Oak Bluffs is once again considering a new bylaw to allow and regulate short-term rentals in town.

At a meeting last week, the Oak Bluffs select board voted to bring a short-term rental bylaw to a special town meeting in December. The draft bylaw names short-term rentals as a permitted property use, requires registration of the rentals with both the state and the town, and allows the town to implement a registration fee if it chooses.

Short-term rentals, hosted on platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo, are not currently prohibited by any Oak Bluffs bylaw, but they are also not explicitly allowed — an omission that can cause legal snags if not addressed. That’s what happened on Nantucket, where both the town and property owners ended up in court after short-term rentals showed up without a bylaw backing them as a legal property use. Nantucket voted last year to approve short-term rentals, a decision the Attorney General upheld in May.

Over the past several months, Oak Bluffs officials have been convening a short-term rental working group to hammer out the proposed regulations. Other provisions include a maximum overnight occupancy, a ban on renting multiple rooms in a house on a short-term basis unless the owner is present, and a way for the town to address health and safety violations at rentals.

“The committee’s goal for the bylaw was to present a clear set of guardrails to protect the landlord, the tenant, and the town,” said select board and short-term rental committee member Bill Cleary.

Mr. Cleary said the committee wanted to give the town the flexibility to introduce a registration fee in the future, but decided not to require fees or inspections, given the state’s increasing involvement in short-term rental regulations. The state began requiring registration in 2019; some towns have included their own municipal registration as well. 

The town planned to propose a short-term rental bylaw at town meeting in April but made a last-minute decision to pull it from the warrant, stating that it wasn’t yet ready for public consideration.

The previous version of the bylaw required owners to reside in their properties for at least 30 days a year and banned a single owner from operating more than one short-term rental at a time to block corporations from buying up properties. Those provisions are absent from the version the board approved for town meeting last week.

On Tuesday, Mr. Clearey said the definition of “owner” included in the bylaw currently being considered is designed to cut out corporations from renting.

“It has to be a natural person, not a corporation,” he said.

The bylaw also limits rental occupancy to two people per bedroom, plus two additional people.

Other Island towns have taken up the issue of regulating short-term rentals. In 2024, West Tisbury implemented a bylaw requiring that owners register their rentals, occupy them for part of the year and only operate one at a time. Chilmark, like Oak Bluffs, tabled a bylaw allowing short-term rentals at town meeting in April.

Oak Bluffs special town meeting takes place on Dec. 1.