Housing crisis prompts Kelowna to consider tightening restrictions on short-term rentals
There are hundreds of illegal short-term rentals in Kelowna that are impacting the long-term rental market.
City staff are recommending a tighter crackdown on all short-term rental suites than what city councillors suggested just three months ago.
“Short-term rentals are diverting units of housing out of the regular rental market during a housing and affordability crisis,” says a staff report going to city council on Monday, Oct. 23.
Nationally, more than 31,000 rental units have been lost to the short-term rental market, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation report from back in 2020.
There was no data specific to Kelowna in that report but since 2020 the number of licenced short-term rentals in the city has jumped 89% to 1,191. That includes 44 in just the last three months while 62 more applications are in the queue.
There are also about 900 identified short-term rental units that don’t yet have a business licences and many others that have been flagged as suspicious.
“Kelowna does not have staff resources that are dedicated to the management and enforcement of the short-term rental accommodation program at a level that the growth and demands of the program currently warrant,” the report says.
From 2019 through 2022, bylaw officers responded to 294 complaints covering 146 properties but more complaints, such as for noise, may not have been identified as coming from such rental units, the report says.
Some are very time consuming and it can be very hard to collect the evidence needed to make fines stick.
One property triggered 19 complaints this year. Another had 115 complaints between 2016 and 2020 before that was resolved.
The province announced earlier this week it will require platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo to list business licence numbers on all ads where local governments issue licences. That will help but it will take months before those rules are in place.
READ MORE: Kamloops and Okanagan getting help from province to crack down on short-term rentals
In the meantime, staff is recommending that no new applications for short-term rental business licences be accepted.
It also wants to ban short-term rentals from all city housing zones with some exceptions in parts of McKinley Beach and projects like Aqua where they have site specific permission. That means 427 existing units would become technically illegal. Those can continue to operate as non-conforming uses.
Another 693 will be conforming but that may change as the province is planning to bring in legislation where only primary residences can be rented out in the short term.
“It is recognized that short-term rentals can supplement the accommodation market and provide homeowners with additional income opportunities,” the report to council says. “Nonetheless, an appropriately regulated process is required in order to preserve the housing stock for long term rentals while managing tourism impacts.”
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