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The next time you book a holiday apartment in Barcelona you may wake up to find an inspector standing at the end of the bed.
Amid growing evidence that the massive upsurge in tourist apartments is driving rents up and residents out, the city has launched a crackdown on illegal, unlicensed apartments, and Airbnb, the dominant platform, is in the eye of the storm, although not the only offender.
According to the council, there are about 16,000 holiday rentals in the city, of which nearly 7,000 are unlicensed. Last year Barcelona fined Airbnb €600,000 for continuing to advertise unlicensed flats on its platform.
The city has doubled from 20 to 40 the team of inspectors who roam the streets seeking out illegal rentals, armed with apps that reveal at a click whether properties are legal or not. By next year their number will have risen to more than 100. Cross-referencing licences with property advertised online, they identify rogue apartments which are then ordered to close down. Owners – when they can be found – face fines of up to €60,000.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 05 2017, @11:56PM
Those houses are still on the market, they're just not on the sector(s) you favor. And as someone noted, if you don't use a house full-time, say because you're on vacation or a bank sitting on a vacant house (there's a huge amount of such housing in some developed world markets simply because the banks can't afford to sell them and realize their true, much-lower-than-book value), then Airbnb puts that excess capacity on the market which otherwise wouldn't be there.