Canadian compliance
British Columbia's short-term rental rules
BC moved short-term rental regulation from the municipality to the province: a principal-residence requirement in most communities, a provincial registry, and a duty on the platforms to enforce both.
Alberta short-term rentals: the levy and the licence
Alberta is the loosest short-term rental regime of the four big provinces — no provincial licence, no principal-residence test — which puts the whole of the compliance burden on the city and the tax.
Quebec tourist accommodation: CITQ registration
Quebec put the enforcement duty on the platforms: a listing without a valid registration number is one the platform is not allowed to publish, and the fines for publishing it anyway are aimed at the platform as much as the host.
Toronto STR registration: what applies to you
Toronto regulates short-term rentals through mandatory registration, not a discretionary licence — and the rules differ sharply depending on whether you're renting a whole unit or a room in your own home.
Toronto's Municipal Accommodation Tax, explained
MAT applies to almost every short stay in Toronto, and the rate has moved twice in the last fourteen months — as of 8 August 2026 it's back down to 6%, after a temporary jump to 8.5%.
Toronto's Vacant Home Tax: the annual declaration
Every residential property owner in Toronto must declare occupancy status every year — even an occupied home — or the property is automatically deemed vacant and taxed at 3% of its assessed value.
Municipal Accommodation Tax across Ontario
MAT is set city by city, and almost nothing about it is uniform — not the rate, not the stay length that triggers it, not how often you remit. Rates below are taken from each municipality's own published pages, not from an aggregator.
Ottawa short-term rental host permits
Ottawa permits short-term rentals only in your principal residence, under a two-year host permit — with one significant exception for rural properties that Toronto has no equivalent of.
Mississauga short-term rental licences
Mississauga licenses short-term rentals in your principal residence only, for $283 a year, with a 180-night annual cap and two requirements — a police check and $2 million of liability cover — that take longer to obtain than the licence itself.
HST/GST on Ontario rental income
Long-term residential rent is exempt from HST. Commercial rent is taxable. Short-term stays under 30 days are treated as a commercial activity by the CRA — and the $30,000 small-supplier threshold combines every property you operate, not just one.
The Ontario Standard Lease, explained
Ontario mandates a specific government template — form 2229E — for most new residential tenancies. Its terms can't be overridden by anything a landlord writes into a side agreement.
Ontario LTB N-forms: which one applies
The Landlord and Tenant Board's N-series covers everything from a rent increase to ending a tenancy for renovation — and using the wrong one is a common, avoidable way to lose at the Board.
LTB Form N4: non-payment of rent
The most-served notice in Ontario, and the one most often served wrong — usually by miscounting the notice period or filing the L1 too early.
LTB Form N12: landlord or purchaser needs the unit
The form for when a landlord, a purchaser, or an immediate family member genuinely needs the unit — and the one the Board scrutinises hardest, because it is the one most often used as a pretext.
LTB Form N13: demolition, conversion or major repairs
The longest notice in the N-series, for work extensive enough to genuinely require an empty unit — with a right of return that defeats the reason most landlords are tempted to use it.
LTB Form N1: increasing the rent
Ontario's guideline is 2.1% for 2026 and 1.9% for 2027 — but the exemption for buildings first occupied after November 2018 matters more to a growing portfolio than the rate does.
LTB Form N9: the tenant's notice to end a tenancy
The only N-form the tenant serves. Landlords search for it constantly — usually because they have been handed one, or because they are about to make the mistake of sending one.
United States compliance
Florida vacation rentals: licence, preemption and three taxes
Florida is one of the few states that licenses vacation rentals itself — and one of the few that stops its cities doing the same, unless they were already doing it in 2011.
California short-term rentals: a city-by-city map
There is no California short-term rental law to comply with. There are roughly five hundred municipal ones, and the only safe assumption is that the city you are buying in does something different from the city you already operate in.
New York City: Local Law 18 and the 30-day line
New York did not ban short-term rentals. It required registration, then required the platforms to check it — which removed most of the market in a single step, because most of the market could never have registered.
San Francisco: residency, registration and the 90-night cap
San Francisco's regime is the strictest of the residency-based models: you must actually live there, you must register, and the city audits the count of nights you were not home.
Multi-line portfolio
Why the best operators don't pick one business line
Long-term leasing, short-term stays, sales, caretaking and fit-outs get sold as five different software categories. Operationally, they're one registry with five ways to earn from it.
The maintenance-week problem, solved
Two identical villas in the same community will never book identically. Per-listing accounting turns that into an owner-relations problem; pooling turns it into a non-issue.