Short term rentals are to be phased out of Barcelona, in a sweeping plan by city officials to get a grip on the northern Spanish city’s housing crisis.
Barcelona has just over 10,000 licenced tourist apartments, serving the highest number of international tourists in any Spanish city. That influx of spending and demand for accommodation from what some call overtourism by foreign tourists has led to rental prices rising by nearly 70% over the last decade. House buyers meanwhile faced an increase of 38%.
“Tourist flats will disappear”
But those 10,000 licences are now set to be scrapped over the next five years, in accordance with the new measure, which is designed “to guarantee the right to live in Barcelona and deal effectively with the housing crisis we have been suffering for years,” the city’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, wrote on X.
“We are confronting what we believe is Barcelona’s largest problem,” Collboni told delegates at a government event, adding that if plans go ahead with no hiccups, “from 2029, tourist flats as we conceive of them today will disappear from the city of Barcelona”.
Turning point
With a “strong” inspection regime in place to root out any illegal vacation rentals, the current stock of short term holiday flats would be sold or go on the open long term rental market, Colboni said, creating what he described as “a turning point”.
The disappearance of the tourist flat cannot come soon enough for Barcelona’s would-be residents, long priced out of a housing market dominated by massive demand for short term holiday rentals. The heavy tourist footfall has other negative effects too, including noise pollution, overwhelmed public transport routes not originally intended for the masses, and the “feeling of collapse” generated by the huge numbers of visitors who arrive on cruise ships.
No overnight impact
But Colboni has also warned that the impact of the move will not be felt overnight, in a debate that has been ongoing since a supposed moratorium on new tourist flat licences in 2014. At that time, there were 9,600 licenced units. Since 2016, 9,700 illegal tourist apartments have been shut down and 3,500 apartments repurposed as primary housing for locals.
The hotel sector is set to benefit, and at the time of writing the major holiday accommodation rental websites are yet to react. But amid claims the city’s economy would be hit, Barcleona’s Deputy Mayor, Laia Bonet, has implied that landlords should think themselves lucky they would have income for the five years before the licences will be retired, with the long lead-in period helping to mitigate their losses.
Barcelona joins other major destinations such as Belgian capital, Brussels, the Canary Islands, and Lisbon, Portugal, in seeking to regulate the tourist accommodation sector to protect quality of life for locals.
