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Canadian Planning and Policy
Aménagement et politique au Canada
Neither housing nor hotel
The emergence of “medium-term rentals” in post-Covid
Canadian cities
David Wachsmuth „ and Bridget Buglioni „
Volume 2024, Number 1, 2024
Technology and the City
URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1110268ar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24908/cpp-apc.v2024i1.16935
See table of contents
Publisher(s)
Association of Canadian University Planning Programs
Canadian Institute of Planners
ISSN
2816-6256 (print)
2562-122X (digital)
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Cite this article
Wachsmuth, D. & Buglioni, B. (2024). Neither housing nor hotel: The emergence
of “medium-term rentals” in post-Covid Canadian cities. Canadian Planning and
Policy / Aménagement et politique au Canada, 2024(1), 68–89.
https://doi.org/10.24908/cpp-apc.v2024i1.16935
Article abstract
One of the many impacts of the Covid pandemic on Canadian cities was the
complete collapse of short-term rental (STR) markets, as long-distance travel
nearly vanished for more than a year. Many dedicated STRs shifted back to the
long-term rental market, but others remained on STR platforms such as Airbnb
but with minimum stays of one month or more—a land use we describe as
“medium-term rentals” (MTRs). This paper provides a planning analysis of
online-platform-mediated MTRs in Canadian cities and their housing-market,
land-use, and regulatory implications. First, we identify and explore the
regulatory grey zone inhabited by MTRs, which appear to be neither standard
residential tenancies nor short-term tourist accommodations. Second, the
paper provides a brief empirical overview of the emergence of MTRs during
and after the Covid pandemic in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Third, the
paper uses a policy case study of situations in which Ontario’s Landlord and
Tenant Board has been asked to adjudicate non-standard tenancies to establish
whether there is a planning basis for distinguishing medium-term rentals from
other tenancy types. The paper concludes by identifying a key planning
principle which could allow Canadian municipalities to pull MTRs out of the
regulatory grey zone: regulating type of stay instead of length of stay.
Canadian Planning and Policy / Aménagement et politique au Canada
, Technology and the City Issue 2024, pages 68-89
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
ISSN 2562-122X
DOI 10.24908/cpp-apc.v2024i.16935
--
Special Issue—Technology and the City Volume 2024:1
Dr. Pamela Robinson, FCIP RPP
Toronto Metropolitan University, Guest Editor
Associate Editors
Dr. David Gordon, FCIP RPP AICP
Queen’s University, Principal Editor
& Dr. Richard Shearmur, MCIP OUQ
McGill University, Associate Editor
Editorial Introduction
The Push and Pull of Technology and its Impacts on Planning in Canadian Cities 1-9
Pamela Robinson
Articles
Privately-directed participatory planning: examining Toronto’s Quayside smart city 10-31
Kate Nelischer
Dashboards as Conduits for Collaborative Planning 32 –44
Carolyn DeLoyde and Betsy Donald
Assessing the Rise of Dedicated Digital Engagement Platforms for Local Planning 45-67
Morgan Boyco
Neither housing nor hotel: The emergence of “medium-term rentals” in post- Covid 68-89
Canadian cities
David Wachsmuth and Bridget Buglioni
Strava Metro Data: how can urban planning leverage crowdsourced fitness activity data? 90–108
Pamela Robinson, Peter Johnson, and Madison Vernooy
Canadian Planning and Policy is a scholarly publication project undertaken by the Association of Canadian
University Planning Programs and the Canadian Institute of Planners.
Canadian Planning and Policy
publishes
manuscripts reflecting the scope and diversity of planning theory and practice in Canada. This publication has a goal
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academics, and students. This publication is an open-access, digital, bilingual, peer-reviewed journal with a double-
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and Atmospheric Sciences,
University of Alberta
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Columbia
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University of Toronto
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Dr. Sylvie Paré, OUQ, Département d’études urbaines et touristiques,
Université du Québec à Montréal
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Toronto Metropolitan
University
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McGill University
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York University
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University of Calgary
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University of Ottawa
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Rachel Barber and Miranda Brintnell,
Queen’s University
Canadian Planning and Policy / Aménagement et politique au Canada
, Technology and the City Issue 2024, pages 68-89
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
ISSN 2562-122X
DOI 10.24908/cpp-apc.v2024i.16935
--
Neither housing nor hotel: The emergence of “medium-term
rentals” in post-Covid Canadian cities
David Wachsmuth
a
and Bridget Buglioni
a
a
McGill University
Abstract
One of the many impacts of the Covid pandemic on Canadian cities was the complete collapse of
short-term rental (STR) markets, as long-distance travel nearly vanished for more than a year. Many
dedicated STRs shifted back to the long-term rental market, but others remained on STR platforms
such as Airbnb but with minimum stays of one month or more—a land use we describe as “medium-
term rentals” (MTRs). This paper provides a planning analysis of online-platform-mediated MTRs in
Canadian cities and their housing-market, land-use, and regulatory implications. First, we identify and
explore the regulatory grey zone inhabited by MTRs, which appear to be neither standard residential
tenancies nor short-term tourist accommodations. Second, the paper provides a brief empirical
overview of the emergence of MTRs during and after the Covid pandemic in Toronto, Montreal, and
Vancouver. Third, the paper uses a policy case study of situations in which Ontario’s Landlord and
Tenant Board has been asked to adjudicate non-standard tenancies to establish whether there is a
planning basis for distinguishing medium-term rentals from other tenancy types. The paper concludes
by identifying a key planning principle which could allow Canadian municipalities to pull MTRs out of
the regulatory grey zone: regulating type of stay instead of length of stay.
Résumé
L’un des nombreux impacts de la pandémie de Covid sur les villes canadiennes a été l’effondrement
complet des marchés de location à court terme (STR), les voyages longue distance ayant presque
disparu pendant plus d’un an. De nombreux STR dédiés sont revenus au marché de la location
longue durée, mais d'autres sont restés sur des plateformes STR telles qu'Airbnb mais avec des séjours
minimum d'un mois ou plus – une utilisation des terres que nous décrivons comme des « locations à
moyen terme » (MTR). Cet article présente une analyse de planification des MTR médiatisés par des
plateformes en ligne dans les villes canadiennes et leurs implications sur le marché du logement,
l'utilisation des sols et la réglementation. Tout d’abord, nous identifions et explorons la zone grise
réglementaire habitée par les MTR, qui ne semblent être ni des locations résidentielles standards ni
des hébergements touristiques de courte durée. Deuxièmement, l’article donne un bref aperçu
empirique de l’émergence des MTR pendant et après la pandémie de Covid à Toronto, Montréal, et
Vancouver. Troisièmement, le document utilise une étude de cas politique portant sur des situations
dans lesquelles la Commission de la location immobilière de l’Ontario a été invitée à statuer sur des
locations atypiques afin de déterminer s’il existe une base de planification permettant de distinguer les
locations à moyen terme des autres types de location. Le document conclut en identifiant un principe
de planification clé qui pourrait permettre aux municipalités canadiennes de sortir les MTR de la
zone grise réglementaire : réglementer le type de séjour plutôt que la durée du séjour. Le document
conclut en identifiant un principe de planification clé qui pourrait permettre aux municipalités
canadiennes de sortir les MTR de la zone grise réglementaire : réglementer le type de séjour plutôt
que la durée du séjour.
Keywords:
Housing, medium-
term rentals, policy
reform, COVID-
19, stay type
Mots-clés:
Logement, location
à moyen terme,
réforme politique,
COVID-19, type
de séjour
Contact
-
--
Introduction
Since the launch of Airbnb in 2008, short-term rental
(STR) platforms have provoked a transformation in
residential land use. Previously, there was usually
only a single viable way for residential property
owners to earn ongoing revenue from their
property—finding a long-term tenant. Short-term
rental platforms introduced a second option—renting
the property to tourists and other visitors for short-
term stays. As travellers and property owners alike
have become more comfortable with conducting
peer-to-peer accommodation transactions, the use of
STR platforms has proliferated.
Short-term rentals have been recognized as an
urban planning dilemma for as long as it has been
clear that they were becoming an important fact of
life in large cities and small towns alike. This is in
part because they were initially unregulated by most
municipalities (Nieuwland and van Melik, 2018), in
part because of the challenges they posed to quality
of life in residential neighbourhoods (Gurran and
Phibbs, 2017), and in part because of their negative
impact on housing availability and affordability for
long-term residents (Barron et al., 2020; Wachsmuth
and Weisler, 2018).
What appeared to be a trajectory of continued
short-term rental growth was unexpectedly cut short
by the Covid pandemic. In Canadian cities like
elsewhere in the world, the pandemic caused the
complete collapse of STR markets, as long-distance
travel nearly vanished for more than a year. Many
dedicated STRs shifted back to the long-term rental
market, but others remained on STR platforms such
as Airbnb but with minimum stays of one month or
more. We describe this land use as “medium-term
rentals” (MTRs), in contrast to STRs and
conventional long-term rentals (LTRs). These MTRs
frequently catered to non-tourist accommodation
needs (for example people spending several months
in a large city because their loved one had an
extended hospital stay). And, because most
jurisdictions define short-term rentals based on a
certain maximum length of stay, MTRs are generally
unregulated. As a result, they arguably introduce a
new set of planning and land-use considerations for
planners in contemporary cities.
In this article, we offer a planning analysis of the
emergence of platform-mediated medium-term
rentals, which we define loosely as rental agreements
for periods of time of at least 28 days but less than
one year, and which could occur either in the
landlord’s principal residence or in a dedicated MTR
dwelling unit. We argue that medium-term rentals
exist in the grey zone between STR and LTR
regulation—municipalities regulate the former and
provinces the latter, with MTRs resting uneasily in
between. But from a land-use perspective, MTRs are
not a single residential land use. Rather, they occupy
a blurry middle ground in the spectrum of short-term
to long-term rentals. Through quantitative spatial
analysis of multiple datasets of web scraped rentals
ads, we present empirical evidence about the growth
of medium-term rentals in Montreal, Toronto, and
Vancouver. Then we present a qualitative case study
of Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board cases
involving ambiguous tenancies to establish whether
there is a regulatory basis for distinguishing medium-
term rentals from other tenancy types. Finally, we
conclude by identifying a key planning principle
which could allow municipalities to pull MTRs out of
the regulatory grey zone: regulating type of stay rather
than length of stay.
Short-term rental platforms and the
housing market
Platform-mediated short-term rentals have been the
focus of a large and growing body of planning
research, albeit more so in the United States and
Europe than in Canada. While early research into
Airbnb and other online STR platforms was mostly
--
conducted by tourism scholars seeking to understand
the implications of STRs for urban tourism and
tourist accommodation market dynamics (Guttentag,
2015; Cheng, 2016; Oskam & Boswijk, 2016), more
recently planners and geographers have investigated
the extent to which STRs interact with the long-term
housing market. Scholars have found evidence that
landlords are replacing long-term tenants with short-
term holiday rental guests, leading to a decline in
housing supply and hence housing affordability (Lee,
2016; Schäfer & Braun, 2016; Gurran & Phibbs,
2017; Combs et al., 2020). Studies have linked
increases in Airbnb listings to increases in house
prices and rents (Barron et al., 2021; Horn and
Merante, 2017), gentrification and displacement
(Cocola Gant, 2016; Mermet, 2017; Wachsmuth &
Weisler, 2018; Bosma & Van Doorn, 2022).
While there have been several analyses of STRs
in various Canadian jurisdictions (Grisdale, 2021;
Kerrigan & Wachsmuth, 2021; Wachsmuth et al.,
2021a, 2021b, and 2021c), the only systematic
analysis of STRs in Canada is Combs et al. (2020).
They found high concentrations of STR activity and
revenue in both spatial and per-host terms: prior to
the pandemic, nearly half of all STRs in the country
were located in the Toronto, Montreal and
Vancouver regions, and roughly a majority of STR
income was earned by fewer than 10% of hosts. They
did not specifically address the question of medium-
term rentals on STR platforms. The only such study
of which we are aware is Llaneza Hesse et al.’s (2023)
analysis of Barcelona before and after the Covid
pandemic. They find that Barcelona’s STR market
shifted somewhat towards medium-term rentals
during the Covid pandemic. Compared to traditional
STRs, MTRs were found to be more resilient to the
generalized collapse of travel demand during the
pandemic, an effect they attribute to the rise in so-
called “digital nomads” (Nash et al., 2018) whose
workplace locational flexibility facilitates a peripatetic
lifestyle. The extent to which the shift to MTRs
observed in Barcelona can be generalized to other
parts of the world such as Canada—and the local
planning and policy implications if such a shift is
indeed occurring—remains to be explored.
The regulatory grey zone of medium-term
rentals
Over the past decade, short-term rentals have
become increasingly tightly regulated in Canadian
cities. Many municipalities and several provinces now
have rules in place which define short-term rentals as
a type of land use or business activity, and most
additionally impose some constraints on where, or
under what circumstances, STRs are permitted to
operate. Although ten years ago none of Toronto,
Montreal or Vancouver had any policies in place
about STRs, they now all have adopted relatively
similar rules (Table 1). In each of these
municipalities, a STR is defined as a temporary
accommodation of no more than a certain number
of nights, this land use is defined in the City’s (or
borough’s, in the case of Montreal) zoning bylaw, a
permit is required in order for a host to operate an
STR, and STRs are generally restricted to a host’s
principal residence. (This rule varies by borough in
the case of Montreal, but principal residence
restrictions are active in the boroughs containing the
large majority of the city’s STRs.¹
¹. A “principal residence” is seemingly an intuitive concept: it is a person’s main dwelling unit. This idea can be operationalized in several dif-
ferent ways, however—for example, length of time you inhabit different dwellings during the year, the address on your government identifica-
tion, or the address where your tax documents are sent. this idea is complex, however. The City of Toronto defines the term for the purposes
of enforcing its STR bylaw as “the residence where you live and the address you use for bills, identification, taxes and insurance” (City of To-
ronto N.D.). The principal residence definition used by the Canada Revenue Agency for tax purposes is quite different: it is a choice a resident
can make among any homes they inhabit. Edge cases can also be tricky. For example, if a person owns a condominium in downtown Toronto
and a cottage in Muskoka, and spends a plurality of nights each year at the cottage but has the condominium address on their driver’s license,
which is the principal residence? If someone rents an Airbnb for a six-month stay while maintaining a tenancy elsewhere, but during the stay
they give up their tenancy, is the Airbnb now their principal residence? There is no single standard that would unambiguously adjudicate prin-
cipal residency in these situations.
--
At the other end of the length-of-stay spectrum,
long-term rental housing is regulated provincially in
Canada, and the provinces have broadly similar
policy structures, including legislation which defines
tenancies and sets out the rights and responsibilities
of tenants and landlords, and a provincial tenancy
board which oversees disputes. In Quebec,
the Code
civil du Québec
regulates tenancies, and the Tribunal
administratif du lodgement oversees disputes. In
Ontario it is the Residential Tenancies Act and the
Landlord and Tenant Board, respectively, and in
British Columbia it is the Residential Tenancy Act
and the Residential Tenancy Branch. None of these
regulatory frameworks for long-term rental housing
define tenancies in terms of length of stay. Once a
landlord and a tenant enter into a tenancy agreement,
the tenancy is active on the first day, and the rights
and responsibilities of both parties remain constant
for the entire length of the tenancy, which could
continue indefinitely if the parties consent.
The fact that the three municipalities’ rules define
STRs as rentals of fewer than 28 or 30 days suggests,
by contrast, that MTRs could be defined as rentals
which are at least 29 or 31 days long.² But beyond
this fact, there is no basis in either municipal or
provincial policy in any of these cities for
distinguishing a medium-term rental from other types
of residential rental agreements. In particular, none
of the provincial legislation which defines and
regulates tenancies makes any reference to minimum
or maximum rental periods in its definition of a
residential tenancy. In practical terms, the main
dilemma is as follows: if someone books a stay of
three months on Airbnb in Montreal, Toronto or
Vancouver, municipal rules do not treat that stay as a
short-term rental, and hence implicitly treat that stay
as a long-term rental which should be regulated by
provincial tenancy law. But it is highly unlikely that
the guest would have signed a formal lease with the
host of the unit, and additionally unclear whether
provincial tenancy boards would consider the rental
arrangement to be a tenancy, and grant the lessor
tenancy rights such as protection from eviction. As
we discuss in the case study of Toronto and Ontario
below, cases which have come before the Ontario
Landlord and Tenant Board imply considerable
ambiguity concerning the conditions under which the
Province would apply the Residential Tenancies Act
to a medium-term rental.
Municipality Regulated in zoning
bylaw?
Maximum length of
stay
Permit required? Principal residence
only?
Montreal In some boroughs 30 nights Yes, from Province In some boroughs
Toronto Yes 27 nights Yes, from City Yes
Vancouver Yes 30 nights Yes, from City Yes
Table 1. Short-term rental regulations in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
² This one-month threshold for defining an MTR is not meaningful on its own terms; a threshold of six weeks or two months would not
capture substantively different land uses. But, in a negative sense, the threshold is sensible because stays which are shorter than a single
month are consistently treated as short-term rentals in municipal policy in Canada.
--
The situation that emerges in each of Montreal,
Toronto and Vancouver is thus that MTRs have a
kind of “negative definition”, where they exist in the
grey zone between STR and LTR regulation. Unlike
short-term rentals, medium-term rentals have no
official definition in municipal policy in any of these
cities. And unlike long-term rentals, medium-term
rentals have no unambiguous definition in provincial
policy. In theory this grey zone between the
(provincial) regulation of long-term tenancies and the
(mostly municipal) regulation of short-term rentals
implies a regulatory space where medium–term
rentals could be defined and regulated. But, in what
follows, we argue that from a land-use perspective
MTRs are not a single residential land use. Rather,
they occupy a blurry middle ground in the spectrum
of short-term to long-term rentals. On one end, some
MTRs are effectively longer-term versions of
traditional STRs: rental arrangements between
tourists or other temporary visitors and hosts who
rely on a platform to manage financial interactions
and offer hotel-like services to their guests. On the
other end, other MTRs are effectively shorter-term
versions of traditional LTRs: rental arrangements
between tenants who are either explicitly or implicitly
attempting to establish a stable (even if time-limited)
tenancy, and landlords who collect rents directly and
do not offer hotel-like services. In the conclusion we
discuss a “type of stay not length of stay” regulatory
principle which could help municipalities resolve this
grey zone.
Measuring and analyzing medium-term
rentals: data and methods
It is nearly impossible to obtain a reliable estimate of
the scope of the medium-term rental market in
Canadian cities, since this land use type is not
tracked by Statistics Canada, the CMHC, or any
other governmental agency. Non-governmental data
sources are more promising but, since MTRs
inherently blur the lines between short-term and long
-term tenures, these rentals could plausibly be found
on any of three categories of housing platforms: 1)
STR platforms such as Airbnb, where MTRs are
identifiable as listings with a minimum rental period
of a month or more; 2) long-term rental platforms
such as Craigslist, Kijiji, or Facebook Marketplace,
where MTRs are usually not directly identifiable but
where their presence may be inferred from other
data points; and 3) dedicated MTR platforms, where
MTRs are unambiguously identifiable but where a
high level of fragmentation in the market makes it
difficult to comprehensively count or analyze listings.
Here we assemble evidence about the trajectory of
medium-term rentals in Montreal, Toronto, and
Vancouver, drawing on STR and LTR platform data.
Specifically, we combine two datasets. First, we use
comprehensive estimates of activity on STR
platforms Airbnb and Vrbo from January 2015
through May 2023 built off of raw data provided by
the consulting firm Airdna. Airdna uses web scraping
of the public Airbnb and Vrbo websites to gather, for
each listing in the three cities, structural attributes
(e.g. entire-home versus private-room rentals,
approximate geographic location, and number of
bedrooms) and daily activity (reservation status and
price). Because STR platforms only publicly
distinguish between properties which are available or
not available, while “not available” could indicate
either a reservation or a date which the host has
blocked, Airdna uses machine learning models
trained against known historical data to estimate
whether non-available listings are reserved or
blocked. These estimations are the only significant
potential source of error in the data, and we mitigate
this error by only using Airdna data in relatively large
aggregates—e.g. listings aggregated per month and per
census tract.
Our second dataset is weekly web scrapes of LTR
platforms Craigslist and Kijiji from April 2020
through December 2022 performed by the first
--
author. Unlike the STR data in the first dataset, these
scrapes are purely of rental advertisements; there are
no availability calendars which would allow us to
know whether or when a given listing resulted in an
actual tenancy. As a result, we only rely on this data
as an indicator of supply-side rental market activity—
e.g. trends in asking rents or listing volumes. The
analysis was conducted in the R programming
language, and all the code is publicly available at
https://github.com/UPGo-McGill/mtr-paper-2023.
Table 2 provides a descriptive summary of these
datasets.
We further supplement this quantitative analysis
with a qualitative analysis of cases at Ontario’s
Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB), where the LTB
was asked to consider whether various types of non-
standard rental arrangements qualified as tenancies
under the Residential Tenancy Act. To identify
cases, we conducted search with key terms “long
term” and “short term” (to identify cases concerned
with length of stay) and “vacation rental” and
“seasonal” (since vacation rentals are exempt from
the Residential Tenancies Act, and therefore are
often used as a reason to claim the Act does not
apply). Cases were chosen based on their relevance
and potential influence on future decisions involving
medium-term rentals. A total of 16 cases between
1993 and 2023 were examined. We use these cases
to establish whether there are plausible policy
parameters that could distinguish medium-term
rentals as a land use distinct from either short-term
rentals or long-term rentals.
The trajectory of medium-term rentals in
Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver
Each listing hosted on STR platforms Airbnb and
Vrbo has a “minimum stay” defined by the listing’s
host; in cases where that minimum stay is 28 nights
or longer, we consider the listing to be a medium-
term rental. Figure 1 shows the percentage of listings
and activity on Airbnb and Vrbo which is attributable
to MTRs in each of the three cities. In some
respects, the three cities display very different
dynamics: in Montreal the share of MTRs has
increased gradually over time, before a spike in early
2023 when the Province cracked down on illegal
STRs in the wake of a fire in an STR in Old
Montreal where seven people died. In Toronto, the
share of MTRs surged dramatically in 2021 after the
City introduced regulations requiring registration of
all STR listings and restricting STRs to a host’s
principal residence; Airbnb responded by shifting all
listings which did not register with the city to 28-day
minimums to avoid the need to remove the listings
from its platform. In Vancouver, the share of MTRs
Dataset Platforms Data prove-
nance
Time period Unique
properties
Total data
points
Notable data features
Short-term
rentals
Airbnb, Vrbo Airdna Jan. 2015 - May
2023
269,374 122,949,354
Daily estimates of activity, mini-
mum stay length, nightly prices
Long-term
rentals
Craigslist,
Kijiji
First author Apr. 2020 - Dec.
2022
967,171 3,296,469
Asking rents, furnished or non-
furnished, rental period (Kijiji only)
Table 2. Summary of quantitative datasets.
--
increased more steeply than in Montreal, but without
the sharp increase seen in Toronto. In this case it is
again likely that regulation played a role: Vancouver
banned non-principal residence STRs with rules that
took effect over the course of 2018, which was the
same time period in which the share of MTRs began
to increase notably.
Despite these differences, however, there are four
important respects in which the trajectory of MTRs
has been similar across the three cases. First, as the
previous paragraph suggests, the relative status of
MTRs on STR platforms has been highly sensitive to
the regulations surrounding STRs in each of the
three cities. When STR rules tightened in each
location, proportionately more activity on STR
platforms shifted to medium-term rentals which are
not regulated municipally. Second, in all three cities
the trajectory of MTRs as a share of overall STR
platform activity increased significantly over the 2017
-2023 time period. In Montreal, for example, MTRs’
share of active listings (listings which were either
reserved or available for reservations) varied between
22.1% and 24.4% in 2023, which is four times the
size of the same share in 2017, which ranged from
4.6% to 6.6%.
Third, all three markets saw spikes in MTR
activity during the Covid pandemic, likely because of
the collapse in demand for short-term tourist
accommodation. In December 2019, the MTR share
of active listings on Airbnb and Vrbo was 11.6% in
Montreal, 6.6% in Toronto and 20.4% in Vancouver.
One year later, those shares had increased to 24.0%,
Figure 1. Medium-term rentals as a share of all listings on Airbnb and Vrbo in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
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Figure 2. MTRs as a share of all dwellings (L) and all Airbnb/Vrbo listings (C) by census tract, with scatterplots (R), for tracts with at
least one average daily active MTR, in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver (May 2023).
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23.5% and 35.6%—on average more than twice as
high. In all three cities MTR shares have since
declined somewhat from 2020 and 2021 peaks, but
still by any metric a much higher share of total
platform activity on Airbnb and Vrbo is medium-
term rentals now compared to prior to the pandemic.
Finally, with almost no exceptions, the share of
MTRs declines as we examine more active aspects of
the STR market. In general, MTRs account for a
high share of all displayed listings (listings which can
be seen on the platforms whether or not they are
actively in business), a lower share of active listings
(listings which are reserved or available for
reservations), a lower still share of reserved nights,
Figure 3. Housing units converted to dedicated STRs and MTRs in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver (monthly average).
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and the lowest share of host revenue. This pattern
suggests that, even as MTRs have become more
prominent on STR platforms, they are lower
performers—booked less often than STRs, and at
lower prices.
Figure 2 shows the spatial distribution of MTR
listings in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver,
expressed in the left panels as a percentage of all
housing units and in the centre panels as a
percentage of all listings on Airbnb and Vrbo. The
right panels show the per-tract relationship between
these two variables. All three cities show notable
concentrations of MTRs in per-dwelling terms (the
left panels). In Montreal and Vancouver these
concentrations are in and around the downtown,
while in Toronto there is a concentration downtown
alongside others in the inner suburbs. The middle
panels reveal much higher relative prevalence of
MTRs on Airbnb and Vrbo in Toronto than in the
other two cities, confirming the results of Figure 1.
The most notable difference among the cities,
however, is the relationship between per-dwelling
and per-listing densities of MTRs. In Montreal, the
per-dwelling density of MTRs is negatively correlated
with the relative share of MTRs on STR platforms at
the tract level (ρ = -0.17 for logged versions of each
variable), while in Toronto (ρ = 0.47) and Vancouver
(ρ = 0.54) these two indicators are positively
correlated. Put differently, in Montreal,
neighbourhoods with high shares of MTRs tend to
have even higher shares of traditional STRs, while in
Toronto and Vancouver, neighbourhoods with high
shares of MTRs tend to have lower shares of
traditional STRs.³ The most likely explanation for
Figure 4. The share of Craigslist and Kijiji rental listings which are furnished (top) and the share Kijiji rental listings which are for “short-
³ These patterns are robust to different subsets of the data—for example, only entire homes or only non-condominium properties—
which suggests that they do not reflect underlying built-form differences between the three cities.
--
this contrast is that, in Toronto and Vancouver, STR
regulations have significantly constrained commercial
STRs, while in Montreal they have not. In Toronto
and Vancouver MTRs emerge as an alternative to
STRs, while in Montreal MTRs accompany STRs in
the most in-demand neighbourhoods.
A final perspective on the dynamics of medium-
term rentals on STR platforms comes from
examining the commercial end of the market—
specifically, housing units which have been removed
from the long-term rental market and converted to
dedicated STRs or MTRs. Figure 3 shows our
estimates of the trajectory of housing units converted
to dedicated STR and MTRs. In the case of entire-
home listings (the orange and light blue bars on the
graphs), we calculate the number of “frequently
rented entire-home” (FREH) listings, which are
listings reserved or available for reservations a
majority of the year and with a 50 percent occupancy
rate, on a seasonally adjusted basis. In the case of
private-room listings (the red and dark blue bars on
the graph), we calculate the number of clusters of
private-room listings which are in fact a hostel-style
subdivision of a single housing unit. (See
Wachsmuth et al., 2021b for more details on the
methodology.) All three cities saw a sharp decline in
the total volume of housing units operating as
dedicated STRs or MTRs during the Covid
pandemic, and all three cities have subsequently seen
a rebound. More notably, all three cities have seen a
substantial increase in the share of total dedicated
STR/MTR activity accounted for by medium-term
rentals. In April 2018, MTRs accounted for 4.8%,
2.1% and 5.4% of, respectively, Montreal, Toronto,
and Vancouver’s total housing units operating as
dedicated STRs and MTRs. Five years later, in April
2023, these proportions had climbed to 20.4%,
46.2% and 16.7%, respectively—a 3x increase in
Vancouver, a 4x increase in Montreal, and a
remarkable 10x increase in Toronto.
Evidence from long-term rental platforms
In addition to STR platforms such as Airbnb,
medium-term rentals can also be offered on
traditional long-term rental platforms. Figure 4 shows
the proportion of Craigslist and Kijiji rental ads
which were furnished (top panel) and the share of
Kijiji rental ads which were “short-term” (bottom
panel) each week from April 2020 through
December 2022 in Montreal, Toronto and
Vancouver. (On the two platforms, these metrics are
the closest available proxies for a non-long-term
rental arrangement.)
The top panel of Figure 4 demonstrates two
distinct eras of furnished rentals on Craigslist and
Kijiji. From the onset of the pandemic through late
2021, the share of all Craiglist and Kijiji rental ads
that were furnished was gradually declining. This very
likely reflects a surge in furnished rentals in the early
days of the pandemic as dedicated STRs were
returned to the longer-term market, and then a
subsequent decline as that inventory was absorbed.
Meanwhile, since late 2021, furnished rentals have
been rising steadily as a proportion of all ads in all
three cities, and as of the end of 2022 were at or very
near their highest point: 38.7% in Montreal, 31.6% in
Toronto, and 39.2% in Vancouver. At least some of
the post-2021 divergence between Montreal and
Vancouver (where the share of Craigslist and Kijiji
rentals which are furnished has climbed quickly) and
Toronto (where the share has not climbed as
quickly) could be explained by the much higher
prevalence of MTRs on Airbnb in Toronto. It is
possible, in other words, that the proportionately
lower presence of MTRs on Airbnb in Montreal and
Vancouver is in fact more accurately understood as a
redistribution of these listings to LTR platforms. The
bottom panel of Figure 4 shows the share of Kijiji
listings which are month-to-month rentals. (Craigslist
listings do not distinguish among tenure lengths.)
The bottom panel tells a broadly similar story to the
--
top panel. It shows a steady increase in this share
among all three cities, again with a a noticeable gap
between higher values in Montreal and Vancouver
and lower values in Toronto.
Given the lack of any major changes in the
trajectory of MTRs on Airbnb and Vrbo since 2022
(in all three cities we studied, the major growth of
MTRs on STR platforms occurred earlier in the
Covid pandemic), the recent robust growth in MTRs
on Craigslist and Kijiji is particularly notable. It is a
plausible assumption that the users of LTR platforms
would contain a higher proportion of local residents
than users of STR platforms. If MTRs are recently
growing more quickly among the former than the
latter, this also implies that MTRs may increasingly
be meeting local demands. For example, in the post-
pandemic housing markets typical of Canadian cities,
which have seen rental vacancy rates drop and rents
increase quickly, medium-term rentals may be
playing a larger than previous role in addressing the
housing needs of local residents who are having
difficulty accessing traditional long-term rentals.
-
-
Our last piece of evidence about the dynamics of
MTRs in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver comes
from a comparative analysis of the asking prices for
these listings compared to traditional STRs and
Figure 5. Average nightly prices for STRs and MTRs on Airbnb and Vrbo (top) and average monthly asking rents for LTRs and MTRs
on Kijiji (bottom) in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver (monthly average, April 2020 - December 2022).
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LTRs. Figure 5 shows the average nightly prices for
STRs and MTRs on Airbnb and Vrbo (the top
panels) and the average monthly asking rents for
LTRs and MTRs on Kijiji (the bottom panels). All
six panels shows strong growth since 2021—after
some instability in the early months of the Covid
pandemic, the price of accommodation has been
increasing in all three cities regardless of the length of
stay. Also, with the partial exception of Toronto’s
LTR market, there is a clear price hierarchy between
STRs, MTRs and LTRs, with the former having the
highest prices, the latter the lowest, and MTRs in
between. This finding supports the conclusion that
MTRs occupy a land-use “middle ground” between
short-term and long-term accommodations. Another
finding which supports the same conclusion is that,
within each city, MTR prices between platforms are
highly correlated with each other, and in some cases
more highly correlated than MTR prices are with the
STR or LTR prices on the same platform. For
example, in Montreal, the correlation between
nightly MTR prices on Airbnb and Vrbo and
monthly MTR prices on Kijiji is ρ = 0.84. This
correlation is lower than the correlation between
nightly MTR prices and nightly STR prices on
Airbnb and Vrbo (ρ = 0.91), but higher than the
correlation between monthly MTR prices and
monthly LTR prices on Kijiji (ρ = 0.73).
The balance of evidence suggests that: 1) MTRs
have been growing in each of Montreal, Toronto and
Vancouver, initially in the early days of the Covid
pandemic as STRs were shifted to longer-term
bookings, and more recently as furnished and
monthly rentals have become an increasingly large
proportion of the inventory of long-term rental
platforms; 2) MTRs are neither “longer-term STRs”
nor “shorter-term LTRs”, but rather represent a
(potentially wide) range of tenure arrangements
which are not neatly captured by either the short-
term or long-term rental categories.
Policy case study: The regulation of
medium-term rentals at the Province of
Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board
To illustrate the regulatory complexities which MTRs
introduce into Canadian cities, we now provide a
case study of cases heard by the Province of
Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB)
involving ambiguous tenancies. We use this case
study to establish whether there is a regulatory basis
for distinguishing medium-term rentals from other
tenancy types. Our review suggests that the tenant’s
intended use of the dwelling has often been the key
factor in whether the RTA would be applied to an
MTR rental agreement, but a recent case of an
Airbnb MTR implies an emphasis instead on
accommodation type which is difficult to reconcile
with previous LTB rulings. The conclusion we reach
is that medium-term rentals fall into a land-use and
regulatory grey zone in Toronto. As previously
established, MTRs are not regulated by the City’s
STR rules. But we find here that they are also not
treated unambiguously as long-term rentals, either in
the text of the Province of Ontario’s Residential
Tenancies Act (RTA) or in the rulings of the LTB.
MTRs thus expose ambiguities in provincial tenancy
rules which municipal planners will need to be aware
of and eventually address
-
Medium-term rentals exist in a regulatory grey zone
in Toronto. Their tenancies are often established
through online platforms which also facilitate short-
term rentals, and these tenancies frequently share
important characteristics with STRs, such as an
indirect relationship with the landlord (because
payments and reservations are processed through a
third party). Even so, they are explicitly excluded
from the City’s STR regulations, which define STRs
as stays of fewer than 28 nights. At the same time, it
is not prima facie obvious that MTRs are traditional
--
tenancies governed by the Province of Ontario’s
RTA)—for example for the aforementioned reason
that they are typically mediated through a third party
which manages payments and reservations, and
moreover because, as we discuss below, there is
usually no formal lease signed between landlord and
tenant.
Some dedicated MTR platforms explicitly state
that they do not consider their rentals to be
tenancies. For example, the terms and conditions for
rental company Premier Suites declares: “This Short-
Term Rental Agreement falls outside the scope of
any provincial or territorial Landlord and Tenant Act
or Residential Tenancies Act” (Premier Suites,
2022). Simply making this claim does not guarantee
that the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB)
would decide not to treat Premier Suites as long-term
tenancies. But the agreement plainly does not
actually govern “short-term rentals” as they are
defined by the City of Toronto, since Premier Suites’
listings have a 30-night minimum stay. Are MTR
stays long-term rentals, or something else?
Medium-term rentals—in the simple sense of rentals
which are longer than 28 days but shorter than twelve
months—are legal in the conventional long-term
rental market. The “standard lease” in Ontario,
which is mandatory for residential tenancy
agreements, allows for rental periods of fewer than
twelve months. For example, if a landlord and tenant
mutually agree to a six-month rental period and sign
a standard lease to that effect, there would be no
question that the tenancy would be protected under
the RTA.
As we discuss below, the LTB would likely find
that stays of a transient nature in which the renter is
not establishing a principal residence would not be
considered long-term tenancies requiring a standard
lease and subject to the oversight of the LTB, even
when such stays are 28 days or longer. In these cases
MTRs are not meant as a substitute for long-term
rentals, and many online platforms advertise MTRs
as accommodations for temporary stays such as
corporate stays, medical stays, and insurance
housing. We have found no evidence to suggest that
the standard lease is commonly used for bookings of
28 days or longer on Airbnb and other short-term
rental platforms. These platforms do not facilitate the
signing of a lease, and in many bookings the landlord
and the guest may never meet.
The legal situation is less clear for tenancies
arranged via dedicated online platforms where the
tenants are attempting to establish their principal
residency. Particularly as the Toronto rental market
features low vacancy rates and high rents, it is
plausible that MTRs are being used as principal
residences in growing numbers. In a recent case
involving a medium-term Airbnb rental, discussed in
more detail below, the tenants requested a standard
lease agreement between themselves and the hosts,
to which the host declined. One of the few MTR
sites with any mention of tenancy agreements is a site
geared to students called amberstudent.com. This
rental site offers a range of tenancies, including 13
weeks (a summer internship stay period), 17 to 21
weeks (the length of one semester), and 52 weeks.
The terms and conditions on amberstudent.com
state that the terms of the rental are the responsibility
of the advertiser (landlord) and the student. This
implies there may be a lease between the landlord
and tenant, although it is not clear what type of
tenancy agreement the rentals will be.
The Ontario LTB has sometimes overseen cases
where one party (either landlord or tenant) in a rental
arrangement involving an accommodation type that
departs from a typical long-term rental—such as a
hotel, motel, vacation home, or other
--
accommodation commonly used seasonally or for
travel purposes—has made the argument that the
arrangement is a legal tenancy and the Residential
Tenancies Act should be applied. By examining
these cases, we can establish plausible parameters
under which MTR renters might or might not be
protected under the RTA. In these cases the
intended use of the accommodation and the
accommodation type are both commonly examined
by the LTB. Our analysis suggests that the intended
use has often been the key factor that the LTB
considers—and particularly the question of whether
the tenant has established their principal residency in
the dwelling unit. But a recent case focusing
specifically on an Airbnb MTR implies an emphasis
instead on accommodation type which is difficult to
reconcile with previous LTB rulings.
Generally speaking, hotels and other dedicated
tourist accommodation types are not regulated via
the RTA, but rather by a set of tourism-related
legislation such as the Innkeepers Act. Section 5(a) of
the RTA states the Act does not apply to:
living accommodation intended to be
provided to the travelling or vacationing
public or occupied for a seasonal or
temporary period in a hotel, motel or
motor hotel, resort, lodge, tourist camp,
cottage or cabin establishment, inn,
campground, trailer park, tourist home,
bed and breakfast vacation establishment
or vacation home.
Often landlords argue the RTA should not apply
to a rental arrangement when the dwelling unit is
what might usually be considered a tourist
accommodation, such as a hotel. However, in cases
where the tenant intended to stay long-term, the LTB
has decided to apply the RTA instead of deferring to
the Innkeepers Act—as there is the possibility that
these accommodation types intended for the
travelling public can instead be used for long-term
residency.
The LTB has in fact ruled that the RTA applied
to rental arrangements involving tenants living in a
hotel, cottage, mobile home, or resort property
(CET-00058 (Re), 2007; CET-70868-17 (Re), 2018;
TEL-86057-17-IN (Re), 2018; TET-56104-15 (Re),
2015; Matthews v. Algoma Timberlakes
Corporation, 2010; TET-90433-18-IN (Re), 2018;
Da Silva v 462226 Ontario Ltd., 2021). The issue of
tenancy in the eyes of the LTB has appeared to be
less a question of the accommodation type but rather
of whether the intention of the tenant is to use the
dwelling as a permanent residence or not. Despite
many landlords arguing their properties are exempt
under section 5(a), in a number of cases the LTB
decided to apply the RTA on the basis that
residential tenancies are not excluded from the Act
based on accommodation type alone.
The relatively robust set of LTB cases establishing
RTA protections in situations where someone
established a principal residency in a tourist
accommodation dwelling type would seem to imply
that many MTRs would also be regulated by the
RTA. Many (and probably most) Toronto MTRs are
operated out of dwellings which would generally be
used as residences—such as condos, townhouses, or
single-family houses—as opposed to dwellings
primarily used for the travelling or vacationing
public. While some of the platforms which offer
MTRs (Airbnb being the most important example)
are primarily marketed towards tourists, dedicated
MTR platforms generally market their listings
towards corporate stays, medical stays, people who
are between homes, recent immigrants, young
professionals, and students. Many individuals in
these groups could plausibly be expected to establish
principal residencies in an MTR, and such MTR
renters might also expect to have their tenancy
protected under the RTA.
--
A 2023 LTB case (Porter v. Ning (Wong), 2023),
in which a family was evicted from their Airbnb,
suggests that these expectations might be mistaken,
and highlights how the legal grey area involving
MTRs leads to uncertainty and precarity for renters.
The case concerns a family that booked an Airbnb
property in Toronto for a 10-month stay. With six
months left on their stay, the property owners asked
the family to leave because they wanted to re-
establish residence of the unit (O’Brien et al., 2023).
The ruling from the Ontario LTB found the rental
was exempt from the RTA, meaning the landlords
were within their right to evict the family without the
usual notice, despite the six months left on their
Airbnb booking (O’Brien et al., 2023).
In reaching its decision in the case, the LTB
considered the questions of landlord and tenant
intent. The landlord argued that the property was
intended for the travelling or vacationing public, and
therefore exempt under 5(a) of the RTA. But the
Board also found that it should consider the intent of
the renters at the original time of their rental
agreement, and whether that intent changed
throughout the course of the rental period. Notably,
the Board suggested that the situation in this case was
distinguishable from a long-term rental lease since
there was no discussion of an extension of the rental
after the end of the rental agreement. (However, one
could argue that is not standard to discuss the
potential extension of a lease agreement at the
beginning of a lease.) In order to prove that the
family was not vacationing but in fact living in the
unit, the tenant argued that she continued to work
from home, and produced a number of documents
such as credit cards, utility receipts, and her
children’s report cards with the rental unit listed as
the address.
The Ontario LTB ultimately decided that the
RTA did not apply to the tenancy due to the
exemption under section 5(a) of the Act, and
supported their decision with the following evidence:
the property was booked through the vacation rental
site Airbnb; payments were made through Airbnb;
early in the stay the tenants requested to enter a
standard lease agreement but the landlord declined;
the rental arrangement was mutually understood to
be for a fixed period; the services included in the
rental such as furnishings, linens, and soaps, are
typical of a vacation rental services; and both parties
did not agree to change the nature of the agreement.
In previous cases the LTB applied the RTA to
tenancies in typical vacation accommodations
because the tenant was not considered a travelling or
vacationing patron. That logic would have implied a
finding in this case that the RTA should apply. In
this case, however, the decision appears rooted more
in the nature of the accommodation type than the
relationship of the tenancy.
Home-sharing arrangements in the medium- and
long-term rental market may also fall into grey areas
in regard to tenancy laws and agreements. Within the
Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, section 5(i) states
the act does not apply to:
living accommodation whose occupant or
occupants are required to share a bathroom or
kitchen facility with the owner, the owner’s
spouse, child or parent or the spouse’s child or
parent, and where the owner, spouse, child or
parent lives in the building in which the living
accommodation is located;
Previous LTB cases suggest a high evidentiary
standard necessary for the Board to decide to apply
the RTA (TET-81989-17 (Re), 2017; TET-87914-18
-IN-AM (Re), 2018; Walsh v Lee, 2022; NOT-00718
-09 (Re), 2009). Specifically, in the cases where there
was evidence the landlord occupied the residence
with the tenants, the tenants were not protected
under the RTA.
--
The implication is that the segment of MTRs that
overlaps with home-sharing arrangements (a still
common use case on Airbnb, for example) may not
be protected under the RTA even if the tenants of
these MTRs are intending to establish their principal
residency there. Renters in home sharing
arrangements exempt from the RTA under section 5
(i), regardless of tenancy length, may find themselves
in precarious rental agreements, and at risk of
eviction without notice.
When would the LTB consider an MTR to
be a tenancy?
Since Ontario does not have any specific legal
framework regulating medium-term rentals, whether
the LTB would apply the RTA to cases involving this
tenure type will vary case-to-case, as the previous
discussion indicates. The following non-exhaustive
list from previous LTB hearings describes situations
where the LTB decided to apply the RTA to
ambiguous rental arrangements. To the extent that
past precedent predicts future TBD decisions, the
presence of any of these circumstances would tend to
increase the likelihood that the RTA would be
applied.
• There is no initial agreement between the
tenant and landlord that the stay is temporary.
• There is no visible posting or information in
the unit pertaining to the Innkeepers Act,
which is required by that Act.
• The tenant does not receive housekeeping
services, or laundry services.
• The tenant is not provided with any toiletries.
• The accommodation is not furnished or fully
furnished—this strengthens the case the tenancy
falls under the RTA, although long-term
tenancies can also be furnished.
• The tenant pays monthly rates rather than
nightly, or weekly.
• The tenant has no other permanent address, or
any other home to live in.
• HST/GST is not charged with the rent.
• The tenant does not receive payment receipts.
• The tenant occupies the unit beyond a
seasonal stay period.
• The tenant pays a utility bill.
• The tenant pays first and last month's rent.
• There is no telephone line or common phone
system in the unit.
• The landlord only advertises the unit locally,
and not to the broader vacationing public.
• The tenant receives mail to the unit.
• The landlord seeks rent increases.
If a tenant can prove they intended to use the
dwelling as a residence, some combination of the
above evidence may strengthen their case. Despite
accommodation types being labelled as hotels,
B&B’s or other typical vacation accommodations,
intent to use the accommodation as a residence has
often persuaded the LTB to apply the RTA—
although the most recent Airbnb case ruling
discussed above offers a contradictory example.
Although there are MTR sites that claim their
services fall outsides the RTA, in some LTB
hearings where tenants signed contracts explicitly
stating the rental falls under the Innkeepers Act, the
board still decided to apply the RTA to the tenancy
(CET-70868-17 (Re), 2018; Foster v. Lewkowicz,
1993). In other words, even direct tenant
acknowledgement that a rental is not subject to
--
tenancy laws may not be enough evidence to prevent
the LTB from applying the RTA.
Meanwhile, some of the evidence that the LTB
relied upon in cases where it decided not to apply the
RTA included: a landlord providing services to
tenants such as linens or housekeeping; and a unit
which could not be occupied year round (even where
there was a individual renting the unit for multiple
years) because of a lack of basic services such as hot
water—implying the unit is not meant to be used for
permanent residency (TET-72326-16-RV (Re),
2017).
However, even with strong evidence a unit is
intended to be used for vacation purposes, there are
several cases where the LTB still decided to apply
the RTA. In one case in particular, despite the
building displaying a notice regarding the Innkeepers
Act, the tenant paying rent on a daily basis instead of
monthly, and the tenant having a permanent address
listed elsewhere at the time of original check-in—all of
which do not suggest long-term residency.
Nevertheless, the LTB still applied the RTA on the
basis that the tenant intended to occupy the unit for
residential purposes and that the landlord failed to
prove the property was used predominantly for
vacation accommodation (Foster v. Lewkowicz,
1993). This case suggests that, even if a property
management company or landlord states that their
rental falls outside of any residential tenancy acts—a
scenario which in fact describes several MTR
platforms operating in Toronto—it is difficult to
determine whether the RTA would be applied in an
LTB hearing. A dwelling type may be intended for
temporary use, but that does not mean it must be
only used temporarily.
Considering the balance of evidence in the LTB
cases we examined, it is likely the RTA could be
applied to a significant number of MTRs in Toronto
as long as the tenant intends to occupy the unit as
their principal residence. But it is equally clear that
there is no single test that could predict whether the
RTA would be applied, and that both planners and
residents should expect a high level of unpredictably
in grey area between short-term and long-term
rentals.
Takeaways for planners: Resolving the
medium-term rental grey zone
In this article, we have offered a planning analysis of
the emergence of platform-mediated medium-term
rentals. Using a combination of quantitative evidence
from STR and LTR platforms and a qualitative case
study of cases at Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant
Board, we have argued that medium-term rentals
exist in the grey zone between STR and LTR
regulation, and that this grey zone specifically reflects
a gap between the land use which MTRs represent
and the regulatory environment around MTRs.
From a land-use perspective, MTRs are not a single
residential land use. Rather, they occupy a blurry
middle ground in the spectrum of short-term to long-
term rentals. We now conclude by identifying a key
planning principle which could allow municipalities
to pull MTRs out of the regulatory grey zone:
regulating type of stay instead of length of stay.
The planning dilemma is as follows: MTRs have
exposed ambiguity in the dividing line between
traditional long-term rentals, which are regulated by
provincial tenancy law, and short-term rentals, which
are not. Municipalities typically regulate STRs by
defining a certain maximum length of stay, but in
practice this definition has led to an increasing
amount of ‘regulatory leakage’, with medium-term
rental arrangements falling outside the remit of STR
rules but also apparently outside the remit of
provincial tenancy law (although below we address
the question of whether provincial tenancy law
should be revised). Municipal planners do not have
the luxury of redefining provincial tenancy law, so to
resolve this ambiguity they should instead revisit the
--
definition of STRs, and specifically the central role of
length of stay in that definition.
Both our analysis of the MTR market in
Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver and our scan of
LTB cases in the Province of Ontario suggest that
length of stay is a fundamentally unreliable way to
establish whether a rental arrangement is a proper
tenancy or simply a transient visit. This is true from
the perspective of the circumstances under which
provincial housing tribunals would apply tenancy law:
a two-month stay where the tenant intended to
establish principal residency seems more likely to be
granted tenancy protection than a two-year stay where
the tenant did not intend to establish principal
residency, for example. But this is also true from the
perspective of the policy goal—shared by all three
municipalities—of preserving and expanding the
supply of affordable housing: a housing unit that is
converted to temporary accommodations for the
visiting public is fundamentally housing that is lost to
residents regardless of how long or how short the
relevant rental agreements are.
Currently, all three municipalities define short-
term rentals as, in part, rentals of fewer than 28 or 31
days. It is very likely that most or all stays of fewer
than 31 days are intended to be temporary, and thus
that most or all of the activity captured by these
municipal regulations does have the character of non
-tenancy, transient occupancy. The reverse is not
true, however. Many stays that are a month or longer
are nevertheless of a transient character, and share
fundamental similarities with short-term rentals. In
other words, much MTR activity has the character of
the activity captured by Montreal, Toronto and
Vancouver’s definitions of “short-term rental”,
despite being formally excluded from those
definitions.
How could municipal planners address this
mismatch? One way would be to explicitly define
medium-term rentals in the zoning bylaw and
develop specific regulations to control their use.
However, as we have discussed above, MTRs are
arguably not a single discrete land use, but rather
encompass some STR-like land uses and some LTR-
like land uses in the blurry area separating the two.
Another, simpler approach would be for
municipalities to redefine STRs in their zoning bylaw
to drop any reference to a maximum length of stay,
and instead to offer a definition based on the type of
usage which occurs in the property. Specifically,
municipalities could define short-term rentals based
on the means of a property’s rental as opposed to the
length of its rental. An STR platform could be
defined as a housing rental platform which not only
displays listings on behalf of hosts but also performs
the bulk of the mediation between hosts and guests,
including collecting and processing payments,
handling disputes, and policing the behaviour of both
hosts and guests. This definition would cover Airbnb,
Vrbo and other similar platforms. Rental agreements
on these platforms are rarely if ever formalized
through a standard lease, and our case study of
Ontario’s LTB suggests that it would be highly
unpredictable whether provincial tenancy laws would
be applied to these rental agreements in the event of
a dispute. A short-term rental would then be defined
as a property offered for rent on an STR platform.
By contrast, other online housing platforms (for
example Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and Kijiji),
which simply allow for the advertisement of
properties but do not perform any important
mediation function between landlords and tenants,
would not be defined as STR platforms. Prospective
tenants use these platforms to identify possible
apartments, but all the business of concluding a
tenancy arrangement is conducted directly between
the parties. These rental agreements are usually
formalized through a lease. It is highly likely that
provincial housing tribunals would decide to apply
tenancy law to these rental agreements in the event of
a dispute, regardless of whether the rental period was
--
less than 12 months long. Properties offered for rent
on these platforms would not be defined as STRs,
regardless of the length of the rental period.
This approach, when compared to the current
regulatory status quo, would better align municipal
land use regulations with both provincial housing
laws and with the substantive goals of municipal
housing policy. If Ontario’s LTB is going to decline
to apply provincial tenancy law to a (currently
unregulated) MTR on Airbnb even when the renter
was trying to establish their principal residence there
(as in the LTB case discussed in the previous
section), then arguably the City of Toronto should be
treating that MTR the same way it would treat any
other temporary rental on Airbnb—requiring its host
to register, and only permitting it to be operated in
the host’s principal residence. More generally, in
cases where the intended usage of the MTR unit is
temporary accommodation for a member of the
travelling public, there is no reason why an MTR
should be exempt from municipal STR rules which
are in part designed to protect the supply of housing
for residents.
The assumption of this discussion is that it will be
a municipal responsibility to clarify the regulations
around medium-term rentals. We have made this
assumption because regulating STRs has generally
been a municipal task in Canada accomplished
under land-use controls, and because many MTRs
are fundamentally “longer-term STRs” which have
no prospect of being regulated via provincial tenancy
laws. These two facts mean that, under any
conceivable provincial tenancy framework,
municipalities will still face the increasingly urgent
task of deciding how longer-term stays which do not
involve guests establishing their principal residency in
the dwelling unit should be treated with respect to
existing STR regulations.
At the same time, our case study of the Ontario
LTB suggests that provincial tenancy law would
benefit from increased clarity around shorter-term
stays. It is understandable that this clarity has so far
been lacking, since Airbnb and other STR platforms
are a relatively recent phenomenon in Canadian
housing markets. But even if the bulk of their usage
concerns tourist accommodation as opposed to
rental tenancies, there is no doubt that tenancy
boards will be asked to adjudicate future cases
involving these platforms. To the extent that
provincial tenancy laws can be modified to explicitly
clarify the boundaries between rental arrangements
which will be treated as tenancies and rental
arrangements which will not be, this will provide
greater certainty for landlords and tenants, as well as
for municipal governments deciding on the
boundaries of their own STR regulations.
In any case, In any case, there are now thousands
of MTRs already operating in cities across the
country, provincial housing tribunals are unlikely to
uniformly extend tenant protections to medium-term
renters on Airbnb, and housing scarcity and high
housing costs are likely to drive more Canadian
renters into the MTR market in the future. This
suggests that clarifying the regulatory framework
around medium-term rentals will be an increasingly
urgent task for municipal governments in Canada
Notes on Contributor
David Wachsmuth is the Canada Research Chair in
Urban Governance and an associate professor in the
School of Urban Planning at McGill University. He
directs UPGo, the Urban Politics and Governance
research group at McGill, where he leads a team of
researchers investigating pressing urban governance
problems related to economic development,
environmental sustainability, and housing markets. In
addition to his academic research, he consults widely
with provincial and municipal governments on
measuring the impacts of short-term rental platforms
such as Airbnb on housing markets, and on
designing appropriate regulations.
--
Bridget Buglioni is a master's student in the School
of Urban Planning at McGill University. She
received a bachelor's degree in Geography from the
University of British Columbia. Her research
interests include issues of housing affordability,
urban commons, and spaces of belonging in cities.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by SSHRC Insight
Grant #435-2019-0720 (“Cities, Short-Term Rentals
and the Sharing Economy: Housing Impacts, Social
Dynamics, and Policy Options”, PI David
Wachsmuth).
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