Spain Fines Airbnb €65m: Why the Government Is Cracking Down on Illegal Rentals

How much effect will 65000 flats have on this?

And meanwhile, getting any kind of building permits is super hard so there's only a trickle of new property being built that lags behind demand.

There's a real estate bubble where real estate value outgrows inflation structurally. So housing is getting more and more expensive. To the point where a normal person with a normal income has basically no chance at all at finding anything decent on the market.

The solution of building more housing and making it easier for property owners to rent out their property are consistently not happening. The Netherlands actually has large amounts of empty property where the owners prefer to not rent it out and keep their investment liquid because it's such a PITA to get out of an agreement. There's also a history of privatized housing corporations selling off their property to make some quick money for the share holders. The net result is a huge mess of private property that is either not rented out or rented out at extortion prices. At the same time there's also growing amount of empty commercial real estate. Because people work from home now. Converting that for housing is another regulation challenge.

The problem isn't greed but broken policy. The reflex of "protecting" renters has had the opposite negative effects on the rental market. Things like Airbnb are more like a symptom than the cause of this.

The way I see it, house construction should not be expensive. It's artificial scarcity. A 50K camper can be pretty comfortable. But forget about having the right to use that as a place to live. You are instead expected to pay extortion rents or buy your own 500K piece of shit tiny apartment that is actually smaller and less comfortable than the bloody camper. A camper is just a house with wheels. Those are mass produced in factories. Houses without wheels should be much simpler to make. This never was a technical problem. Prefab housing is kind of a solved problem. It's not that hard. Any idiot can construct a garden shed in an afternoon. If the rules were different, most big cities would have huge slums with campers and other improvised housing. Regulation is what keeps this under control. But when policy breaks down, slums like that become the next logical level of this crisis.

A good example of exemptions in the Netherlands are so-called holiday homes where people live permanently; despite this clearly being illegal. Evicting people would create an unsolvable problem for bureaucrats. So, a lot of people that live like that got their situation legalized. And of course recreational units tend to be in nice places too. So, it's a popular thing. If tens of thousands of people start parking their campers on the edge of town bureaucrats would struggle to address the issue without creating a bigger crisis.

Probably something like this will force a solution eventually.

A lot of other European governments took on too much public debt and had to enforce austerity measures. This proved very unpopular.

Unlike the US, the Spanish government did not bail out private industry debt. And so 15 years later here we are. Not enough housing stock and not enough private builders to carryon building more.

Get over it! Seriously, most buildings are not historic. By trying to make them all historic you ensure they are all lost and the few that really are historic can't stand out for the history they represent. Save what is really history, but not everything.

Similarly, the skyline will change. That is life. Accept it. You do not own the view, it is the combination of everyone, and not everyone agrees with you so why are you forcing your preferred view on others?

Sure, everyone wants their particular city to be frozen in time for cuteness and nostalgia reasons. However, it sort of assumes that the sociopolitical environment is also frozen (it isn't).

so instead you end up with voters voting against densification because, essentially, "I got mine."

p.s. i'm not sure that places that banned/heavily restricted airbnb experienced a meaningful decline in rental prices (e.g. new york, san francisco, vancouver, etc). it's basically a distraction from failed policy.

p.p.s. new york is one of the most popular tourist destinations and incredibly built up, and doesn't seem to have issues with tourists wanting to visit. tokyo too. and these also still have their quintessential historic/preserved areas, too.

Not great for prices (Ryanair is complaining about high landing fees) but it does mean tourists have a good job being dispersed into the countryside and having a good experience.

By what measure? Granted, I now live outside of Barcelona after moving here from an island with ~700 people on it, so for me pretty much any city is big, but I'm fairly sure Barcelona is within top 100 worldwide in terms of population living in it, so I'm guessing you're saying "not a large city" by some other metric?

At 100€ per night, at 70% occupancy the equivalent monthly rent is ~2000€.

That list does not make much sense, because it mostly consists of small municipalities that have been engulfed by growing metropolitan areas. Four of the five Spanish entries are like that, three in Valencia and one in Barcelona; and most other entries in the top 20 are suburbs of Paris, Athens or Naples.

This is a big generalization but I think it's broadly true.

If you are in a "resource" area you'll get pollution and often instability and war.

If you are in a "playground" area you get massive cost increases and are eventually forced out.

As the trend is toward concentrating more and more wealth at the top, the slice of rich who can afford to enjoy the playgrounds becomes smaller and the number of refugees, homeless, and poor becomes larger and poorer.

But you still need to build more housing obviously

Expats come, locals are pushed out, existing business is replaced by business catering towards expats. But an economy built on being a trendy expat location is not sustainable. Expats will leave to a new place eventually, and then the city is dead. This dynamic is accelerated by the fact that locals are forced out when expacts come, but the city was attractive in the first place because of how charming locals made it.

If you run the city - and imagine it’s a company, and you’re the CEO - you can see that your city is falling for a hype train that will eventually kill it. The smart thing is to not let that hype train happen.

Because expat purchase power is a mutliple of your locals, you need to find other levers. Every company would do the same thing.

There are so many empty and decaying homes all over Europe, in Italy they sell houses for 1 Euro. Yes there's a catch but that catch is that you are supposed to renovate the house for a cost that ranges from 20K euros to 100K euros and this is still quite cheap considering that you end up with a proper house at a picturesque location.

Then along came 'right-to-buy', allowing tenants to buy their social housing for knock down prices (and so become a natural Tory [right of centre party] voter).

If councils had been allowed to use the money to build more social housing, then maybe this was fine. But they were not. So now we have affordability issues in the UK too.

The problem is that the supply/demand curves are being manipulated by, as mentioned, property owners which are destroying the fabric of their respective city via short-term rentals, which, in turn, increases rents and prices for housing en masse. All of a sudden, a "boring" property becomes an investment that generates revenue. All of a sudden, hedge funds, banks, etc. want in on the action. There's money to be made, after all! (Expats and global financial markets further complicate this: how can an average Spaniard that makes $50k compete with a California "digital nomad" that makes $150k?)

While this used to be the case in the past (if you bought, for example, farmland, or a factory, or something), the financialization of housing is a relatively new phenomenon.

I would expect that to be the minority of visitors.

I certainly don't do that when I stay in Airbnbs.

> The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.

Sure, the problem is balancing that with the desire of tourists that want something better than a hotel.

This problem exists regardless of who does the buying. Where I live the locals got into the market first. Still, it's a zero-sum game, every short-term rental is a house a family cannot live in and probably cannot afford to buy.

On my street 30% of the houses are short-term rentals. Some rent out for $10k/week just 8 weeks a year and are closed up the rest of the time. My daughter is currently the only kid on the street, which has over 100 houses.

Not only are all the houses now priced as income-producing investments, they are killing the community that used to exist here.

What does this mean or are you just communist coding your speech?

It is better than being the world’s cheap factory with lax environmental and labor regulations though.

Stop and think a bit more instead.

Best way to reduce tourism is to levy taxes on tourist activities.

There are very few hotels with kitchenettes. Most people don't cook (and don't want to cook) on vacation. Most hotels also don't cater to the low-income, and folks who cook on travel tend to be low-income. There's business rentals that offer this, but they're often not bookable for short-terms (usually 2+ weeks minimum).

Most hotels can accommodate 5+ people in a room, if you call them. Though no rooms (except suites) will have more than 2 beds, hotels will provide cots. In general, though, rooms aren't expected to host any more than that, and if you have more people than that, the expectation is that you'd book more than one room. Plenty of hotels have adjoining rooms for this purpose.

Again, though, hotels aren't really targeting low-income folks. Airbnbs can be cheaper in this regard, but most rentals on Airbnb charge by the person, so in some cases can be as expensive or more expensive than getting 2 rooms.

In either case, I think the issue is your needs are uncommon for vacation travel.

Airbnb was not a bad idea, but it has been perverted. It's time to regulate it and probably break it too.

New York, as expensive as it is, is still considerably cheaper than cities like SF. Part of this is that they build more, part of it is that they have a usable train system, which allows people to live more spread out across the city, but part of it as well, is that they've banned airbnb. It would be ideal to also see empty unit taxes on units >$10m (inflation adjusted). It would also be good to see high taxes on sales of units >$10m (inflation adjusted).

> Minimum contract length of 5 years.

This is good, assuming it's one sided (the tenant can choose to move out, but the landlord can't break the lease). People need stability in housing more than landlords need to be able to end leases.

> Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years)

Sure, it should be generally tied to inflation, but what other investment exists where you're guaranteed yearly increases? Why are people so adamant that landlords need to be guaranteed minimal increases in their profits?

Housing is a natural monopoly, and allowing businesses to maximize their profits, unchecked, isn't capitalism.

> It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.

This is often brought out as a massive negative of regulations, but let's be honest, this is an outlier. Without tenant protections, however, it's common for landlords to evict tenants to increase rents. Even with protections, landlords still take illegal measures to try to evict tenants to increase rents, like doing constant construction at night, or refusing to do maintenance.

This is basically the same complaint about welfare programs. We have to accept some percentage of fraud to serve the greater good.

It's completely normal for most businesses to take a risk based approach to fraud, to maximize profits. Retail businesses, for example, will try to maximize their credit card auth rates, even though that may increase their fraud rate, if the increases in auth rate outweigh the cost of the fraud.

A stable society is worth a small percentage of fraud.

> If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.

Good. I don't see how this is a downside.

> Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.

Again, this is good. If there's a housing crunch, then residents should be prioritized over tourists.

When I first arrived here I relied on these long stay airbnbs until I could find a way through the byzantine Spanish rental process. Now this option will no longer exist.

Again, you are not familiar with Spanish politics if you think this is by accident. I have myself given up on any attempts of doing business here after I spent 1 year waiting for a certain business license and could only obtain it (in a week) after a chance friendship with a local notary. :)