In a stunning announcement, the mayor of one of the world’s top tourist destinations, Barcelona, revealed on Friday that the Catalan city in Spain plans to completely eliminate vacation apartment rentals by November 2028.
This drastic measure was announced by Jaume Collboni, the left-wing Mayor who won an absolute majority in 2023. According to his administration, the aim is to combat the Catalan capital’s escalating housing crisis. As the mayor noted, this plan would make the city more livable for residents.
Over the last ten years, Barcelona has seen rent prices for local residents soar by an astonishing 68 percent. Moreover, the cost of buying a home has jumped nearly 40 percent. This has made housing increasingly unaffordable, particularly for young people who either suffer from the high rates of unemployment or live off of seasonal jobs. This has turned access to housing into a major driver of inequality in the city. Unfortunately, Barcelona is not alone in this trend.
The uncontrollable expansion of lucrative short-term tourist rentals has been a significant—if not the foremost—contributor to this problem. Local residents who call Barcelona home find themselves totally priced out of the market and are constantly pushed further and further out of their own hometown. While the national authorities of Spain seem happy to enjoy the economic benefits of the booming tourism sector, the residents of Barcelona (and other major tourist destinations in Spain) have been left to bear the burden of the housing crisis.
This ongoing crisis has led to protests demanding legal limitations on excessive tourism that has ruined their dreams of becoming homeowners or simply finding affordable housing.
Under the new plan, the city will completely ban the licenses of the 10,101 apartments that are currently approved as short-term rentals. These apartments will instead be made available for either rent or sale to the permanent residents of Barcelona. The local authorities of this beautiful Mediterranean city have also pledged to maintain a very thorough inspection scheme that will swiftly detect and then shut down illegal tourist apartments once the 2028 ban comes into effect.
This is indeed a bold move by Barcelona and, if enacted, will be one of the strictest crackdowns on short-term rentals by a major European tourist destination.
After Barcelona, Greece?
For quite some time, Greece has been considering further restrictions on the short-term rentals market. Such restrictions would place a cap on the number of nights property can be rented out as short-term vacation rentals, PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis had said in May.
“We are studying the Airbnb market mainly in Athens to see if we can logically limit short-term rentals, to free up more properties for long-term rentals,” he said.
“We will also see how much time we should allow in total during the year [for] a property [to] be rented through Airbnb-type platforms. We are studying [this] because it is a complex issue,” he added.
The Airbnb market in Greece is blamed for spiking prices and drying up the market for long-term rentals. Many Greek households struggle to find properties to rent.
Golden Visa holders scooped up multiple properties when the threshold for qualifying was only 250,000 euros ($270,272). Many of these were put out for nightly rentals.
Earlier, Mitsotakis had the threshold needed to qualify for the visas—with 5-year residency permits and valuable European Union passports for holders and their families—raised to 800,000 euros ($864,872) in popular areas.