewrote Chapter 7, Article XVII — §§ 7-465 through 7-477 — end to end, replacing Ordinance No. 3779 of April 2023.1
Four licences per person, and entities are looked through
The provision most directly aimed at what association boards complain about, § 7-468.3:
“(a) No natural person shall hold, directly or through beneficial ownership, more than four active STR licenses city-wide in residential zoning districts. (b) Applicants with entity ownership shall disclose all natural persons with beneficial ownership; licenses held by an entity are attributed to each such person for cap purposes. (c) The cap does not apply in mixed-use or commercial districts if expressly authorized by SUP or PUD conditions.”
“Beneficial ownership” is newly defined at § 7-466 as “direct or indirect ownership or control of 25 percent or more of the equity or voting interests of a legal entity, or the ability to appoint a majority of governing persons.”
You will be told by certified mail
§ 7-468(e) requires, with every application and every renewal: “Evidence of mailed notice to each abutting property and those directly across any abutting public street(s) of the applicant's intent to secure or renew a short-term rental license. Initial applications shall use certified mail, return-receipt requested. Renewals may use first-class mail. Where an email address for the record owner is reasonably available, email notice shall also be sent. The notice shall include the LRA's 24/7 phone number, the city complaint hotline/online form, and the property address.”
The platform duty, which is genuinely unusual
§ 7-468.2: “(a) A hosting platform shall provide a conspicuous notice to users listing STRs in the city that a city STR license is required. (b) Hosting platforms shall provide a dedicated field for the city license number in any listing for an STR located in the city. (c) Upon written notice from the city that a listing lacks a valid license number or pertains to a suspended or revoked STR, a hosting platform shall remove or disable the listing within three business days. (d) A hosting platform that complies with [subsections] (a)—(c) shall not be deemed in violation for user content posted without a valid license number.”
The rest of the rewrite
Screening near schools, § 7-468(d)(3): a screening plan plus acknowledgement that any short-term rental “within a 500-foot radius of schools (public, private, and all related facilities), day cares, playgrounds, or parks, must conduct additional screening of all potential renters, and not allow rental to individuals on the sex offender registry.”
Interior posting, § 7-468(n): the licence certificate and number, the local agent's 24/7 contact, maximum occupancy, a parking diagram, trash days, an emergency egress map, quiet-hours rules, and a conduct list including “no more than six persons outdoors on the premises between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m.; and no more than ten non-occupant invitees on site at any time.”
Annual inspection consent, § 7-468(f): “The short-term rental owner's consent to an annual inspection by a city code enforcement officer, or designee that the facility meets the property maintenance codes as adopted by the city.”
A good-behaviour discount, § 7-467: an owner with no enumerated violations “may have their renewal fee reduced by 20 percent.”
What an association actually gains from this
A standing intelligence feed most boards do not know they have. Since February 2026, an abutting owner in Broken Arrow — which in many communities means the association's own members, and sometimes the association itself where it owns a common-area parcel — receives certified mail before a new short-term rental licence is issued next door, and first-class mail before every renewal.
That is the earliest warning any Oklahoma city gives. Use it: a board that collects those notices from members has a real-time map of licensed short-term rentals inside its boundaries, which is exactly what it needs to enforce a covenant.
The four-licence cap is the first Oklahoma municipal tool aimed at the investor-aggregator problem. Note that it is a cap on licences per person, with entity ownership looked through — not a cap per neighbourhood. It does not stop four rentals appearing on one street; it stops one operator holding twenty across the city.
What it does not do
The ordinance says nothing about covenants. A grep of the full article returns no reference to covenants, deed restrictions, homeowners associations or condominiums. Broken Arrow is a silence city, like Tulsa — the licence and the covenant operate on separate tracks, and the city enforces only its own.
Fees are not in the code. Section 7-467 provides that the city manager may set initial and renewal licence fees and replacement certificate fees “by resolution in the manual of fees.” Figures circulating online for Broken Arrow's short-term rental fee are unsourced; the current manual of fees is the only reliable answer.
What a board can do
Ask members to forward the notices. One line in a newsletter converts a statutory mailing into a monitoring system.
Object in writing where you have grounds. A notice that arrives before a licence issues is an opportunity, and it costs a letter.
Check whether a workshop is being held. Broken Arrow has convened homeowners association workshops in the past. Following an ordinance of this size, that is the venue to ask the city how it intends to apply the cap and the platform takedown duty.
What to watch next
Whether any other Oklahoma city copies the four-licence cap or the platform takedown duty. Both are novel in this state, and the second in particular is the kind of provision that gets litigated before it gets imitated.
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