Short-Term Rental Rules and Rents: What McGill Measured

A McGill study by Cloé St-Hilaire and David Wachsmuth, published in the journal Regional Studies, measures what principal-residence requirements do to long-term rents. The result comes down to one amount: roughly 55 dollars a month. This piece asks what that figure tells a plex owner, and above all what it does not. It covers neither the legal framework nor permits, both handled in our article on Airbnb regulation in Montreal.

What the study actually measured

The scope deserves to come before the result, because it governs how far the result travels. The two researchers analysed 798 neighbourhoods spread across Quebec, British Columbia, Ontario and New Brunswick, over six years, from 2017 to 2022. Of those neighbourhoods, 309 sit in municipalities that had adopted principal-residence requirements for short-term rentals by January 1, 2023.

The finding applies to that subset: a measured rent decrease of roughly 55 dollars a month. Four provinces, six years, a neighbourhood-level cut. A study built this way says nothing about any single building, and it does not claim to.

The effect travels through the lease, not the stay

This is the most useful distinction in the whole file, and the one least often drawn. When short-term rental rules come up, an owner's instinct runs to their own booking calendar: how many nights, at what nightly rate, at what occupancy. That is not what the study looks at. It measures what happens to long-term rents in the neighbourhoods concerned.

For a plex owner the consequence is clean. The documented effect does not show up in stay revenue; it shows up in the base of ordinary revenue, which is the lease. That is a shift of attention, from the stay side to the lease side, and it changes what is worth watching.

The two amounts do not compare themselves

The study sets the 55 dollars against the roughly 1,500 dollars a one-bedroom unfurnished unit cost in Montreal in 2022. The pairing helps place an order of magnitude, and it stops there. The two numbers do not share a standing: the first is an effect estimated over a set of neighbourhoods in four provinces, the second is a rent level observed in one market for one unit type.

So we draw no ratio from them, no percentage, no projection. Dividing one by the other would yield a precise-looking number measuring nothing real, since the two quantities cover neither the same territory nor the same object. Citing them side by side is exactly what the study does, and it is all this article allows itself.

What the authors decline to conclude

Their reservation is explicit, and it is worth carrying without softening: regulation is one of the options on the table, and it does not solve the crisis. That sentence is theirs, not ours. It rules out presenting the result as proof that a regulatory measure would be enough to make housing affordable.

A second number circulates in the coverage of this work: 192.4 million dollars a month in savings for renters nationally. It is reported by Le Journal de Montréal, and it is attributed here to that outlet. The distinction is not fussiness. A figure carried in the press and a result published in a peer-reviewed journal are not invoked the same way.

What a plex owner can take from it

A direction, not a forecast. An effect estimated across 309 neighbourhoods does not transfer to a given building, whose stock composition, local demand and standing leases are its own. Nobody owns an average neighbourhood, in the same way nobody lives in a median.

What the study offers an owner is a reading frame for what they observe on their own leases, and a reason not to assign every rent movement to a single cause. It does not replace looking at the rents actually being asked in their sector, for their unit type, on the date they will next re-let.

What this article does not cover

It covers neither the legal framework for short-term rentals, nor zoning, nor permits, nor the condo declaration, nor the penalties involved. All of that is handled elsewhere on this blog and does not summarise in passing. It also does not compare rental strategies against one another and recommends no trade-off.

Its purpose is narrower and, we think, more useful: read a research result correctly, name its scope, restate the limits its own authors placed on it, and refuse to extract numbers it does not contain.