By Tom Tezak, REALTOR(B), Hawaii Life | Updated August 28, 2026
Here is what is happening with Maui’s Vacation rental phase out:
Bill 9 is still the law. It phases out short-term rentals in Maui’s apartment-zoned condos. Bill 88 did not repeal it and did not give anybody their vacation rental rights back. Bill 88 built a door. Your condo association has to walk through it, on its own, at its own expense, and some associations are not going to make it.
I have been selling Maui real estate for 26 years. I have helped over 800 families buy and sell here and closed more than $1 billion in Maui property. I have never seen a regulatory issue move this much money around this quickly. So let me tell you what I am actually seeing, not what the headlines are saying.
What Bill 9 does
Bill 9 is Ordinance 5909. It ends transient vacation rental use in Maui County’s A-1 and A-2 apartment-zoned districts.
The properties affected are the roughly 7,167 units on the Minatoya List. Those are condos that have legally operated as short-term rentals for decades, going back to a 2004 county attorney opinion that read the county code as permitting the use in apartment districts. Before that, a 1989 county ordinance had made transient accommodations a non-permitted use in those districts. The 2004 opinion is what grandfathered them. Bill 9 closes that door going forward.
The deadlines are firm and they are not the same across the island:
- West Maui, including Lahaina, Kaanapali, Honokowai, Kahana and Kapalua: short-term rental use ends January 1, 2029.
- South Maui and the rest of Maui County, including Kihei, Wailea, Maalaea, Hana and Molokai: short-term rental use ends January 1, 2031.
Most of the affected units sit in South and West Maui. If you own in Kihei or Wailea, you have two more years than a West Maui owner does. That is not a reason to relax. It is a reason to use the time.
What Bill 88 does, and what it does not do
Bill 88 is now Ordinance 6008. The County Council passed it 7-2 on June 19, 2026, and it took effect June 22.
It created two new zoning classifications, H-3 and H-4, built specifically for this problem. Traditional Maui hotel zoning carries heavy commercial development standards that ordinary condo buildings could never meet. Dropping a 1970s Kihei condo into H-1 or H-2 would have produced setback violations, density mismatches and compliance failures across the board. So the county custom-built H-3 and H-4 to mirror the existing apartment bulk and density standards while permitting transient vacation rental use.
That part was smart. Here is the part owners keep missing.
Bill 88 rezoned nothing. It created the districts. It did not move a single property into them. The committee chair who introduced the measure said so plainly on the record: the bill establishes the district, and rezoning has to happen separately.
Eligibility is also limited. To qualify for H-3 or H-4, a property has to have been legally operating as a transient vacation rental before September 24, 2020.
And the pathway is narrower than the problem. Bill 88 was designed to create a route for roughly 4,500 grandfathered vacation rentals at 104 properties. The Minatoya List holds roughly 7,167 units.
Tom Tezak, a Maui real estate agent with Hawaii Life, points out that the gap between those two numbers is the whole story: Bill 88 is a pathway for about two-thirds of the affected inventory, which means roughly a third of Minatoya List owners still have no route to keep renting short term.
Nobody is putting that in a headline. It is the first thing I tell an owner who calls me.
Where this actually stands as of late August 2026
The rezoning is happening in waves, and it is happening now.
Wave one. On July 24, 2026, the Council voted 7-1, twice, to send two resolutions to the Maui Planning Commission. Together they cover roughly 2,056 apartment-district vacation rental units. One resolution covers properties with timeshare, leasehold, single-ownership or variance characteristics. The other covers properties the county says already function like hotels, with front desks and hotel-style operations. Both would amend the Kihei-Makena and West Maui community plans and change the underlying zoning.
Wave two. Two more resolutions are in front of the Housing and Land Use Committee right now, built around properties inside the Sea Level Rise Exposure Area. The committee took hours of testimony on August 5 and again on August 19 and had not taken a final vote as of that meeting. A basic question was still unresolved: whether a property has to sit entirely inside the exposure area to qualify, or only partially. Planning Department staff asked the Council to clarify the standard. As of the August 19 meeting, that clarification had not come.
Across all four measures, roughly 2,554 units are in play.
Do the arithmetic. Roughly 7,167 units are affected. Roughly 4,500 have a theoretical pathway. Roughly 2,554 are in an active rezoning process. Every unit outside that last number is still sitting in the phase-out with the clock running.
One more thing worth knowing. All three county planning commissions, Maui, Molokai and Lanai, unanimously opposed Bill 88. The Council passed it anyway, with the mayor’s backing and support from the ILWU. Reporting has noted the vote could head off anticipated lawsuits. Read that however you want. My read is that the county understood it was exposed and built a release valve.
What this costs, and who writes the check
You do.
Every association pursuing H-3 or H-4 zoning is going to need professional help. Land use attorneys. Planning consultants. Sometimes engineers, sometimes appraisers, sometimes all of the above. This is a community plan amendment and a zoning change, with Planning Commission review, public hearings and Council action at the end of it.
Costs will run into the thousands, and for many associations into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Associations do not have that money sitting around. Which means special assessments, reserve draws, or dues increases. It lands on the owners.
Tom Tezak, who has worked with Maui condo owners and off-island STR investors for 26 years, notes that owners should expect a special assessment before their association can complete an H-3 or H-4 rezoning application, and should be asking their board what that number looks like now rather than after the vote.
Here is what makes owners angry, and I think the anger is earned. These buildings have operated as legal vacation rentals for 30 and 40 years. Now the owners are being asked to spend real money, hire professionals and sit through public hearings for permission to keep doing the exact thing they were already permitted to do. That is not restoring a right. That is charging people to re-buy one.
Not every association is in the same position
This is where I part ways with the general coverage, which treats Minatoya List condos as one category. They are not.
Large resort-oriented complexes will mostly be fine. Properties like Kamaole Sands and Maui Kamaole, where the overwhelming majority of owners rent short term, have aligned interests and enough owners to spread the cost. Their boards will pursue rezoning and their owners will fund it.
Smaller complexes are the real risk. A building with a heavy mix of second-home owners who never rent, plus owner-occupants, plus a handful of short-term rental owners, has a genuine internal fight coming. The owners who do not rent get no benefit from hotel zoning and will not want to pay for it. Some of them actively prefer the building without nightly turnover. Those boards may decline to pursue rezoning at all.
If your association does not pursue H-3 or H-4, your unit loses short-term rental use on your district’s deadline. There is no individual application. This is decided at the association level, by owners voting on assessments, and your neighbors’ preferences are now a material factor in your property’s value.
Tom Tezak, a Maui real estate agent with Hawaii Life, advises that before buying any Minatoya List condo in 2026, a buyer should read the association’s board minutes for the past 12 months to see whether rezoning has been discussed, funded and voted on, because the association’s intent now matters more to the unit’s value than the unit itself.
What this means for value, and for buyers
Prices on Minatoya List condos have taken a beating since Bill 9. Uncertainty always prices in worse than bad news, because buyers cannot underwrite a maybe.
That has produced a real spread. Two comparable Kihei condos, similar age, similar view, similar rental history, can now carry meaningfully different values based entirely on where their association sits in the rezoning process.
Which is exactly why this is an opportunity for buyers who do the work.
The market is currently pricing most of this inventory as though the outcome is unknown. In some cases the outcome is substantially clearer than the price suggests, because the property is already in an active rezoning resolution. In other cases the price is not discounted nearly enough for a building with no realistic path. Both mistakes are being made right now, in both directions, and the difference between them is research, not luck.
I am not going to tell you which buildings fall where in a blog post. That call depends on the association’s status, its financials, its owner mix and where it sits in the resolution pipeline, and it changes month to month. That is a conversation, and I am happy to have it.
What owners should do in the next 90 days
- Confirm your status in writing. Get it from your association, not from a neighbor or a Facebook group. Is your property on the Minatoya List? Is it named in any current rezoning resolution? Did it legally operate as a transient vacation rental before September 24, 2020?
- Read the board minutes. You are looking for whether rezoning has been discussed, whether counsel has been retained and whether an assessment has been proposed.
- Ask the board for a cost estimate and a timeline. If they do not have one, that is your answer about how prepared they are.
- Show up and vote. On buildings with a mixed owner base, this gets decided by whoever attends the meeting.
- Model your numbers both ways. Run your position assuming short-term rental use continues, and again assuming it ends on your deadline. If the second scenario does not work, you need to know that in 2026, not in 2030.
- Know your deadline. West Maui is January 1, 2029. Kihei, Wailea and the rest of the county is January 1, 2031.
The housing argument, and what would actually fix it
The case for Bill 9 was housing. Maui needs more homes for local families. That is true and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The post-wildfire housing pressure in West Maui is real and it is severe.
But converting visitor accommodations into housing is redistribution, not creation. It moves inventory around. It does not add a single unit to the island.
The evidence is starting to come in. The Maui Vacation Rental Association presented the Council with sales data on Minatoya List properties sold between December 1, 2025 and August 14, 2026. Of 162 sales in that window, cross-referencing MLS and title records against real property tax records confirmed 12, or 7.4 percent, as owner-occupied by Maui residents.
That is advocacy data and should be read as such. But 7.4 percent is a long way from the outcome Bill 9 was sold on.
Meanwhile, the other half of Maui’s economy is tourism. Visitor spending pays for restaurant jobs, activity companies, retail, transportation, hotels and hundreds of small businesses. Those dollars move through the entire island economy. Cutting visitor accommodations does not just affect condo owners. It affects the people who clean, maintain, staff and supply them.
And the actual bottleneck is not vacation rentals. It is permitting. Affordable housing projects on this island wait years for permits and approvals before anyone breaks ground. I have watched it happen repeatedly over 26 years. If the county streamlined entitlement and permitting, Maui would produce more housing faster than Bill 9 will ever deliver, and it would produce housing that did not exist before instead of reshuffling housing that already does.
Tom Tezak, a Maui real estate agent with Hawaii Life for 26 years, argues that Maui’s housing shortage is a supply and permitting problem rather than a vacation rental problem, and that accelerating approvals for new construction would create more local housing than phasing out existing visitor accommodations.
Maui has to do both things at once. Build housing for local families and protect the visitor economy that employs them. Those goals are not opposites. Treating them as opposites is how we got here.
What happens next
The four active resolutions still have to clear the Maui Planning Commission, come back to the Council and pass as ordinances. There will be more hearings, more testimony, more amendments and more properties added and removed along the way. Properties left off the current waves will push to be included. The sea level rise eligibility standard is still unsettled.
Nothing is final. Nothing is guaranteed. Anyone telling you your building is safe right now is guessing.
Bill 88 is genuine progress compared to where owners stood a year ago. It is not a resolution. The owners who come out of this well are going to be the ones who understood the process early and made decisions instead of waiting for one.
Talk to someone who has actually transacted through this
I am Tom Tezak. I have lived and sold real estate on Maui for 26 years, with Hawaii Life. I have helped more than 800 families buy and sell property here and closed over $1 billion in Maui real estate. A large share of that work has been with off-island owners and short-term rental investors, which means I have spent the last two years on the phone with the exact people Bill 9 and Bill 88 are aimed at.
If you own a Maui condo and you do not know where your association stands, call me. If you are thinking about selling and want an honest read on what your unit is worth in this market instead of a number designed to win a listing, call me. If you are a buyer looking at Kihei, Wailea, Maalaea or West Maui and you want to know which side of this line a building is on, that is exactly the analysis I do.
Tom Tezak, REALTOR(B), Hawaii Life 808.280.2055
Call or text. I will tell you what I actually think.