If you are looking to rent a summer cottage this season, you are not alone. Ever since the Quebec government gave the greenlight late last month for rentals outside the Montreal and Joliette areas to start June 1, bookings have been taking off.
"Things have been going pretty crazy," said Dany Papineau, founder of the Quebec-based WeChalet - an Airbnb-type of online rental platform for summer chalets. Papineau told CJAD 800 that in the last month, they've processed half a year's worth of transactions.
That's despite all the new cleaning procedures, extra fees charged by some property owners because of the extra cleaning and restrictions such as having only one household renting a property at any given time and a 24-hour gap between rentals to different groups.
"What happened with the COVID, is a lot of people have been stuck in the city for the past three months and people just want to get out of the city and just go in nature," said Papineau.
Typical clients are looking for places with pools or access to water, close to the city, with the popular ones getting booked fast for the summer. And the bookings are longer.
"It's a lot of cleaning to do between bookings so you'd rather have a way longer booking of a week or two weeks or even a month than just do a two day booking," said Papineau.
The way it's been going, Papineau said it's better to plan in advance.
"For people that are looking to plan a trip for August or for July, don't wait last minute because it's going to be really hard to book. And what could happen even, if the market gets so hot, I think prices could go up and it might be even more expensive to travel," said Papineau.