Caribbean Short-Term Rental & Property Regulation Update: July–December 2024

Six Things to Know

• Hurricane Beryl strikes Jamaica’s west; STR hosts face recovery amid strong demand
• JTB accelerates accommodation licensing consultation after years of delay
• NYC Local Law 18 at one year: Airbnb supply down 85%, hotel prices up sharply
• Spain bans new STR registrations in Mallorca; Caribbean watches European precedents
• Canada’s STR deduction restrictions now law; diaspora investors reassess portfolios
• Airbnb posts record full-year 2024 revenue; Caribbean cited as standout growth region

Hurricane Beryl and the Resilience Test

The second half of 2024 opened with a brutal reminder that Jamaica’s tourism economy—and the short-term rental sector that is increasingly woven into it—remains acutely vulnerable to the region’s annual hurricane season. Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall near Negril on 3 July 2024 as a Category 4 storm, caused severe damage across Jamaica’s western parishes, including Westmoreland, Hanover, and parts of St. Elizabeth. The storm, which had earlier devastated Carriacou and Union Island in Grenada, was the earliest Category 4 Atlantic hurricane in recorded history at that point in the season—an ominous signal of the shifting severity of Caribbean weather events under climate change.

For Jamaica’s STR host community, Beryl presented a serious challenge. Vacation rental properties in the affected western corridor sustained wind and water damage at varying levels of severity, with some operators reporting total losses. A significant number of properties had been booked for the July peak season, triggering Airbnb’s Major Disruptive Events cancellation policy and creating disputes between hosts, guests, and the platform over refund obligations. Several hosts complained publicly that Airbnb’s extenuating circumstances policy—which governs cancellations in declared natural disasters—favoured guests over hosts in cases where hosts faced repair costs that cancellation payouts did not cover.

The Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) confirmed in August that it had activated its disaster response protocols and that some funds had been directed toward supporting affected accommodation operators. The broader tourism recovery was nonetheless relatively swift: by October the majority of affected properties had reopened, and the JTB reported that Jamaica’s H2 2024 stopover arrivals finished the year only modestly below the record pace set in 2023. The resilience of tourism demand—and the speed of private sector repair—was widely credited to investment in property quality in the years since the pandemic.

JTB Licensing Consultations: Closest to the Line Yet

The Ministry of Tourism used the hurricane recovery period, paradoxically, as an opportunity to advance accommodation regulation conversations that had stalled for much of the preceding two years. Beryl’s damage exposed the extent to which many short-term rental operators were operating without adequate insurance, without formal safety certifications, and in some cases without any form of registration with either the JTB or local authorities. The Ministry convened a series of industry round-tables in September and October 2024, drawing together representatives from the JHTA, the Caribbean Short-Stay Owners and Managers Association, Airbnb’s Caribbean policy team, and the Insurance Association of Jamaica.

The round-tables produced a widely-shared position paper in November 2024 that proposed a phased registration framework: an initial 12-month grace period during which hosts would be encouraged to register voluntarily without penalty, followed by mandatory registration with enforcement action against unlicensed operators. The paper acknowledged that enforcement capacity at the JTB would need to be substantially expanded—the agency’s current inspectorate, designed for a much smaller licensed accommodation sector, is not resourced to manage oversight of an estimated 15,000-plus STR properties. Whether the government is prepared to make the necessary investment in JTB enforcement capacity remains a critical and as yet unanswered question.

NYC Local Law 18: A One-Year Assessment

September 2024 marked one year since New York City’s Local Law 18 took effect, making it the mandatory that all short-term rental hosts register with the city and be present during any guest stay. The one-year anniversary prompted a wave of assessments from housing advocates, the hotel industry, urban economists, and affected hosts that together painted an ambivalent picture.

On one side of the ledger: New York City’s Airbnb listing count had fallen from approximately 22,000 entire-home listings in summer 2023 to roughly 3,000 registered listings by autumn 2024—a reduction of more than 85%. Housing advocates argued this had returned thousands of apartments to the long-term rental market, easing pressure in specific neighbourhoods. On the other side: average hotel nightly rates in Manhattan had risen to levels not seen since before the pandemic, with some analysts attributing part of that increase to the elimination of competition from STRs. Reports of illegal off-platform rentals operating in defiance of the law continued to circulate, and city enforcement resources were stretched managing a non-compliant grey market that the law had driven underground rather than eliminated.

The NYC experience has become the reference point most frequently cited in Caribbean STR policy discussions. For Jamaican policymakers, its lessons cut in both directions: it demonstrates that regulation can dramatically restructure platform-mediated accommodation markets, but also that heavy-handed rules can generate unintended consequences for affordability and visitor experience that require careful monitoring and adjustment.

Spain’s Mallorca STR Ban and the European Debate

Spain’s escalating war on tourist apartments entered a new chapter in 2024 when the Balearic Islands government announced that no new short-term rental licences would be issued in Mallorca and that existing licences in designated residential zones would not be renewed on expiry. The measure, which built on earlier restrictions in Barcelona and Valencia, reflected widespread public anger in Spain’s most visited island destinations about housing affordability, neighbourhood character, and what local politicians characterised as the “touristification” of residential communities.

The Mallorca ban attracted international coverage and was closely watched in the Caribbean, where similar—if less acute—pressures around housing affordability and tourism concentration are developing. Caribbean Journal noted in October 2024 that several Caribbean hotel associations had circulated the Mallorca news to their members and to government contacts as evidence that the economic and social costs of unregulated STR growth are not a uniquely European concern. Jamaica’s Ministry of Tourism confirmed to The Gleaner in November that it was monitoring the Spanish regulatory developments as part of its own policy research.

Canada’s STR Restrictions: Now in Force

Canada’s Budget Implementation Act 2024, which restricted the deductibility of expenses for short-term rental properties operating in non-compliant jurisdictions, received royal assent in June 2024 and took effect for the 2024 tax year. The measure, proposed in the 2024 federal budget and aimed at incentivising STR operators to comply with local licensing rules, began to reshape investment decisions among Canadian-based hosts and investors in the second half of the year.

For the Jamaican diaspora in Canada—a significant and growing segment of Jamaica’s STR investor base—the new rules prompted a reassessment of how their Jamaican rental property income should be structured and reported. Many diaspora investors operate Jamaican properties through informal arrangements that may not constitute a compliant structure under either Canadian or Jamaican tax law. The introduction of the Canadian deduction restrictions has added urgency to a long-overdue conversation about cross-border STR tax compliance that Jamaican and Canadian tax advisers are increasingly being asked to navigate.

Airbnb’s Record 2024 and the Housing Affordability Conversation

Airbnb closed 2024 with record annual revenue, reporting full-year figures that exceeded US$11 billion for the first time. The company’s investor communications confirmed that the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southern Europe remained its highest-growth regional markets by nights booked, with Jamaica continuing to feature in the platform’s marketing materials for the region. Caribbean hosts on the platform collectively earned an estimated US$160 million during 2024, according to data extrapolated from Airbnb’s regional disclosures, with the bulk of that income concentrated in St. James, St. Ann, and St. Elizabeth parishes.

Against this backdrop of strong platform performance, housing affordability concerns in Jamaica’s coastal communities continued to deepen. The National Housing Trust raised concerns in its 2024 annual report about the growing proportion of coastal residential properties shifting from owner-occupied or long-term rented status to short-term holiday let configurations. Economists at the University of the West Indies published research in the latter half of 2024 estimating that average long-term rental prices in coastal communities with high STR density had risen by 18 to 25% over the previous three years—a rate substantially above general CPI inflation and well beyond the adjustment mechanisms provided by the Rent Restriction Act.

As 2025 approaches, Jamaica’s STR policy agenda is more active than at any point in the market’s history, driven by the convergence of post-Beryl reconstruction needs, housing affordability pressure, hotel industry lobbying, and the global regulatory momentum generated by landmark decisions in New York, Barcelona, and Spain’s Balearic Islands. Whether 2025 will finally be the year Jamaica moves from consultation to legislation remains the defining open question in the island’s property and tourism policy landscape.

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