HONOLULU — Vacation rental supply fell on Oahu and the number of visitors reporting vacation rental stays dropped by about half in September, the first month since the city’s crackdown on illegal rentals took effect.
Ordinance 19-89, which took effect Aug. 1, makes it illegal to advertise a vacation rental that is not properly permitted or not inside a hotel-resort zone.
It also raised fines for recurring short-term rental violations to $10,000 per day from $1,000 per day. Since enforcement began, the city has issued 166 notices of violations for advertising unpermitted short-term rentals and 24 notices of violation for renting an unpermitted rental. Only 10 notices of order, which come with potential fines, have been issued by the city to owners who failed to take timely corrective action.
According to a vacation rental report released Thursday by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, Oahu’s supply of available vacation rental units in September dropped to 241, 811 unit nights, a decrease of 19% since July, 8% since August and 7% since a year ago. At the same time, the vacation rental supply on Maui, Hawaii island and Kauai posted monthly and year-to-date gains.
“While supply continued to grow in August and September for the other three counties, Oahu saw the decrease in supply that I would have expected to see with Ordinance 19-89,” said Erik Kloninger, whose firm Kloninger &Sims Consulting LLC assisted Transparent Intelligence in preparing HTA’s first Hawaii Vacation Rental Performance Report, which is slated to be released monthly.
An island highlight released Thursday by HTA also indicated that the number of Oahu visitors who said that they planned to stay in a vacation rental house had dropped. In July, 64, 389 visitors reported that they planned to stay in an Oahu rental house. However, that number fell to 51, 669 in August and to 32, 740 by September.
While those numbers could prove meaningful over time, it’s still too early to determine how the decrease in visitors planning vacation rental house stays on Oahu relates to the ordinance. To be sure, similar declines were reported for rental house stays during the same period on Hawaii island, Kauai and Maui.
Jennifer Chun, HTA director of tourism research, said part of the reason for the across-the-board drops could be that July is a peak tourism season, while September is a softer shoulder season. Due to seasonality, HTA typically doesn’t compare month-to-month changes, Chun said.
“The number of people staying at a hotel in September is lower than July, too,” Chun said. “Are there impacts? I’m sure there are because I’ve read in the paper that there are, but it’s too hard to see it in the data.”