Barcelona tourism let ban won’t stop housing crisis…say holiday home owners ...Middle East

Holiday home owners in Barcelona say a ban on second lets by the city council will not help the housing crisis.

Jaume Collboni, the Socialist mayor of Barcelona, said the city council will not renew licenses for all 10,000 holiday flats in 2028 in a move which, he claims, will alleviate the housing crisis.

Collboni says when the ban comes into force it will mean 25,000 people can get access to 10,000 flats which were formerly tourist lets.

In March, Spain’s Constitutional Court backed Barcelona city’s ban and rejected an appeal that argued the measure infringed on the rights of private property owners.

However, Apartur, which represents tourist flat owners in Barcelona, took the matter to the European parliament this week.

Marian Muro, director general of Apartur, told MEPs debating the housing crisis that banning holiday lets would not help relieve the scarcity of available flats in the city.

She said the number of tourist flats in Barcelona had been frozen at 10,000 since 2014 but in the past decade rental prices have risen by 72 per cent.

“There is no correlation between the number of tourist flats and the rise in rental prices. The action of Barcelona council (to ban lets) is therefore disproportionate,” Ms Muro said.

Apartur presented a report by Price Waterhouse Cooper which cited evidence from the Bank of Spain, the Spanish competition watchdog (CNMC), the Catalan competition commission and evidence from New York which introduced curbs on tourist flats.

The Bank of Spain said earlier this year that the country lacked 700,000 homes, with the shortage most acute in cities like Barcelona, Madrid and Malaga.

A report from the institution found that “imbalances between supply and demand are more decisive factors in the increase in rental prices than tourist accommodation”.

The bank added: “The housing supply has been insufficient to meet the growing demand from newly created households, which has contributed to the increase in prices”.

The report added that in New York, one year after Local Law 18, which requires hosts to register their short-term rental properties and prohibits booking platforms from processing transactions for unregistered units, was introduced in 2023, monthly rental prices rose 3.4 per cent.

Joan Ramon Riera, Barcelona council housing commissioner, said reason the ban will not come into force until 2028 was that the council needed five years between announcing the move to write off these flats without having to pay compensation to their owners.

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“It is very profitable to rent property in Barcelona. Perhaps only one per cent of owners will leave their flats empty when the ban comes into action but it is not economically good sense to do that,” he told The i Paper.

Barcelona was the first Spanish city to adopt a radical decision to shut down short-term rentals to address rising rents.

The popular city has has been at the heart of protests over the housing crisis in Spain, which has spread across parts of Europe. 

Daniel Pardo, a member of the Spanish Assembly of Neighbourhoods for Tourism Degrowth, who organised a series of protests in the city, said the ban will only work if tourist flats were then rented out to local people.

“I also hope that this does not mean that a lot of illegal tourist flats do not spring up,” Mr Pardo said.

Meanwhile, three left-wing parties which support the ruling Socialists in the Catalan regional government are pushing for a ban on second home purchases.

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In a move which could potentially limit holiday home purchases for Britons if it is adopted, Esquerra Republicana, Comunes and CUP want to introduce legislation which limits house purchases to ones which families live in to combat “property speculation” by companies which buy flats to rent out.

Salvador Illa, the Catalan president, has said he will study the measure.

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