Updated on April 8, 2026
Feature Image: David Krauss, Co-Founder and CEO of Rent Responsibly, and Julie Marks, Executive Director of Right to Rent Collaborative and Vermont SRTA
Julie Marks’s role as a short-term rental advocate requires a kind of social hypervigilance, reading faces as soon as she enters a meeting.
“When I walk into a room, I have to prepare myself to encounter someone who wants to give me a big hug for what I do, and at the same time, brace for encountering someone who wants to punch me in the face for what I do,” Julie said.
It’s the kind of dichotomy most people don’t associate with hospitality. But in many places around the country, the debate over short-term rentals has become polarizing, personal, and fraught with misunderstandings, a reality Julie experienced early in her hosting journey in Jericho, Vermont.
This challenge is something her current role is designed to address.
As Executive Director of the Right to Rent Collaborative and Founder and Executive Director of the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance, Julie now helps organize and fund advocacy efforts meant to bring more structure and staying power to an industry often forced into a defensive posture.
A host’s perspective
The path into that work started with how Julie first experienced travel. Since her early travels in her 20s, she has gravitated toward vacation rentals.
“I love getting a glimpse behind the curtain of other people’s lives,” she said. “I’m a naturally curious person, so walking in someone else’s shoes (or sleeping in someone else’s bed, to be more accurate) is an experience I find fun and interesting.”
“I also love the opportunity for creativity,” she added. “My favorite vacation rentals are the ones that are crazy, funky, over-the-top themed, never-seen-anything-like-it-before, can’t-believe-they-thought-of-that types of places.”
So when she bought a home of her own, hosting felt like a natural extension of that curiosity, a way to give back and share her corner of Vermont. Her property, Homestead Hospitality, is a little house beside her main home, surrounded by sprawling gardens of flowers, fruit, and vegetables, and forestland. As a host since 2018, she has leveraged her experience as a former environmental health consultant to model living off the land and to prevent exposure to harmful chemicals through her cleaning practices.
“One of the things that I loved so much instantly about the hospitality side was just the immense pleasure I received from people coming to my home, seeing what we had created and just falling in love with it,” she said in an interview with Matt Landau on the Unlocked podcast. “It made me feel so lucky and appreciative of what I have every day… that where I lived was where people wanted to come and pay to experience.”
Setting the record straight
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Julie found herself at the center of a growing backlash against short-term rental hosts. A local hotel operator publicly accused hosts of ignoring state guidelines, an assertion that felt like an affront to her own ethical business practices. Julie had been following the rules “to a T.” So she decided to respond in a public forum.
She wrote an op-ed for the Brattleboro Reformer and Bennington Banner, pushing back on the hotelier’s narrative and explaining how hosts like her were actually operating. She titled the piece, “Why short-term rentals in Vermont aren’t so bad.”
Dana Lubner, Director of Community Development at Rent Responsibly, saw the op-ed and reached out to Julie.
“When so many in our industry were still sitting on the sidelines, Julie was brave enough to use her voice,” Dana said. “I remember reading her op-ed and feeling instantly energized to see another New Englander speaking up instead of just complaining about the outcome. Watching what she built from that moment has been incredible, and I’m deeply grateful for the work we now get to do alongside each other.”
Founding the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance
Their conversation reinforced Julie’s growing recognition that if hosts weren’t telling their story, someone else would and not always accurately.
Dana made her aware of other groups through the Rent Responsibly directory, such as the Vacation Rental Professionals of Maine and the Nashville Short-Term Rental Association.
The conversation led Julie to found the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance, a space for hosts to share resources, stay informed, and speak with a more unified voice.
Five years later, that effort has earned a sizeable following of hosts, recognition from Montpelier, and serves as a model for other state alliances.
“The fact that the thousands of people in Vermont’s vacation rental industry now have a voice through VTSTRA is no small feat,” Julie said. “Most people don’t realize how much active and proactive effort it takes to earn and sustain credibility as an industry representative. We still have a long way to go, but the inroads we’ve made were unprecedented in Vermont, and I’m proud and grateful to have brought the vacation rental community this far.”
Building the Right to Rent Collaborative
Her work in Vermont also revealed a larger national challenge.
Even as state alliances like VTSTRA have gained a voice, the industry relies heavily on volunteers. Advocacy efforts are often reactive, underfunded, and inconsistent across markets, leaving many communities without the resources to organize before regulations are enacted.
“I believe the biggest weakness of our industry is that it’s largely invisible to communities,” Julie said. “It’s invisible to lawmakers. It’s invisible to local businesses. If we can create a systematic change in the way vendors, OTAs, managers, homeowners, DMOs, and lawmakers interact, then this industry will become unsinkable.”
To that end, a group of leaders in the vacation rental industry created the Right to Rent Collaborative (R2RC) in 2025.
As R2RC Executive Director, Julie now leads, at the national level, an effort to create a funding mechanism that supports advocacy where it’s needed most.
The model involves a $2-per-booking contribution, pooled across the industry, to fund the work that keeps short-term rentals viable. The proceeds from these contributions support state alliance leadership in critical needs, such as hiring professional staff and local lobbyists to engage in local policy conversations before they escalate.
In its first year, R2RC distributed $99,000 in grants across eight associations, helping to fund new organizations, support staffing, and expand advocacy efforts in markets that previously lacked resources.
“Julie Marks is exactly what our industry needed,” said Jonathan Wicks, President of the R2RC Board. “She’s brilliant, hard working and most importantly, she genuinely cares about the longevity of our industry. Her presence brightens any room and makes every group more organized and confident in the mission at hand. As the Executive Director, I could not think of a more perfect individual to lead the Right to Rent Collaborative.”
The challenge of funding advocacy
But selling this concept to the industry itself has been more challenging than Julie anticipated.
“Have you ever tried to fundraise for a cause that’s success is measured in ‘nothing happening’?” Julie said. “Advocacy can be a really tough sell for that reason. Everyone wants an ROI. A ‘what’s in it for me?’ Unfortunately, prevention tactics don’t work that way. And they can take years to effect change–or no change, if that’s the goal.”
That perspective, and the way she connects people around it, has made Julie a leader and influencer in the industry.
Matt Landau noted that his discussion with Julie on the Unlocked podcast was one of his favorite advocacy interviews.
Unfair regulation “is arguably the biggest threat to our industry,” he said. Meanwhile, advocacy “gets the least amount of press, the least amount of awareness, and ultimately, could sink most of our businesses, and Julie is first and foremost an advocate, but she’s also just a generous soul, and she loves helping people, and she loves connecting people.”
Julie hopes that, through persistent messaging, the industry will begin to rethink its mindset.
“Businesses – and homeowners – need to start shifting the way they think about the threat of bad regulations. Investing in state associations shouldn’t be about what ‘I’ get out of it; it should be about preventing what the collective ‘we’ are likely to lose if we don’t, which is the ability to do business,” she said. “Funding advocacy isn’t charity. It’s an investment in future business opportunity.”
…
GET UPDATES