Ulster County first contracted with a Denver software company called Granicus in December 2022, paying $539,314 for compliance monitoring, rental-activity monitoring, and consulting services for the short-term rental market (STRs).
By scraping the rental information of dozens of short-term rental websites, including major platforms Airbnb, Vrbo, HomeAway, Booking.com, FlipKey, and Expedia, Granicus builds an aggregated database of listings. Duplicate listings are separated using machine learning. Owner contact information is gathered, and Ulster County gets the data.
After a year of data collection, the county made the information available to the public in January on the website Participate Ulster. According to the STR dashboard there, three percent of the 85,853 housing units in Ulster County were let out as STRs in 2023.
Saugerties led the list of municipalities on the dashboard with 447 units, followed by Woodstock’s 383 units and Shandaken’s 252.
It’s not a coincidence that the three Ulster County townships furthest north from New York City lead the county in STRs. End-of-2023 home-sales data shows Ulster (62.0 percent), Columbia (75.1 percent), Greene (65.8 percent), Sullivan (98.2 percent), and Delaware (65.0 percent) with the highest price appreciation since 2019 of the 56 New York State counties for which there are easily available records except for two, Schuyler (85.7 percent) and Essex (66.6 percent).
With the spread of hybrid and nomad work habits, this exurban region has been experiencing increasing popularity. Many of those potential residents have been skilled workers with New York City paychecks.
More data available
At the February 15 legislative meeting, the county legislature expanded its contract with Granicus by $122,000 to include the collection and sharing of address information directly with the municipalities through another dashboard.
“So with this new module the towns will have direct access to the Granicus system,” said first-term Woodstock and West Hurley legislator Jeff Collins. “And they can look up the addresses themselves.”
Companies in the business of operating STR platforms are cagey about providing their data, even to municipalities, oftentimes preferring to go to court to conceal this information.
“One issue we have in Woodstock, and probably other towns have it also, is many more houses devoted to short-term rentals than there should be,” said Collins. “If you include the illegal ones, I’ve heard as high as eleven percent in Woodstock … which is a ridiculous percentage.”
The squeeze accelerates
The fear is that with a STR-heavy housing stock the rental price of the remaining units will rise. Members of the community less compensated for their work choices will find themselves competing with the short-term rental market, a moneyed professional class that can easily afford high rental prices.
Many local workers can’t afford high rents, and they certainly can’t afford to buy a home. The Town of Woodstock expresses the conundrum on its website: “In our town, most people who work here cannot afford to live here.”
A third of single-family houses in Woodstock are owned by people with a primary address outside Ulster County.
Until Collins was elected legislator, he belonged to a committee looking into changing the short-term rental laws in Woodstock. Currently available permits for short-term rentals in Woodstock are capped at 205 for owner-occupied properties and 75 permits for properties that do not have the owner residing on the premises.
There’s a discrepancy between Woodstock’s permitted 280 short-term rentals and the numbers reported by Granicus, 383 STR units. If the Granicus numbers are correct, the total of STRs is 102 higher than the allowable permitted stock.
Shandaken is considering a moratorium on STR permits. Saugerties has no cap at all.
Commuting back and forth
“During the pandemic, a lot of people from the city wanted to buy a place up here — and they did,” explained Collins. “And they’ve been commuting back and forth. Some of them want to send their kids to school up here. There’s really nothing that can be done about that because there’s no laws that say you can’t be a part-time resident. At the same time, you want to be able to encourage housing for people who live here full-time, who work here, who support our town, our volunteer fire department, our volunteer EMS.”
According to a state group that tracks the industry (NYSAR), the inventory of homes for sale across the Empire State fell to its lowest recorded mark in history at the end of 3023. It dropped to a low of 24,469 units in December 2023. a 17.8 percent decline in the 29,768 homes available in December 2022.
The data suggests that the unmet demand for housing in the mid-Hudson Valley and the Catskills is the highest on the state. And our housing squeeze remains on an upward trajectory. It will not disappear overnight.
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