Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act
It’s a big deal… and it’s also nothing… and it’s a big deal – generally like everything we’re dealing with these days.
Timeline: The regulations and responsibilities under the proposed Act will come into effect at different times over the next two years through a phased approach:
Immediately after Royal Assent: Increased fines and tickets, business licensing authority for regional districts
May 1, 2024: Principal residence requirement (including definition of exempt areas or accommodations), changes to legal non-conforming use protections
Summer 2024: Data sharing
Late 2024: Provincial registry launch, requiring platforms to remove listings without valid provincial registry numbers.
Full rules can be found here https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/short-term-rentals
Creeping, punitive government regulation changes for homeowner-landlords made renting to long-term tenants (largely) unfeasible over the last ~5 years. Because of this, many homeowners decided to pivot to short-term rentals. This allowed them to avoid tenants, as a business case, that had the RTO (Residential Tenancy Office) providing unreasonable rights to the use of property, even when in arrears, breaking rules, having caused damage or serious nuisance if only the right story was told. Many cases of landlords waiting many months for the regulator to act, or rather, allow the owner to address the problem tenant and provide them access to their property again (at great expense).
Short term rentals were the answer, allowing property owners the flexibility to keep up with rampant inflation and not keep them beholden to a tenant that was unconscientious.
Cue the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act. Having totally failed to provide adequate social housing over the last 10 years, or any affordable options for BC residents + fiscal insanity and immigration policy, the burden of these monumental Government failures has once again been offset to the private sector. Along with the obligatory tisk-tisk to the ‘greedy’ property owners and developers.
The long and short of the changes being; the government both wants to restrict your rights to how you use your property (again); they want to lock-in access to a broader array of permit and penalty revenue; and they want YOU to solve the housing crisis, which they’ve emboldened by policy and ignored with any real stewardship of existing resources. There are some, very drop-in-the-ocean housing solutions being worked on Provincially, but it scarcely moves the needle under the current economic backdrop.
Generally I would say this is a net negative for tenants, as property owners aren’t going to blindly take losses as some social-housing function. But, on this round, the government may have solved the equation. I would expect many property owners who are banking on having secondary properties running Airbnb’s to cover the massive jump in carrying costs, will simply not be able to generate enough revenue from [monthly] rentals at current interest rates. This will then force some to sell and generally make housing more available. Maybe? Possibly? Time will tell.
This has been a rapid pillaging for homeowners this year between interest rates and rule changes. Be very cautious as to what you are expecting a property to produce for you from a feasibility standpoint. Make sure you have an agent that knows the local, regional and provincial rules for rental accommodations.