The legislature went home without touching short-term rentals
The Tennessee General Assembly adjourned its 2025 session today. Notably for anyone who rents a home nightly: no new short-term rental legislation passed (ThinkTennessee's 2025 session summary).
That is a non-event, and non-events are worth writing about because owners spend a lot of energy watching the wrong level of government.
Where the rules actually live
Tennessee state law sets some outer boundaries on what cities can do to short-term rentals, and those boundaries have been broadly stable. Within them, the decisions that determine whether you can operate, and how, are made by Metro Nashville — the Council, the zoning code, and the Codes Department.
That is where the action has been for three years:
No new non-owner-occupied permits issued in residentially zoned areas since 2022.
A steady stream of council bills adjusting who qualifies for an owner-occupied permit, how residency is proven, and what happens when a property changes hands.
Individual zoning exemptions, waived at Council one property at a time.
Enforcement pressure that lands mostly on unpermitted operators.
If you are going to follow one calendar, follow the Council's, not the General Assembly's.
What a quiet session means
Three practical reads.
Stability, for now. Nothing changed at the state level this spring, so plan your year on the rules as they are.
The scarcity is intact. The value of a permitted non-owner-occupied property in a residential zone rests on the fact that Metro is not issuing new ones. Nothing this session altered that. If you hold one, you are holding something that is genuinely difficult to replace, and you should operate like the permit is the asset.
Compliance risk is entirely local. The thing most likely to take your home out of service is not a bill in Nashville's other capitol building. It is a lapsed permit, a residency requirement you cannot document, or a neighbor complaint on a home whose paperwork is not clean.
The Boost part: we run the renewal clock
Here is the operating detail. Metro short-term rental permits run 365 days and have to be renewed. Metro does send renewal reminders in advance of the expiration date. I do not want your business depending on that email.
For every home we manage:
The expiration date lives in our system with its own reminder chain, well ahead of the deadline.
We confirm the contact information Metro has on file is one somebody actually reads.
We assemble the renewal documentation before the window opens rather than during it.
We file it and follow it until it is issued, not until it is submitted.
Permit work is included with management — you pay Metro's own application and renewal fees, and we do not add anything on top of them. For owners who want the permit handled without the management, we do it as a standalone service.
If you are doing this yourself, the official requirements live on Metro Codes' short-term rental page. Read them for your specific permit type before you start the application, because the documentation requirements are where applications get bounced.
The three-item audit
Do this in the next week. It takes twenty minutes.
1. Find your permit and read it. Permit type, holder name, address, expiration date. Confirm the holder name matches how the property is actually owned and occupied today. If it moved into an entity at some point and nobody re-checked, check now.
2. Put two reminders on your calendar. One at 90 days before expiration, one at 45. Not one. Two.
3. Verify the email Metro has for you. If it is an address you used in 2021 and stopped checking in 2022, fix it today.
That is the whole audit. Every owner I know who has had a permit problem could have prevented it with those three steps, and most of them knew that afterward.
Watch the Council, not the Capitol
The next thing that changes your operating rules will come out of Metro, and it will show up on a Council agenda before it shows up in the news. Those agendas are public. If you own two or more homes here, it is worth twenty minutes a month.
If you would rather have somebody else watch it and handle the paperwork, talk to Boost Rentals. Send me the address and your permit number and I will tell you where you stand, whether or not you ever hire me to manage the home.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals