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From this Tuesday July 1, anyone wanting to rent out their property as a tourist rental, temporary accommodation or room rental will need to register with a new government system before they can advertise it online.

 

The Ministry of Housing has created something called the Digital One-Stop Shop for Rentals. Once set up on the system, every rental property will get its own registration number that has to be displayed in online ads.

 

The system has been running on a voluntary basis for six months, but now it becomes mandatory. Digital platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com will have to show these registration numbers in their listings and report data to the government every month, or else face huge fines.

 

In a bit of an unexpected turn, the numbers show that people have actually been rushing to register, especially recently. From January 2 until last Friday, nearly 200,000 applications have been submitted. Most of these were for tourist rentals specifically.

 

Out of all these applications, about 90,000 have been approved, around 17,600 were rejected and more than 92,000 are still waiting to be processed.

 

The government says there's been a big surge in recent weeks. In just the last month since May 26, more than 125,000 new applications came in.

 

If you have a holiday home you rent out, this is something important to understand: this new registration system doesn't replace any local licenses you might need. Many towns and cities still require their own specific permits to run tourist accommodations. When you apply for the government registration, you'll need to show you have all the proper local permits too.

 

The General Union of Workers suggested last week that tourist apartment owners should also have to provide information about their employees and working conditions, but that would require changes to labour laws, so it’s on the backburner for the time being.

 

Once your application is approved, your registration number will work for one year. When it's time to renew, property owners have to provide an anonymous list of all the rental contracts they signed during that year, plus details about any changes to how they operate. This lets the government check that properties are actually being used for what they're registered for and operating legally.

 

The growth in tourist apartments has led to lots of illegal listings popping up and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs has been finding thousands of these illicit ads on rental websites. Just last Thursday, they got Booking.com to remove some 4,000 illegal listings after asking them to clean up their platform, and Airbnb ran into similar trouble recently.

 

Not everyone's happy with these new rules. The Spanish Federation of Tourist Housing and Apartments thinks the system will actually make the illegal rental problem worse and create more bureaucracy. They argue that landlords could be put off by all the red tape and procedures and choose to rent their properties under the table as an easier option.

 

However, the Spanish government is staunchly defending the new system as a practical step to bring more control to the short-term rental market, prevent fraud and hopefully ease some of the housing pressures that have been building up in many Spanish cities where tourist rentals have been blamed for reducing available housing for residents.

 

In any case, it’s part of the EU regulations, and every single member state will have to adopt a similar system at some time in the near future, so Spain is for once ahead of the game.

 

How Heniam can help

 

Based in Cartagena, the English-speaking team at Heniam & Associates specialises in Spanish property law and can guide you through the process of securing a tourist licence, obtaining community approval and meeting all regional and national requirements.

Whether you're starting from scratch or need to adapt to the latest legal updates, the experts are here to help you stay compliant and avoid risk.

Contact Heniam today for a free consultation and take the stress out of short-term rentals in Spain.

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