Who Holds Short-Term Rental Permits: People, Companies and Trusts

Most short-term rental permits are in a person's name, but a large minority are not. Across 19 public registers that name the legal holder, 32% of 150,469 permits are held by a company (an LLC, corporation or partnership) and 2% by a trust. The share swings from a few percent to nearly half depending on the place, as of 2026-10-08.

How the names were sorted

Each register prints a holder name: the owner, licensee or applicant. We sorted those names into three groups by their wording, exactly as printed:

• Company: the name contains LLC, Inc., Corp., LP, LLLP, Ltd., PLLC or "Company".
• Trust: the name contains Trust, Trustee, TR or TRS, and no company word.
• Person: everything else.

A register only counts here if it names the holder on at least 80% of 500 or more rows, and if its names include companies or trusts at all. Registers that print a host's or applicant's personal name instead of the legal owner are listed separately below.

Company, trust and person shares by register

The two statewide files sit near the top: Florida and Wisconsin license short-term rentals across the whole state, and 44% of Florida's licenses and 43% of Wisconsin's name a company.

Registers that name a host instead of the owner

San Diego STRO licenses, Chicago shared housing registrations, Denver licenses (city map layer), Aspen permits print a person's name on almost every row and almost never a company. That reflects what those programs publish (the host or applicant who filed), not who owns the property. Their names are useful for outreach but say little about ownership, so they are left out of the shares above.

Nashville: investor homes and large buildings

Nashville's register separates permits for homes the owner lives in from homes the owner does not. Of 31,694 permits with that label, 63% are for homes the owner does not live in.

Ownership in Nashville is also concentrated at the top. 43 names hold 50 or more permits each, 5,310 permits in all, or 17% of the city's register. 41 of those 43 names are companies, and many read as apartment buildings (names with "Apartments", "Village" or a street address), where each unit is permitted separately. The register counts permits, including renewals and expired ones, so these are permits held, not homes owned today.

New Orleans: commercial and residential owners

New Orleans files applications by permit class, and the classes split cleanly by who holds them:

Commercial-owner applications are mostly companies; residential and non-commercial applications are almost all individuals. Anyone selling to New Orleans hosts can split a list by permit class alone.

Trusts in mountain and resort towns

Where the holder name comes from county property records, trusts show up far more often. In Summit County, Colorado (Breckenridge, Frisco, Dillon), 14% of permits name a trust. In the City of Boulder, whose owner names come from the Boulder County Assessor, 16% do. In unincorporated Boulder County it is 14%. Registers that print the applicant or licensee rather than the deed holder show far fewer: 2% in Nashville and 1% in Florida.

What the shares mean for outreach

• Company names are often investors, management companies or building owners. They buy software, financing, insurance and services for many units at once, and they are usually reached through the company, not a personal phone.
• Personal names are mostly individual owners, many with one rental. They are the property manager's natural prospect.
• Trusts are run by a trustee, who makes the decisions. The owner's mailing address on the county tax roll is usually the best way to reach one.

The multi-property owners guide shows how to count properties per name, and the buyer pages show which kinds of businesses use which records.

Limits

• Wording, not legal status. A name is sorted by the words in it. A company without a suffix in its printed name counts as a person, so company shares are a floor.
• Licensee is not always owner. In Florida a management company can hold the license for a home it manages, so some Florida company licenses belong to managers rather than owners.
• Permits, not people. Shares are of permits. An owner with ten permits counts ten times.
• Different registers, different rules. Each register is shown on its own row because cities publish different fields; the combined share is a sum of those rows, not a national estimate.