Short-term rentals (STRs) get talked about a lot in Vermont right now, usually as a problem. The narrative goes something like: STRs pull housing off the long-term market, drive up prices, and hollow out communities. It’s a real concern people raise in good faith. But when you look at the actual published data on Vermont’s STR market, the picture is a lot more complicated, and a lot less dramatic, than the narrative suggests.
What the Data Actually Shows
According to the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing, short-term rentals represent about 3% of Vermont’s housing stock, while accounting for over 60% of the state’s visitor lodging capacity. That’s a small footprint in the overall housing market carrying most of the weight of Vermont’s tourism economy.
Zoom out further, and a related data point matters even more: reporting on Vermont vacant-home data has found that around 71% of the state’s vacant homes are seasonal, occasional-use, or vacation homes, while only about 4% of vacant homes are actually for sale. In other words, most of Vermont’s housing scarcity shows up in homes that were never going to be someone’s primary residence in the first place, STR or not.
There’s also the question of what these homes would do if STRs didn’t exist. According to VTSTRA, roughly 75 to 85% of STR owners operate just one or two properties, and around 90% of vacation rentals are used by their owners for part of the year, which keeps them out of the long-term rental pool regardless of whether they’re also listed as an STR. Many of these are seasonal camps, vacation homes, or part-time-occupied properties that wouldn’t convert to full-time long-term housing even under stricter regulation.
What Neighboring States Found
Vermont isn’t the only place asking this question, and the research from next door is worth paying attention to. A 2023 New Hampshire Housing analysis using regression analysis found no relationship between the rise in short-term rentals and the increase in median rents in that state between 2014 and 2021. That same study did find that STRs contributed to a decline in rental vacancy rates over that period, so the effect isn’t zero, but it’s also not what the “STRs are driving up your rent” narrative claims. Rent increases and STR growth turned out to be two separate trends running in parallel, not cause and effect.
The Economic Side of the Ledger
None of this is to say STRs are irrelevant to Vermont’s economy, they’re a significant part of it, just not in the way critics often assume. VTSTRA reports that Vermont’s STR economy generates over $1 billion in annual economic activity, supports at least 6,000 local jobs, and is projected to bring in more than $65 million in state tax revenue in 2025. More than 500,000 visitors stay in a Vermont STR each year, spending an average of roughly $1,500 per visit at local businesses, restaurants, and shops that depend on that tourism traffic.
Our Model: STR Income Funds LTR Improvements
Here’s how it actually works for us specifically. Our short-term rentals aren’t a separate business chasing separate profit; they’re part of the same portfolio strategy that funds our long-term rental improvements. Revenue from STR units helps cover the capital costs of upgrading our multifamily long-term rentals: new building systems, safety improvements, structural repairs, and the kind of deferred maintenance that many of these buildings carried for years before we took them on.
In plain terms, the guest paying for a weekend stay is indirectly helping fund a safer furnace, a rebuilt staircase, or a properly insulated unit for a long-term tenant down the road. Rather than pulling from the long-term rental pool (which is nearly impossible given the low margins on long-term rentals), we’re using STR revenue to reinvest in it.
Why This Distinction Matters
The published data suggests Vermont’s housing shortage is being driven primarily by other factors: constrained construction, land-use rules, an aging population holding onto homes longer, and a genuine shortage of homes being constructed, not by short-term rentals pulling meaningful supply out of the long-term market. We think that distinction matters, because policy built on an inaccurate diagnosis doesn’t fix the actual problem. It just makes life harder for STR operators like us who are using that income to reinvest directly in Vermont’s long-term rental stock.
What We Support Going Forward
We’re not against STR regulation in general, sensible rules around safety, registration, and accountability make sense. What we’d like to see is regulation grounded in the data that’s already been collected by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, the Department of Tourism and Marketing, and organizations like the Vermont Short Term Rental Alliance (VTSTRA), rather than in assumptions about STRs that the numbers don’t actually support.
Curious how we structure STR and LTR operations across our portfolio? We talk shop like this regularly at the Vermont Real Estate Meetup, come find us.
Sources
- Vermont Short Term Rental Alliance, “Vermont Short-Term Rentals: Economic, Housing, and Community Impacts,” vtstra.org
- Vermont Short Term Rental Alliance, “Facts About Short Term Rentals,” vtstra.org/facts
- Vermont Housing Finance Agency, HousingData.org STR data and 2025-2029 Housing Needs Assessment
- New Hampshire Housing, “Short-Term Rentals in New Hampshire: An Analysis of Data from 2014-2023”
- Manchester Journal, reporting on Vermont vacant-home data (2023)