When we launched the Northern Michigan Property Insider six months ago, the pitch was simple. Absentee property owners in this region were making significant financial decisions based on word-of-mouth, Facebook rumors, and the occasional optimistic chat with a real estate agent. We thought you deserved better than that. Turns out, so did you, because you showed up.

Over the past six months, this newsletter has tracked regulatory shifts, dug into market data, assembled vendor intelligence, and listened carefully to what subscribers actually asked about. What follows is an honest accounting of what we found and what it means for anyone who owns, manages, or rents property across Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Antrim, Charlevoix, Benzie, and Manistee counties. This is the state of the market, as we understand it right now.

The single most consequential story of the past six months has been the accelerating patchwork of short-term rental regulations across the region. Townships are not moving together on this. They are not even moving in the same direction.

Leelanau County has seen the most active regulatory conversations, with several townships weighing registration requirements and occupancy caps. Empire and Glen Arbor sit within this zone of heightened scrutiny, and owners there should be watching township planning commission agendas closely. Antrim County townships, including those around Elk Rapids and Torch Lake, have taken a more hands-off posture, though that can change quickly when seasonal complaints pile up. Benzie County, covering areas like Honor and Beulah, remains relatively permissive, which has quietly made it attractive for STR investors who got priced out farther north.

The clearest takeaway from six months of tracking this: your property's regulatory exposure depends entirely on which township it sits in, not which county. Owners who assume broad county-level rules apply to them are often surprised. The township is the unit that matters. If you have not read your township's current ordinance in the past 12 months, that is the one piece of homework worth doing this fall. Most are available through your township's website or through Michigan Township Association resources.

AirDNA tracks short-term rental performance at the market level, and the Northern Michigan data from this past year tells a more complicated story than the headlines suggest. Occupancy rates have softened slightly in the most saturated markets, particularly properties in the Old Mission Peninsula and the Traverse City corridor. But average nightly rates have held, and in some submarkets they have climbed. The result is that well-managed, well-positioned properties are performing fine, while the middle tier is getting squeezed.

Properties in Harbor Springs and Petoskey have shown resilience, partly because the supply of quality STRs there remains constrained and partly because the Bay Harbor and Petoskey area draws a repeat visitor demographic that books earlier and cancels less. Further south, the Frankfort and Beulah markets have picked up demand from guests who cannot afford peak-season rates farther up the coast. Owners in those areas are benefiting from spillover in ways they did not two years ago.

The broader signal here is that Northern Michigan is not one rental market. It is seven or eight distinct micro-markets that happen to share a zip code region. What is true in Glen Arbor this August is not true in Elk Rapids, and neither of those stories applies cleanly to Honor or Empire. Local precision matters more than regional averages.

Early subscriber surveys pointed to contractor access as the dominant operational frustration for absentee owners, and six months of reader mail has confirmed it repeatedly. The complaint is not that good contractors do not exist in Northern Michigan. They do. The complaint is that they are invisible to owners who are not physically present to ask around.

This is where the newsletter's vendor guide work has been most directly useful. Subscribers who engaged with our PM evaluation framework and vendor content reported two patterns. First, they used the framework to ask better questions before committing to a property manager, rather than discovering problems after a bad summer season. Second, several used the contractor sourcing criteria to identify tradespeople through local referral networks, particularly through property managers, real estate agents, and local building supply contacts, rather than relying on Google reviews alone. That is not a revolutionary insight, but it is the kind of practical friction reduction that actually changes outcomes for people who are not on the ground.

One subscriber story stood out enough to share here, with their permission.

Mark and his wife own a cottage near Elk Rapids that they have used as a family gathering spot for nearly a decade. For three of those years, they had a deteriorating deck that needed full replacement. Every spring, they lined up a contractor. Every spring, something fell apart: the contractor took a bigger job, schedules slipped, and by Labor Day they were heading home to Ohio with the same rotting boards they started with. Mark described it, memorably, as "the Northern Michigan contractor lottery, and we kept losing."

After reading the vendor sourcing piece we ran in March, Mark tried a different approach. Rather than searching online or asking neighbors who lived an hour away, he called his property manager and asked her to recommend a contractor she had personally worked with on other properties. He also asked the contractor for references from two jobs completed in the prior 12 months, specifically for seasonal or absentee owners. The deck was finished in June, on time and within the quoted price. Mark's note to us ended with: "This seems obvious in retrospect, which means I needed someone to write it down."

We appreciated that. Writing down the obvious things, it turns out, is a significant portion of what this newsletter does.

Forecasting in a market this seasonal and this locally fragmented is genuinely difficult, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. That said, a few directional trends look durable.

Regulatory pressure on short-term rentals will increase, not decrease. The political dynamics in tourist-heavy townships favor permanent residents who vote year-round over absentee owners who vote elsewhere. Owners who want to protect their STR income should engage with local governance now, not after an ordinance passes. Showing up to a planning commission meeting once a year is worth more than most owners realize.

The labor and contractor market in Northern Michigan will remain tight for at least another two to three years. Population growth in the region has not produced a matching increase in skilled trades workers, and the seasonal demand spike makes the problem worse. Owners who build genuine relationships with reliable vendors will have a structural advantage over those who treat each season as a fresh search.

Long-term, the fundamental appeal of this region is not going anywhere. The water, the land, the pace of life along M-22 or the back roads above Petoskey are not going to become less attractive. What is shifting is the operational complexity of owning here. The owners who treat their property as a business, even if it is a small one, will navigate that complexity better than those who do not.

Six months is a short time. We have covered a lot of ground, and we have also discovered how much ground remains. The next six months will bring deeper dives on property tax assessment appeals, a full STR regulatory tracker updated by township, more vendor sourcing content, and a reader survey that will help shape what we cover in year two.

You built this thing with us by reading, writing in, and forwarding issues to people who needed them. That is not nothing. That is, frankly, everything.

See you next week.

The Northern Michigan Property Insider publishes weekly for second-home and vacation property owners across Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Antrim, Charlevoix, Benzie, and Manistee counties. STR data referenced above sourced from AirDNA. Township ordinance resources available through the Michigan Townships Association.