Living next door to a ‘ghost hotel’ has become a nightmare for many Ontario homeowners. Cities and towns across the province are struggling to keep the peace without turning away tourists
The dusty road narrows as it winds through a thickening canopy of trees before opening up to a cluster of about 10 primarily summer homes nestled alongside Lake Simcoe.
Renters, he said, sometimes spill over to his property and migrate through the water, even occasionally ending up lounging on his dock. The tall cedar hedge dividing the properties provides a bit of a wind break but does nothing to dampen the noise of late-night music and parties. Amid the boom of so-called “ghost hotels”—guest houses where no owner or manager is onsite—municipalities throughout Ontario are struggling to find the right balance between attracting tourists and maintaining the peace.
It’s been copied by other online platforms. And its use has since expanded, allowing individuals to buy property to use exclusively for short-term rental—which allows a much higher return than a monthly residential rental. And there has been violence, too. In February 2020, three men in Toronto were fatally shot during a social gathering at a Queens Wharf condo used as an Airbnb. The murder-suicide prompted the online company to enact tougher restrictions; people under 25 without a track record with the company, for example, would no longer be able to rent entire homes in what Airbnb called a pilot project in Canada.
In his witness statement provided to the tribunal during the February hearing, Oro-Medonte Township resident Steve Hawryluk described his frustrations when the two houses next to him were used for short-term rentals. Each attracted 10 to 20 people with new bodies appearing every summer weekend and some weekdays. The house right next door had a revolving door of guests from the summer of 2017 until it was sold in October 2020.
In addition to the dispute in Oro-Medonte, the Ontario Land Tribunal has heard short-term accommodation cases involving Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, the Town of Blue Mountains, Ramara and Niagara Falls. Several municipalities are currently considering ways to control short-term rentals in response to complaints—with some finding that they are going to the drawing board a second time around in hopes of striking the right balance.
The approach used by the Town of Blue Mountains has been a work in progress for well over a decade. The holiday community overlooking Georgian Bay began its control of holiday rentals in privately owned condos and chalets with an interim control bylaw in 2008, followed by a formal bylaw. A licensing regime to regulate them was recently revamped.
Some municipalities had used that power initially to deal with parking tickets, then expanded it to address other issues. For the Grey County town, it made sense to bring its licensing system into that regime as a way to control the town’s approximately 300 licensed short-term rentals, which are typically privately owned condos and chalets.
The town also requires parking plans, and that the property be maintained and subject to the town’s other bylaws, including noise. A “responsible person” must also be designated as a contact if issues and complaints arise, in hopes they can be mitigated. A two-year licence to operate a short-term rental runs around $2,300 in the Town of Blue Mountains and is designed to cover the cost of the program.
There are many like Schinkel who rent out their own home, cottage or condo. There are also organizations that manage rentals. Members of the Ontario Cottage Rental Managers Association say that good operators vet their guests, lay out the rules and expectations and that they enforce them, ejecting those who fail to abide by them. They argue that the approaches adopted by some municipalities to control short-term rentals paint good and bad operators with the same brush. And those operating province-wide are left to navigate regulations that have no consistency from one municipality to another.
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