Work on Chester’s delayed short-term rental registry to move forward

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2023 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Implementing a short-term rental registry has been a more daunting task than Chester’s town government had expected.

More than five months after signing a contract to provide Chester a short-term rental registration program that was planned to launch by April, Granicus told the town on July 13 that it will “kick off” the bulk of the work shortly with a launch date set for November.

Last January, Chester ordered four of the software “modules” offered through the “Host Compliance” product owned by Granicus. One module would identify the addresses that are being advertised on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. A second would send out letters to the owners of those addresses telling them they are required to register and would track compliance. The third module is a 24/7 hotline to report problems with short-term rentals and the last module would be an online portal for an owner to register a short-term rental. The price of the contract is $10,490 for the first year with $7,600 paid to date.

The process seemed to start well, with a Feb. 13 email to Chester’s Zoning Administrator Preston Bristow introducing Maggie Samons, a “project team coordinator” who would “reach out to you shortly to get your new implementation scheduled for kick-off with your Project Manager.”  Samons emailed Bristow that day and the town sent grand list and parcel data to Host Compliance by early March. But by April 3, Bristow was looking for a progress update on the work.

Samons responded that the company was not ready to assign a project manager yet and asked for a number of pieces of information that she said “can help you project move faster when the data and (project manager) are ready to begin.”  Three days later, Bristow responded with the answers to 16 questions.

In May, Bristow sent Granicus copies of the letters to be sent to rental operators to let them know about the requirement and a warning letter for those who fail to register. In a May 15 email, Bristow asked Granicus when the letters would be sent to STR owners, but was told there was no timetable. In early June, Bristow asked when the town could begin registering the rentals. Samons replied, “We are currently experiencing slower implementation timelines … we do not have an available Project Manager to begin your more complex modules.”

The desire for a registration program arose out of discussions by the Chester Planning Commission and Select Board of  whether to regulate short-term rentals in Chester. Both panels came to the conclusion that they needed more information on what’s happening in the market and that requiring rental hosts to register could provide that information.

In the meantime, more houses were being sold and converted into STRs, making the problem became more pressing. At the June 7, 2023 Select Board meeting, chairman Arne Jonynas stressed the need to look at short-term rentals.

“I really would like to see that come before the board sooner than later,” said Jonynas. “The houses that are going for sale in small residential neighborhoods are being bought up and turned into unhosted” rentals.

At that meeting, Town Manager Julie Hance said that Bristow had asked Granicus for the address data, which the town hoped to have by the end of June. Granicus set up a one-hour training for town staff in which they learned to download a large spreadsheet of rental addresses from a dashboard.

Noting that the original target for the registrations was back in April, Jonynas and other board members asked that the board again address the issue at its Aug. 2 meeting.

Timetables or no timetables

On July 7, The Telegraph spoke with Graeme Dempster, Granicus’s director of Host Compliance who works from San Francisco. Dempster told The Telegraph that each of the modules the town ordered has its own implementation timetable and that the town was made aware of these from the outset. He said that there’s a “build time” because they configure everything to the client’s exact specifications.

According to Dempster, identifying all the STR addresses would take eight to 10 weeks; creating a 24/7 Complaint Hotline and an Online Registration Portal and conducting “Compliance Outreach” would take a total of  10 to 18 weeks; and having the town test the system would take four weeks. In total, Dempster said, implementation should take five and a half to eight months.

Asked if the town would have copies of those timetables Dempster responded, “They absolutely should.”

“It’s in all of our meetings, every discussion,” Dempster said adding that Granicus provides the client with copies of any presentation it does.

But in mid-July, Bristow told The Telegraph that he had not received a list of timetables saying, “My frustration would have been even greater if I’d had such a list.” He also said that in his discussions with Granicus sales representatives that he brought up the April roll out goal, but now he is uncertain that the town spelled that out in requesting proposals. The copy of Granicus’ presentation that Bristow gave to The Telegraph did not include timetables.

Addressing the issue Samons brought up concerning a lack of a project manager for Chester, Dempster acknowledged to The Telegraph that the company is “not immune to” problems that plague the tech sector.

“It’s not that we are not trying actively to find people” for implementation, said Dempster. “Ultimately it’s a timing issue.” Of 47 job listings on its website on July 25, nearly one-third (15) are in the “implementation” area.

Action from Granicus

One week after the Telegraph interview with Dempster, Bristow received an email thanking him for his patience and announcing that a project manager was being assigned to the Chester account and a kick-off meeting would be scheduled to “get traction towards launching these modules in November.”

The following day, Bristow was contacted by Alex Wenglein of Granicus, who said he is the project manager for Chester and would like to schedule a “quick meeting to touch base regarding the project timeline and next steps for your team.”

The Telegraph did its own analysis of short-term rental offerings in Chester and compared its findings with the results of the Granicus Address Identification module and found a near match for the number of properties on offer. The main difference was that Granicus included rooms in inns and hotels that list with platforms like Airbnb.  These are not covered under Chester’s Short-Term Rental Ordinance since they are a different type of business that is licensed and regulated by the state of Vermont.