It is the most consequential short-term rental decision any Canadian resort town has taken, and a lot of Canmore owners still haven't worked out what it means for the unit they already have.
Canmore doesn't ask whether you'd like to rent short-term. It asks what your property already is under the Land Use Bylaw, and the answer was largely settled before you bought it.
Which one applies to a given unit is not obvious from the address, the building, or what the neighbours appear to be doing. It is a matter of record, and it is checkable — but you have to actually check it.
Want to know which category a specific unit is in? It is a matter of record, and we can read it for you. For an exact opinion on a Canmore property, ask us.
On 11 March 2025 the Town of Canmore amended the Land Use Bylaw to eliminate Tourist Homes as a permitted use. Existing Tourist Homes keep their status. New ones cannot be created — not by a developer, not by an owner, not by application.
Read that as a supply statement, because that's what it is. In a town where demand is set by two national parks and a fixed amount of developable land, the number of properties that can legally take a nightly booking is now a closed set. It can shrink. It cannot grow.
If you own one, you own something that is no longer being made. That is a genuinely unusual position and it deserves more thought than most owners have given it.
Tourist Homes are taxed at roughly three times the residential rate — the Town says so in its own words. That has been true for a while. What changed in 2025 is that owners can no longer declare personal use to reduce the bill. Every Tourist Home now pays the same higher rate whether it is rented three hundred nights a year or none.
The practical effect is blunt: a Tourist Home that sits empty is now considerably more expensive to sit on than it used to be, and the arithmetic that made it comfortable to keep as a family place has quietly stopped working for a lot of owners.
The personal-use declaration is gone. All Tourist Homes are taxed at the same rate regardless of how they're used.
The Land Use Bylaw is amended to eliminate Tourist Home as a permitted use. Existing ones remain; the category is closed to new entrants.
Tourist Home owners can convert to residential through a streamlined process with conversion fees waived. After that date the incentive goes.
A converted property cannot become a Tourist Home again, because Tourist Homes can no longer be created. The decision is permanent.
If you hold a Tourist Home, you are being asked to choose between two genuinely different assets, with a deadline attached and no undo button.
Which one is right depends entirely on whether the unit can earn. A Tourist Home that rents well is worth its tax rate several times over. One that sits empty for eight months is paying a premium for a permission it isn't using.
That is a revenue question before it is a tax question, and it's the one we'd want answered before anybody converts anything.
Assuming the permission is in place, Canmore adds an operating layer on top of it that catches people who are used to running rentals elsewhere.
We owned and ran property in Canmore while living an hour down the highway in Calgary, and we dealt with all of this ourselves. It is a large part of why the compliance side of the business is the part we're best at — Canmore is an unforgiving place to learn it.
In most markets, permission is free to hold and only the operating costs bite. In Canmore the permission itself is billed to you annually at roughly triple the residential rate. That changes the maths.
We'd rather tell an owner their Tourist Home isn't earning its tax rate than help them keep paying for a permission they never use.
We'll tell you free which of the three categories your property is in and whether nightly rentals are on the table for it at all. The jurisdiction comes back on screen straight away; the rest of that answer follows by email, usually within a day. It costs nothing either way.
If you're weighing up conversion before 31 December 2026, that's the bigger question, and it's what the Parcel Report is for — what the unit would realistically earn, what it costs to hold either way, and which decision you'd rather have made in five years. Quoted before we start.
Knowing what a property is allowed to do is the first of three things we do. The next questions are usually whether the place is ready to list and who's going to run it.