The ownership of hospitality assets in New York State is shifting — away from out-of-state corporations and toward the homeowners, families, and communities that REALTORS® have always served. As a licensed New York State real estate broker and a director at Hudson Valley Catskill Region REALTORS® (HVCRR), I have a front-row seat to what that shift looks like on the ground — and the data behind it is worth understanding.
Who Really Owns the New York Hospitality Economy — People’s Hospitality and Why It Matters for Real Estate — By Dino Alexander, CEO & Principal Broker, Alluvion Real Estate | NAR Certified Resort & Second-Home Property Specialist | NAR Certified At Home With Diversity Specialist | Director, Hudson Valley Catskill Region REALTORS®
A new framework for thinking about short-term rental economics just landed in Hudson Valley Style Magazine, and I think it deserves a wider read among real estate professionals, property owners, and the communities we serve. The piece, People’s Hospitality: The New Economics of Tourism in the Hudson Valley and Catskills, introduces a framework that I believe reflects what NAR members across this region are already seeing in their own transaction data: the hospitality economy is increasingly being built by the same people who own the land, pay the property taxes, and care about the long-term health of their communities.
As Principal Broker at Alluvion Real Estate, Director of Hospitality Experience at Alluvion Vacations, and a director at Hudson Valley Catskill Region REALTORS®, I work at the intersection of real estate ownership and hospitality operations every day. What follows is what the data — and the transaction record — is telling us about where this is heading.
Second-Home Owners Are the Backbone of the STR Economy
The policy debate around short-term rentals has been dominated by the investor narrative: the outsider who purchased affordable housing stock and diverted it toward tourist revenue. That narrative may have relevance in dense urban markets. In the Hudson Valley and Catskills, it does not reflect reality.
According to the National Association of REALTORS®, vacation home sales accounted for 5.2% of all residential transactions in 2024, with a median national price of $475,000. In the Hudson Valley and Catskills, professionally managed vacation rentals typically transact at $700,000 and above — a price point that eliminates the thin-margin investor extraction model entirely. New York State property taxes and mortgage carrying costs on a property at that value make speculative short-term rental investment economically implausible without substantial personal use and long-term appreciation as the actual investment thesis.
The homeowners we work with at Alluvion Vacations are not investors. They are New Yorkers — professionals, families, retirees — who purchased properties they love and use for a significant portion of the year. Nationally, over two-thirds of STR owners own only one property, and four in five use their property personally for some portion of the year. Professional vacation rental management is how responsible second-home owners keep their properties maintained, occupied during periods of personal absence, and contributing to the local economy rather than sitting dormant from October through April.
NAR’s 2025 data shows that vacation homeowners hold their properties for an average of 11.7 years — not the behavior of speculative investors churning assets, but of committed owners building long-term wealth and community roots in the places they love.
The Trajectory Points to a Structural Shift in Hospitality Asset Ownership
The numbers behind this shift are significant and accelerating. The U.S. short-term rental industry is projected to reach $138.1 billion in 2025, up from $124.6 billion in 2024, growing at a compound annual rate of 10.9% through 2037. The vacation home ownership and rental market — the segment most directly relevant to the Hudson Valley and Catskills — is projected to grow from $15.5 billion in 2024 to $26.4 billion by 2032, driven by remote work flexibility, the rise of short-term rental platforms, and demographic demand from both Millennials and Baby Boomers acquiring second homes.
When you apply that growth curve to New York State — and specifically to the Hudson Valley and Catskills, where visitor spending is already approaching $5.7 billion annually — the projection is striking: STR and vacation rental-related tourism spending is on a trajectory to approach and potentially surpass what legacy institutional hospitality was generating in this region before it became structurally dependent on regulatory protection rather than competitive performance. By 2027, on current trajectory, People’s Hospitality will not be an emerging trend. It will be the dominant hospitality economic model in this region.
That is not a disruption story. It is a transfer of economic stewardship — from institutional operators headquartered elsewhere to the homeowners, property managers, and community businesses that have always had the most at stake in the health of this place.
What This Means for the Property Tax Base — and for Communities
This is where the real estate perspective matters most, and where I think the People’s Hospitality framework deserves serious attention from county governments, school boards, and municipal planning offices.
Every professionally managed vacation rental in the Hudson Valley and Catskills is a property paying full New York State property taxes — among the highest in the nation — at assessed values that reflect the premium the STR market has helped sustain. That tax base funds schools, roads, hospitals, emergency services, and the public infrastructure that makes these communities livable for both residents and visitors.
In Greene County alone, visitor spending generated $17.5 million in county tax revenue and $115.7 million in local employment income in 2024. A meaningful and growing share of that came from vacation rental guests spending in the community — not in hotel lobbies, but at independent restaurants, farm stands, wellness studios, and local services that keep the economic character of these towns intact.
As of March 25, 2025, New York State platforms are required to collect and remit the 4% state sales tax on STR occupancies directly, with county occupancy taxes collected in parallel. This is a fully tax-integrated sector contributing at every level of the fiscal framework — state, county, and municipal — in addition to the underlying property tax base that anchors community finance.
If we project the cumulative property tax contribution, sales tax revenue, and local economic multiplier effect of the People’s Hospitality ecosystem at scale across New York State, the fiscal case for supporting rather than restricting this sector is not a matter of opinion. It is arithmetic.
People’s Hospitality Creates Better Jobs Than Legacy Hospitality
One dimension of this conversation that rarely gets enough attention is the employment profile that People’s Hospitality generates — and how it compares to the labor model of institutional hospitality.
The average hourly wage across all employees in the U.S. leisure and hospitality sector is approximately $22.70 as of April 2025 — a figure that reflects the heavily weighted base of minimum-wage and near-minimum-wage positions that dominate hotel and resort payroll structures. Hotel room attendants, front desk staff, and food service workers in institutional hospitality have seen wage growth in recent years, but remain concentrated in a labor model built around volume, shift scheduling, and centralized management.
The People’s Hospitality economy creates a different employment profile entirely. Professional vacation rental management requires photographers, designers, marketers, property managers, maintenance specialists, housekeeping professionals, guest experience coordinators, landscapers, and inspection specialists — roles that command significantly higher compensation than entry-level hotel positions, offer greater schedule flexibility, and support independent contractors and small business operators rather than inserting workers into corporate payroll structures. These are positions that keep money in the local economy not just through consumer spending, but through the wages themselves.
That is a workforce development story as much as a hospitality story. And it is one that communities across the Hudson Valley and Catskills should be factoring into their economic development planning.
The REALTOR® Community Is Positioned to Lead This Conversation
NAR’s Resort and Second Home Property Specialist (RSPS) certification exists precisely because this segment of the real estate market has distinct dynamics — financing structures, usage patterns, regulatory environments, and investment theses that differ materially from primary residence transactions. The REALTORS® serving buyers and sellers in the Hudson Valley and Catskills are not just closing transactions. They are helping shape the ownership structure of the regional hospitality economy, one transaction at a time.
At Hudson Valley Catskill Region REALTORS®, we are watching this shift in real time. The second-home buyer in this market today is sophisticated, committed to the community, and making a long-term investment in a place they intend to use, maintain, and contribute to. That buyer profile is the foundation of People’s Hospitality — and understanding their motivations, their ownership patterns, and their economic footprint is essential for anyone making policy, planning, or investment decisions in this region.
The full economic analysis behind this shift is in the Hudson Valley Style Magazine piece, People’s Hospitality: The New Economics of Tourism in the Hudson Valley and Catskills. I encourage every real estate professional, property owner, and community stakeholder in the region to read it — not as a hospitality industry argument, but as a real estate and community economic development story that directly affects the assets we manage, the communities we serve, and the tax base that sustains the quality of life that makes this region worth living in and investing in.
The story is already being written on the ground. The data supports it. And the ownership structure of New York’s tourism economy is shifting in a direction that REALTORS®, homeowners, and communities should understand — and embrace.