An investor calls me with a property three-quarters of a mile from AT&T Stadium. Cowboys games, Rangers games at Globe Life Field, Texas Live! foot traffic, Six Flags a short drive away. The pro forma practically writes itself: nightly rate during a home game weekend, multiply by fifty-two weeks, add the World Cup bump from this summer. Then I ask one question. Have you checked the zoning?
Most of the time, the answer is no. And in Arlington, that single question decides whether the investment thesis survives contact with the city code.
The assumption every out-of-market investor makes
Arlington sells itself on proximity to a stadium, a ballpark, and an amusement park that together pull millions of visitors a year. Add the residual attention from hosting World Cup matches this summer, and it's easy to see why a buyer would treat the city as a short-term rental market first and a housing market second. One rental analytics platform pegs the median Arlington host's gross revenue at roughly $28,000 a year, with nightly rates averaging around $196 and occupancy near 55 percent. Numbers like that travel fast in investor group chats.
What doesn't travel as fast is the fact that the city spent 2019 making sure most of its housing stock could never generate that income legally.
The ordinance that redraws the map
On April 23, 2019, Arlington City Council adopted two ordinances, No. 19-014 and No. 19-022, that together rewrote where a short-term rental can exist in the city. The first amended the zoning code to specify eligible locations. The second built the actual regulatory chapter: permitting, operating rules, and penalties. Both took effect August 1, 2019, and neither one grandfathered in properties that were already operating as short-term rentals. If you were renting a house on Airbnb the week before the ordinance passed, you needed a permit the same as anyone starting today.
Here's what the ordinance actually allows. Short-term rental use is legal inside a mapped zone roughly one mile around the Entertainment District, bounded by East Lamar Boulevard, Center Street, East Abram Street, and the southbound State Highway 360 frontage road. Outside that ring, the ordinance also permits STR use in two zoning districts available citywide, RM-12 and RMF-22, plus existing residential structures inside non-residential or mixed-use districts. Everywhere else, meaning the ordinary single-family zoning that covers most of Arlington's neighborhoods, a short-term rental cannot get permitted. Not with a variance, not with a well-written application. The zoning is the gate, and there's no door around it.
Opponents of the ordinance estimated it eliminated legal operating ground for more than 90 percent of the roughly 428 short-term rentals active in the city before the rules took effect. Property owners challenged the restriction in court, arguing it violated their rights under the Texas Constitution. In July 2021, the Second District Court of Appeals sided with the city. The Texas Supreme Court declined to take the case further. The zoning has held since, through a summer that put Arlington on a global stage during the World Cup without the city expanding the eligible zone in response.
Here's the practical version of that history, laid out by parcel type:
| Where the property sits | Can you legally run a short-term rental? |
|---|---|
| Inside the STR Zone, the roughly one-mile ring around the Entertainment District bounded by E. Lamar Blvd, Center St, E. Abram St, and the SH-360 frontage road | Yes, with a permit |
| RM-12 or RMF-22 zoned parcels, anywhere in the city | Yes, with a permit |
| Existing residential structures in non-residential or mixed-use districts | Yes, with a permit |
| Ordinary single-family zoning outside those areas, which covers most of Arlington | No, and there's no variance process |
What it costs even when the zoning cooperates
Landing inside the eligible zone doesn't mean the math is simple from there. The permit itself runs $500 a year through the city's Planning and Development Services office, and it's non-refundable even if the application gets denied. Beyond that fee, an eligible operator needs:
- A passed safety inspection covering smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and posted emergency information
- Minimum $1 million in liability insurance, since most standard landlord policies in Texas exclude short-term rental activity outright
- Separate registration for the city's 9 percent hotel occupancy tax, filed on its own schedule and never collected automatically by a booking platform, stacked on top of the state's 6 percent hotel occupancy tax
- One permit per owner, non-transferable, tied to a single address, with annual renewal at the full fee
Fifteen percent of every night's revenue goes to hotel occupancy tax before an operator sees a dollar of it. That's before insurance, before the permit, before whatever a property manager charges to handle the turnover between a Friday Rangers game and a Sunday checkout.
What this means for the numbers you're actually underwriting
If a property sits outside the mapped zone, and statistically most of Arlington does, the investment case has to stand on long-term rental fundamentals, not stadium-weekend nightly rates. That's a different underwriting exercise entirely, and it's worth knowing where the broader market sits before running it.
Arlington's median home sale price has been sitting in the $315,000 to $320,000 range through the middle of 2026, down somewhere between 3 and 5 percent year over year depending on the tracker. Homes have been taking around 55 to 62 days to sell in recent months. That's a buyer-friendlier environment than Arlington has seen in a few years, which matters for acquisition price even if it says nothing about STR eligibility.
The regional context adds a wrinkle worth knowing about. The Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M reported in its August 2026 housing insight that Fort Worth-Arlington has posted consecutive months of year-over-year price gains, a notable rebound at a time when statewide home prices were still working through a 13-month stretch of decline. Arlington is stabilizing faster than much of the state. That's a reasonable tailwind for a long-term hold. It's not a substitute for checking whether the parcel can legally do what the pro forma assumes it can do.
The check that costs nothing and saves the offer
Before an STR income line goes into any offer on an Arlington property, the parcel needs to be checked against the city's zoning map. Arlington's Planning and Development Services office maintains the lookup tools and the permit portal, and the city posted guidance as recently as February 2026 reminding prospective hosts to verify eligibility before listing. That's a five-minute check against a purchase decision worth six figures.
The pitcher's version of this lesson is simple. You don't throw the pitch you wish you had. You throw the one the count actually calls for. An Arlington property three-quarters of a mile from the stadium might be a strong long-term rental, a strong owner-occupied buy, or a legitimate STR play. Which one it is depends on a zoning line, not on how close it sits to the scoreboard.
A couple of questions that come up often
Does hosting World Cup matches this summer change any of these rules going forward? Not based on anything the city has published. The STR zoning map that's been in place since 2019 held through the tournament without expansion, and there's no indication of a pending change.
Where do I verify whether a specific address qualifies before I make an offer? Arlington's Planning and Development Services department maintains the current STR eligibility map and permit process on the city's own site. Checking the exact parcel there, before the option period starts, is the only way to know for certain.
If you're evaluating a property in Arlington and want a clear read on what the zoning actually supports before you write the offer, that's exactly the kind of groundwork Nathan Karns walks investors through. Schedule a Consultation and we'll pull the zoning on your specific address before the numbers go anywhere near a contract.
