Platform income, occupancy rules and county licensing all shape what a lender will do with the file. The property matters, and the town matters more.
Refinancing a short-term rental sits somewhere between a second home refinance and a commercial file, and which side it lands on depends on details most owners have never had to think about. Two owners with identical properties in different Colorado towns can get very different answers on the same morning.
Some lenders count documented short-term rental income. Others ignore it entirely and qualify you on your personal income as though the house sat empty. A third group takes it through a DSCR program, where the property qualifies on its own revenue and your tax returns stay out of the conversation.
When platform income counts, lenders generally want twelve months of history, and they want it documented in a form they recognize. Platform statements, a Schedule E, and deposits that match. A property you bought last spring has a thinner file than one you have run for three seasons.
Denver permits short-term rentals only in a primary residence. Several mountain towns cap licenses by zone, and some have paused issuing new ones altogether. A lender looks at that landscape and asks a fair question: if the license goes away, does this loan still work?
Tell your lender the town first. The town decides more than the property does.
Occupancy type drives the rate. A primary residence prices best, a second home prices in the middle, and an investment property prices highest. Telling a lender the property is a second home when you rent it out two hundred nights a year is occupancy fraud, and lenders audit for it. The honest classification costs a little more and protects the loan.
Most programs let you take cash out to about seventy-five percent of value on an investment property, a notch below what a primary residence allows. Owners use that money to fund the next purchase, which is the point at which the file becomes a portfolio conversation rather than a single refinance.
Gather twelve months of platform statements, your current license, the last Schedule E and your current mortgage statement. With those four items Steev can tell you which lenders will look at the file and roughly where the rate lands.
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