Regulation means more safety
Gilmer County may hide somewhere between 500 and 3,000 unlicensed short-term rental properties.
“There’s no way to even guess,” said Short-Term Rental Department (STRD) Director Mary Abernathy.
Unlicensed rentals are a problem, because they could be dangerous for visitors and are unfair to people who follow the rules.
“The short-term rental ordinance is for two purposes,” Abernathy said. “To make sure that every short-term rental property in Gilmer County is safe for the guest so that nobody gets killed in a short-term rental in our county. The second thing is that to the best of our ability, it is our goal to enforce the ordinance consistently across the board.”
Before the passing of Gilmer’s Short-term Rental Host License Ordinance, the county was a “Wild West” where people could basically do whatever they wanted, she said.
“We are not about just being another big government department,” she said. “We are needed, it is necessary and our entire goal is to make sure that short-term rental properties in this county are safe.”
Many aren’t.
In 51 new inspections between May and June this year, only two short-term rentals had no code infractions, Abernathy said.
Already, Gilmer has had one fire at a short-term rental.
“We’ve had one fire. That particular short-term rental has been closed, and is still closed and will remain closed,” she said.
Regulations can be a matter of life or death. The law requires that all Gilmer short-term rentals should have approved fire extinguishers on each floor, railings on balconies, smoke detectors in each bedroom and many other such measures.
Usually, once owners know something is unsafe, they’re cooperative, Abernathy said.
The STRD started licensing in 2025 under Abernathy’s leadership. It’s funded entirely by short-term rental registration fees.
In its first year of operation, it registered 1,286 short-term rental businesses.
Between renewals of some of these licenses and new registrations, the department has processed 1,408 licenses this year.
“At this point this year in June, we have more than what we had for the whole year last year,” Abernathy said.
Anyone who isn’t registered has 10 days to either get a license or pay a fine of three times the license cost.
Some of the reason it’s so hard to get all the rentals licensed is that many short-term rental owners don’t live in Gilmer County.
One San Francisco man told Abernathy he hadn’t visited his Gilmer short-term rental property in six years.
“I can’t really imagine owning a property in another jurisdiction all the way across the country and at least not getting the local newspaper so you’ll know what’s going on,” she said.
Of the county’s current licensed short-term rental owners, the majority are from either Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama and California.
When people have no connection to Gilmer, the STRD must investigate to find their rental.
“A lot of the way we’ve caught a lot of people is they pay taxes without a license,” Abernathy said.
Anyone can get more information at the STRD’s website at gilmercounty-ga.gov/short-term-rental/. If information isn’t on the website, they can call 706-635-4361 for help.
The short-term rental complaint line is available at 762-543-5187.
Short-term rentals are a fact of life in Gilmer County now, Abernathy said. No matter how we feel about them, we need to know how many there are and make sure they are safe.
“They are making boatloads of money on these things,” she said. And they don’t want them to be unsafe any more than we do.”