Dear editor:

Further to your April 20 editorial, “Town needs to tax short-term rentals,” residential real estate is being commercialized everywhere. It’s not just with the short-term rental business.

More attention should be brought to this practice and laws need to be developed to manage it. Huge companies are now buying up residential real estate and driving up prices.

Purchasing residential real estate for investment purposes has always been a practice that drives up prices. Then it’s just a matter of either financing the units through long- or short-term rental.

Short-term rentals remove units from long-term rental availability.

If Niagara-on-the-Lake wants to put more limits on short-term rentals then it would be a much fairer solution to allow only one short-term rental per owner but not to insist that it be a principle residence.

That would allow the many people who plan to retire in NOTL (which is another common reason to own a rental property) or who want to use their property as their “cottage” to use the short-term rental income to offset their expenses.

This is a practice that existed long before the commercialization of the short-term residential rental business.

Laws are definitely needed to stop the commercialization of all residential real estate, not just short-term rentals.

Jackie Bonic
NOTL