The Government tightens its grip on tourist rentals with new control measures in the works, including a unified housing registry to veto illegal listings, stronger veto power for homeowner associations, higher taxes on tourist rentals, and investigations into deceptive practices by online portals. It also steps up monitoring of the actual growth of the phenomenon in the Spanish market. The aim is to have near real-time data on the spread of tourist housing so that all administrations — including autonomous communities and city councils — have up-to-date information to calibrate their regulations.
The Executive is finalizing the awarding of a public tender to hire a privately specialized firm to monitor the websites of major rental portals such as Airbnb, Booking, Vrbo, or Niumba (TripAdvisor) with the goal of understanding the supply of tourist-use housing neighborhood by neighborhood and month by month. The Secretary of State for Tourism, through the public company Segittur, is in the final stage before formalizing the contract, and the contracting committee has proposed awarding the service to Mabrian Technologies.
The Government also intends to maintain a permanent monitoring service for the supply of tourist flats in Spain’s major destinations by analyzing online rental portals to feed the large public database that forms the Tourism Intelligence System. Until now, information has come from experimental statistics developed by the INE on the evolution of the stock of tourist-use housing. But the public body only offers data on a semiannual basis, in February and August each year, and the Government seeks closer monitoring and monthly measurement of the tourist rental supply.
More information on regulation measures
The objective of the department led by Jordi Hereu is to gather new information to help autonomous communities and the relevant city councils adopt control and regulatory measures for tourist rental, as these administrations hold core competencies in this area.
The Government plans to provide fully public access to the month-by-month evolution of the aggregate supply of tourist housing by autonomous communities and provinces through Dataestur, and to further disaggregate the data in a restricted manner for public administrations until the stock of tourist flats can be known at the municipal level and even by neighborhood (census sections) through the Tourism Intelligence System.
The Ministry of Industry will launch this new service as a strictly statistical tool, operating in parallel to the new single registration window overseen by the Ministry of Housing. The one-stop portal, effective from January but expected to become fully functional on July 1, will grant a form of registration for each dwelling dedicated to temporary rental, without which online platforms cannot offer them and a real census will be created to curb irregular supply.
According to the official tender documents about to close, the Government seeks to enhance the ability to measure and monitor extreme, disruptive phenomena that could impact the short- and mid-term competitiveness of tourist destinations, as stated to justify hiring a private company for this work and financing it with European Recovery funds under the Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia.
The maximum budget for the contract was set at nearly 300,000 euros, including taxes, for three years of monitoring (about 98,000 euros per year with a three-year term). Mabrian Technologies won over three others (Informa D&B, Lighthouse Intelligence, and Peninsula Corporate Innovation) with the lowest bid, around 40,000 euros per year before VAT (roughly 48,400 euros annually in total).
“This information is already available and its usefulness to the sector has been demonstrated, so the proposal is to purchase this database long-term,” State that Mabrian Technologies, the public company under the Ministry of Industry, notes. “Maintaining access to data on tourist-use housing is essential and is a constant demand from destinations because there is no public source complete enough to allow tourism authorities to improve regulation and conditions for this type of lodging.”
The Government aims to tighten oversight of tourist flats and broaden the information available. The contract being nearly awarded will require the chosen company not only to locate and provide quantitative data on the tourist housing stock (numbers of listings, beds, and the share of tourist flats relative to total housing) but also to measure trends in listing prices, the average traveler rating, and the volume of guest reviews.
The Tourism Secretariat justifies using European funds to finance this web-tracking service for platforms like Airbnb and Booking as part of building the future Intelligent Destinations Platform, an initiative included in the Recovery Plan. The platform is designed to integrate public and private data to generate competitive intelligence for Spain’s tourism destinations.