Victoria council is planning to tinker with its short-term rental regulations to make the rules more clear.
Council voted this week to have city staff report back on the implications of outlawing the use of secondary suites for the purpose of short-term rentals and on what effect placing a cap on the maximum number of nights that a principal residence could be rented out as a short-term rental within a calendar year might have.
Staff will also be expected to consider a sliding scale for licensing fees based on how often a host rents out their principal residence.
Coun. Jeremy Caradonna said one of the most problematic aspects of the provincial rules governing short-term rentals — those limiting rentals to a principal residence or basement suite, laneway or garden suite on the same property — is the fact it clashes with the city’s regulation that secondary suites cannot be used for that purpose.
“And I think that if we were to not clarify that in our own regulations I think some users out there might assume that the provincial baseline would take precedence,” he said.
Caradonna also noted there is a lack of clarity around how many nights someone in Victoria can rent out their principal residence.
“We’ve had this sort of fuzzy non-bylaw regulated cap of up to four times [a year] by 30 nights, so in theory 120 nights in total,” he said. “But it was never formalized in a bylaw.”
He said if something isn’t formalized, some people could be renting out a room in their home for 360 nights a year.
Caradonna said he didn’t know what the right number might be, but he has suggested considering starting points of 120, 150 or 180 nights in total.
Staff have been directed to study the implications and report back later this year.
The study will not come in time for other amendments to be made to the city’s short-term rental bylaw expected to come before council the first week of August.
At that time, council is expected to consider endorsing amendments to better define terms such as operator, tenant, dwelling, property manager and host.
Other amendments coming for the bylaw include increased fees, increased fines for non-compliance, restricting the occasional rental of someone’s entire home to four bookings per year and closing a loophole that would have allowed units that had been used for short-term rentals to continue to be rented out by conversion from residential to hotel zoning.
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