Walton County, GA Short-Term Rentals: Repeat Violator Strikes (2026)

Every Short Term Rental in unincorporated Walton County must designate a local property manager or contact person available twenty-four hours a day under Section 6-1-840(C), with that person's name, address and phone number filed with Planning and Development, the Sheriff's Office and the Fire Department, and posted inside the rental unit itself. Section 6-1-840(F) backs that requirement with a specific strike rule: if the Walton County Sheriff's Office is unable to reach the local contact person more than three times within any consecutive six-month period, that failure alone is grounds for revoking the Short Term Rental License, independent of any other violation.

The mechanism exists because complaints about a rental typically route through the Sheriff's Office first; when the property's designated contact does not answer, deputies have no way to resolve a noise, parking or nuisance complaint on-site, so the ordinance treats repeated unavailability as a licensing failure rather than a mere paperwork lapse. The same subsection folds this into the Article's broader violations clause, which applies Article 15's general Land Development Ordinance penalties to any Short Term Rental violation and independently allows license revocation for any breach of Section 6-1-840.

An operator whose contact person changes address or phone number must promptly update Planning and Development, the Sheriff's Office, the Fire Department and neighboring property owners within a 300-foot radius, since a stale contact record is what typically produces the unreachable count that triggers this rule.