As the housing shortage continues to be front and centre, a Halifax community led advocacy group says there are nearly 4,000 houses in Nova Scotia that aren’t available as permanent housing because they’re listed as quick-term vacation rentals, according to research conducted.
The group Neighbours Speak Up says they compiled data from the government of Nova Scotia’s short-term rentals registry — in addition to brief-term housing data analytics internet site AirDNA, which gathers numbers from journey web sites such as VRBO and Airbnb — and determined there are 3,792 rentals within the province indexed as an “entire home.”
Bill Stewart, a spokesperson for Neighbours Speak Up, says since the groups inception four years ago, he has seen how short-term rentals have “really impacted housing.”
“In HRM, there’s about 2,000 active short-term rentals and 1,600 of those are actually entire homes,” he said. “In other words, no one is living in them. If you rent that house, you have the use of a whole house, and these are available all the time to people.”
As a part of a campaign research study of short-term rentals in Halifax, a 2019 report from the Urban Politics and Governance research group at McGill University said there were 740 entire home short-term rentals in Halifax.
If those entire homes were taken and converted to long term housing through regulation, Halifax would be able to have more housing available and also increase the vacancy rate by one or two per cent, the research says.
In April, the provincial government brought in an amendment to the Tourist Economy Registration Act.
The act states all owners of short-term rental properties are required to register and will provide precise information about the number of short-term rentals, including Airbnb units, in the province.
At the time, Minister of Tourism Pat Dunn said the government’s lack of accurate data about the number and location of short-term rentals was a source of frustration for municipalities, some of which are attempting to regulate them through zoning and planning bylaws.
To date, the act still hasn’t become law.
“For us, that was an important provision. Unfortunately, that was six months ago. All of the MLAs approved of that act, but we haven’t seen it implemented,” said Stewart, who wants to know when the province will take action.
“No timeframe was given. We’ve certainly made inquiries and all we can find out at this point is it won’t be proclaimed until regulations are ready. Now, this is the second act that’s been done. So, they certainly have lots of experience with regulation and it could have been done much sooner than this,” he added.
Nova Scotia Housing Minister John Lohr said this week the Tourist Economy Registration Act is being utilized but couldn’t speak to specific numbers or give any feedback.
“I know that the registration is active, and people are registering, and I do know that our goal as a government to recognize there is not a one size fits all solution but that we want to work with our municipal units,” he said.
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