7,473 Permits: What Nashville's STR Supply Actually Looks Like
Two weeks ago the Nashville Post published a permit breakdown that I have been quoting to owners ever since. As of early October, Metro shows 7,473 active short-term rental permits: 378 not-owner-occupied, 2,179 owner-occupied, and 4,915 in multifamily buildings. The same piece notes that 388 complaints had been filed year to date, most of them about unpermitted operators.
Sit with the first number for a second. Three hundred seventy-eight.
Why that number is small, and why it stays small
Metro stopped issuing new not-owner-occupied permits in residential districts years ago. If you own a standalone house in an R, RS, RM or AR2A district and it does not already hold a NOO permit, you cannot get one. New NOO permits are only available in the commercial and mixed-use districts on Metro's permit types list — MUN, MUL, MUG, CS, CA, the downtown DTC districts, and so on.
The grandfathered residential NOO permits are the ones that matter, and they die on sale or transfer. Not "transfer to the new owner with a form." They end. That includes deeding your own house into your own LLC. The buyer cannot get a new one at that address.
So the standalone-house NOO pool is a closed, slowly shrinking set. Every time one of those 378 sells to someone who wants a long-term rental or a primary residence, the number goes down and it does not come back. This is the argument I have been making since New York spent a year demonstrating that the paperwork, not the nightly rate, decides whether a listing exists at all.
What that means if you hold one
You own something with a genuine, structural scarcity attached to it. That is worth more than the annual revenue suggests, and it is worth protecting with more care than most owners give it.
Three things I would do:
Know your expiration date. Permits run 365 days. Metro emails every address on the permit at 60 and 45 days out. If those emails go to an address you no longer check, you will find out you lapsed the hard way. There is a discretionary 30-day grace period after expiry, but only for permits with zero documented complaints — one complaint on file and the grace disappears.
Take complaints seriously the first time. Three violations of the Metro Code arising from the property is grounds for revocation, and revocation carries a one-year bar. That is a permanent loss of a permit that cannot be reissued at that address.
Display the permit number. Every internet listing has to prominently show it. This is the easiest possible violation to avoid and I still see listings without it.
The 4,915 multifamily permits
That is the bigger number and the one changing fastest. Purpose-built and converted multifamily inventory in and near downtown is where most new legal supply is coming from — the same dynamic that let Davidson County's listing count keep climbing year after year while no new residential NOO permits were issued. If your home is a downtown-adjacent condo or an apartment-style unit, that is your competitive set, and it is growing.
If your home is a standalone house in a neighborhood, you are competing against a fixed set of grandfathered permits plus owner-occupied listings. Different market, different pricing behavior, different guest.
Owners routinely price against the wrong one of those two markets. It is worth knowing which one you are in, because the citywide revenue figures Metro publishes fold both of them into a single number.
How we handle permits at Boost
We track the renewal date for every home we manage on our own calendar, not Metro's — the 60- and 45-day emails are a backstop, not a system. The renewal package goes out with time to spare: notarized affidavit, current insurance, tax compliance, then the $313 when Metro approves it. Nobody's permit is renewed until payment clears, which is exactly the kind of detail that quietly kills a listing in February.
Boost can also serve as the responsible party on the permit — the named contact within 25 miles who answers 24/7 for the length of every stay. If you live in Franklin, or Denver, or spend three months a year somewhere else, that is not a formality you can hand-wave.
Permitting service is included with management. You pay Metro's fees; we do the paperwork.
The honest caveat
I am not a lawyer and Metro's pages get updated more often than most owners realize. Anything zoning-adjacent, or anything involving a duplex, an HPR, or a detached ADU, deserves a direct call to Codes before you act on it.
But if you own one of those 378, or you are looking at buying a house in a residential district and someone told you the STR permit "conveys," talk to me before you sign anything. That one conversation has saved a few Nashville buyers a very expensive surprise.