Yes, that's generally how you get around a vacancy tax without spending more time and money on convoluted solutions to get around the tax, like buying furniture

Yes, that's generally how you get around a vacancy tax without spending more time and money on convoluted solutions to get around the tax, like buying furniture and setting up utilities and paying someone to periodically turn on the lights and run the water and pretend that they live there without actually living there. (This is actually a thing that people used to do when Vancouver introduced its vacancy tax.)