By Steve Hubrecht
The District of Invermere has started a review of its short-term rental (STR) regulations.
The current municipal STR rules came into effect in May 2024, and Invermere councillors have been saying for months that they would review the regulations after they’d been in place for a year. That review is now underway and the public have a chance to find out more — and to give feedback — during an open house on Tuesday, June 17 at the Columbia Valley Centre. An exact time has not yet been set, but the open house will likely be in the evening.
Last year the district hired consulting company Granicus to help it track STRs here, and to enforce the new rules. In total, Granicus has found 217 STRs in Invermere. Of those, 191 applied for and received the business licences and temporary use permits (TUPs) they need. (Under the new regulations all STRs in Invermere must have business licences, and those operating in areas not already zoned for tourist accommodation — including most single family residential neighbourhoods — must also have TUPs).
The district recently created an infographic detailing how many STRs are in each part of Invermere. Athalmer has by far the most STRs of any Invermere neighbourhood, with 109. But that’s mostly because Athalmer has the Lake Windermere Pointe condos building, which is home to 108 of the 109 STRs in the neighbourhood.
‘Central Invermere’ (which includes most of downtown Invermere, but also the Heron Point condos, the Highland Mews townhomes and the Purcell Point condos and townhomes) has 35 STRs. The Wilder subdivision has 13 STRs. ‘West Invermere’ (which includes the Westridge subdivision, the Pine Ridge subdivision, the Westside Park neighbourhood, and parts of Invermere near Eileen Madson Primary School and parts of town south along 13th Avenue) also has 13 STRs.
There are 11 STRs in the Fort Point neighbourhood; seven in ‘North Invermere’ (which includes all of what many older residents call ‘Upper Invermere’ as well as the area around J.A. Laird Elementary School and Mount Nelson Athletic Park); and four in the Kpokl neighbourhood.
Of the 191 STRs approved to operate, 118 needed only business licences (i.e. they are in parts of Invermere already zoned for tourist accommodation) and 73 needed business licences and TUPs.
Invermere planner Rory Hromadnik explained to the Pioneer that 24 of those TUPs were in strata-type developments, such as the Heron Point, Highland Mews and Purcell Point, and that 49 of them are in more typical single family residence neighbourhoods.
There are somewhere between 950 and 1,100 single family parcels in Invermere, depending on how you count, meaning that in total between 4.5 to 5 per cent of single family residential parcels in Invermere are operated as STRs.
District staff have heard concerns about “clustering of STRs” and had suggestions from residents about limits or caps on the number of STRs in a given neighbourhood, said Hromadnik. But overall there aren’t too many parts of town — aside from condo and townhome strata developments — where this clustering is very obvious, he added, though he did say there are a few STRs bunched together in the Wilder subdivision and a few bunched together in the southern end of ‘Central Invermere’ near Fieldstone Glen.
“There’s just a couple places in these areas where there’s three or four STRs on one street in close proximity,” explained Hromadnik. “So on the street as a whole there may not be too many, but the ones that are there are almost back to back. So it may feel like there’s a lot.”
When the topic came up for discussion with Invermere council last week, councillor Gerry Taft was glad to see that so many of Invermere’s STRs are concentrated in the Lake Windermere Pointe condos. He noted that condo STRs result in far fewer complaints and generate much less concern than those in single family homes. Given just how many STRs are in not only Lake Windermere Pointe but also in other strata developments, the overall prevalence of STRs in the community is “not necessarily as high as it might have first seemed,” said Taft, although he did add that regulations are still very much needed since “we don’t want to see the number (of STRs) grow exponentially and we don’t want to see too much concentration in certain neighbourhoods.”
