Last month, Spain’s Ministry of Housing ordered online platforms such as Airbnb to take down advertisements for around 54,000 illegal holiday rentals in Spain. Almost 900 of these rentals were located in the Lanzarote municipalities of Yaiza and Tías.
The orders follow the introduction of Spain’s Single Registry for Short-Term Rentals in July this year. This law requires all holiday rentals to apply for a rental registration number, or Marketing Code, that must be displayed by any platform advertising the property.
While many properties have not yet obtained a registration number, the 54,000 properties that have been forbidden from advertising are all properties that applied for a code and were rejected.
On Lanzarote, two of its municipalities rank among the top six in the Canaries for the highest number of rejections. Yaiza leads with 442 illegal properties, followed closely by Tías with 427.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that “thousands of irregularities have been detected in these properties that were trying to become holiday rentals.”
He also stated that “these apartments will now be rented permanently, to young people, to the families of our country”. This claim was repeated by Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez, who said the law aims to “preserve the social function of housing and combat illegal tourist apartments, which force families out of their neighbourhoods and diminish the quality of cities.”
However, according to ASCAV, the Canarian Association of Holiday Rental Owners, there is no guarantee that owners of the withdrawn properties will choose to rent them to residential tenants instead. “On the contrary,” said an ASCAV speaker “To date, no government that has promised to ban tourist housing to expand the residential rental market has fulfilled its promise.”
ASCAV also claims that it is incorrect to describe the unregistered properties as “illegal”, as it is up to the regional government to revoke rental licences. “The only effect of their exclusion from the registry will be that they cannot be marketed through websites that promote these types of listings.”
The association claims that the only way that these apartments are likely to find their way onto the residential rental market is if the government changes its housing law to “guarantee the security of landlords.” Without this, “The properties are likely to be used as short-term rentals or simply be locked up and add to the country’s unoccupied housing stock.”
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