A few people with a lot of power are proposing a new state regulation that would put the majority of short term/vacation rentals out of business. This proposal suggests making all Short Term Rentals required to be owner occupied as their primary residence. That would eliminate all second homes and condos from being able to be rented out to tourists.  This would be encouraging all of these homes to sit empty instead of encouraging tourism to our state.  This bill would also harm the majority of Vermont residents that host short term rentals, the “little guy”, just trying to survive in Vermont and keep their property.  This will cause local Vermonters to have to sell their properties if this bill passes or considerably raise rents of long term tenants in order to break even to keep their property.  

Please pass this petition on to anyone and everyone you think will be affected, write to our local representatives, and fight to keep this bill (H.200) from going through.  Also note this bill is to go through by this July, 2021!

For those that this doesn’t affect directly in Vermont but you enjoy staying in Airbnbs, VRBO, and vacation rentals across the country think about how this will have a cascading effect across the country and ultimately wipe out these platforms and only support the large hotels and old-school Inns and B&Bs.  

There is also credible chatter on the street that the reason this is even on the docket is because wealthy-“very wealthy”- hoteliers and inn owners are lobbying like you wouldn’t believe because short term rentals have eroded their nine figure hotel businesses and they want to eliminate as many short term rentals as possible. 

In the process, they simply don’t care if it hurts Vermont tourism as a whole as long as they can pad their pockets by having more people stay in their $300 a night cookie cutter old school hotel rooms. They are masking this movement as only trying to help this “housing crisis” but rest assured the only reason this movement has real legs is because rich hoteliers are in the ears of powerful Vermont politicians only caring about themselves and in the process doing way more harm to the average property owner, the average tenant and more broadly the state as whole.  Less people with more money having more organizational power and influence than more people with less money. We need to change this now.

PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION IF YOU OPPOSE BILL H.200 & RESIDENCY REQUIREMENTS FOR SHORT TERM RENTALS.  

https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2022/Docs/BILLS/H-0200/H-0200%20As%20Introduced.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0qqvthRPsffsaHtXwQsWNHICtWbb6Gw7RYKBuksTFspQpyw_QmOIrZTU4

***Note the last chapter of the bill***

RESIDENCY REQUIREMENT:

A person may not offer all or part of a dwelling unit as a short-term rental unless the person has occupied the dwelling unit as his or her primary residence for: 

(1) 270 days of the preceding year; or 

(2) if the person has owned or leased the dwelling unit for less than a year, more than 70 percent of the days that the person has owned or leased the dwelling unit.