Every Maui buyer's agent tells you to check the Minatoya List before you write an offer on a Kihei condo. That advice was correct in 2024. It is incomplete in 2026.
The list itself hasn't changed much. What has changed is that Maui County stopped treating the roughly 7,000 apartment-zoned units on that list as one problem with one deadline, and started deciding their fate one building at a time, in public hearings, this summer. If you're shopping Kihei condos right now, the question that actually determines what you're buying isn't whether your building is on the Minatoya List. Most of the ones you'll look at are. The question is where that specific building sits in a rezoning fight that is being argued, building by building, in county council chambers as I write this.
The two laws you need to hold in your head at once
Bill 9, now Ordinance 5909, is the law everyone talks about. Mayor Bissen signed it on December 15, 2025, and it closes a decades-old zoning workaround that let apartment-zoned condos operate as short-term vacation rentals. For Kihei and the rest of South Maui, the operative shutoff date is January 1, 2031. West Maui's deadline lands two years earlier, in 2029.
Bill 9 alone would have made the calculus simple: every Minatoya List unit in Kihei loses its rental rights on the same day. But in June 2026, the council passed a second law, Ordinance 6008, known as Bill 88. It created two new hotel zoning categories, H-3 and H-4, that let an apartment-zoned building apply to be reclassified as a hotel and keep renting short-term indefinitely.
Here's the part that matters for anyone shopping right now: Bill 88 doesn't reclassify anything automatically. Every building has to apply on its own, survive review from the county's planning commissions, and win council approval through a numbered resolution. Nothing about it is a blanket exemption. It's a door that some buildings will walk through and others won't, and which door a given complex is standing in front of changes almost weekly.
The building-by-building fight, happening in Kihei this month
In late July 2026, the council voted 7-1, twice, on a Friday, to send two resolutions, 26-110 and 26-111, to the Maui Planning Commission. Together they cover roughly 2,056 apartment-zoned rental units across the county being considered for the new hotel zoning. Kamaole Sands, one of Kihei's largest condo complexes at 440 units, is named in Resolution 26-110's proposed H-4 bucket. So is the 169-unit Kauhale Makai complex.
Then it got more granular. During the same council session, a separate 13-unit timeshare portion of Kauhale Makai at 938 South Kīhei Road, on its own 3.11-acre parcel, was added to both resolutions through a council member's floor amendment, distinct from the main complex's listing. In the same meeting, a property up the coast in Māʻalaea, Māʻalaea Kai, was pulled out of the resolution entirely once the council determined it's no longer a leasehold property. Same law, same meeting, three different outcomes for three pieces of paper that all started in the same bucket, and a reminder that this process is being fought parcel by parcel well beyond Kihei's own borders too.
Just last week, in a hearing first reported on August 20, 2026, the county's Housing and Land Use Committee spent nearly two and a half hours hearing testimony on three new council amendments that would add sixteen more properties, some overlapping across the proposals, to the rezoning track. Two Kihei properties came up by name. Waiohuli Beach Hale, built in 1979, has owners arguing the building faces enough coastal hazard exposure that it should be rezoned rather than phased out. El Dorado was raised in testimony for the first time that same day, with no resolution attached to it yet. The committee didn't vote. It's reconvening.
If your Kihei condo search includes any of these buildings, here's the status as of this writing, not as of when some other guide was published. I've included one nearby Māʻalaea property alongside the Kihei buildings, since it moved through the exact same council meeting and shows how differently two properties in the same resolution can land:
| Building | Where it stands (August 2026) |
|---|---|
| Kamaole Sands, Kihei (440 units) | Named in Resolution 26-110, proposed for H-4 hotel zoning |
| Kauhale Makai, Kihei, main complex (169 units) | Named in Resolution 26-110's H-4 bucket |
| Kauhale Makai, Kihei, 938 S. Kīhei Rd timeshare (13 units) | Added separately to both 26-110 and 26-111 by council amendment |
| Waiohuli Beach Hale, Kihei | Owners petitioning for inclusion, citing coastal hazard exposure; undecided |
| El Dorado, Kihei | Named in testimony for the first time in August 2026; no resolution yet |
| Māʻalaea Kai, Māʻalaea (for comparison) | Removed from the same resolution after being found no longer leasehold |
This table will be out of date within a few months. That's the point. A generic Minatoya List explainer can't tell you this, because the list itself hasn't moved. The resolutions have.
Who's actually buying these units, and what that tells you
Testimony at that August 20 hearing included a data point worth sitting with. A representative of the Maui Vacation Rental Association reviewed 162 Minatoya List sales between December 1, 2025 and August 14, 2026, cross-referencing MLS records and title data against county tax records. Only 12 of those sales, about 7.4 percent, were confirmed as owner-occupied purchases by Maui residents. Adding sales where the paperwork suggests likely owner occupancy but tax records haven't caught up yet brought the high-end estimate to 21 of 162, or 13 percent.
Read the other side of that number. Roughly 87 percent of recent Minatoya List buyers are not people planning to live in the unit. They're buyers underwriting a bet, whether that's on the building winning a rezoning fight, on the eventual conversion to long-term housing pricing in their favor, or simply on holding the asset through 2031 and figuring out the rest later. That's not a criticism of anyone's strategy. It's a reason to be precise about which bet you're actually making before you make it.
The half of the list nobody's rezoning
Not every Minatoya building is even in this conversation. The county's working rezoning list, referred to in council documents as TIG Exhibit 2, was last updated July 31, 2026. Of the roughly 7,167 total Minatoya List units countywide, about 4,519 belong to buildings actually named in that working list, and only around 3,785 units currently have any specific rezoning outcome proposed across the resolutions moving through council.
Do the subtraction. Something close to half of all Minatoya List units, potentially including complexes in Kihei that haven't drawn a single line of council testimony, are sitting entirely outside this process. For those buildings, there's no pending amendment, no hearing on the calendar, no lobbying underway. Bill 9's original 2031 deadline is simply the rule, full stop, with no rezoning lifeline currently in motion. If a listing agent tells you a unit is on the Minatoya List and stops there, ask the next question: is this building even named in TIG Exhibit 2, or is it one of the ones nobody is trying to save?
What this means for price and leverage
By mid-2026, apartment-zoned condo prices on Maui sat roughly 50 percent below their 2022 to 2023 peak, while hotel-zoned buildings, the ones immune to all of this, held their value through the same stretch. Island-wide condo data through the summer of 2026 showed median sale price down 21.7 percent and average sale price down 18.3 percent year over year, even as pending sales climbed 31.6 percent while closed sales fell 20.3 percent. That pattern, buyers stepping back in once sellers lower their number rather than demand vanishing, is the shape of a market that's repricing risk, not a market that's dying.
The University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization has modeled the relationship between rental inventory and price appreciation here, and the takeaway is straightforward: uncertainty about a building's rental future is already showing up in what buyers are willing to pay, years before any unit actually loses its rental rights. That's your leverage if you're buying an apartment-zoned Kihei condo today. It's also your risk if you're buying one assuming the rezoning fight resolves your way.
Before you write an offer on a Kihei condo
- Ask for the county's documentation confirming Minatoya List status. Don't take "vacation rentals permitted" in the MLS remarks at face value.
- Ask whether the building is named in TIG Exhibit 2. If it isn't, there is currently no rezoning path being pursued for it.
- If it is named, ask which resolution, and what that resolution actually proposes, since being on the list doesn't mean being on a path to keep renting.
- Check whether the building's zoning applies to the whole complex or, as with Kauhale Makai, only a specific portion under a different ownership structure.
- Price the property against its 2031 reality as a residential unit, not just its current rental income, unless the building already has a favorable resolution moving through council.
A few questions I hear often
My building isn't named in any resolution. Does that mean it's safe from Bill 9? No. It means the opposite. If a building isn't in TIG Exhibit 2, there's no rezoning effort in motion to exempt it, and the original 2031 deadline for South Maui stands as written.
If a rezoning resolution passes for a building, does that guarantee rental rights forever? It gets the building into H-3 or H-4 hotel zoning, which is the classification Bill 9 doesn't touch. But every resolution still has to clear the full council, and litigation tied to Bill 9 is active, so nothing here is entirely closed off from future change.
Does buying now lock me into today's rules? You inherit whatever the building's zoning status is at closing, along with whatever resolution, if any, is pending for it. That status can still shift after you own the unit, in either direction, which is exactly why the building-specific research matters more than the list.
If you're comparing Kihei condos right now and want someone who's actually tracking which buildings are moving through which resolutions this month, that's the kind of groundwork I do before we ever look at a unit together. Contact Steve Landin to get started on your Kihei condo search.
