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Catskills STR Market Report 2026: Ski Anchors, the Brooklyn Second-Home Wave, and a Market Still Finding Its Ceiling

Updated: Aug 7

Catskill New York

For twenty years, the Catskills short-term rental market meant one thing: ski season around Windham and Hunter Mountain, a reliable but narrow window of winter demand bracketed by quieter shoulder months and a summer trade built mostly on legacy bungalow colonies and lake houses. That market still exists. But it is no longer the whole story, and any Catskills short-term rental market report written today has to account for a second engine that has bolted onto the ski-corridor base in the last several years: a wave of Brooklyn and broader NYC creative-class buyers picking up farmhouses, A-frames, and raw land in the western Catskills — Phoenicia, Margaretville, Andes, Fleischmanns, Roxbury, and the Catskill village corridor along the Hudson — and turning them into design-forward, high-ADR listings faster than local property management infrastructure, permitting offices, or even the towns' own zoning boards can absorb.


The result is a genuinely two-engine market: a mature, seasonal, ski-anchored economy around Hunter Mountain and Windham Mountain Club, and a younger, design-led, Instagram-fluent second-home economy radiating out from Phoenicia and the river towns. Both engines are adding supply. Neither is obviously winning. And the data that does exist points to a market where listing counts are climbing considerably faster than revenue per listing — a supply boom that hasn't yet found its ceiling.


Two Markets, One Region

It's worth being precise about geography, because "the Catskills" gets used loosely and the regulatory and demand pictures differ sharply block by block. The ski corridor — Windham (town and hamlet), Hunter (a separate town despite sharing marketing and a mountain range with Windham), Tannersville, and Jewett — has been an STR market since long before Airbnb existed, built on multi-generational ski houses and weekend rentals timed to snowmaking season. The western Catskills — Phoenicia, Big Indian, Shandaken, Margaretville, Roxbury, Andes — historically leaned toward legacy second-home ownership and long-term rentals, with STR activity a more recent overlay. And the Hudson River corridor, anchored by the Village of Catskill and the city of Kingston to its south, is a different animal again: walkable, historic, increasingly gallery- and restaurant-dense, and now home to some of the highest-ADR individual listings in the entire region.


What ties these together into one "Catskills market" for booking and marketing purposes is proximity to the same core demand pool: the New York City metro, roughly two to three hours south. What's changed is who's buying into that proximity. Ski-season buyers are still there. But Brooklyn creative-class buyers — people who might have bought in the Hudson Valley proper five years ago, or who are priced out of the more saturated Hudson Valley towns closer to the city — are pushing further north and west into the Catskills specifically because land and older housing stock are still comparatively affordable, and because a renovated A-frame or converted barn photographs exceptionally well for a design-forward direct-booking or Airbnb Plus listing.


The Supply Boom, By the Numbers

Third-party STR analytics on the ski-corridor towns show a market adding listings noticeably faster than it's growing revenue per listing — the classic signature of a market moving from undersupplied to competitively saturated in a compressed window. In the town of Hunter, one 2025 dataset put average annual host revenue at roughly $54,000 on a $554 average daily rate and about 32% occupancy — healthy unit economics, but occupancy in the low 30s alongside a high ADR suggests a market leaning on a small number of peak weeks (ski weekends, foliage, holiday weeks) rather than consistent demand, which is exactly the profile you'd expect if new supply is arriving faster than new demand.


In the town of Catskill (the broader township along the Hudson, distinct from the historic Village of Catskill inside it), one dataset showed active listings more than doubling year-over-year off a small base — a reminder that percentage supply-growth figures in a market this size can look dramatic purely because the starting number of listings was low, and should be read directionally rather than as precision statistics. The consistent theme across every town-level dataset we reviewed for Windham, Hunter, and the Catskill corridor is the same: listing counts climbing at a pace that outstrips revenue-per-listing growth, with average nightly rates in some towns actually softening year-over-year even as the total number of active listings expands. We'd caution any operator or investor against treating any single third-party estimate as gospel — sample sizes at the town level are small enough that quarter-to-quarter swings can be noisy — but the direction is unambiguous: supply is growing significantly faster than per-listing revenue across all three towns, and the market has not yet found a new equilibrium.


For an operator already in the market, that's a signal to double down on differentiation — design, direct booking, and guest experience — rather than assume rising tide alone will keep filling the calendar. For someone evaluating a Catskills purchase in 2026, it means underwriting on today's occupancy and ADR trend, not on trailing-three-year averages that predate the current wave of new inventory.


Regulation, Town by Town: A Genuinely Mixed Picture

Unlike a lot of markets we cover where the phrase "check local regulations" is a formality, the Catskills right now has real, materially different rules from one town line to the next — and getting this wrong before buying or listing a property here is an expensive mistake. Four jurisdictions matter most.


Windham (town) is genuinely open, with no permit, no fee, and no cap — a rarity in the current Hudson Valley/Catskills regulatory environment. That openness is not an oversight; it's the result of a fight the town already had and settled. In 2020, the Windham Town Board drafted a short-term rental law that would have capped total permits at 150 townwide and limited any individual property to 100 rental days per year, alongside guest-count restrictions tied to bedroom count. A petition gathered more than 1,400 signatures opposing the draft law, and the town board withdrew it in November 2020, canceling the scheduled public hearing rather than advancing it.


Nothing has been re-proposed since. For hosts and investors, that history matters: Windham's openness isn't guaranteed permanently, but there's no active legislative threat on the table as of this report, which is a meaningfully different risk profile than a town actively drafting new restrictions.


The Village of Catskill requires a village-issued permit and a safety inspection, with a fee structure that has climbed over the past several years — from roughly $375 for an initial permit and $125 for renewal as recently as 2021, up to a currently posted $500 initial / $200 renewal fee schedule on the village's own permit application. There is no numeric cap on the number of permits the village will issue; it remains a permit-by-right system, just a costlier and more scrutinized one than five years ago. Operators should budget for the compliance overhead (inspection scheduling, code compliance) rather than assume a simple form-and-fee process.


The Town of Hunter is the strictest of the three and is frequently confused with Windham despite being a distinct municipality that happens to share the Hunter Mountain ski marketing umbrella. Hunter's Local Law No. 2 of 2023, in effect since July 26, 2023, requires a $500 initial permit fee and $250 renewal, a fire and safety inspection, and — critically — a townwide cap of 250 total short-term rental permits. Current active-listing counts in the market vary widely depending on how "Hunter" is drawn on the map: one dataset shows roughly 55 active listings within a tight town boundary, while broader market-area definitions that sweep in more of the surrounding ski corridor report figures as high as 453. That spread means we cannot confidently say whether the 250-permit cap is currently binding or has meaningful headroom — it depends entirely on which of those listing counts reflects permits actually issued under Local Law No. 2, versus unpermitted listings, versus listings physically located in neighboring towns. Anyone evaluating a Hunter, NY acquisition or planning to list there should call the Town of Hunter Building Inspector's office directly — (518) 589-6150 — to confirm current permit issuance against the 250 cap before assuming availability. This is the single most important unverified data point in this report and it's a call worth making before writing an offer.


One footnote worth flagging for anyone doing their own diligence: the Town of Catskill (the township, governed separately from the historic Village of Catskill that sits inside it) operates under its own ordinance, Local Law No. 1-2022, amended in March 2025 — a different rulebook from the village permit process described above. Confirm which jurisdiction a specific parcel sits in before assuming village rules apply.


Two nearby markets worth naming for contrast, even though they're covered in more depth elsewhere: Woodstock and Kingston — different towns from anything covered above — both have permit caps that are already full, with waitlists in place. Kingston's cap of 106 full-time short-term rental permits (roughly 1% of the city's housing stock) has been reached, though non-renewals periodically open small numbers of new slots for waitlisted applicants. Anyone drawn to the Catskills by Kingston or Woodstock's walkability and restaurant scene should know upfront that a straightforward new listing there is not currently available the way it is in Windham or the Village of Catskill.


Finally, at the county level: Greene County runs a free, non-mandatory short-term rental registry through an online customer portal, enabled by state bills S820 and A5686. This is worth registering for — it signals good-faith compliance and helps the county track the STR base — but it is administrative and voluntary, and should not be confused with New York's separate, mandatory statewide registry-verification requirement under S885C/A4130C (finalized via the Chapter 99 of the Laws of 2025 amendment, S820/A5686), which operates independently of whatever a given county or town chooses to run locally.


Who's Already Operating at Scale

Despite the regulatory patchwork, institutional and semi-institutional operators have already staked claims in this market, and their presence is a useful gauge of how investable the corridor now reads to outside capital. AvantStay's flagship in the region is the "River House" in the Village of Catskill — a historic riverfront estate on the Hudson, sleeping 24, booked around $1,000 a night with full concierge service. It's the kind of large-format, event-capable property that only makes sense for a company with AvantStay's booking and revenue-management infrastructure behind it, and its presence in the village (rather than the ski corridor) says something about where the highest-ADR opportunity in the region currently sits: not necessarily on the mountain, but on the river.


Vacasa maintains listings in both Windham and Hunter, giving the ski corridor itself a national-brand management presence on both sides of the town line. Regionally, Alluvion Vacations and Home Sweet Hudson are both active property managers in the broader ski-corridor and Hudson Valley market, offering local, boutique-scale alternatives to the national platforms.


What's notable is that none of this named competition has come close to consolidating the market. Superhost rates — a rough proxy for how much of a market's active listing base is independently owned and professionally run by individual hosts rather than churned through by absentee, low-touch operators — sit at roughly 72.7% in Hunter and 57% in Windham, both well above what you'd expect if a handful of institutional players controlled meaningful share. The takeaway for an independent operator: the named competitors above are real, and worth knowing, but the underlying inventory in both ski towns is still predominantly independent — this remains a market where a well-run, well-marketed individual listing can out-compete a corporate portfolio property on guest experience, review quality, and search visibility.


What This Means If You're Operating Here Now

The single biggest strategic fact in this report is that the Catskills is adding supply faster than it's adding revenue per listing, across both of its demand engines simultaneously. That's not a reason to avoid the market — the underlying demand driver (a two-to-three-hour drive from the largest metro in the country, now reinforced by a genuine wave of second-home buyers with design sensibility and disposable income) is real and durable. But it does mean the easy-growth phase, where simply listing a property in Windham or Phoenicia guaranteed strong occupancy almost regardless of execution, is likely behind this market.


For ski-corridor operators, that means leaning harder into what a national platform listing can't easily replicate: direct-booking relationships with repeat ski-season guests, packaging (lift tickets, gear storage, apres-ski amenities) that a generic Airbnb listing doesn't offer, and permit compliance that keeps a Hunter property fully legal under Local Law No. 2 rather than exposed if enforcement tightens. For western Catskills and river-corridor operators competing in the design-forward segment the Brooklyn wave has created, the bar is now photography, styling, and brand story — the AvantStay River House and its peers have set a visual standard that smaller independent listings need to meet on presentation even when they can't match on square footage or amenity count.


Work with Crest & Cove Creative

The Catskills has two different markets wearing one name — and most operators are marketing to the wrong one, or to neither. If you're running a ski-corridor property in Windham or Hunter competing against Vacasa's national booking engine, or a design-forward listing in Phoenicia trying to stand out in a market suddenly full of beautifully renovated A-frames, a generic Airbnb listing isn't enough anymore. Crest & Cove Creative builds direct-booking brands and market-specific content strategies for independent STR operators — including in fast-changing corridors like the Catskills, where the rules and the competition are both shifting under your feet. Get a free audit at crestcove.co, email info@crestcove.co, or call (256) 998-7502.


Frequently Asked Questions

Is Windham, NY still unregulated for short-term rentals in 2026? Yes. The Town of Windham has no STR permit requirement, no fee, and no cap as of this report. A restrictive draft law proposed in 2020 — which would have capped permits at 150 townwide and limited rentals to 100 days per year — was withdrawn in November 2020 after more than 1,400 residents signed a petition opposing it, and nothing has been re-proposed since.


Does the Town of Hunter's 250-permit cap actually limit new short-term rentals right now? This is unconfirmed and worth verifying directly. Hunter's Local Law No. 2 of 2023 does cap total townwide permits at 250, and requires a $500 initial / $250 renewal fee, a $1,000 compliance bond, and a fire/safety inspection. But reported active-listing counts for the Hunter market range from roughly 55 (narrow town boundary) to as many as 453 (broader market-area definition), so we can't say with confidence whether the cap is currently binding. Anyone planning to operate in Hunter should call the Town of Hunter Building Inspector's office at (518) 589-6150 to confirm current permit issuance before assuming a slot is available.


Are Windham and Hunter the same town? No, and this trips up a lot of people because both towns share the "Hunter Mountain" ski marketing and sit adjacent to each other in the same ski corridor. Windham and Hunter are separate municipalities with entirely different short-term rental ordinances — Windham has no permit system, while Hunter has a capped, fee-based permit system under Local Law No. 2 of 2023.


What does it cost to get a short-term rental permit in the Village of Catskill? The Village of Catskill's current posted fee schedule is $500 for an initial permit and $200 for renewal, along with a mandatory safety inspection. That's up from roughly $375 initial / $125 renewal as recently as 2021. There is no numeric cap on the number of permits the village issues, so it remains open to new operators willing to go through the permit and inspection process.


Is Kingston, NY open to new short-term rental listings? Not for full-time short-term rentals. Kingston caps full-time STR permits at 106 (about 1% of the city's housing stock), and that cap has been reached, with a waitlist in place for new applicants. Kingston is a separate city from anything in the ski corridor or western Catskills covered in this report, and is worth knowing about mainly as a contrast case for how much tighter regulation can get once a market decides to cap supply.


Who are the biggest professional operators active in the Catskills right now? AvantStay's most prominent regional listing is the "River House" in the Village of Catskill — a large-format riverfront estate sleeping 24 that books around $1,000 a night with full concierge service. Vacasa maintains listings in both Windham and Hunter. Alluvion Vacations and Home Sweet Hudson are both regionally active property managers in the ski corridor and broader Hudson Valley. Despite this activity, Superhost rates of roughly 72.7% in Hunter and 57% in Windham indicate the underlying inventory base in both towns is still predominantly independent, not institutionally consolidated.


Why is Phoenicia, NY suddenly such a hot vacation-rental market? Phoenicia sits at the center of the western Catskills' Brooklyn-buyer wave — a corridor of creative-class second-home purchasers converting older farmhouses, A-frames, and cabins into design-forward, high-ADR listings. It's benefited from proximity to Woodstock and Kingston (both now capped for new STR permits) pushing overflow demand and buyer interest further into towns like Phoenicia, Big Indian, and Shandaken that haven't yet imposed the same restrictions.


Is now a good time to buy an investment property for short-term rental in the Catskills? The honest answer is that it depends heavily on which sub-market and which regulatory jurisdiction you're evaluating, because this report's core finding is that listing supply is growing meaningfully faster than revenue per listing across the ski corridor and the Hudson River towns simultaneously. That doesn't mean the opportunity is gone — underlying demand from the NYC metro is durable — but it does mean new entrants should underwrite conservatively on current occupancy and rate trends, verify the exact permit status of the specific town and, in Hunter's case, confirm cap headroom directly with the town before closing.


About the Authors

Crest & Cove Creative is a short-term rental marketing agency founded by Thomas Garner and Jacob Mishalanie. We build direct-booking brands, listing optimization systems, and market-specific content strategies for independent STR operators nationwide, including emerging corridors like New York.


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