Demand to list short-term rentals in Kelowna slow to recover

The City of Kelowna has approved hundreds of new short-term rentals since the provincial ban was lifted at the start of June, but the demand hasn’t caught up with the change.

The City of Kelowna said it has approved 605 short-term rental licenses this year, including 403 since the ban was lifted last month. The city has been slowly rolling out more short-term rental licenses and controlling where they’re allowed through sub-zones.

According to the Airbnb tracker AirROI.com, there were 1,000 more booked nights last year when the ban was in effect. In June, there were 8,300 booked nights at 633 properties, but in June 2025 there were 9,300 booked nights at 552 properties.

When you look at the Airbnb short-term rentals specifically, there are 724 active listings with an average daily rate of $241 a night. The average occupancy rate is 45 per cent. Most short-term rentals with Airbnb in Kelowna are made by Canadian, around 80 per cent, and 50 per cent of guests were born after the year 2000.

When asked about the impact of the city’s decision to bring back short-term rentals, the city said it doesn’t have any data aside from the new short-term rental license approvals and referred iNFOnews.ca to Tourism Kelowna.

Tourism Kelowna didn’t have the information and said it would take time to collect its own data.

While there might not be a boom in short-term rentals, Tourism Kelowna’s CEO Cassandra Zerebeski said the tourism indicators are looking good so far.

“We’re looking forward to an exceptional summer in Kelowna,” Zerebeski said in an emailed statement.

“The season is off to a strong start, with positive tourism indicators including healthy accommodations numbers, record-setting passenger volumes through Kelowna International Airport and encouraging booking trends across the visitor economy.”

Vacation rental services have found that the short-term rental uptake from property owners hasn’t been an instant switch just because the rules have changed.

Les Bellamy is a local homebuilder who has been outspoken on the issue of short-term rentals and he said it’s important for policy decisions to have a measurable goal.

“Any government at any level, when they’re making policy decisions, the first thing they need to do is determine what is the metric of success,” he said.

Bellamy said since the short-term rental return was so close to major events like Touchdown Kelowna, it’s hard to decipher the impact it had.

“The timeline between when the policy got changed and this most recent event, it’s a pretty short window. There’s a lot of people that are planning way farther out than that, so they wouldn’t have had time to react to that policy change,” he said.