Spain’s southern Valencia region is joining a growing number of governments cracking down on Airbnb-style holiday rentals in response to a rising backlash against mass tourism.
The regional government, which oversees beach hotspots including Benidorm and Alicante, is seeking to stamp out black-market rentals by threatening rule-breaking landlords with fines of up to €600,000.
Nuria Montes, Valencia’s top tourism official, said holiday apartments had an important role in the regional economy but “we want to regulate and bring order to them so they don’t grow in an uncontrolled way”.
The starting point, included in a package of measures unveiled on Thursday, is to eradicate black market rentals. “We cannot allow any kind of underground economy in accommodation,” Ms Montes said.
Airbnb-style flats in southern European destinations from Venice to Lisbon have been blamed for hosting unruly visitors, accelerating the “touristification” of public spaces and driving up property prices.
Valencia is stopping short of more radical steps taken by Barcelona, which plans to close down all of its 10,000 Airbnb-style apartments – including those already licensed by the authorities – by late 2028.
Across the Valencia region, which includes the Costa Blanca coastline from Dénia to Torrevieja, the number of licensed holiday apartments had surged to 106,000 from 40,000 since 2015, according to Ms Montes.
But she estimated that the number of unregistered black market apartments could be 50,000 or more, including many listed on classified sites online where fraud is rife.
“They escape any type of control. Obviously they don’t pay taxes. We don’t know whether the owners are fulfilling their obligations to their workers,” Ms Montes said.
“But the main thing is safety. They don’t comply with the obligation to communicate the identity of clients to the authorities. We don’t know if they follow the rules for fires, emergencies, evacuation plans.”
Under Valencia’s plans, which are due to be voted on by the regional parliament in September, a sliding scale of fines will rise to as much as €600,000 per apartment for grave infractions.
By the end of this year even licensed apartments will be deemed illegal if owners have not supplied an official 20-digit code used to identify all properties in Spain.
Licenses will also need to be renewed every five years – and they will be denied if a homeowners association has changed its rules to ban holiday apartments in a building.
The Valencia region has only 11 inspectors for holiday apartments but it plans to enlist municipal governments to boost enforcement.
In a push to harmonise a patchwork of national laws across the EU, Brussels officials adopted a regulation this April requiring short-term rental companies to share data with the authorities.
The rules, which will come into force in May 2026, call for platforms such as Airbnb to submit regular updates on landlords and their renting activity to help governments crack down on illegal listings.
Valencia was determined to stamp out any renting of single rooms on platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo, Ms Montes said. But she does not want a Barcelona-style ban on all holiday apartments. Instead the regional government will encourage municipal leaders to decide what is best for their area.
“Local councils can establish limits, for example, on the maximum number of dwellings for tourist use per building, or per neighbourhood, and these limits must be based on clear, objective criteria,” she said. “It cannot be arbitrary.”
While tourist apartments accounted for 1.8 per cent of all housing in the Valencia region, empty properties made up 14 per cent of the total, she noted.
Ms Montes said that for many years holiday rentals had coexisted “in a tremendously peaceful manner” with permanent residents. But she said the appearance of platforms such as Airbnb had led to the “hotelisation” of buildings and “increased the number of conflicts, especially with residents in owner-occupied communities”.
But Ms Montes argued that the demonisation of holiday apartments across Spain had gone too far.
“Tourist flats seem to have been identified as the cause of every problem,” she said, mentioning housing shortages and rising rents. “And I think that this is tremendously unfair.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis