When Most Vacation Rentals Aren't Registered
If you want accurate tourism and housing data for a small town, start by counting every vacation rental that's actually operating, registered or not, and tie each one to a parcel number. Then build your trends on top of that count. Permit rolls, lodging-tax filings, and Census tables all undercount the market. Deckard Technologies' Rentalscape STR fills that gap by matching listings from 10,000+ rental websites to individual parcels, so your numbers reflect what's actually operating.
Halfway through a budget workshop, a commissioner asks how many vacation rentals are operating in town, and where. You've got a permit list with 60 names, a lodging-tax ledger with 41 filers, and a nagging feeling the real number is two or three times either one. Neither a market report nor the Census will settle it.
Your official data undercounts vacation rentals because every source you already hold is either self-reported or was never built to spot a short-term rental. Permits only count the operators who chose to register. Tax filings only count the ones who chose to remit. And Census housing tables don't have a category for short-term rentals at all.
| Data source | What it tells you | What it misses |
| Short-term rental (STR) permit or registration list | Who has voluntarily registered, and where | Operators who never applied; lapsed permits that kept renting |
| Short-term rental lodging-tax filings (called transient occupancy tax, tourist development tax, hotel occupancy tax, or a local equivalent depending on the jurisdiction) | Who is remitting, and roughly how much | Non-filers, under-reporters, and platform lump-sum remittances with no property-level breakdown |
| Census American Community Survey housing tables | Housing units, vacancy, "seasonal, recreational, or occasional use" units | Which units are rented to visitors, and where |
| Code enforcement complaint log |
Where neighbors are upset | Every quiet rental that never draws a complaint, which is many of them |
The Census Bureau confirms that gap. In a 2024 housing data Q&A, the Bureau was asked whether any of its products capture short-term rentals. The answer: "No Census Bureau survey collects data to specifically distinguish short term rentals." So a whole home booked 200 nights a year sits in the same "seasonal, recreational, or occasional use" bucket as somebody's family cabin, a bucket the Census counts as vacant, and one that held over 4.3 million units in the 2020 Census.
With no official count available, even the Congressional Research Service relies on a private one: its February 2025 primer cites AirDNA's unofficial estimate of 2.4 million U.S. short-term rentals in 2023. The same primer notes that in 2024, demand grew fastest in small and mid-sized cities. Those are often the places with the fewest staff to track it.
Market analytics subscriptions can tell a small town roughly how many listings show up on the largest booking platforms in a zip code, along with estimated occupancy, nightly rates, and seasonality. What they can't tell you is which parcels those listings are, who owns them, whether they hold a permit, or whether they remit tax. They estimate a market rather than identify properties.
That distinction matters more in a small town than a big one. If you have 300 rentals and the estimate is 15% off, that's 45 houses, and nobody can tell you which 45.
The three-layer method: count first, then trend
The way we've seen this work across the 500+ jurisdictions we serve is to line up three layers of information about the same properties: what you know, what's advertised, and what's actually booked. The differences between those layers show what your records are missing. Every occupancy rate, tax forecast, and housing-impact figure is only as good as the inventory underneath it.
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Pull together what you already know. |
Permit list, business licenses, lodging-tax filers, all in one table keyed to parcel number. Standardize the addresses, flag duplicates and lapsed permits. In most tourism towns this ends up being the smallest of the three layers.
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Build the advertised supply, matched to parcels. |
This step is where manual searches break down. Rentalscape STR's Forensic AI monitors more than 15 million publicly advertised listings across 10,000+ rental websites every day and ties each one to a parcel number and address, even when the listing hides its location or rotates photos. The listings it reviews are public, and the property matching draws on public records and licensed third-party data. More than 50 in-house analysts check the matches before they ever reach your staff. Rentalscape detects even unlisted or disguised rentals with 35% more accuracy than competitors. Advertised minus known is your unregistered inventory, address by address.
"Managing STR compliance manually at scale is nearly impossible. A well-designed monitoring system with accurate data, ease of use, and strong support is essential for staying ahead." — Jeanne Snider, Assistant City Attorney for the City of Norman, Oklahoma
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Add what's actually booked. |
Not every listing is an active rental. Booking history per property shows you which listings are live and roughly what they earn. Put that next to your tax remittances, and you've got your revenue gap.
In the jurisdictions we work with, the gap between registered and operating rentals at program launch has ranged from under twenty unregistered rentals in a capped permit program to registrations growing more than tenfold after launch. Three jurisdictions show what that looks like in practice:
| Jurisdiction | Setting | Before | After |
| City of Sandusky, Ohio | Lake Erie tourism city of about 25,000; STR permits capped at 99 | ~80 staff hours every two weeks searching platforms by hand | 19 unregistered rentals found in year one, nearly 20% of the permit cap |
| Marion County, Florida | Large county of about 430,000; Ocala, natural springs and national forest tourism | Just over 100 registered STRs when the partnership began in 2024 | Almost 1,400 registrations today |
| City of Deadwood, South Dakota | National Historic Landmark city of about 1,200 in the Black Hills; new ordinance in 2023 | No visibility into live listings; complaints couldn't be verified | 100% compliance among licensed operators; activity mapped against zoning |
Stephen Rucker, Housing Manager for the City of Sandusky, described the change:
"With Rentalscape, what used to take 80 hours over two weeks is now accomplished in minutes, and we’re not missing any properties."
— Stephen Rucker, Housing Manager for the City of Sandusky, OHMarion County sits at the other end of the range. By the time Deckard came along in 2024, its Tax Collector's Office knew exactly what it needed: a continuously updated view of who's operating and who hasn't registered yet. The climb from just over 100 registrations to almost 1,400 came as that visibility turned into outreach.
Once every rental is on one list, customers tell us it becomes a shared property record for the whole town, used well beyond the compliance team. Lee Sherman, Analyst for the City of Ventura, California, put it this way: "Having highly accurate data accessible to multiple users across different departments is key. It's eased our workload and made it more efficient."
Ventura is larger than most of the towns we're writing for, but the same approach works at a smaller scale: one accurate inventory shared by planning, finance, and code enforcement, instead of three departments each keeping a partial list.
Tourism trends and housing trends don't need separate data sources. With every operating rental tied to a parcel, they're two reports run on the same list, and you don't have to reconcile two vendors' numbers in front of your council.
Deckard's Analytics and Tourism Reporting sits on top of the Rentalscape inventory and adds:
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And because the same platform holds the compliance record, your revenue model can be checked against what was remitted, property by property. |
Housing numbers are often challenged in public hearings, so they need to rest on parcels and ownership records. With every operating rental tied to both, a planner can report:
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That level of detail matters when a resident tells the council short-term rentals are taking over their street. A planner can pull up that street and see how many units are rented, whether they're whole homes or rooms, and whether the owners live in town or out of state. In some cases the data confirms the concern. In others, it shows the pressure on local housing is coming from second homes that sit empty most of the year.
The commissioner's question was "how many vacation rentals do we have, and where are they?" Every trend your planners and finance staff want to report is a calculation on top of that answer, and a wrong count makes every one of them wrong in the same direction. For the identification step in detail, see our post on real-time identification of short-term rentals.
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If you already suspect your permit list is incomplete, get in touch and we'll run the comparison with you: what you have on record against what's advertised and booked inside your boundaries, on your own map. Book a Demo |