Maui Minatoya List: What Bill 9 Means for Your Vacation Rental

If you own or are considering buying a Maui vacation rental condo, the Minatoya List is the most consequential document in your investment thesis — and as of December 2025, it's on a court-ordered countdown to extinction.

Understanding what the Minatoya List is, what Bill 9 does to it, and what options current and prospective owners actually have requires some history. But the bottom line is this: approximately 6,000 to 7,000 apartment-zoned condominiums that have operated as legal short-term vacation rentals for decades are being phased out. West Maui operations must stop by December 31, 2028. South Maui and all other affected areas have until December 31, 2030.

If you own one of these units, you have decisions to make. If you're looking to buy one, you need to understand exactly what you're acquiring.

What the Minatoya List Was

The Minatoya List originated in 2001, when Deputy Corporation Counsel Richard Minatoya issued a formal legal opinion recognizing that certain condominiums located in Maui's Apartment Districts (A-1 and A-2 zoning) had been operating as short-term vacation rentals — legally — since before the county adopted regulations that would otherwise have prohibited it. Provided these units met specific historical usage criteria, they were grandfathered.

For more than two decades, that grandfathered status was extraordinarily valuable. Properties like the 440-unit Kamaole Sands, the 364-unit Papakea, the 280-unit Maui Vista, and hundreds of similar complexes operated as high-yield vacation rental buildings despite their underlying apartment zoning. The Minatoya designation allowed owners to charge short-term vacation rates — commanding significantly higher gross revenue than equivalent long-term rentals — in buildings that technically weren't supposed to be hotel-style operations.

This created a dual market in Maui real estate. Apartment-zoned condominiums on the Minatoya List traded at premiums because of the income potential from short-term rental operations. Properties in true Hotel zones traded at even higher premiums because their rights were more legally robust.

What Bill 9 Does

Maui County Council Bill 9 — signed into law as Ordinance No. 5909 by Mayor Richard Bissen on December 15, 2025 — systematically eliminates the Minatoya exception.

The law does not provide immediate bans. Instead, it establishes a staggered amortization schedule designed to phase out short-term rental operations in affected units while giving owners time to adjust:

West Maui (including Lahaina, Ka'anapali, Napili/Kahana): Short-term rental operations in Minatoya-listed properties must cease by December 31, 2028.

South Maui (including Kihei, Wailea, Makena) and all other affected districts: Short-term rental operations must cease by December 31, 2030.

After those dates, apartments in A-1 and A-2 zones — regardless of prior Minatoya status — cannot be legally rented for periods shorter than the county's residential minimum stay requirement. The grandfathered protection disappears entirely.

The Backstory: Lahaina Fires and Housing Pressure

The passage of Bill 9 did not happen in isolation. It was accelerated by the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire, which destroyed over 2,000 structures and displaced thousands of residents. In the aftermath, the political pressure on vacation rental operations intensified dramatically.

Maui's vacation rental inventory had become politically untenable to a significant portion of the community. Vacation rentals accounted for approximately 21% of Maui's total housing stock, and roughly 94% of the units affected by the Minatoya phase-out were owned by non-residents. For local residents already stretched by Hawaii's housing crisis, seeing thousands of residential units occupied by tourists rather than workers represented a direct cause of their housing insecurity.

The county framed the elimination of the Minatoya exception explicitly as returning workforce housing to the local community. Whether or not one agrees with the policy rationale, the political coalition behind it was broad enough to pass the ordinance, and the legal challenges that arose have not prevailed in reversing the core phase-out provisions.

What "Bill 9-Proof" Actually Means

As Minatoya-listed properties face declining income projections, the focus has shifted to which Maui properties retain unassailable short-term rental rights.

The legally secure category is properties with genuine Hotel zoning (H-1 or H-2). These buildings were always intended for transient accommodations, and their zoning is not subject to the apartment-district phase-out. Properties like hotels-with-residences, timeshare buildings, and hotel-zoned condominiums continue to operate under their original use rights.

There was hope among some Minatoya property owners that the county would create new "H-3" and "H-4" hotel-adjacent zoning categories that would allow apartment-zoned buildings to be reclassified and preserve their short-term rental rights. The Maui Planning Commission voted against recommending these new districts in early 2026, making a blanket rezoning lifeline highly unlikely at this point.

Truly Bill 9-proof properties — Hotel-zoned STR assets and permitted Bed & Breakfasts — are now experiencing concentrated investor demand and corresponding price premiums as buyers recognize their insulated status. If you want to enter the Maui short-term rental market with legal certainty, you're competing for a smaller, more expensive inventory than existed two years ago.

Current Options for Minatoya Property Owners

If you own a Minatoya-listed unit today, your decision set has compressed to essentially three paths:

1. Operate as a short-term rental through the phase-out date and then transition to long-term rental. If your unit is in South Maui, you have until December 31, 2030 to continue short-term rental operations. That's approximately four years of remaining STR income to harvest. Some owners are treating this as a final monetization window — maintaining operations, potentially making targeted improvements to maximize ADR, and planning a transition to long-term rental or a sale before the cutoff.

2. Transition to long-term rental now. The long-term rental market on Maui is strong, partly because of the displaced population from the 2023 fires. Median rent on Maui sits near $3,500, driven higher by post-fire housing demand. If you convert now, you potentially qualify for Maui County's Long-Term Rental property tax classification (significantly lower than the TVR rate), avoid the 18.5% combined GET/TAT burden, and reduce the operational complexity of managing a vacation rental. The trade-off is lower gross revenue than active STR operations.

3. Sell before the phase-out. Properties where the Minatoya STR rights are about to expire are trading at discounts relative to their prior valuations — buyers are already pricing in the future income loss. If you sell now, you capture some remaining premium versus waiting until after the rights expire when the property is purely valued as a long-term rental. Conversely, some buyers are deliberately acquiring Minatoya units at the discounted prices with the explicit intent of operating them as long-term rentals — accepting lower yields but betting on Maui's long-term appreciation.

What Prospective Buyers Should Know

If you're considering buying a Maui condo that is on the Minatoya List:

Verify the specific phase-out date for the property's location. West Maui and South Maui have different deadlines. Know exactly how many STR-eligible years remain when you're modeling the investment.

Underwrite the long-term rental scenario, not just the STR scenario. Your exit or conversion plan needs to work on long-term rental economics, because that's what you'll be left with after the phase-out. If the investment only makes sense as an STR, you're buying a time-limited asset.

Verify current Minatoya status with the county. The Minatoya designation is property-specific, not building-wide. Within a large complex, some units may be listed and others may not have maintained the required historical use documentation. Due diligence requires confirming the specific unit's status, not just the building.

Understand the tax reclassification benefit. Converting from STR to long-term rental dramatically changes your property tax classification. Maui's TVR/STRH rate runs $12.50 to $15.55 per $1,000 of assessed value. The Long-Term Rental rate runs $2.95 to $8.50. On a $600,000 unit, the annual difference could be $5,000 to $7,000 in property taxes — a meaningful offset to the lower gross rental income.

The Minatoya phase-out is the most significant structural change to hit the Maui investment market in years. Getting the analysis right requires understanding both the remaining STR window and the long-term rental economics that follow it.

For the complete Maui regulatory framework — including the Minatoya phase-out timeline, Bill 9-proof property categories, county property tax rates by classification, and the long-term rental conversion process — see the Hawaii Investment Property Guide.

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