Where the fewest listings match a permit
All 41 sub-markets where we hold a usable permit registry and at least 200 entire-home listings, ranked by the share of listings that match a permit, from 11% in St. Petersburg to 94% in Nashville.
This is the ranking that every "is it legal" question wants and that no data vendor publishes, because none of them holds the permit side. It is also a ranking we could not publish yesterday, because the first draft put Austin and Chicago at 0%, and both were bugs in our coverage rule rather than facts about the cities. The rule is fixed and described on the matching page. What is left is below, all of it.
How to read the table
Each row is a sub-market where we hold a registry with at least 100 geocoded permits and at least 200 entire-home listings sit inside the registry's jurisdiction. The share is listings matched to an active permit within a distance buffer, divided by the listings in that jurisdiction, not by the whole metro. A match is not proof of legality and a miss is not proof of an illegal rental; the matching page explains both directions of error and publishes the score distribution.
Places that are not here are not here because we cannot measure them yet, not because they are clean. Austin's registry has no coordinates. Chicago, Atlanta and Palm Springs have no usable registry in our data. Their pages say "not measured".
| Sub-market | Listings matched to a permit | Listings in registry area |
|---|---|---|
| St. Petersburg, FL | 11% | 747 |
| Orlando, FL | 17% | 474 |
| Cambridge, MA | 18% | 240 |
| Richardson, TX | 19% | 347 |
| Santa Rosa Beach (30A), FL | 28% | 1,892 |
| Largo, FL | 32% | 1,056 |
| Wisconsin Dells, WI | 36% | 523 |
| Fort Myers, FL | 37% | 446 |
| Tampa, FL | 37% | 1,707 |
| Tallahassee, FL | 39% | 425 |
| Melbourne, FL | 41% | 222 |
| Jacksonville, FL | 41% | 952 |
| Lakeland, FL | 46% | 268 |
| Clearwater, FL | 47% | 466 |
| Delray Beach, FL | 51% | 469 |
| Kissimmee, FL | 52% | 947 |
| Pompano Beach, FL | 53% | 1,489 |
| Sarasota, FL | 54% | 787 |
| Cape Coral, FL | 58% | 892 |
| Hollywood, FL | 61% | 2,532 |
| Deerfield Beach, FL | 66% | 431 |
| West Palm Beach, FL | 68% | 635 |
| Sacramento, CA | 68% | 331 |
| Fort Walton Beach, FL | 69% | 847 |
| St. Augustine, FL | 70% | 1,391 |
| Miami, FL | 70% | 4,904 |
| Bend, OR | 72% | 267 |
| Fort Lauderdale, FL | 75% | 2,363 |
| Key West, FL | 77% | 373 |
| Destin, FL | 78% | 721 |
| Palm Coast, FL | 79% | 384 |
| Miami Beach, FL | 79% | 1,819 |
| Daytona Beach, FL | 79% | 1,514 |
| Louisville, KY | 80% | 1,020 |
| New Orleans, LA | 84% | 2,325 |
| Denver, CO | 84% | 542 |
| Panama City Beach, FL | 84% | 2,073 |
| San Diego, CA | 91% | 1,431 |
| Cocoa Beach, FL | 92% | 561 |
| Seattle, WA | 92% | 755 |
| Nashville, TN | 94% | 2,735 |
What the ranking shows
The top and bottom are not what a buyer's intuition expects. The most matched markets, Nashville, Seattle, Cocoa Beach, San Diego, Panama City Beach, New Orleans, Denver, are the cities with the strictest programs. A strict program with enforcement produces a registry that hosts actually join. The least matched are not lawless towns; they are Florida cities where the state vacation-rental license is the registry, the city adds little, and a large share of the listings never took the licence.
Two rows deserve a note. Santa Rosa Beach, on the 30A corridor, matches at 28% across 1,892 listings, the largest sample on the low side; it is also the most professionally managed sub-market in our dataset, which suggests operators there are working from a county rule rather than a city one, and the county registry is what we should be reading. Cambridge matches at 18%, and Cambridge's ordinance is one of the tighter ones in the country, which reads as enforcement lag rather than tolerance.
What a buyer does with this
A place-level share tells you the odds that the listing you are underwriting has a permit behind it, and therefore the odds that its revenue is durable if the city starts enforcing. In a 90% market, the comps you are looking at are mostly permitted and their revenue is defensible. In a 20% market, the comps are mostly unpermitted, the observed revenue includes supply that could vanish, and the permit you would hold becomes worth more, not less, on the day the city acts.
Either way, look the address up in the registry before you offer. Every DwellSignal legality section links the registry it read and the date it read it.
What we will add
Registries for the cities with none, county registries where the city defers to the county, and a stricter match threshold with both rates shown. Each change is dated, and rows whose number moves say "updated".