County Council forwards proposed changes to short-term rental regulations to planning commissions, director

Bill 121 does most of the work, adding new definitions and rules for owner-hosted, operator-hosted and unhosted transient accommodation rentals, as well as hosting platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO.

It would require all three types of rentals, which are those that provide accommodations of 180 days or less as per state law and the county’s real property tax code, to be registered with the county. It also aims to lay out and make clearer the standards these rentals must follow. For example, off-street parking requirements, event limits and even guest limits.

“When I was campaigning the first time around and knocking door-to-door, this was one of the top three issues that people in my community had concerns about,” said Kimball. “And it was around issues like … parking being taken up on their street by a vacation rental, noise at all hours of the day and night. I had two folks in my community who decided to move because they couldn’t tolerate the activity that was going on next door.”

The new regulations also would require hosting platforms to include registration numbers on all of their listings and provide regular reports to the Hawai‘i County Planning Department.

Owner-hosted rentals, or any transient accommodation rental hosted by a person who uses the building as their principal home, would pay an initial registration fee of $500. Operator-hosted properties, those rented on behalf of an owner who lives on the same site, would be required to pay a $750 initial fee.

Unhosted short-term rentals, any transient accommodation rental that is not the principal home of the property owner and without an operator located on-site during rental operations, would see an initial registration fee of $1,000.

The new regulations would include an amnesty program for people operating a transient accommodation rental now who did not know they were under a different tax law because of it. Kimball and Kierkiewicz said the county will not use the registration process to go back and penalize people for back taxes.

“We want to have everybody registered,” Kimball said. “We didn’t want to be overly punitive.”

The new regulations also are aimed at preserving the character of residential and agricultural areas of the island, “keep country country, as they say,” Kimball said, and reducing the impact these short-term rentals have on the long-term rental market, including inventory and overall rental rates.

It’s hoped the proposed legislation will decrease speculative investment of properties in residential and ag markets around the island as well.

The county’s first attempt to regulate these short-term rentals was in November 2018 with the passage of Bill 108, which included some recommendations from a March 2018 Hawaiʻi Appleseed report that provided an overview of impacts from the rentals on the state’s housing market.

That bill, however, only dealt with unhosted rentals, limiting where they could operate and creating a set of operational standards. Kimball said there was always a plan to revisit the issue. So after about 2 years, some modifications were needed to address the other types of short-term rentals and clarify operation standards to make them easier to follow and more enforceable.