Vermont Housing Commissioner Alex Farrell looked out over a conference room packed with people who had come to defend — and grow — the state’s short-term rental industry. It was a Thursday in March, and snow still lingered on the slopes of Mount Mansfield as vacation-rental owners, proper ty managers, property-rights lawyers and software vendors met in Stowe for the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance’s annual statewide conference. As Vermont’s housing shortage deepened and vacation rentals came under increasing scrutiny, they gathered to find out how Gov. Phil Scott’s administration viewed their business. Farrell tried to allay their concerns. “There’s a reason you don’t hear us at the state level saying short-term rentals are the problem that is driving our housing shortage,” he said. Because they are not, he told the audience: Short-term rentals have become a bogeyman that distracts attention from Vermont’s failure to build enough homes. In fact, recent data from the company AirDNA, which analyzes listings on rental platforms including Airbnb and Vrbo, show only 3 percent of all residences — or about 11,000 dwelling units — in Vermont are in use as short-term rentals. But just outside the conference doors, local officials in Stowe were dealing with a different reality. In their town, a surge in short-term rentals was making it more difficult for residents and local workers to find homes or apartments. And Stowe is not alone. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of Vermont homes have been added to the vacation-rental market; the statewide data mask sharp local differences. In some tourism-dependent communities, including Stowe, the concentration of short-term rentals is now 20 percent or higher. Gov. Phil Scott and Alex Farrell Credit: Kevin McCallum “Stowe needs to make a demonstrable change in the way that we manage housing, or we will no longer have a community,” Josi Kytle, a local resident and short-term rental owner who advocates for stricter regulation, said in an interview. As Vermont’s housing shortage has intensified, more communities have confronted the same question: How much housing should be reserved for tourists rather than year-round residents? In the absence of statewide standards or regulations, municipalities have been left to answer that question and find their own solutions. The result is a growing patchwork of policies across Vermont, with some cities and towns aggressively restricting vacation rentals while others have opted for lighter oversight or none at all. Woodstock, for example, has put a roughly 5 percent cap on the number of residences in its historic village that can be used as short-term rentals. In the ski town of Ludlow, where the concentration of such rentals surpassed 20 percent late last year, officials are in the early stages of considering whether to adopt a registry and other light regulations. Meanwhile, the state’s largest city has limited most short-term rentals to owner-occupied properties. Just outside Burlington, communities such as Winooski and South Burlington have created regulations, including registries, to monitor the industry, even though they host relatively few short-term rentals. Nearly all of these policies have generated heated local debates, bad feelings and, in Burlington, a lawsuit by short-term rental owners. The gamut of arguments in defense of short-term rentals runs from fundamental property rights to the tax revenue these businesses generate. Wade Treadway, a Woodstock real estate broker and chair of the town’s Development Review Board, said many short-term rental owners rely on the added income to pay their own tax bills or hold on to generational homes, while the guests they host spend money at local restaurants, cleaners, contractors and other small businesses. In some tourism-dependent communities, including Stowe, the concentration of short-term rentals is now 20 percent or higher. Residents who press for regulation object not simply to the overall numbers but to the way a concentration of vacation rentals in one place can leave them feeling like they no longer know their neighbors. Sometimes, as in Stowe, anger about short-term rentals is exacerbated by evidence that out-of-town investors are turning homes into vacation rentals and reaping the financial rewards. Some properties can go for more than $1,000 per night during peak seasons, giving owners a financial incentive to cater to visitors instead of year-round tenants. A push for statewide rules briefly looked promising in 2021, when lawmakers drafted a statewide short-term rental framework that aimed to impose uniform registration and reporting requirements. Gov. Scott vetoed the bill, saying additional regulations would reduce the number of housing options. A separate bill that would have introduced a statewide registry did not advance out of committee this past legislative session. Vermont’s town-by-town approach reflects the broader national landscape, according to Jorge González-Hermoso, a senior researcher at Urban Institute. While some states have adopted uniform baseline requirements — such as registries, tax registration systems or safety standards — most continue to leave decisions about licensing, occupancy limits and other restrictions to local governments, allowing communities to tailor rules to their own housing markets. State policy makers are also acutely aware of the rental industry’s importance to Vermont’s $4.2 billion tourism economy. According to Airbnb, by far the largest rental platform, its Vermont properties contributed $416.5 million to the state’s gross domestic product and generated $29.1 million in state tax revenue in 2025 alone. And, as Tourism Commissioner Heather Pelham said at the Stowe conference, “Visitors need to stay somewhere.” She offered the 93-mile Lamoille Valley Rail Trail as an example: Some of the towns along the trail have no hotels; vacation rentals allow those communities to share in the dollars that tourists spend. Seven Days set out to look at the ways four communities are confronting the tension between capitalizing on the tourism economy and preserving housing for full-time residents. Even where restrictions have come to pass, the vacation-rental industry has continued to make gains. Hard Cap: Stowe Josi Kytle Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur One weekend in mid-June, anonymous flyers appeared on car windshields in the parking lots of Stowe hotels and businesses. “Tourists — Boycott Body Lounge,” it read. “The owner Beth Gadbois Does Not Support Short Term Rentals and Tourism in STOWE.” The fight over short-term rentals had gotten personal. Gadbois, vice chair of the Stowe Selectboard, is a fierce advocate for limits on vacation rentals in her town. She won her seat in 2025 by defeating a 14-year incumbent who had been the board’s staunchest defender of the short-term rental business. “I’m an easy target. I have a store, and you can pick on me, but this was a statement to the whole board because we’re all aligned,” Gadbois said last week, describing the board’s unanimous support for regulating short-term rentals. The flyers were only the most recent salvo in the bitter debate over short-term rentals in Stowe, where such properties constitute a quarter of the housing, the median home value is roughly $1 million, and workers in the town’s hospitality and restaurant businesses have trouble finding and affording apartments or other homes. A housing needs assessment last year made clear that new construction alone would not solve these problems because much of it is being snapped up as second homes or vacation rentals. Last fall, Benjy Adler, co-owner of local chainlet the Skinny Pancake, closed his Stowe location because he couldn’t adequately staff it. “If this town wants a sustainable tourist industry, it needs housing in town, not people driving from an hour away,” he said at the time. No one wants to ban short-term rentals in Stowe, Gadbois said, but voters have shown repeatedly that they want “regulations and moderation.” In second home-heavy Stowe, permanent residents made up 33 percent of homeowners in 2012 — but that number had declined to 27 percent by 2024, according to the housing needs assessment. “It is no longer about thriving; it’s about surviving,” Josi Kytle, the Stowe rental owner who strongly supports regulation, said of her community. Stowe needs to make a demonstrable change in the way that we manage housing, or we will no longer have a community.Josi Kytle She said she understands how the short-term rental business fits in. “It’s a valuable, necessary part of our housing stock, our economy, our life, my livelihood and other people’s livelihood,” she said. Kytle herself relies on the income from two short-term rentals to afford to live in Stowe and subsidize her nonprofit work. She grew up in town and remembers it as a community with a healthy mix of full-time residents and second-home owners. She had classmates whose families lived year-round in condominium developments that were built to appeal to snowbirds. Then, she said, “investors bought them and took them off the long-term property market and put them to use as short-term rentals.” The purchase of Stowe Mountain Resort by multinational ski corporation Vail Resorts in 2017, followed by a flurry of all-cash sales during the pandemic, accelerated these changes. “The COVID blur really changed things. I think at least a couple hundred people bought an escape house here,” said David Sullivan, a longtime Stowe resident. “There’s a fear of losing the sense of community,” echoed a fellow resident, Terrie Wehse. “There’s a fear of my road turning into hotel rooms even though they’re houses.” In response, town officials in 2024 proposed new safety requirements and created a registry of all short-term rentals. From the jump, a coalition of rental owners, property managers and property-rights advocates fought back. That year, they forced a town-wide vote on whether to create a registry. Voters supported one by a wide margin. The registry confirmed what outside data had already shown: About 1,000 residential units — a quarter of all the homes in town — are vacation rentals, although the number includes units that are part of larger resort hotels. The registry also showed, for the first time, that nearly 80 percent of those properties were owned by people who lived outside of Stowe, with almost as many owners based in Massachusetts as Vermont. “I wasn’t surprised because I knew that there were plenty of out-of-state people. It’s what Stowe’s been about forever,” Wehse said. “But I think since Airbnb and COVID, it just is out of hand.” Earlier this year, the selectboard decided it had seen enough and proposed to cap the number of short-term rentals at 850. Current owners would be allowed to keep their rentals until the property was sold or turned into a longer-term home. This would put a near-total freeze on the creation of new short-term rentals until the target number was reached through attrition. But once the proposal became public, homeowners flooded the town’s rental registry, fearful of being locked out once the cap took effect — even if they didn’t have immediate plans to rent. The number of registrants ballooned from about 1,000 to more than 1,600, nearly 40 percent of the town’s housing stock. “People acting in their own self-interest are making it more difficult to roll this out in a way that’s fair to everyone,” selectboard chair Ethan Carlson said. Sullivan, the longtime resident, rents out rooms in his home during holidays and other peak tourism seasons so that his family can afford to live in town. No one is forcing him to stop renting, but he’s concerned about what will happen when he tries to sell his home. “I can’t — in five years, when it comes time to retire — turn around and sell my property to someone from Boston and say, ‘This is my income from our short-term rental’ to help the sale,” Sullivan said. Rental licenses can be transferred within families. If the town doesn’t see the number of short-term rentals dip below the cap in the next two years, a lottery system will be created to allow 25 new rental licenses to be issued in addition to those already operating in an effort to not completely shut out would-be rental owners. The selectboard could approve the proposal as soon as Wednesday, July 22. It would take effect in September. Major resorts in the town — including Spruce Peak, von Trapp Family Lodge Resort and Topnotch Resort — successfully lobbied to be exempted from even registering because their units function more like hotels than neighborhood homes. That will shave a few hundred vacation rentals from the registry, assistant town manager Will Fricke estimated. But other concerted lobbying efforts have proven less effective. Last December, for example, Airbnb called on its Stowe hosts to speak out against the proposed regulations. The company’s email messages warned that the selectboard was “considering significantly stricter restrictions that could limit your ability to continue hosting,” and the company needed hosts’ help to “protect fair, reasonable STR rules in Stowe.” At the end of March and in early April, some residents received texts asking them to participate in a two-minute “Stowe Issues Survey” paid for by Airbnb that polled them on housing and vacation rentals. The Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance, which has its own Stowe chapter, asked the selectboard to make the short-term rental license transferable by sale; to set a percentage cap rather than a hard number; and to wait for the completion of a short-term rental economic impact report commissioned earlier this year. But the selectboard declined to incorporate any of the alliance’s suggestions. Airbnb, which spent nearly $30,000 on lobbying efforts in Vermont in 2023 and 2024, increased its spending to more than $76,000 in 2025 and the first half of this year. Britte McBride, a public policy manager for Airbnb, has attended public forums where the cap ordinance was debated. She also spoke at the short-term rental conference, emphasizing the economic value the industry provides to Vermont. Carlson suspects the cap ordinance will likely be met with a legal challenge. And a plaintiff might have plenty of help — the short-term rental conference in March included a session about grassroots advocacy and property-rights law led by a high-profile California lawyer who specializes in the field. Public opinion, though, seems to be firmly in favor of the regulations. “I had a couple of my best weeks ever in June,” Gadbois, the target of the boycott that month, said of the response to her local business. Home Rule: Burlington Lucas Jensen Credit: Daria Bishop It’s not just resort towns that worry about the impact of short-term rentals. Burlington, Vermont’s biggest city, has had some of the strictest rules in the state for the past four years. A 2022 ordinance requires that most short-term rental hosts live on the same property as the units they rent to others. In addition to 12 percent in state taxes, each Burlington booking pays a 9 percent local tax, money that’s used to bolster the city’s housing trust fund. Short-term rentals make up a tiny fraction, under 2 percent, of the city’s housing stock. But the intent of the ordinance was to increase the number of landlords who use their properties for long-term rentals, one way to bolster the city’s very short supply of homes and apartments. The Chittenden County rental market has long been well below the 5 percent vacancy rate considered healthy. “There was meaningful competition going on between short-term rentals and long-term renters, and our priority was long-term residents,” said Miro Weinberger, who was the mayor of Burlington at the time. Calling it too “draconian,” Weinberger opposed — and vetoed — an initial ordinance that allowed no exceptions to the rule that hosts live on-site. He relented once exemptions and the tax to fund affordable-housing construction were included. Miro Weinberger Credit: Kevin McCallum Predictably, perhaps, 12 owners of Old North End vacation rentals sued the city, arguing that Burlington’s regulations conflict with state law and that their “pre-existing, lawful, non-conforming” businesses should be allowed to continue. Four years later, the city and the rental owner group are still stuck in legal wrangling. In the meantime, those rentals can continue to operate. Despite the restrictions and added expenses, the number of Burlington short-term rentals has increased since the ordinance was passed, from about 200 in 2022 to about 300 now, according to city officials. And that could very well be an undercount. Seven Days reported in 2023 that a number of owners were flouting the rules, and it’s possible some still are. The city Department of Permitting and Inspections does not have the personnel to conduct investigations and has paused issuing penalties for violators while the legal challenge plays out in court, department Director Bill Ward said. But he believes “most people have complied.” While it’s impossible to know how large the number would have grown without the ordinance, short-term rental advocates such as Julie Marks, executive director of the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance, point to the increase in Burlington as evidence of the policy’s failure. Meanwhile, the hefty tax levied on short-term rentals has buoyed the city’s affordable-housing efforts. Since the city started taxing the industry in 2017, Burlington has raised $1.7 million. In the last fiscal year, the tax generated nearly $300,000, about a quarter of the amount contributed annually to the city’s Housing Trust Fund. The tax is a “vital tool” to create and preserve affordable housing, according to Will Clavelle, an assistant director at the Community and Economic Development Office. The housing trust fund provides grants and loans for building and maintaining long-term affordable housing, low-income households and shelters. Last year’s short-term rental tax revenue, for instance, nearly covered the cost of a $305,000 Champlain Housing Trust supportive-housing project on St. Paul Street. I would far prefer us to be working towards a world where we make it easier to build enough housing so that both markets can be served.Miro Weinberger Weinberger, who now leads the nonprofit Let’s Build Homes, still believes intervention in the short-term rental market was necessary. But in his new role, he is looking at the problem more broadly and sees the debate much like state officials do: as an unfortunate symptom of Vermont’s inadequate housing supply. “I would far prefer us to be working towards a world where we make it easier to build enough housing so that both markets can be served,” Weinberger said. Burlington’s quest to regulate the industry helped give birth to what is now Vermont’s foremost short-term rental lobbyist organization. Lucas Jensen, a landlord who operates a vacation rental out of his home near Battery Park, as well as 10 long-term rentals in the city, connected with Marks, who founded the alliance in 2021, while protesting the proposed regulations. Jensen was a founding board member. Initially, short-term rentals made it affordable for people “to come into Burlington and to visit, stay and spend in the city,” Jensen said. But now that he is passing along all of the taxes to his lodgers, and with Airbnb covering fewer fees than it once did, he said that’s a more expensive proposition. He still nets a few thousand dollars each year, he said, and uses that revenue to subsidize his long-term rental operations. Marks, meanwhile, recently sold the Elmwood Avenue apartment building where she had lived in one unit while renting two others short-term. Keeping up with the costs of maintaining the 200-year-old building had become “unaffordable” on top of the expense of complying with Burlington’s regulations and paying the additional taxes, she said. She sold the building for $749,000, twice what she’d paid for it five years earlier. Living Laws: Woodstock Wade Treadway Credit: Hannah Bassett Woodstock began regulating short-term rentals before many people had ever heard the term. In 2002, the town adopted one of Vermont’s first short-term rental permitting requirements in response to noise nuisance complaints from neighbors. Three years later, Woodstock village — a compact, historic municipality within the larger town — established similar rules. Officials limited the frequency of rentals (with exceptions during foliage season) and set standards for parking, permitting and safety measures. Since the village created its first stand-alone short-term rental ordinance in 2019, officials in Woodstock town and village — which have nearly a combined 2,000 homes, occupied and vacant — have repeatedly amended their policies, leaving the two communities to operate under overlapping but distinct policies. In 2024, Woodstock launched a Lease to Locals program that offered landlords as much as $9,000 to convert their properties to seasonal or year-round rentals for local workers. That same year, the town and village established a cap on short-term rentals — 110 registrations, split equally between owner- and nonowner-occupied properties — though voters in the town later repealed the cap, leaving only the village under the new rules. Jeffrey Kahn, vice chair of the Board of Village Trustees, said the leasing incentive program was only a part of the solution. While landlords converted about a dozen properties into long-term rentals, the town is no longer funding the program, Kahn noted, allowing owners to eventually add those units to the short-term rental market if they choose. The community also needs significantly more housing if it is to meet the needs of tourists and residents, he said. Laura Powell, a former selectboard member, told Seven Days that the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance mobilized rental owners in 2024 to oppose further regulation in Woodstock, but the effort backfired: Village residents became more aware of vacation rentals operating in their neighborhoods and pushed for tighter oversight. Part of the response was driven by the concern that out-of-state investors would create too many short-term rentals in the village. “I believe there is a market for short-term rentals,” Powell wrote in an email. “But I think that privilege should be enjoyed by primary homeowners.” Nowadays, by the time a short-term rental application reaches Wade Treadway and his colleagues on Woodstock’s Town Development Review Board, the hard questions have already been answered. Fire safety inspections have been completed. Parking plans have been reviewed. Occupancy limits have been established. Most hearings last only a few minutes before the board votes to approve each proposal. For Treadway, whose time in town government spans three decades, that’s a sign the system is working. “One of the beautiful things about living in Vermont is that we’re small enough to where changes can take place as changes are needed,” Treadway said. “None of it is totally cast in stone.” One of the beautiful things about living in Vermont is that we’re small enough to where changes can take place as changes are needed.Wade treadway Treadway said Woodstock residents’ fears about investors buying neighborhoods, party houses disrupting quiet streets and homes disappearing into the vacation market largely haven’t materialized. Instead, he’s seen many longtime residents use the income from short-term rentals to allow them to stay in one of Vermont’s more expensive communities. One neighbor transformed an old chicken coop in the middle of an apple orchard into a tiny guesthouse. Visitors sleep in the outbuilding, then walk into the owner’s house to use the kitchen and bathroom. “People absolutely go nuts for it,” Treadway said. The income, he added, helps her pay the annual property taxes. Village land use coordinator and zoning administrator Emily Collins said Woodstock is just shy of the village’s cap of 100 short-term rentals. According to AirDNA, Woodstock town and village had 95 total active listings as of December, with a median monthly revenue of roughly $3,000. The town, which recently began using a new software system to regulate and track short-term rentals, is focused on building a complete registry to more fully understand the nuances of the market and who exactly is benefiting from the industry. One of the features identifies active listings that have failed to register with the town. Rather than relying primarily on complaints from neighbors, staff can now contact owners directly through emails, phone calls and public outreach before considering enforcement for unregistered properties. “We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to comply,” Collins said. Hands Off: Ludlow The “11 Gables” short-term rental in Ludlow Credit: Hannah Bassett With roughly one in five homes available for short-term use, Ludlow has one of the highest concentrations of vacation-rental homes in Vermont. Unlike Stowe, Burlington and Woodstock, however, the Okemo ski resort town in Windsor County has largely avoided a bruising political fight over whether the business should be curtailed. That doesn’t mean the issue has been ignored. The town first considered regulations in 2019 with broad discussions about safety and a rental registry. The effort regained momentum after a 2024 condominium fire, progressing to public meetings and a formal hearing on draft rules. But in a community where tourism has long been the dominant industry and second residences are in high demand, the recurring debate has focused more on oversight than on limiting the number of short-term units. Noah Schmidt, who owns a property management company in Ludlow, attended the March conference in Stowe, eager to keep up with the most recent technology and industry trends. As a Ludlow Selectboard member and planning commission chair, Schmidt has seen little evidence that restricting short-term rentals would significantly increase housing for year-round residents. Much of the town’s vacation housing stock, he argued, was built specifically to serve seasonal visitors — not the local workforce. He supports a short-term rental ordinance that creates a local registry and establishes health and safety requirements. But broader restrictions would do little to change the town’s housing market, he said, which was further constrained by flooding in July 2023. Instead, additional regulations would make it harder for people such as Schmidt or his three employees to afford to live in the area as the cost of living continues to increase. Several small businesses that depend on the tourism economy described short-term rentals as part of a broader network of commerce that keeps jobs and money flowing through the community. Joel Neto, who founded Nordview Cleaning in 2023, now oversees nine employees serving more than 80 short-term rentals, including 34 in Ludlow. Vacation rentals account for roughly one-third of his clients, which also include commercial and residential properties. But the short-term rentals generate the most revenue, Neto said. Guests typically pay cleaning and maintenance fees as part of the booking. And short-term property clients typically require many more visits than a residential home, he said, creating steady work for cleaners, laundry services and maintenance workers. Brian and Caryll Maylor, who launched the vacation rental-cleaning and property services company VelocityMaids last year after careers in the cruise and hospitality industries, said many of their clients live out of state and rely on local service providers — from landscapers and cleaners to electricians and plumbers — for upkeep. Noah Schmidt Credit: Aaron Calvin The Maylors said they support one provision in the proposed ordinance, which would require absentee owners to designate a local emergency contact. They said the rule would likely create additional demand for companies such as theirs, which already offers emergency response visits. Beyond regulation, they argued that Ludlow’s larger challenge is attracting visitors outside of ski season; more year-round attractions and better hospitality would strengthen the broader local economy that depends on tourism. “If we all do a good job, every one of us wins,” Brian said. Andrew and Jillian Demers spent four years restoring a historic three-family home in downtown Ludlow that once operated as a boardinghouse; Calvin Coolidge briefly lived there as a teenager. Long-term renters occupied two of the units when the Demers first took over, but they have since converted all three units to short-term rentals as their family of eight splits its time between Ludlow and their primary home in coastal Connecticut. Catering to visitors allows the Demers to keep a closer eye on the property while preserving the flexibility to gather their extended family there throughout the year. The clientele also fuels more than the lodging market, Andrew said. Unlike year-round residents, who likely own winter gear to last several years, visitors often arrive needing supplies such as mittens, skis or other equipment, he said, creating more frequent business for local retailers. “They come in with very, very open wallets,” Andrew said. Though Andrew said he supports regulations, he questioned why requirements should only apply to short-term rentals instead of all rental properties. In his view, “a renter is a renter,” and safety standards should be the same regardless of how long someone stays. He said he would support a rental ordinance, “but not one that discriminates against and targets short-term rentals.” The debate entered its next phase on Monday night, as the selectboard prepared to send the latest draft ordinance to a joint public hearing with village trustees. Rather than revisiting the broader question of whether Ludlow should regulate short-term rentals, board members spent much of the meeting wrestling with details — fees, inspection schedules, insurance requirements and parking standards — repeatedly describing the proposal as a work in progress that would continue to evolve with public input. Jean Strong, who served on several Ludlow town boards and rents her home seasonally, said she believes the town needs regulations but understands why previous efforts have stalled. With so many vacation rentals already woven into the community, she said, crafting rules that protect neighborhoods without placing unnecessary burdens on owners has proved more difficult than many expected. “Maybe in hindsight, it would have been good to have done something sooner,” Strong said. “But it’s been too complicated.” As she left the meeting, Strong said she was more optimistic than she had been in a long time, pointing to new planning staff and a willingness among officials to refine the proposal. She only wished residents had more advance notice to study the ordinance, ask questions and stay engaged — the kind of informed public process she believes a town so deeply shaped by short-term rentals will need if it hopes to get the rules right. ➆ About the Data Short-term rental figures cited in this article come from the Vermont Housing Finance Agency. The organization uses data from AirDNA, which analyzes listings on websites such as Airbnb and Vrbo to estimate the number of active short-term rentals in a community at specific moments in time. The data include only entire homes — such as houses, apartments and accessory dwelling units — that were listed as available for short-term rental during the reporting period. They do not include individual rooms rented within occupied homes. Totals reported by municipalities with their own short-term rental registries, including Burlington, Stowe and Woodstock, may differ slightly because of different registration requirements and methodologies. The state — and most towns and cities — define short-term rentals as rooms or residences rented for at least 14 days per year but fewer than 30 consecutive days. The original print version of this article was headlined “Housing Crunch | Short-term rentals are eating into the housing stock of some Vermont towns. Without state regulations, communities are trying to figure it out on their own.” The post Vermont Towns Try Different Ways to Regulate Short-Term Rentals appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less