New England Landmark Realty · Waterbury Center, VT

Waterbury Short-Term Rentals: Fifteen Minutes from Stowe, a Decade of Decisions

Stowe just capped its short-term rental market at 850 units. Here's how Waterbury gets to write its own ending — and why the real fix was never the rentals.

By Tony Walton, Principal Broker · New England Landmark Realty · Waterbury Center, VT · September 2026

Last month, Stowe voted 5–0 to cap its short-term rentals at 850 units. There are roughly 1,450 of them in town, so nobody gets evicted — it's an attrition plan: as rentals sell or close, they aren't replaced. And if you're not a Stowe resident, you had until September 15 to register what you own, or watch the door close behind you.

Here's what happened immediately after the vote, because it tells you almost everything: the town's rental registry ballooned from about 1,000 properties to over 1,600 — nearly 40 percent of all the housing in Stowe — as owners, many of whom had never rented a single night, rushed to register while the door was still open. There's a certain dark comedy to watching a whole town buy fire insurance after the fire trucks have already arrived.

It would be easy to file this away as a Stowe problem. I think it's a Waterbury problem — just not the way the speculation mill has it. Not "Stowe's loss, our gain." Not "the phones are ringing" — it's too early for that, and that isn't the interesting version anyway. The interesting version is about what Waterbury chooses to be over the next ten years. And if I'm going to think out loud about that, you should get my bias up front.

Here's my bias
I don't like telling people what to do with their own deed.

I've spent a career in this business telling people their deed is their business. I'm constitutionally skeptical of towns telling property owners what they can and can't do with the biggest investment most of them will ever make. The presumption should sit with the owner; the burden should sit with the town, to prove a rule is necessary — not merely convenient.

But I also watched Stowe's numbers, and I get the problem. When a quarter of a town's homes are hotel rooms, and eight in ten of those are owned by people who live in other states — more owners based in Massachusetts than in Vermont — something real is happening, and it isn't nothing. The share of Stowe homeowners who actually live in Stowe fell from 33% in 2012 to 27% in 2024. The median house sells for around a million dollars. That town can't house its teachers, its restaurant workers, or its volunteer firefighters — and a town that can't do that doesn't get to feel smug about anything.

So I'm not here to tell you Stowe was wrong, or that the people worried about this are hysterical. They're not. What I am here to tell you is this:

The math nobody at the hearings wants to say
STRs are a chapter, not the whole book.

The state's own housing needs assessment says Vermont needs somewhere between 24,000 and 36,000 additional year-round homes by 2029. That is not going to be delivered by making Airbnb slightly more annoying. That's like treating a drought by banning sprinklers in August. There are about 11,000 short-term rentals in the entire state — roughly 3 percent of all residences. We are not short 30,000 homes because of the 11,000 rentals. We are short 30,000 homes because we don't build enough, it takes forever to permit what we do build, and the places where working people can afford to live keep shrinking.

And here's the uncomfortable truth: Vermont had a housing shortage before Airbnb existed — before the first smartphone booking, before the pandemic cash buyers. The STR fight is a real chapter in a book that was never going to be finished by closing that chapter.

The remedies that actually matter are the unglamorous ones. Act 250 — the 1970-era permitting system that can treat a four-unit building like a chemical plant — is finally being reworked, with the first reforms landing this year. The state has published 802 Homes, a catalog of ten pre-permitted house designs meant to shave months off the build clock — a little like shopping the Sears catalog, if Sears required a three-year escrow. There's grant money to build an ADU over the garage. And there's a serious conversation about letting more homes go into village centers where the pipes already are. None of this is as exciting as a town-meeting fight about rentals. All of it matters more.

The Waterbury part
We're a real town with a resort economy next door.

Waterbury is genuinely different from Stowe. They're a resort town; we're a real town that happens to sit next to the resort economy. Since 2024 we've run a rental registry — free, no fees, no caps — covering both short- and long-term rentals. It was sold at the time, accurately, as data collection: "We don't know how many rentals are even in Waterbury," our town manager said. Reading that quote back now gives me the feeling of watching someone smile at a poker table.

The registry gave us our first real numbers: roughly 660 rental units in town, about 180 of them short-term. Meaningful — but not Stowe's. About 63% of Waterbury homes are primary residences, which quietly makes this a town where full-time families still set the character.

Now add geography, which every map app lies about.

We are the midpoint of the busiest corner of Vermont, with the least short-term rental regulation of any town in it:

• Burlington restricts rentals to owner-occupied homes.
• Warren, twenty minutes up Route 100, put a licensing regime in last year.
• Montpelier registers every rental annually.
• Morristown, back in 2022, went furthest: you can rent your own home, but you cannot buy houses to run as rentals.
• And us? A free registry.

For everyone who tracks this stuff, that's the story: four towns, four answers, all pointing the same direction — tighter — each for its own reasons. Waterbury hasn't chosen yet. Not because we're wise. Because we haven't had to.

How I read the next ten years
This is my read, not a spreadsheet's.

After long enough in this business, you learn to tell the difference between a town with a problem and a town with runway. We have runway.

Years 0–3: we learn what we actually are. As Stowe's September deadline settles in, some share of rental demand that no longer fits there will go looking for the next town that says yes. We may see more registrations, a few more out-of-state buyers, more conversations at the post office. Keep perspective: even if every displaced Stowe rental owner moved here, we're talking dozens of properties, not hundreds — gradually, not in a flood. And here's the luxury our neighbors didn't have: we get to watch it happen with data, on our own schedule.

Years 3–6: data becomes policy. This is the one I'd bet on. Once we know exactly how many rentals we have and where, the conversation shifts from speculation to policy. If it comes, the most likely shape isn't Stowe's cap — it's Morristown's owner-occupancy rule. I don't love that rule. It tells a new homeowner that the town has opinions on what they do with their land—and no Vermonter hears that without clenching their jaw. But I understand the arithmetic that produces it. Homes people live in: protect. Homes that exist only to be rented: that's a business, and businesses get regulated. It's an honest line, even if I'd rather never have to discuss it.

Years 6–10: the state forces the question anyway. Here's the part most people haven't noticed. The State of Vermont has spent a decade making second homes more expensive in a dozen different ways — a transfer tax on non-primary homes more than double the rate on a primary residence, a 9% rooms tax on every booking, a 3% surcharge on top of that, and withholding when a nonresident sells — and then left rental policy entirely to the towns. That patchwork can't hold. Either the legislature eventually adopts statewide rules (a bill that would have capped owners at one rental each died in committee this session, but the conversation isn't over), or the towns keep legislating themselves into a checkerboard. Either way, the direction of travel is one-way: the investor-friendly window in the unregulated towns closes within this decade. The only question is whether Waterbury writes its own rules first, or discovers them the way Stowe did.

What that means for you
If you're the one who lives here.

• Your house is not under threat. No town in this region has gone after the homestead owner, and there's no appetite for it here. The person who lives in their home and rents a room or the guest apartment is the one everybody is trying to protect. If you own the place you sleep in, you're on both sides of this fight — which is the only sane place to be.
• Watch the registry, not the headlines. Here's your leading indicator, and it's public record: how many rental registrations does Waterbury hold at the end of next winter? Flat means we're fine as we are. A jump means it's time for a measured conversation — on our timetable, with our numbers — not an emergency meeting with a Boston lawyer on speakerphone.
• Second homes aren't the enemy. They pay the higher tax rate. They keep the general store open in February. The question is proportion. Stowe's failing wasn't second homes; it was losing the mix. Everything we do for the next decade should be in service of the mix.
• And the real work is building. Every hour spent arguing about 180 rentals is an hour not spent on the harder question of how Waterbury gets more homes for the people who work here. Our registry describes what exists; it builds nothing. The towns that win this decade are the ones that learn to say yes — ADUs, village infill, starter homes — without losing what makes people want to live here to begin with.

Full disclosure: this next decade is my livelihood. I sell the houses. Which makes me the guy who'll be explaining to some out-of-state buyer why the town they just fell for has opinions about their new place — or, if we're lucky, why it already settled this with good sense and good data.

I've called Waterbury Center home since 1978. I've watched this town survive the floods, and the ebb and flow of fifteen different economies. The pattern is always the same: the outside sees Waterbury before Waterbury sees itself, and by the time we look in the mirror, a piece of the story has been written for us. This time we have numbers, a registry, a charter, and about ten years of runway. That's more than most towns get.