Nantucket Short-Term Rental Registry Provides New Data On Island Vacation Rentals

There are currently 1,623 short-term rental (STR) permits registered with the town of Nantucket, according to a presentation by the Health Department given to the Select Board last week.

Those 1,623 permits cover 1,551 unique addresses, with 63 properties holding multiple permits. The data showed that 81.6 percent of all STRs registered with the town are owned by non-residents, a statistic that the presentation describes as “emphasizing the shift from traditional home-sharing to investor/seasonal ownership.”

Some Select Board members disagreed with that characterization.

“I sold real estate here in the 90s. All of our rental homes were owned by people in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey. There were very few that were Nantucket-owned homes,” DeCosta said. “We only have basically a year and a half of data, so it’s hard to say that we have a shift or that there’s any kind of change here.”

Around 65 percent of all dwellings on Nantucket are occupied seasonally, and around 82 percent of property taxes are paid by non-residents.

Fully 56.9 percent of STRs are associated with mailing addresses outside the state of Massachusetts.

The presentation flags the non-residential nature of the permit holders as a potential concern, especially when it comes to the 63 properties that hold multiple permits.

The presentation says that “multi-permit properties indicate institutional/larger-scale commercial operations, multi-dwelling compounds, or main-and-cottage configurations designed explicitly for high-occupancy rentals,” and argues that non-local ownership of these properties is “accelerating community commercialization.”

Former Nantucket Association of Real Estate Brokers president Penny Dey offered a different perspective.

“The folks that rent these properties are not billionaires, and many of them only rent for a couple of weeks, possibly a month, to help defray the cost of ownership on Nantucket, which is a longstanding tradition here,” Dey said. “I feel like there’s a bit of a bias in the manner in which these conclusions were drawn and written.”

The data presented to the Select Board came from the town's new short-term rental registry, which was created to identify all short-term rental properties on the island that are rented for more than 14 days per year and less than 30 consecutive days.

Beyond enhancing the town's ability to manage and control short-term rental properties, the registration system is intended to provide much-needed data on the number and use of Nantucket's short-term rentals. Town Meeting voters approved the registry and other short-term rental regulations in May 2022 when they approved Article 39, a general bylaw amendment, to establish a framework to regulate and register short-term rentals on the island. The proposal was sponsored by the Planning Board and was adopted on a 610-302 vote.

The registry was intended to start on Jan. 1, 2023. However, the failure of the firm the town initially hired to monitor and track short-term rentals - Granicus - to deliver a workable program and software led the town to cancel its contract with the company over the summer. A new vendor, GovOS, was hired and has been working with the Health Department since last November 2023, and launched the registry in March of 2024.