“While completing this report of the current number of active host licenses in Gilmer County, a discrepancy was discovered which indicated an error in the prior reported number of 1,777. After further review, it was determined that the prior count of 1,777 included a count of all people who were affiliated with the active host licenses as of that time. That number did not reflect actual host licenses. … The total number of STR Host Licenses in Gilmer County is 1,448.”The figures below are the corrected ones. The error was the county's, not this site's, and it is noted here in full because that is how corrections are handled on this page.
(county figure, 8/10/2026)
Where these numbers come from
These are not estimates, and they are not rumors. On August 10, 2026, in response to an Open Records request from this site, Gilmer County produced its complete Active Host License Inventory — every active short-term rental license in the county, with license number, business name, license holder, issue date, expiration date, and property address. The county's cover letter states the total plainly:
“Today’s report indicates the actual number of host licenses in Gilmer County as of 8.10.2026. … The total number of STR Host Licenses in Gilmer County is 1,448.”
How the Coosawattee count was derived. The county's inventory is county-wide; it is not sorted by community. To find how many of those licenses sit inside Coosawattee, every address in the county's inventory was matched against the property addresses in the Gilmer County tax assessor's own parcel records. 393 licenses matched a Coosawattee property address exactly. Another 27 are on Coosawattee streets but written with a spelling or abbreviation the automated match could not confirm — giving a working figure of about 420. That derivation is this site's work, not the county's, and the method is stated here so any owner can check it.
A note on the county’s community labels. The assessor’s parcel records group lots into valuation categories such as “Coosawattee – River,” “Coosawattee – Mtn Town” and “Coosawattee – Camping.” These are tax classes based on water frontage and lot type, not Association communities — every one of them lies inside Coosawattee, and the lots within them carry Eagles Mountain, Beaver Forest, Beaver Bend and Beaver Lake legal descriptions. The community figures above use each lot’s recorded legal description instead.
Any owner can request the same record from the county's Open Records Officer. The county has also stated that no year-end figures exist for 2023 or 2024, because the STR Host License Ordinance was not approved until the end of 2024 — so these are the first hard counts that have ever existed. Owner telephone numbers and email addresses were withheld from the inventory under O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72; license numbers, holders, addresses and dates were produced in full.
What the numbers mean
Coosawattee is 29% of the county's entire rental inventory
One community — ours — holds roughly 420 of the county's 1,448 licenses. Nearly three of every ten short-term rentals in Gilmer County are inside our gates. When the county writes and enforces its rental ordinance, Coosawattee is by far the largest single piece of what it is regulating. Within the resort, the 393 exactly-matched licenses fall out by community as follows — read from each lot’s recorded legal description, not from the assessor’s valuation codes:
The Eagles Mountain Campground — several hundred lots on the numbered streets — has essentially none. Not one numbered campground street appears anywhere in the county’s entire 1,448-license inventory.
More than a quarter of our rentals sit on the water
Gilmer County assesses waterfront lots in separate valuation classes. Cross-referencing those classes against the license list shows that 108 of the 393 matched licenses — 27% — are on river or creek frontage: 77 on the Coosawattee River and 31 on Mountaintown Creek. Those are the same banks where the state’s 25-foot and 50-foot stream buffers apply, and the same banks where owners have been reporting tubers and guests coming ashore on private property. Whatever one thinks of rentals generally, the concentration of them along the water is not an impression — it is in the county’s own records.
Nine out of ten owners here don't rent
There are roughly 3,900 eligible votes in the Association. Setting aside the 29 licenses held by CRRA itself, about 390 licenses are owner-held — roughly 10% of owners hold a rental license. The other 90% of us just live here — full-time or part-time — and rent to no one. It is also not an investor takeover: only 13 people hold more than one license inside the resort, and the largest of those holds four. The single biggest holder is the Association.
The Association itself is the biggest rental operator in the resort
Of the roughly 420 licenses inside our gates, 29 are held in the name of Coosawattee River Resort Association, Inc. — license numbers 4244 through 4312 in the county's inventory, covering the Villas on Water Tower Villa Circle, Fife Villa Drive and Court, Eagle Mountain Villa Court, Villa Drive, Newport Drive and the Floyd Suites. They are rented nightly by the Association, with the revenue flowing to the Association.
No individual owner comes close. The next-largest holder inside the resort has four. The organization that administers rental policy for every owner in Coosawattee is also, by license count and by a wide margin, the largest short-term rental business inside it.
About a third of the resort's owner-held licenses — 34% — are registered under an LLC, trust or other business name rather than an individual's.
The boardroom doesn't look like the community
On the ten-member Board of Directors seated for 2025–2026, by our count, three directors own short-term rentals and a fourth does business with the rental trade — four of ten seats, 40%, with a financial connection to rentals, in a community where about 10% of owners rent. Good people, serving voluntarily — that's not in question. But on this one subject, the room is not shaped like the membership it represents. Owners deserve to know that when rental policy is discussed, they are watching a board that is 40% rental-connected govern a community that is 91% rental-free — inside an Association that runs 29 rentals of its own. (This tally describes the 2025–2026 board; the newly elected board is seated August 25, 2026 and will be re-counted then.)
Why this page exists
None of these numbers had ever been published where owners could see them — not in a newsletter, not on the portal, not at a meeting. The county compiled them only because an owner asked under the Open Records Act. Whatever your view on short-term rentals — for, against, or somewhere in between — decisions about this community are better made by owners who know the numbers than by owners who don't.
Now you know them.
Questions, corrections, or the underlying records: svhawk@ellijay.com