The Airbnb Income In That Leelanau County Listing Doesn't Come With the House

A buyer looking at a cottage on Suttons Bay this summer did the math the way most second-home shoppers do. The listing showed strong occupancy. The seller mentioned a full summer of bookings. The buyer ran the numbers, assumed the rental history would carry forward, and wrote an offer that leaned on that income to make the mortgage work.

Then someone checked the Village of Suttons Bay's short-term rental page. The village caps permits at 45. It currently has 53 issued. No new permits are being written until attrition brings that number back down, and the page states plainly that if the home is sold, the permit is no longer valid. The seller's rental history was real. It just wasn't a property right. It was a permission that belonged to the seller, not the address, and it expired at closing.

That single fact changes how a rental-income buyer should read every listing in Leelanau County, because the county has no single rulebook. It has roughly a dozen townships and villages, each writing its own answer to what a short-term rental is, how many are allowed, and whether the right to run one survives a sale.

Michigan Left This to the Townships

Short-term rental regulation in Michigan happens entirely at the local level. A 2021 bill, House Bill 4722, would have stopped townships from banning short-term rentals outright through zoning, and it passed the House 55-48 before dying without a Senate vote. A follow-up package built around House Bill 5438 tried again in 2024 with a more detailed licensing and enforcement framework. As of early 2026, that package is still sitting in committee. No statewide law has taken its place, so the patchwork that exists today in Leelanau County is not a temporary gap waiting to be closed. It is the operating environment, and it has been for years.

That matters because it means the township or village a parcel sits in isn't a footnote on the listing sheet. It's the entire regulatory answer.

Twelve Jurisdictions, Twelve Different Answers

Here's what that patchwork actually looks like across a sample of Leelanau County jurisdictions:

Two things jump out. The caps aren't uniform, and neither is the definition of what counts as short-term in the first place.

Thirty Days Isn't Always Thirty Days

Most Leelanau townships define a short-term rental as anything under 30 days. The Village of Northport uses 21 days. Leland Township uses 75 days, which means a summer-long lease that would be perfectly fine as a long-term rental in most of the county gets treated as a regulated short-term rental in Leland.

That difference isn't cosmetic. A buyer weighing a shoulder-season strategy, renting from Memorial Day through Labor Day rather than by the week, could be operating legally in one township and out of compliance a few miles away in another, purely because of where the property line falls.

Elmwood Township's cap tells a similar story about how these numbers get set in the first place. The township allows short-term rentals across all its zoning districts, but it landed on 93 total licenses only after what local officials described as a long and contentious process. Elmwood's township supervisor, Jeff Shaw, put the tension plainly when he said the board had worked hard to reach a workable compromise and would find it disappointing to see that effort undone by outside preemption. That's the pattern across the county: each cap is the product of a specific local fight, not a formula that transfers cleanly to the next township over.

Bingham Township adds another wrinkle. Reporting from local real estate professionals tracking the county's rental market has noted that Bingham's permit cap sits at 145 and is currently full, with a 1,000-foot buffer rule between any new short-term rental and an existing one. Even if a permit becomes available on paper, the buffer can make it functionally impossible to license a nearby property. In a capped market, the best house on the block doesn't automatically come with the best rental opportunity next to it.

Then there are the places where the rules simply haven't caught up. Glen Arbor Township's zoning framework lists inns, lodges, and rental cottages as permitted uses in certain districts, but a standalone, currently active short-term rental registration page wasn't confirmed in the materials reviewed for this piece, which means parcel-specific zoning review matters more there than almost anywhere else in the county. Empire Village has draft registration language on the books but no clearly adopted final ordinance, making it a verify-before-you-write-an-offer location rather than a settled one.

What This Means If You're Underwriting Rental Income

The mistake isn't buying in a regulated township. It's underwriting a purchase price based on a rental history that the seller built under a permit that dies with the sale. Several jurisdictions in the county state this outright: Suttons Bay Village, Suttons Bay Township, and Leelanau Township all specify that a new owner has to apply fresh, and in capped jurisdictions, "applying fresh" can mean joining a waitlist with no guaranteed timeline.

There's a second layer buyers often miss, which is the tax side. Michigan applies a 6 percent state use tax to any stay under 30 days, statewide, regardless of township rules. Airbnb collects and remits that automatically. VRBO does not, and neither does a direct booking, which means an owner taking reservations outside Airbnb is personally responsible for registering with the Michigan Department of Treasury and remitting that tax. It's a detail that has nothing to do with zoning and everything to do with whether the income projection in a spreadsheet holds up against an actual tax bill.

None of this means rental income is off the table in Leelanau County. It means the income has to be evaluated at the parcel level, not the county level, before it goes into an offer. The questions worth asking before you write are straightforward: which specific township or village governs this parcel, is that jurisdiction's cap currently full or open, does the permit transfer or does it require a new application, and what does that jurisdiction count as short-term in the first place. A Northport mailing address, for instance, can sit under either Village of Northport rules or Leelanau Township rules depending on the exact parcel, and those two rule sets don't match.

A Few Questions We Hear Often

Does a short-term rental permit ever transfer when a home sells? In the jurisdictions with the clearest published rules, no. Suttons Bay Village, Suttons Bay Township, and Leelanau Township all state that a new owner must apply for a new permit rather than inherit the seller's.

What happens if I buy in a township where the cap is already full? It depends on the jurisdiction. Cleveland Township gives priority to renewal applicants and local owner-occupants before offering any remaining permits by lottery. In villages like Suttons Bay, no new permits are issued at all until the count drops through attrition, meaning an existing operator lets their permit lapse.

How do I confirm which township or village actually governs a parcel? Mailing addresses can be misleading, since a Northport address may fall under either the Village of Northport or the surrounding Leelanau Township depending on the parcel. Confirming the governing jurisdiction and its current zoning district is a step worth taking before assuming any rental plan is workable.

Does Michigan's rental tax work the same everywhere in the county? The 6 percent state use tax applies statewide to any stay under 30 days. What varies is who collects it. Airbnb remits it automatically. Bookings through VRBO or direct reservations put that responsibility on the owner.

If you're weighing a Leelanau County property with rental income in the plan, the house is only half the underwriting. The other half is a phone call to the township or village office to confirm what's actually allowed on that specific parcel, today, not what the seller happened to be doing with it. Molly Buttleman works these parcel-level questions with clients across Leelanau County before an offer goes in, not after. Inquire now to talk through a specific property before you build a plan around numbers that might not survive closing.