The City of Charlottesville will be revising its short-term rental ordinance, and it wants input from the community.

The city is conducting an online survey to better understand what people think about short-term rentals, more commonly known as “AirBnBs,” referring to a company founded in 2008 that connects property owners with short-term renters. The 14-question survey takes between 5 and 10 minutes to complete, and includes both multiple choice and open-answer questions. It closes June 30.

Logo reads "Short & Important"

Through the survey, the city hopes to hear feedback on short-term rentals from residents, property owners, and visitors alike. 

A short-term rental is a type of temporary lodging that has become a popular alternative to traditional hotels. Short-term rentals are furnished, residential properties rented out for a period of time — usually 30 days or less — by the owner of that property. 

They became popular in the 2010s, and Charlottesville started regulating these types of stays about a decade ago — after months of discussion, City Council adopted the current ordinance in September 2015 (Subscribers to The Daily Progress can read more background here). Prior to that, the homestays were unregulated, and the city heard some complaints about them, mostly centered around noise. Others expressed concern that landlords would turn their long-term rentals into short-term ones, decreasing the city’s housing stock.

Every short-term rental must have a valid permit from the city and must renew that permit annually in order to continue operating. Additionally, the property owner must occupy the property for 185 days per calendar year — that works out to a little over 6 months. The full list of regulations can be found on the city’s homestay FAQ page.  

City staff are examining whether or not the existing policy needs to change, and if so, what changes need to be made, Director of Neighborhood Development Services Kellie Brown told the City Council during its June 16 meeting. Staff are currently studying other localities’ ordinances, and will take community comments from the survey and forthcoming public engagement sessions into consideration.

Currently, there are about 400 short-term stay rentals in the city, Brown said.

Their existence is controversial, not just in Charlottesville, but throughout the country.

Short-term rentals give property owners the opportunity to earn extra income, and they give tourists the chance to get to know a place on the neighborhood level. They can also be economically beneficial to a locality — Charlottesville collects a 9% transient occupancy tax on short-term rentals (the tax also applies to hotels and bed and breakfasts).

However, opponents of the practice say that short-term rentals not only create problems with parking, traffic, and noise, they take long-term rentals off the market for tenants who need them. 

But the economic costs of the rentals can outweigh the economic benefits, according to a 2019 study from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit nonpartisan think tank that works to counter inequality. In general, the presence of short-term stays can increase housing costs for locals, that study found.

When the number of short-term rentals increase in a city, so do rent prices, Harvard Business Review researchers found in 2019.

This 2020 report from Forbes takes a look at the so-called “AirBnB effect,” examining some of the ways short-term stays are affecting housing markets across the world, what various studies on them have shown, and what some communities have done to regulate them.

The city’s survey is only the start of its public engagement process for revising the ordinance. Throughout the summer, city staff will consider research and survey responses as it writes a draft of a new ordinance. Throughout the fall, the city will hold public engagement events and focus groups about the draft ordinance and will make revisions on feedback. After that, the draft will go to Planning Commission and City Council for a series of work sessions. The Planning Commission is expected to make its recommendation to the Council, who gets the final say on the ordinance, in early 2026.

Take Action

Take an online survey to tell the City of Charlottesville what you think about the current short-term rental ordinance, and how it could be improved. A short-term rental is a type of temporary lodging that has become a popular alternative to traditional hotels. Short-term rentals are furnished, residential properties rented out for a period of time — usually 30 days or less — by the owner of that property.

The 14-question survey includes both multiple choice and open-answer questions, and takes between 5 and 10 minutes to complete. The survey closes June 30.

Click here to take the survey.

Need to brush up on the current ordinance before taking the survey? Click here to learn about the city’s current regulations on short-term rentals.

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