City officials say Juneau’s short-term rental listings may have increased by about 300 in 2022, more than doubling the previous year’s total.
Most of the listings are for entire homes or apartments. Scott Ciambor, Juneau’s planning manager, says the trend is contributing to Juneau’s housing crunch.
“Short-term rentals are definitely impacting the overall housing stock, and the availability for folks looking for housing to find it,” he said.
Last summer, the city hired a contractor to comb through listings on Airbnb, Vrbo and other rental sites.
City Revenue Officer Ruth Kostik tracks sales tax in Juneau. She presented the investigation’s findings at a Juneau Assembly finance committee meeting earlier this month and said the Ironman Alaska race contributed heavily to the increase — but many of those listings are still up.
“I was curious to watch and see, post-Ironman, especially with the cancellation (of next year’s race), if we’d start to see some of that tick back down,” Kostik said. “But we haven’t really seen that play out in the numbers just yet, so it’s actually still growing.”
Kostik says it’s hard to get an exact count of short-term rentals. Some listings were duplicates, and some appeared on some days and not others — possibly because people were putting up and taking down listings to hide their unregistered rentals.
A 2022 survey of Southeast Alaska business owners found that 72% cited the region-wide housing shortage as a major concern. Ciambor says other factors play into the housing crunch, like rising housing costs and limits to development in Juneau, and there’s no easy fix.
“There’s no real magic bullet or a definite guidance to follow,” he said.
But he says other cities have taken actions on short-term rentals that the City and Borough of Juneau could consider.
Across the country, tourist towns have limited the types of units that can be used as short-term rentals, how many nights a rental can be rented, and how many short-term rentals can exist in a municipality.
Last fall, Sitka approved a requirement for owners of new short-term rentals to live on the registered property for half of the year. Ketchikan is also looking into various limitations on short-term rentals.
