Rent board boss cites need for legislation tailored for short-stay market
MONTEGO BAY, St James — Chairman of the Rent Assessment Board Rose Bennett Cooper has highlighted the need for legislation specifically tailored for the short-stay segment of the real estate market.
She pointed to the challenge it would be to rely on existing legislation such as the Rent Restriction Act, which requires landlords to give tenants 30 days’ notice.
“How does that connect to a short-term rental? How can you give somebody a 30-day notice when your arrangement is for them to stay for two weeks? What then governs this relationship and get them out if they’re staying too long?” she asked.
Bennett Cooper was speaking on Thursday during a panel discussion titled ‘Tourism — the impact of real estate’, one of the topics covered on the first day of the International Real Estate Conference (IREC) 2024 at Montego Bay Convention Centre.
Last September, New York City began enforcing changes to Airbnb rules, causing jitters in the local market which is said to account for about 30 per cent of Jamaica’s tourism sector. Changes included a limit of two paying guests at a time, and an insistence that the person renting the space must be physically present when they have guests. Anxiety mounted when Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett announced that discussions were under way to roll out regulations here.
Since then there have been no significant updates on the issue.
On Thursday, Bennett Cooper suggested that one approach could be to modify the existing Rent Act.
“That, I think, is the way to go. But how do we do that if the parent legislation does not
address short-term rental? Can we do a quick fix? These are some of the conversations that need to happen; some of them have started,” said the rent board chairman.
She said these discussions about the existing legislation would include a matter the board has been called on to adjudicate, the use of units in a strata complex for short-term rental.
Bennett Cooper said a reliance on contract law had also been explored as another possibility “but that’s not foolproof”.
“Every time we think about creating a legal framework, or construct, that we think can assist in resolving a problem, we need to look at the entirety of the spectrum of how that legal construct will operate,” she said.
“So, you craft the contract or you look to the hotel laws, and you look to the Rent Act, and of course there are standards that will automatically be assumed to exist in the relationship with the landlord and the tenant, if you will — you look to all of that. But you keep in mind [that], as clever as you are, and as cleverly as you craft the solutions, that many of these things are going to end up in the courts,” she argued.
The only option now, she said, was to do the best with the existing legislation until something is tailor-made for that segment of the market.
“Until we have crafted a specific legal framework to take care of this, we look at the entire spectrum of laws and standards… that are fixed. Look at what is happening in the hotels, the laws that affect that; look at what is happening in the homes, look at what is happening in stratas. Look at all of this so that when we create our wonderful loopholes, to plug the [existing] holes, to solve the problems until the time when we get the laws that we create as iron cast as possible, these plugs for these holes,” she said.
Panellist Robin Russell, who is president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, suggested that licensing may help.
“The Hotel Act speaks to what we do when a guest doesn’t pay, how we get them out of our room. If we were to integrate the Hotel Act with short-term rental, we would solve a major problem because then you would have laws to back up everything that you’re doing,” he argued.
He highlighted some of the benefits to be derived from regulating the short-term segment.
“Everybody who is not licensed is missing out on the PIR (Productive Inputs Relief), which means that you could bring in your furniture taxfree, means you could bring in new equipment tax-free, means all of these renovations, all of these things that you would want to do to compete with a licensed entity, you’re missing that opportunity. So I encourage everyone [to] go out, get licensed, get involved, because there are more benefits being a licensed entity than being an unlicensed entity,” he said.