Success Story | Town of Canmore
How the Town of Canmore turned short-term rental enforcement into a ‘big win’ for community housing
The Town of Canmore in Alberta, Canada, balances a thriving tourism economy and a subsequently booming short-term rental (STR) atmosphere with an ongoing housing shortage for locals. The number of STRs increased as tourism rose at the nearby Banff National Park, and, in response, the town recognized the need to identify unauthorized operators, improve licensing compliance, and preserve housing for residents. Canmore used the Government of Canada Short-Term Rental Enforcement Fund (STREF) and Granicus’ Short-Term Rentals (Host Compliance) to transform a complaint-driven process into data-informed enforcement that responsibly serves residents.
The Town of Canmore is facing a notable housing crunch. “Rental availability is below 1% and prices continue to climb,” explained Paul Martel, municipal enforcement officer. “It’s just more difficult for locals in the community to find housing.”
At the same time, Canmore started getting more pressure from unauthorized short-term rentals as visitor demand in the area also grew. Until 2025, the town managed most enforcement efforts reactively through resident complaints, which limited visibility into the full scope of the issue.
Town leaders recognized that manual investigations could not keep pace with thousands of potential listings. The municipality needed a scalable approach to identify unauthorized rentals, support new licensing requirements, and protect housing availability for local residents.
The town adopted Granicus’ Short-Term Rentals solution to support proactive enforcement. The platform combines listing data, property records, and business-license information to help staff quickly identify and address potential violations. Key capabilities of the solution include:
“One of the biggest benefits we’ve found with Host Compliance is the mapping feature,” said Alykhan Pradhan, municipal enforcement officer. “The mapping is extremely helpful because our municipality has fairly tight zoning and control. Now we can see exactly where short-term rentals are permitted within the town.”
The solution also supports Canmore’s new business-license requirements, giving staff greater visibility into operators and helping improve compliance across the community. “It’s really taken a lot off of our plates and given us the ability to follow through with these investigations, rather than spending the time trying to identify listings,” said Pradhan.
Camore strengthened its short-term rental enforcement further through funding from the government’s STREF program. The fund enabled the town to create two dedicated compliance positions focused on identifying unauthorized short-term rentals, improving licensing compliance, and protecting housing availability for residents. The additional resources allowed the municipality to implement a proactive enforcement strategy that leverages Granicus technology and significantly expand investigations into noncompliant operators.
Within the first year of using Granicus’ Short-Term Rentals solution, licensed tourist-home operators increased from just 71 to 677, while the town processed 1,409 business licenses for visitor-accommodation units. Staff completed 139 investigations — up from only 18 complaint-driven investigations previously — and identified 50 noncompliant short-term rentals that required enforcement action.
Staff also issued 25 successful MGA 645 Stop Orders and helped drive a substantial increase in business-license compliance, with approximately 2,200 visitor-accommodation business licenses and 650 tourist-home business licenses issued.
The endeavor also generated tangible housing outcomes. Canmore removed 39 unauthorized vacation rentals from rental platforms, returning those units to the residential housing market. Enforcement officers now regularly observe formerly noncompliant STR properties reappear as residential rentals, helping support the town’s broader goals around housing availability and community livability. “When an advertisement for a property as a short-term rental is removed and then pops up on residential rental markets … that is a big win,” said Martel.
Awareness of the enforcement program spread throughout the community, leading to more operators choosing to comply voluntarily. This harmony makes the overall short-term rental landscape easier to manage and helps Canmore preserve a healthy balance between tourism and housing for residents.
While the STREF federal funding supports the program through March 2027, the town has already recognized the long-term value of the initiative and has budgeted for an ongoing enforcement position to continue advancing its housing and livability goals.
“Taking a moment to recognize the positive impact on the community that the work has — and the impact on the housing market that the removal of unauthorized short-term rentals has — is a really positive thing,” said Martel.
Granicus’ Short-Term Rentals (Host Compliance) capability helps governments and associations collect short-term rental tax revenues while enforcing the safety and quality-of-life standards that helps create communities where people want to live and visit. Short-Term Rentals uses AWS’s Relational Database Service (RDS) to efficiently connect identification, enforcement, and revenue collection tasks. AWS’s Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) ensure fast, reliable access to keep compliance efforts moving.
