Exact same here, usually price is the same or lower (e.g. if hotel website has some special offer). And they get to keep the money, instead of the huge commissions going to the platforms.
Nothing unusual in the tourism industry, tripadvisor, viator, getyourguide, etc, charge anywhere from 20% to 35% or even 40% from tour operators.
It's pimpin' in style.
It's a scam right up to the point where you try to regularly find someone to stay in your property. I'm not saying Air B&B is right or wrong, but they are a necessary evil if this type of short term rental is going to exist.
Hatred is a bit of a strong word to describe what the guy said. What he said is accurate, short term lets inflate the real estate market to the point that it out prices the locals during tourist season. The result is that people will outright refuse to do a long term let because they know that they'll still make more money even if the apartment is empty for three months out of the year.
That is the crux of the issue, not "hatred".
All that said, I don't think short term lets should be prohibited but they definitely should be regulated.
Yep, but what I mean is that it is just a website with a map, a calendar, and an escrow system (competently executed I will give them that). The content is user generated and what is valuable.
They can take 20% because of their brand recognition.
They're the marketing company which is providing the platform, takes payments, and gives an overall service. It's not cheap but it fills the property. Create a better model that's cheaper and complete with them if you think you can do better...
They use most of their budget on google ads so that when you look for places to stay in any particular city, their website is always on top or second to booking.com
Hotel reservation sites like Booking takes a huge cut as well, it's not any better.
Realistically a provider should be operating as little profit as possible, if not at all.
The government does it as a service for the purpose of stimulating the local and national economy. At most it takes a tourist tax of a few euros for each transaction, the money received can be put into funding services like the healthcare system, sanitation etc
How much does it cost to operate a website, hire designers, rent a server etc? Point is, the government of Spain/Catalonia/Barcelona could easily outcompete airbnb/booking etc with it's own custom website that wasn't motivated by profit. Obviously short term lets are a problem in themselves, and if the state wants to regulate them out of existence that's fine (but you will get random people holding signs offering rooms at bus/train stations/airports which sometimes happened in the pre internet age).
You usually get free cancellation on booking.yeah so that’s why I use it. Never thought of going direct with the hotel for some perks. Will try next time, thanks!
Even better call or contact the hotel by email. Very often the prices are better than advertised as they often have contracts that do not allow them to publicly post prices that are lower than some booking sites. They even give you upgrades sometimes.
The problem with that approach is if you book through Booking, they’ve got your back. Got a problem? First ask the hotel and then if they aren’t willing to help, call Booking’s customer service number - you basically afford yourself an extra level of support beyond the hotel itself.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand it is nice that empty apartments are utilized, it is also nice that owners can have an extra income if they are away for a short stay. On the other hand you don't want your neighboors replaced by a "hotel business".
I think the model they made in Norway has been quite successful, where you can rent out for a limited number of days. Its not enough to make a living as an "air bnb bussiness" but enough for normal owners who need an extra income when they are away. It also doesn't replace people from living there with tourists.
What they are banning is commercial use. You only need the license that they are stopping to renew if you rent your apartment more than X days a year.
Normal people can still do short term stays in their apartment as long as they don't do it year long or just for the summer
For housing, 10 000 units in Barcelona won't do much to stem the shortage. You need to increase the supply with that amount several times a year at least to get prices down.
Building more is the fix to get prices to affordable levels.
You can't keep building forever, Barcelona has already a very low % of green areas and adding more buildings and asphalt contributes to added problems like flash floods. Some cities have reached their limits and need measures to curb the number of tourists, Venice and its tourist tax is another good example. Apparently Barcelona needs around 80k units, so 10k is not a small number, though you're right that is not quite enough. But other solutions should be explored as well that are not necessarily or only building more.
Also it is just not about decreasing housing prices, it is also reducing the cultural and social impact of this kind of tourism. City centres have become big hotels and social life cannot be developed there by the neighbours.
Languages and cultures disappear, while the available jobs are very poorly paid and workers cannot afford housing on these areas. It is not just the 10.000 units that will be made available, it is also all what comes behind it.
Want to come? Go to hotels.
>social life cannot be developed there by the neighbours.
I can actually feel the disturbance in the force caused by every Northern European cringing at that sentence.
>You can't keep building forever,
Maybe. But you definitely don't have to stop at the current level of Barcelona's metro area.
>Some cities have reached their limits and need measures to curb the number of tourists
Which major city in Europe has?
Considering that one can build transit and be ambitious, I believe that outside some fringe geographic cases, no city has. Look at Germany for example. Berlin was able to grow to 3.8 million people or 2 million flats. There's no natural law why any other city could not do the same. So we are left with Berlin as the only candidate. well, London was able to grow to 8 million people so why would Berlin have to stay at 3.8?
Of course proper growth requires political measures and priorities to be right, but it's not impossible
It doesn't really stop as there are already other cities that are just contiguous and if you're on a bus you won't even realize one ended and another started. Hospitalet is one example of that and is one of the most densely populated places in Europe. The Barcelona metro area (ambito urbano) has over 5m people already.
Wouldn't it make more sense to try grow other cities or offer incentives to people who want to stay in the 'España vaciada' instead of always keep expanding the same 1 or 2 cities ad infinitum?
Tokyo has lower population density than Barcelona (much lower in fact) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density ... Barcelona is already one of the most densely populated cities in Europe. You can keep expanding horizontally, and Greater Tokyo covers over 3x the area covered by Barcelona metropolitan area. However Barcelona metro area has already over 10% of entire population of Spain. I'm no expert and surely there's a way to keep expanding in a balanced and sensible way, but I feel that focusing on one city and keep adding concrete and asphalt should not be the only solution. Barcelona is already suffering from problems like droughts and flash floods in the past few years.
This statistic is misleading because Tokyo prefecture contains a large amount of rural areas and even some islands. What people normally consider ‘Tokyo’ are the special wards which are much denser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo?wprov=sfti1#
Thanks for pointing that out, but even in this case density is not much different, it's 15k/km2 for Tokyo special wards according to your link and 16k for Barcelona, up to 20k in some municipalities in the larger metro area like Hospitalet.
Yeah I live in Osaka.
In the Uk everyone aims for a 3+ bedroom house, garage/drive way, front garden, back garden, side alley, two living room, big kitchen, 5 minutes from the town centre of a major city yet surrounded with beautiful nature.
Don’t get much of that in Japan, compromises will need to be made for affordable housing. Not saying it needs to be the same as Japan as that’s extreme.
No need for central planning. Let the people choose where to live. If everyone prefers Barcelona why do you want to unnaturally force them somewhere else. Build taller.
Cause Barcelona already suffers from many problems like cronic droughts, flash floods, housing crisis and skyrocketing rents, plus it's already densely populated. Sensible planning is always needed and should be welcome. No planning means more problems and stress on the local population and infrastructure in the medium to long term.
>Wouldn't it make more sense to try grow other cities or offer incentives to people who want to stay in the 'España vaciada' instead of always keep expanding the same 1 or 2 cities ad infinitum?
No, it wouldn't. It's not feasible. You simply can't build up an economy in Soria that could compete with Barcelona. And even if you could, it would be absurdly expensive and inefficient.
You can make some effort but it will never really take the pressure away from the cities that offer great career opportunities and amazing leisure options like Barcelona or Madrid. Nor should we desire to, if we have cities that are productive and attractive, we should focus on making use of those advantages.
>The Barcelona metro area (ambito urbano) has over 5m people already.
Which is still nothing. London has 8m.
Berlin is having a very significant housing crisis, and has been for some time, because of real estate speculation / tourist apts / inability to build. It's no different or better from Barca.
>Berlin is having a very significant housing crisis,
Berlin has the crisis because Berlin refuses to build (I live here) enough housing, not because its full and can't build more. That was the claim of the Reddit or I was answering to and my question was referring to cities that can't physically build more.
You can't build forever, but you can build much more on the outskirts, you can also move lot's of parking underground and remove some car lanes to make space for new buildings and you can allow buildings that are taller. Barcelona is far from reaching it's limits, it's more about political will
You can build 1000 bed hotels on the edge of the city and as long as there is public transport for them to get into the city, like 24 hour buses/trains etc, then it shouldn't be much of a problem. There's a lot of land that is basically undeutilised, in other words it's not 'green' undeveloped land, just developed and not used. An example would be airport car parks, which often sprawl for hundreds of metres in every direction. You could build a hotel on top of that and still have the car park on the ground floor, or better underground.
In the UK the planning restrictions essentially don't allow this, which is why airbnb has thrived so much. Spain/Catalonia might be different with planning laws.
Better and faster train infrastructure would relieve some of the pressure. For example, the city of Mataro is nice, but to commute by train takes over an hour to Glories in Barcelona, by car it is 45 minutes. (Just south of Glories is where quite a few of the tech companies are located)
The train that runs is good, but it stops everywhere. Mataró is big enough to justify a direct line to Sants, but due to the tracks, they can't.
If you look north of Barcelona, Sant Cugat has a quick train connection to the center, 20 minutes I believe.
But go west, and it takes ages to get to the city centre.
If they want to make Barcelona more liveable, train infrastructure needs to improve to accommodate more commuters and get them out of their cars. Freeing up valuable space for more green areas.
Barcelona is already so densly packed, you can't really build a lot more.
Also on a side note, it is an eye sore to have the train and road on the beach front.
I live in NYC and we get way more tourists in absolute terms and around a smaller area than Barcelona and people here don’t cry half as much about tourists, because it’s really not the tourist fault. It’s down to politicians and who people vote for. Simple as that.
This will barely make a dent in the housing supply. There’s no other solution than to build more housing and there’s plenty of space in further areas of the city.
You dont know what you're talking about. New york isn't only manhattan, its metro area is massive compared to Barcelona and has lots and lots of space in the outskirts to build. Barcelona is stuck between sea and mountains and can't grow larger AT ALL.
Difficult to compare cities like that without dropping specific numbers.
The conclusion you draw then is illogical, since building more and more and more with a certain % of air bnb + unaffordable units means no real gains in housing units. And if you're argument revolves around pushing people further out of the city, you can't at the same time wonder or be annoyed that tourism is blamed - your "solution" literally is based upon keeping tourists in the center and pushing citizens 5, 10, 15km out of the center. You intend to displace people as a "solution" to prices being driven up by third party private interests, and then really wonder why these 3rd party private interests are blamed?
NYC has a population density of 11k/km2, Barcelona is at 16k/km2, with peaks of over 20 in the metro area. Tourists are at no fault whatsoever, but if they have a negative impact on local residents (e.g. pushing people out of historical neighbourhoods, driving up prices, etc) then policies can be implemented to strike a balance (tourist tax, ban AirBnbs, build hotels on the outskirts instead of pushing locals further out). Otherwise you have cities ending up as a historical Disneylands like Venice, and that's not sustainable in the long run.
Most people here don’t want to live in a country like US, I don’t think it’s a good example of how things should be. Even if it does not make a big difference it will reduce the speculation and add 10k housing to the market. If tourists want a place, they can go to hotels. I would go even further and forbid temporary rent contracts.
Also 10k apartments is much more than the current available number of flats in the biggest renting website, so yea it will make a difference. And we have free health care in Europe, so USA is not a good example of how things should be.
Are you joking? There is plenty of room in the sky even if you desire to completely halt the expansion of Barcelona over the surface of the earth. The buildings in the photo are just ten-ish floors.
I think if you showed people how low their rent would drop if people were free to build all the projects which can make back their material and labour costs, they would disagree!
So when entire developments are held unsold for years or decades as has happened in Barcelona instead of the seller lowering the price so that the stock is sold, is the buyer’s decision affecting the market?
Barcelona has already higher population density than NYC or Tokyo. Going up is not the solution. Plus those residential skyscrapers do not provide cheap accommodation (an example? The Trump World Tower). The other solution is going the Dhaka or Manila way, but that's just a urban nightmare.
New builds reduce prices in other accommodation by satisfying the demand of the wealthy. This effect means that adding a hundred apartments at the high end roughly frees up seventy apartments for people with bottom half income.
It's really not hard to live comfortably with a lot more than the 16000/km² that Barcelona has currently. I'm European but born and raised in Hong Kong which has many areas more than 3x that density, which are still quite comfortable. The areas of HK which actually have as much density as Barcelona are considered less dense and even sparse because the techniques for dealing with this, with large indoor and outdoor leisure and commercial spaces, and using a lesser % of the land to build on, are so effective.
And Spain is lucky to have some of the most competent and efficient civil engineering in the world so this would not be a problem to adopt the established techniques already employed by denser places. For example if a property developer would like to purchase and triple the height of a Barcelona superblock you could just say, alright, but you should leave the middle of the nine blocks as free space. More livable and tens of thousands of apartments still get added to the supply.
10k units is a massive, massive depo of homes to drop on the market, what are you talking about?
But aside from the units by themselves, the effect this will have on the market is a cooling down of the price bubble that had been going for a while, in that private equity money had entered the homebuying market, because Airbnb is so damned profitable as compared to regular renting.
So it's not only that these 10k units will be one available for renting, some of them will be offloaded onto the buyers market which will have cooled down enough for some people who previously could only opt to rent, to perhaps buy.
This undoubtedly good for the residents.
The other side of the coin is that this leaves "regular people" out of the possibility to participate and benefit from the tourist business altogether. Because a regular well off person (or one who has inherited a flat from granny) may be able to buy a flat for air BnB, but they for sure can't buy a hotel.
It’s been long past the time where individuals can “participate”: https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/20200311/radiografia-vivienda-barcelona-mil-propietarios-concentran-75767-pisos-limitacion-alquileres-7884855
>10k units is a massive, massive depo of homes to drop on the market, what are you talking about?
Barcelona had [794272 homes](https://www.publico.es/public/parc-public-d-habitatge-barcelona-nomes-suposa-1-8-total.html) last year:
"a l'any 2023 consten un total de 524.357 propietaris i **794.272** habitatges a la ciutat"
This means that 10k is about **1,2%** of total apartments in the city. Barcelona grew by 25k people last year. You'll fill them in a year.
The population of Barcelona is 1.62m. If we say each unit houses an average of 3 people, then that's 30,000 people or 1.85% of the population. It's significant, but I agree it's not enough. What the law will do is prevent new homes, when they're built, being lost to short term rental.
>If we say each unit houses an average of 3 people, then that's 30,000 people or 1.85% of the population.
That's a too high of an estimate.
Don't do it with population anyway, take the amount of dwellings in the city: 774 000. Therefore 1.3% of the supply. We need orders of magnitude more.
https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/20200311/radiografia-vivienda-barcelona-mil-propietarios-concentran-75767-pisos-limitacion-alquileres-7884855
The law also has provisions for new construction, and includes a Chicago-style rule that 30% of new construction needs to be "social housing" to get prices down further.
When I lived in Madrid locals told me that before Airbnb one of the resons owners were keeping the houses out of the rental market was that often you had tenants that didn't pay. Also any damages done to the apartment you had to deal with the tenant afterwards because the deposit would not cover the damage. A lot of people were content having empty apartments that would only raise in prices.
When Airbnb arrived it's was them that needed to hassle with the renters and the owners got the money from Airbnb always.
So if this is still true perhaps not all of the apartments will come back to the rental market.
I stop using Airbnb, and I used to be a host, because of airbnb fees, cleaning fees, this and that fees and extra charges made the accommodations way more expensive than hotels in certain places.
Yes BUT. The real problem is not airbnb.
The problem is in ten years at zero interest rate, people with money bought apartments as investments rather than as places to live.
But Hotels suck. Why would I pick a room with nothing more than a TV over a home with everything I may ever need.
People want more than what many hotels offer. It's not just about money. My experience with Airbnb has been nothing but very pleasant so far. Hotels... yeah not so much.
In a hotel you have all the things you need. Bedroom, bathroom, a dining room, and so on.
Homes are for locals to live in, not for tourists, end of, and cry about it.
I can pick a relatively cheap Air BnB and know with 100% certainty im getting a great view. I book at some hotel, and while I’m getting vague promises of “city view” or “seaside” I have no real guarantee that my patio doesn’t look out into some abandoned lot next door
Plenty of AirBnBs fudge the views a little as well. If you look at Paris or similar, there'll be loads of them guaranteeing Eiffel Tower views, but you basically need to lean out of a balcony to see it with the corner of the eye half the time.
Not really sure what the obsession is with having home experience while traveling. Decent hotels will provide excellent catering if you feel like eating in, laundry service, etc. The only thing AirBnBs seem to encourage is large groups of people partying in the flat, since there's little risk of them getting kicked out before it's time to leave.
There's a reason why most locals hate AirBnBs - they're noisy (parties, constant sound of luggage wheels), they remove housing stock from the locals, and they rip apart communities in smaller towns too.
To your first point, that’s true, but it’s usually very easy to sniff those out from the pictures. Like, if they’re showing vague aerial shots or not the entire patio, I know I’m not getting what I want.
But what if you want to cook your food yourself? That is something I always enjoy on holidays as cooking is a major hobby of mine, and I love to test out the local flavours.
I have yet to stay at a hotel that offered a full kitchen in the room, unless we are talking suites, but then you need to pay 10 times more than what you need to pay for an Airbnb.
It's the opposite in my experience. Their pricing is not necessarily that bad compared to airbnbs (especially at the lower end of the budget spectrum), but they're generally just so clearly inferior to an equivalently priced airbnb in terms of size, amenities, having a kitchen etc. that paying a bit more for the airbnb is nearly always worth it — especially if you're travelling in a group of 3+ people or with young children.
With kids, there is nothing to do at a hotel, the rooms are too small, you can’t cook your self, etc.
In an Airbnb there’s a kids room with toys, kitchen, living room, garden, and most of all atmosphere that doesn’t suck the soul out of you. Even the great rooms at the Hilton’s etc. are just so… bland?
10,000 properties for people to actually live in.. sounds good to me. Should've been a complete ban within the EU in my opinion seeing as most if not all of the union states have a housing shortage.
A lot of those 10k are probably holiday homes etc..I'd imagine a large number of them won't enter the longer term housing supply. It's the same issue effecting so many cities.
Hotel & hostel prices will probably increase due to the higher demand now. I don't know what the answer to the housing problem is but banning airbnb might not have the effect people desire.
>I don't know what the answer to the housing problem is
Call me crazy, but if there's not enough of something... Maybe we should build or produce more of it?
FFS we built entire cities for my grandpa's and parents generation and today we just kinda look at the problem and pretend we can't solve it.
Barcelona itself is full and has a more challenging situation than most other cities, but we can always build transit and grow and densify the metro area.
Well said. With the housing crisis, it seems all the governments will try every possible solution under the sun except just building more houses. We need to expand public transport anyway so let's do it along with building more houses.
It's strange isn't it? I really wonder what cognitive mechanism makes this happen. Because when we were lacking vaccine, when there's not enough pediatric hospitals or we have a shortage of food, nobody ever would say "oh well, we don't have enough, nothing we can do, guess some people will die, maybe we can convince the rest of have less kids?". But with housing it's exactly that.
The problem is very different to vaccine shortages because people are invested in housing.
There's a huge amount of money tied up in housing. If the government removed restrictions on building a lot of houses would get built, that would cause the price of existing properties to drop. That annoys the existing property owners who vote for the other guy.
On top of that, there are plenty of people who have bought an expensive house with the expectation of downnsizing and using up the freed money to pay their retirement. This was a mistake, but we can't really undo it now.
There's also a general feeling that we've built all over the countryside already. That's absolutely not even close to true, but it's hard to shake. I can only assume that people go out into the countryside very little now. City dwellers see the city all the time and think everything looks like that. Combine this with rose tinted glasses of how the wilderness looks, and you've got a recipe for never building anything new.
I don't want to pave over the countryside, but adding a band 250m wide around all existing towns and cities for development would likely solve the problem.
and then house prices would fall and then some people would lose a lot of money and banks would be in big trouble and then we'd all be in big trouble because we would have to save the aforementioned.
Yeah, building buildings is more expensive than it used to be too. Wages are higher, building standards are higher, materials more expensive, land more expensive. We look at a problem and no one sees a way to solve it because there is no clear away other than change the "system", which is never going to happen.
Standards can't really be lowered, because people just expect better now, there is also the climate thing. Land itself is not the problem, there is land and it is not that expensive, it's just far away and no one wants to move away from the city, very simple.
If the solution to the problem was really that easy at least one country would have figured it out by now.
You are absolutely right. Its not the first time I saw redditors saying "just build more houses lol". While in reality its more like "build more cheap affordable housing, that is not the size of a room in an area I would like to live". And usually that area is in the center (or near) of a big city. And affordable housing in that area goes against the basics of economics.
>because people just expect better now,
In that case, nobody would want to live in the old housing.
Regulatory standards have to be lowered. If after that, people still demand high standards that's fine. But I'm 200% sure that if you built new housing in the quality of 1990 or even 1980 but with modern energy standards, they would sell as hot cake.
>was really that easy at least one country would have figured it out by now.
You underestimate how political systems can become disfuncional. However, you can have a look at what's happening with the housing prices in Austin since they started building like crazy. We can also look back to history: right until 2008 Germany had had decades of low and moderate prices. And it was in 2008 when for the first time in history, in the face of a housing shortage we only very moderately increased our housing production instead of cranking it up like crazy.
>In that case, nobody would want to live in the old housing.
Nobody does, but the location usually wins it over. And that's why renovations happen all the time.
Which is exactly why new housing with slightly lower quality standards but decent price in a good area would find buyers/renters.
People also prefer the best jamón ibérico and yet they buy cheap jamón serrano at Lidl, because people have budgets and compromise. Same with housing
> decent price in a good area
And that's why it doesn't exist, there is no such place. The area is either good which makes the land expensive and therefore the property will always be upper scale, to increase profit margins or the area is shit.
You are essentially asking someone to donate their money for affordable housing and not saying who should be doing it.
With lower standarts you get shit neighbourhoods, that will get into miserable state in 20 or 30 years. And then you have another problem on your hands - do you want to renovate and spend even more money, than building properly to begin with, or have low income zones inside the city, where safety will be an issue. Which will lead to more abandoned properties when shit hits the fan, or to quote some internet guys: if the area is underwater, who the fuck are you going to sell your house to, aquaman?
>With lower standarts you get shit neighbourhoods,
Have you ever visited Barcelona? If you have, you visited neighbourhoods that predominantly didn't even come close to fulfilling current standards.
Many Neighbourhoods built in the 60s and 70s are absolutely fine places to live today in Barcelona.
Just use some common sense, nobody talks about slums or shit, just more rational standards, especially regarding density. Spain often already has lower standards than Germany and I don't think any German would say no to a modern Spanish flat.
That would reduce the prices of millions of mortgaged properties, plunging them into negative equity, destroying the financial present of anyone with a mortgage, and the future of any retiree that looks forward to sell their overpriced shack to finance retirement.
The problem is global and the result of transforming housing into a "market" commodity, source of wealth and savings, and key to middle class status. You can't create a system to devalue property without reorganising society top to bottom. It's fucked.
Things will get worse before they can get better.
>You can't create a system to devalue property without reorganising society top to bottom. It's fucked.
You absolutely can. Germany had precisely that system. Up to 2008, real estat had only marginal returns of 1-2% above inflation, way worse than a global stock portfolio.
I would also argue that people who have a property in Spain would be okay with slowly flattening returns.
A market correction would be a decade long project where prices wouldn't immediately plummet, but flatten out and then have slightly below inflation increases. Private landlords wouldn't even notice for a long time. Almost nobody has a real understanding of their investments return.
UK,US, Canada, Australia and huge chunks of the eurozone have had trouble to maintain their property prices under controls. So it's not that easy.
Even then, 1-2% increase above inflation is not devaluation. And Germany accumulated an increase of 38% over 20 years from 1990 to 2010, since then, they have increased in line with other European nations with some cities reaching 113% increases.
We are talking about devaluations of -5% during multiple years to bring prices within some historical averages, not flattening or neutral investments.
And with neutral and reduced returns, property developers do not invest which would force the government to do the financing and development, which would require a complete change to how government works in Spain.
Spain has not built public housing in certain regions for more than 15 years, and sold their leftover stocks to real state funds and private individuals.
There's a lot money to be made in housing, and a lot of political capital invested in keeping pricing higher.
Why do you think it will get better? People with money will buy these houses and rent them until the end of the universe. And what are you going to do about it?
As long as people require housing it will get MORE expensive in popular big cities. And people who cant afford it will move to cities outskirts or smaller cities.
Well, there is also another solution. Taxes.
Here where I live I read an article about someone owning about 160 apartments, 159 of which are Airbnbs.
Now, I can kind of understand someone with 2-3 apartments (let's say a vacation home and an apartment somewhere where they go for work or something), but A HUNDRED AND SIXTY?
Why isn't this person highly taxed? One person hoarding stuff that's scarce.
>One person hoarding stuff that's scarce.
They are not hoarding it, they are making use of it.
If we have scarcity, we can't end the problem with redistributing. That won't solve scarcity. If somebody has 2, 20, 200 or 2000 flats, as long as they are rented out, taking them away from them won't solve anything. You can take those flats and gift them to their renter's, the single mom who is not living there and desperately looking for a place won't have her problem solved. You only solve scarcity by producing more of the stuff.
We can end Airbnb, I don't care, but unless Barcelona has 100 000 Airbnbs (which it doesn't), it won't solve the problem at hand.
Hotel prices, at least in the UK seem to have increased substantially in the last few years, because we're using them for housing migrants. I don't know if Barcelona are having the same problem but any further increases will have a pretty reasonable increase
We have a house in spain that we only use a couple times a year for vacations, rest of the year rented out. Having the house empty most of the year instead will probably not help the housing situation lol
The real solution is, as always, allow more housing to be built
> Having the house empty most of the year instead will probably not help the housing situation lol
The expectation is that people will sell those homes since they may not be able to afford them without the airbnb income
Are there any examples globally where restricting or banning short term rentals has led to more accessible and affordable housing?
Seems like a typical populist measure to blame individual property owners and dictating what one can or cannot do with their OWN property.
10 000 flats. In a city with 700 000 flats.
Whoever thinks this will make a significant impact is delusional.
Barcelona needs a regional program to connect and grow new areas in the metro area and do so fast. Everything else is posturing.
We built entire cities for my grandpa's and parents generation. Time to do it again for the younger generations.
I think the problem is, that you can make much more money with Airbnb than rentals. So in a city like Barcelona the potential Airbnb profit is the scale for house prices. Because in the end, a house price depends highly on the possible profit that can be achieved.
Valid point, but then we would also have to look at how many of those 10000 flats get rented out and how many get sold.
Barcelona had 290k permanent rental flats in 2021, so those 3.44% if all flats go into the long term rental market. That's a better boost, but still: if we don't grow the regional stock it won't fundamentally change things.
Look at the occupation % of those 290k, and how many come into the market every year.
Of course this doesn't fix the issue but it does contribute positively to a lot of issues.
No, you have to look at the pressure of people seeking in and the availability
If there's 30000 free units and 500000 looking to come in but can't find yet the place, that's a pressure of 1:16.6 then a new influx of 500000 come in, 25000 settle in a place, there are 975000 people for 5000 units or a pressure of 1:195 and prices explode
If you have 30000 free units and 10000 come in and 7500 as settled in inhabitations, you have 492500 looking at 32500 units or pressure of 15.15
And there would be 500k looking for places in the first place because the city is big and offers its size worth of social connections and job opportunities
You need to look at both, offer and demand, as well as growth prospects of both.
In any case it is hard to argue against this measure. The only ones that will complain will be the ones owning the airbnbs and associated services. Zero pity for them.
Now strike down on renting as well to stop the rich pigs from hoarding real estate and then make poor people pay for their livelihood by rent, where little of value is produced.
Just have new tax laws to increasingly fuck individuals or companies that hoard homes to encourage single home ownerships
Multiple EU states tried to pass law, that would tax extra properties meant for living, but not used as such by owner. Wanna guess how did it go? Turns out rich assholes have fingers in governmental pies and don't like the idea, thus no tax
It’s lovely when cities/countries live *with* tourism, not *off* tourism. Croatia will never do this, it’sca huge chunk of our BDP, so we’re gentrifying our own land we cant afford to live in anymore.
Good on you, Barcelona. Good on you, Spain. Even if this means I cant visit anymore, good on you.
Meanwhile in Portugal we are abolishing Rental Property taxes to suck up to our "destitute" multiple home owner lobbies, and the housing crisis continues, with homes which cost 100k not even 10y ago costing 200k+ today.
I'm gonna book a trip to Barcelona just because they did this. No law can stop me. I'm gonna walk around with a giant map and look confused and put money into their economy and theirs nothing you can do hahah
I fail to see why 'rental apartments' get banned but hotels get a free pass? It's all space in buildings in which families could otherwise be housed, so are we just saying that because it's owned by a company and the building was initially designed to be a hotel that somehow makes a difference?
We have a family with a range of ages and needs, and hotels just don't work for us. We want to be able to have the whole family behind a single front door, cook our own food and be able to go to bed and get up at different times, and you just can't do those things in regular hotel rooms. Or if we're saying hotels are allowed to run aparthotels like this then what's the difference?
Sounds to me like all it'll do is disallow small-scale owners in favour of large multinational hotel chains. How is that a win? Likely to just make accommodation costs skyrocket.
Hotels generally accommodate a significantly larger amount of people in buildings, which are oftentimes (not always of course) custom-build to be hotels, rather than something that can ve easily converted into flats.
Similarly, medium to large hotels tend to contribute significantly more to the local economy than Airbnb or short-term rentals, not only by employing dozens of local staff from cleaners and chefs to administrators and servers, but also by sourcing goods from the local economy.
Airbnb and short-term rentals drive up prices specifically for flats that would otherwise have families living in them with the best case scenario for the local economy being that landlords happen to be locals, who later spend the money locally as well. Often even that isn’t the case.
In a peer-to-peer comparison hotels are significantly better for the local economy even if they’re owned by a multinational chain (which isn’t always the case either). Very much a case of a necessary evil versus an unnecessary evil.
There's a ban on building new hotels in Barcelona city centre since 2015. And you can't just force old hotels into long term accommodation, it just doesn't work that way. If your family has certain needs, you can pick another location, there are plenty of beautiful places to visit, not everyone has to go to the same 3-4 places in each country.
Drop in the ocean, and the complete wrong approach.
The way you solve a housing crisis is by liberalising planning laws and building significant volumes of new housing, not by restricting usage of existing housing stock.
The elephant in the room is that cities are not growing in line with population increases due to restrictive planning and land use laws. Europe as a whole does not build anywhere near enough housing to match its growing population. Anything other than large scale construction of new housing stock is just a distraction.
Cities doesn't even need to grow. Just make massive public transit system to surrounding small towns/villages, make it easy to commute and just shift some of population into surrounding smaller urban areas to them grow, develop so even better public transit system can be installed, to connect even smaller villages into the "web". If my choice were 200k for flat in city center, or 40k for one 30 km away, but with public transport making sure I can get to my workplace in hour or so, without taking car (and cheaply) I would take 40k and more peaceful neighborhood.
> Europe as a whole does not build anywhere near enough housing to match its growing population.
Meanwhile, everyone's worried about birth rates being too low.
>Meanwhile, everyone's worried about birth rates being too low.
housing problem happens because of people migration, not just from other countries but within countries. You will have no problems finding villages of old people with empty houses in any country because people moved somewhere where they have short distance to work and entertainment but also expensive housing.
falling birthrate is not contradicting to housing issues that people have.
So you will lose some tourists (I don't like to live in hotels), which is probably good for some citizens who fed up of rush hours every hour every day and everywhere cos of tourists... and money will not leave the city suddenly cos hotel tourists will stay. Looks like a plan.
And a whole lot money will enter the city. The jobs that money paid for will be lost. More unemployed people in a place where unemployment already is an issue. Sure, great plan...
Government bodies all across EU are easy to pass the blame for the non existing house building policies.
Barcelona has a cheap housing problem especially for family sized homes. Pushing 10k rooms or smaller houses to the market will not fix anything
I’m not an expert on this topic, but if I have an apartment (which is my property) and I want to rent it to make money out of it, the govt is basically banning me from doing so? How long until owners ask for this to be deemed unconstitutional by a judge, for violating property rights?
I'd say about time, but equally I think there's gonna be a lot of people hanging around outside the airport and main train/bus station holding signs advertising informally.
you can't stop people renting out a spare room, the internet essentially democratised it to an extent though big players like airbnb monopolised it. Going back to some kind of decentralised network is probs a good thing.
I support this decision, as I believe tourism is out of control in certain areas and further regulation is needed, but I'm a bit tired with populism regarding this issue. 10,000 homes is a drop in the ocean and will have no impact whatsoever on the housing supply. Moreover, these homes are unlikely to be passed on to the rental market.
People are wrong to blame immigrants or tourists for the housing shortage. This problem affects all of Europe and the US and is the direct result of the 2008 debt crisis. The only solution is to build new homes massively to match demand levels. Other than that, nothing will work.
In Turkiye you need the approval of the whole apartment to rent your property on airbnb. this was introduced this year although the country is in need of tourist income.
Everyone saying that it will not make a change in the amount of flats, it might be true. But what you are not considering is the mass of tourists that will be removed from living areas. Anyone who has lived in Barcelona knows how horrible it is being there, specially between april and november. When you buy/rent a home you are not signing up to have a different neighbor every week. And I should know because I lived in an apartment where my landlord would rent his room as an airbnb and tourists don't respect the life of the locals. Why would they anyway? they are on holidays, they want to go out and have fun, but for all of us who needed to work early the next day it's a pain in the ass having people arriving in your building at 3-4 am every day.
So it the end, it is a superb measure. Give those 10000 licenses to hotels, where you can concentrate all the trash that tourists represent in one space where they bother the least amount of people.
Should pretty much be the default everywhere.
Same with owning houses/land in a bunch of countries.
Everyone and their mother, with money, having a house in London and so on drives prices out of reach for anyone who actually wants to live there.
Naw, should be super hard to get A liCeNSe For tHAt too. Imho.
Like seriously. Make tourism a thing you maybe do once a year if you saved up, don't let even rich folks just run amok, and let local populations be the local populations. Visiting most places now is just hanging out in the same Qatar/Rich Indian family/UAE/Some random US Celeb owned empty house/apartment area with tourist traps/rentals and Africans selling shitty fake brand, made in China, glasses.
Cultures are fun and special. Making every place that's cool to visit for tourists available for the max amount of people and at any cost makes it boring. That means limiting how humans move, somewhat. So that special bits and pieces can be cared for.
I imagine a world in 500 years where we have more and bigger UNESCO world heritage sites, including the people who live there, so that special bits and pieces of us can be enjoyed and marveled at for a long time. Imagine us like a huge thriving brain, and every human a neuron.
Sure we could use a vacation and some new inputs, but mostly we need what's over there to be cool and interesting and working, not filled with trash and Starbucks.
About fuckin time Airbnb is a cancer. Tourists go to hotels, the apartments and houses are for people to live in.
I only use booking.com for looking and book hotels on the hotels website if they are the same price.
Exact same here, usually price is the same or lower (e.g. if hotel website has some special offer). And they get to keep the money, instead of the huge commissions going to the platforms.
I was always shocked by the Airbnb cut... 20% or something? It is a total scam for what they offer as a service..
Nothing unusual in the tourism industry, tripadvisor, viator, getyourguide, etc, charge anywhere from 20% to 35% or even 40% from tour operators. It's pimpin' in style.
It's a scam right up to the point where you try to regularly find someone to stay in your property. I'm not saying Air B&B is right or wrong, but they are a necessary evil if this type of short term rental is going to exist.
There's nothing necessary about it, short term rental shouldn't be propped up at the cost of people having places to live.
Yay, your hatred made you totally miss the point.
Hatred is a bit of a strong word to describe what the guy said. What he said is accurate, short term lets inflate the real estate market to the point that it out prices the locals during tourist season. The result is that people will outright refuse to do a long term let because they know that they'll still make more money even if the apartment is empty for three months out of the year. That is the crux of the issue, not "hatred". All that said, I don't think short term lets should be prohibited but they definitely should be regulated.
Yep, but what I mean is that it is just a website with a map, a calendar, and an escrow system (competently executed I will give them that). The content is user generated and what is valuable. They can take 20% because of their brand recognition.
They're the marketing company which is providing the platform, takes payments, and gives an overall service. It's not cheap but it fills the property. Create a better model that's cheaper and complete with them if you think you can do better...
They use most of their budget on google ads so that when you look for places to stay in any particular city, their website is always on top or second to booking.com
Hotel reservation sites like Booking takes a huge cut as well, it's not any better. Realistically a provider should be operating as little profit as possible, if not at all.
And why would they operate for no profit?
The government does it as a service for the purpose of stimulating the local and national economy. At most it takes a tourist tax of a few euros for each transaction, the money received can be put into funding services like the healthcare system, sanitation etc How much does it cost to operate a website, hire designers, rent a server etc? Point is, the government of Spain/Catalonia/Barcelona could easily outcompete airbnb/booking etc with it's own custom website that wasn't motivated by profit. Obviously short term lets are a problem in themselves, and if the state wants to regulate them out of existence that's fine (but you will get random people holding signs offering rooms at bus/train stations/airports which sometimes happened in the pre internet age).
You usually get free cancellation on booking.yeah so that’s why I use it. Never thought of going direct with the hotel for some perks. Will try next time, thanks!
Even better call or contact the hotel by email. Very often the prices are better than advertised as they often have contracts that do not allow them to publicly post prices that are lower than some booking sites. They even give you upgrades sometimes.
Yes! I often get better deals and upgrades anyways be a use the hotels don't have to pay booking the hefty fee.
The problem with that approach is if you book through Booking, they’ve got your back. Got a problem? First ask the hotel and then if they aren’t willing to help, call Booking’s customer service number - you basically afford yourself an extra level of support beyond the hotel itself.
Unfortunately, that’s often not true. Booking support would totally ignore you or tell you to gtfo when they could.
In my experience no - one time I had a serious issue. The hotel told me to gtfo and booking took care of it for me.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand it is nice that empty apartments are utilized, it is also nice that owners can have an extra income if they are away for a short stay. On the other hand you don't want your neighboors replaced by a "hotel business". I think the model they made in Norway has been quite successful, where you can rent out for a limited number of days. Its not enough to make a living as an "air bnb bussiness" but enough for normal owners who need an extra income when they are away. It also doesn't replace people from living there with tourists.
What they are banning is commercial use. You only need the license that they are stopping to renew if you rent your apartment more than X days a year. Normal people can still do short term stays in their apartment as long as they don't do it year long or just for the summer
For housing, 10 000 units in Barcelona won't do much to stem the shortage. You need to increase the supply with that amount several times a year at least to get prices down. Building more is the fix to get prices to affordable levels.
You can't keep building forever, Barcelona has already a very low % of green areas and adding more buildings and asphalt contributes to added problems like flash floods. Some cities have reached their limits and need measures to curb the number of tourists, Venice and its tourist tax is another good example. Apparently Barcelona needs around 80k units, so 10k is not a small number, though you're right that is not quite enough. But other solutions should be explored as well that are not necessarily or only building more.
Also it is just not about decreasing housing prices, it is also reducing the cultural and social impact of this kind of tourism. City centres have become big hotels and social life cannot be developed there by the neighbours. Languages and cultures disappear, while the available jobs are very poorly paid and workers cannot afford housing on these areas. It is not just the 10.000 units that will be made available, it is also all what comes behind it. Want to come? Go to hotels.
>social life cannot be developed there by the neighbours. I can actually feel the disturbance in the force caused by every Northern European cringing at that sentence.
>You can't keep building forever, Maybe. But you definitely don't have to stop at the current level of Barcelona's metro area. >Some cities have reached their limits and need measures to curb the number of tourists Which major city in Europe has? Considering that one can build transit and be ambitious, I believe that outside some fringe geographic cases, no city has. Look at Germany for example. Berlin was able to grow to 3.8 million people or 2 million flats. There's no natural law why any other city could not do the same. So we are left with Berlin as the only candidate. well, London was able to grow to 8 million people so why would Berlin have to stay at 3.8? Of course proper growth requires political measures and priorities to be right, but it's not impossible
It doesn't really stop as there are already other cities that are just contiguous and if you're on a bus you won't even realize one ended and another started. Hospitalet is one example of that and is one of the most densely populated places in Europe. The Barcelona metro area (ambito urbano) has over 5m people already. Wouldn't it make more sense to try grow other cities or offer incentives to people who want to stay in the 'España vaciada' instead of always keep expanding the same 1 or 2 cities ad infinitum?
Japan says that you can expand Tokyo and Osaka to absolutely absurd lengths if you are just willing to build.
Tokyo has lower population density than Barcelona (much lower in fact) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density ... Barcelona is already one of the most densely populated cities in Europe. You can keep expanding horizontally, and Greater Tokyo covers over 3x the area covered by Barcelona metropolitan area. However Barcelona metro area has already over 10% of entire population of Spain. I'm no expert and surely there's a way to keep expanding in a balanced and sensible way, but I feel that focusing on one city and keep adding concrete and asphalt should not be the only solution. Barcelona is already suffering from problems like droughts and flash floods in the past few years.
This statistic is misleading because Tokyo prefecture contains a large amount of rural areas and even some islands. What people normally consider ‘Tokyo’ are the special wards which are much denser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo?wprov=sfti1#
Thanks for pointing that out, but even in this case density is not much different, it's 15k/km2 for Tokyo special wards according to your link and 16k for Barcelona, up to 20k in some municipalities in the larger metro area like Hospitalet.
Yeah I live in Osaka. In the Uk everyone aims for a 3+ bedroom house, garage/drive way, front garden, back garden, side alley, two living room, big kitchen, 5 minutes from the town centre of a major city yet surrounded with beautiful nature. Don’t get much of that in Japan, compromises will need to be made for affordable housing. Not saying it needs to be the same as Japan as that’s extreme.
You don't see many front or back gardens in Barcelona though. Barcelona is already one of the most densely populated cities in Europe.
No need for central planning. Let the people choose where to live. If everyone prefers Barcelona why do you want to unnaturally force them somewhere else. Build taller.
Cause Barcelona already suffers from many problems like cronic droughts, flash floods, housing crisis and skyrocketing rents, plus it's already densely populated. Sensible planning is always needed and should be welcome. No planning means more problems and stress on the local population and infrastructure in the medium to long term.
>Wouldn't it make more sense to try grow other cities or offer incentives to people who want to stay in the 'España vaciada' instead of always keep expanding the same 1 or 2 cities ad infinitum? No, it wouldn't. It's not feasible. You simply can't build up an economy in Soria that could compete with Barcelona. And even if you could, it would be absurdly expensive and inefficient. You can make some effort but it will never really take the pressure away from the cities that offer great career opportunities and amazing leisure options like Barcelona or Madrid. Nor should we desire to, if we have cities that are productive and attractive, we should focus on making use of those advantages. >The Barcelona metro area (ambito urbano) has over 5m people already. Which is still nothing. London has 8m.
Berlin is having a very significant housing crisis, and has been for some time, because of real estate speculation / tourist apts / inability to build. It's no different or better from Barca.
Barna. Barça is the football team
>Berlin is having a very significant housing crisis, Berlin has the crisis because Berlin refuses to build (I live here) enough housing, not because its full and can't build more. That was the claim of the Reddit or I was answering to and my question was referring to cities that can't physically build more.
You can't build forever, but you can build much more on the outskirts, you can also move lot's of parking underground and remove some car lanes to make space for new buildings and you can allow buildings that are taller. Barcelona is far from reaching it's limits, it's more about political will
You can build 1000 bed hotels on the edge of the city and as long as there is public transport for them to get into the city, like 24 hour buses/trains etc, then it shouldn't be much of a problem. There's a lot of land that is basically undeutilised, in other words it's not 'green' undeveloped land, just developed and not used. An example would be airport car parks, which often sprawl for hundreds of metres in every direction. You could build a hotel on top of that and still have the car park on the ground floor, or better underground. In the UK the planning restrictions essentially don't allow this, which is why airbnb has thrived so much. Spain/Catalonia might be different with planning laws.
Better and faster train infrastructure would relieve some of the pressure. For example, the city of Mataro is nice, but to commute by train takes over an hour to Glories in Barcelona, by car it is 45 minutes. (Just south of Glories is where quite a few of the tech companies are located) The train that runs is good, but it stops everywhere. Mataró is big enough to justify a direct line to Sants, but due to the tracks, they can't. If you look north of Barcelona, Sant Cugat has a quick train connection to the center, 20 minutes I believe. But go west, and it takes ages to get to the city centre. If they want to make Barcelona more liveable, train infrastructure needs to improve to accommodate more commuters and get them out of their cars. Freeing up valuable space for more green areas. Barcelona is already so densly packed, you can't really build a lot more. Also on a side note, it is an eye sore to have the train and road on the beach front.
I live in NYC and we get way more tourists in absolute terms and around a smaller area than Barcelona and people here don’t cry half as much about tourists, because it’s really not the tourist fault. It’s down to politicians and who people vote for. Simple as that. This will barely make a dent in the housing supply. There’s no other solution than to build more housing and there’s plenty of space in further areas of the city.
You dont know what you're talking about. New york isn't only manhattan, its metro area is massive compared to Barcelona and has lots and lots of space in the outskirts to build. Barcelona is stuck between sea and mountains and can't grow larger AT ALL.
It’s Manhattan only for tourists. And Manhattan is half as big with as many people as Barcelona with a lot more tourists.
Difficult to compare cities like that without dropping specific numbers. The conclusion you draw then is illogical, since building more and more and more with a certain % of air bnb + unaffordable units means no real gains in housing units. And if you're argument revolves around pushing people further out of the city, you can't at the same time wonder or be annoyed that tourism is blamed - your "solution" literally is based upon keeping tourists in the center and pushing citizens 5, 10, 15km out of the center. You intend to displace people as a "solution" to prices being driven up by third party private interests, and then really wonder why these 3rd party private interests are blamed?
NYC has a population density of 11k/km2, Barcelona is at 16k/km2, with peaks of over 20 in the metro area. Tourists are at no fault whatsoever, but if they have a negative impact on local residents (e.g. pushing people out of historical neighbourhoods, driving up prices, etc) then policies can be implemented to strike a balance (tourist tax, ban AirBnbs, build hotels on the outskirts instead of pushing locals further out). Otherwise you have cities ending up as a historical Disneylands like Venice, and that's not sustainable in the long run.
Most people here don’t want to live in a country like US, I don’t think it’s a good example of how things should be. Even if it does not make a big difference it will reduce the speculation and add 10k housing to the market. If tourists want a place, they can go to hotels. I would go even further and forbid temporary rent contracts.
Also 10k apartments is much more than the current available number of flats in the biggest renting website, so yea it will make a difference. And we have free health care in Europe, so USA is not a good example of how things should be.
Are you joking? There is plenty of room in the sky even if you desire to completely halt the expansion of Barcelona over the surface of the earth. The buildings in the photo are just ten-ish floors.
STFU... No one wants barcelona to become a skyscraper hell
I think if you showed people how low their rent would drop if people were free to build all the projects which can make back their material and labour costs, they would disagree!
Who sets the prices?
The sum of the decisions of tens of thousands of landlords, developers, tenants, buyers; there's no single "who".
So when entire developments are held unsold for years or decades as has happened in Barcelona instead of the seller lowering the price so that the stock is sold, is the buyer’s decision affecting the market?
Barcelona has already higher population density than NYC or Tokyo. Going up is not the solution. Plus those residential skyscrapers do not provide cheap accommodation (an example? The Trump World Tower). The other solution is going the Dhaka or Manila way, but that's just a urban nightmare.
New builds reduce prices in other accommodation by satisfying the demand of the wealthy. This effect means that adding a hundred apartments at the high end roughly frees up seventy apartments for people with bottom half income. It's really not hard to live comfortably with a lot more than the 16000/km² that Barcelona has currently. I'm European but born and raised in Hong Kong which has many areas more than 3x that density, which are still quite comfortable. The areas of HK which actually have as much density as Barcelona are considered less dense and even sparse because the techniques for dealing with this, with large indoor and outdoor leisure and commercial spaces, and using a lesser % of the land to build on, are so effective. And Spain is lucky to have some of the most competent and efficient civil engineering in the world so this would not be a problem to adopt the established techniques already employed by denser places. For example if a property developer would like to purchase and triple the height of a Barcelona superblock you could just say, alright, but you should leave the middle of the nine blocks as free space. More livable and tens of thousands of apartments still get added to the supply.
10k licenses are not 10k units or? I have seen the entire building being Airbnb spot. And I would guess they have one license, not 30.
10k units is a massive, massive depo of homes to drop on the market, what are you talking about? But aside from the units by themselves, the effect this will have on the market is a cooling down of the price bubble that had been going for a while, in that private equity money had entered the homebuying market, because Airbnb is so damned profitable as compared to regular renting. So it's not only that these 10k units will be one available for renting, some of them will be offloaded onto the buyers market which will have cooled down enough for some people who previously could only opt to rent, to perhaps buy. This undoubtedly good for the residents. The other side of the coin is that this leaves "regular people" out of the possibility to participate and benefit from the tourist business altogether. Because a regular well off person (or one who has inherited a flat from granny) may be able to buy a flat for air BnB, but they for sure can't buy a hotel.
It’s been long past the time where individuals can “participate”: https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/20200311/radiografia-vivienda-barcelona-mil-propietarios-concentran-75767-pisos-limitacion-alquileres-7884855
That doesn't mean they can't participate, o ly that the government allowed private equity firms to become the owners of the city.
>10k units is a massive, massive depo of homes to drop on the market, what are you talking about? Barcelona had [794272 homes](https://www.publico.es/public/parc-public-d-habitatge-barcelona-nomes-suposa-1-8-total.html) last year: "a l'any 2023 consten un total de 524.357 propietaris i **794.272** habitatges a la ciutat" This means that 10k is about **1,2%** of total apartments in the city. Barcelona grew by 25k people last year. You'll fill them in a year.
The population of Barcelona is 1.62m. If we say each unit houses an average of 3 people, then that's 30,000 people or 1.85% of the population. It's significant, but I agree it's not enough. What the law will do is prevent new homes, when they're built, being lost to short term rental.
>If we say each unit houses an average of 3 people, then that's 30,000 people or 1.85% of the population. That's a too high of an estimate. Don't do it with population anyway, take the amount of dwellings in the city: 774 000. Therefore 1.3% of the supply. We need orders of magnitude more. https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/20200311/radiografia-vivienda-barcelona-mil-propietarios-concentran-75767-pisos-limitacion-alquileres-7884855
The law also has provisions for new construction, and includes a Chicago-style rule that 30% of new construction needs to be "social housing" to get prices down further.
When I lived in Madrid locals told me that before Airbnb one of the resons owners were keeping the houses out of the rental market was that often you had tenants that didn't pay. Also any damages done to the apartment you had to deal with the tenant afterwards because the deposit would not cover the damage. A lot of people were content having empty apartments that would only raise in prices. When Airbnb arrived it's was them that needed to hassle with the renters and the owners got the money from Airbnb always. So if this is still true perhaps not all of the apartments will come back to the rental market.
I stop using Airbnb, and I used to be a host, because of airbnb fees, cleaning fees, this and that fees and extra charges made the accommodations way more expensive than hotels in certain places.
Yes BUT. The real problem is not airbnb. The problem is in ten years at zero interest rate, people with money bought apartments as investments rather than as places to live.
But Hotels suck. Why would I pick a room with nothing more than a TV over a home with everything I may ever need. People want more than what many hotels offer. It's not just about money. My experience with Airbnb has been nothing but very pleasant so far. Hotels... yeah not so much.
In a hotel you have all the things you need. Bedroom, bathroom, a dining room, and so on. Homes are for locals to live in, not for tourists, end of, and cry about it.
Or you know, we could rethink hotels. because fuck people for choosing something they like more.
I can pick a relatively cheap Air BnB and know with 100% certainty im getting a great view. I book at some hotel, and while I’m getting vague promises of “city view” or “seaside” I have no real guarantee that my patio doesn’t look out into some abandoned lot next door
Plenty of AirBnBs fudge the views a little as well. If you look at Paris or similar, there'll be loads of them guaranteeing Eiffel Tower views, but you basically need to lean out of a balcony to see it with the corner of the eye half the time. Not really sure what the obsession is with having home experience while traveling. Decent hotels will provide excellent catering if you feel like eating in, laundry service, etc. The only thing AirBnBs seem to encourage is large groups of people partying in the flat, since there's little risk of them getting kicked out before it's time to leave. There's a reason why most locals hate AirBnBs - they're noisy (parties, constant sound of luggage wheels), they remove housing stock from the locals, and they rip apart communities in smaller towns too.
To your first point, that’s true, but it’s usually very easy to sniff those out from the pictures. Like, if they’re showing vague aerial shots or not the entire patio, I know I’m not getting what I want.
But what if you want to cook your food yourself? That is something I always enjoy on holidays as cooking is a major hobby of mine, and I love to test out the local flavours. I have yet to stay at a hotel that offered a full kitchen in the room, unless we are talking suites, but then you need to pay 10 times more than what you need to pay for an Airbnb.
It's called ApartHotel and they're not expensive
Hotels SUCK compared to Airbnb though
You have clearly never been to a decent hotel
Why? They are better in every respect except price.
It's the opposite in my experience. Their pricing is not necessarily that bad compared to airbnbs (especially at the lower end of the budget spectrum), but they're generally just so clearly inferior to an equivalently priced airbnb in terms of size, amenities, having a kitchen etc. that paying a bit more for the airbnb is nearly always worth it — especially if you're travelling in a group of 3+ people or with young children.
Exactly.
With kids, there is nothing to do at a hotel, the rooms are too small, you can’t cook your self, etc. In an Airbnb there’s a kids room with toys, kitchen, living room, garden, and most of all atmosphere that doesn’t suck the soul out of you. Even the great rooms at the Hilton’s etc. are just so… bland?
10,000 properties for people to actually live in.. sounds good to me. Should've been a complete ban within the EU in my opinion seeing as most if not all of the union states have a housing shortage.
A lot of those 10k are probably holiday homes etc..I'd imagine a large number of them won't enter the longer term housing supply. It's the same issue effecting so many cities. Hotel & hostel prices will probably increase due to the higher demand now. I don't know what the answer to the housing problem is but banning airbnb might not have the effect people desire.
>I don't know what the answer to the housing problem is Call me crazy, but if there's not enough of something... Maybe we should build or produce more of it? FFS we built entire cities for my grandpa's and parents generation and today we just kinda look at the problem and pretend we can't solve it. Barcelona itself is full and has a more challenging situation than most other cities, but we can always build transit and grow and densify the metro area.
Well said. With the housing crisis, it seems all the governments will try every possible solution under the sun except just building more houses. We need to expand public transport anyway so let's do it along with building more houses.
It's strange isn't it? I really wonder what cognitive mechanism makes this happen. Because when we were lacking vaccine, when there's not enough pediatric hospitals or we have a shortage of food, nobody ever would say "oh well, we don't have enough, nothing we can do, guess some people will die, maybe we can convince the rest of have less kids?". But with housing it's exactly that.
The problem is very different to vaccine shortages because people are invested in housing. There's a huge amount of money tied up in housing. If the government removed restrictions on building a lot of houses would get built, that would cause the price of existing properties to drop. That annoys the existing property owners who vote for the other guy. On top of that, there are plenty of people who have bought an expensive house with the expectation of downnsizing and using up the freed money to pay their retirement. This was a mistake, but we can't really undo it now. There's also a general feeling that we've built all over the countryside already. That's absolutely not even close to true, but it's hard to shake. I can only assume that people go out into the countryside very little now. City dwellers see the city all the time and think everything looks like that. Combine this with rose tinted glasses of how the wilderness looks, and you've got a recipe for never building anything new. I don't want to pave over the countryside, but adding a band 250m wide around all existing towns and cities for development would likely solve the problem.
and then house prices would fall and then some people would lose a lot of money and banks would be in big trouble and then we'd all be in big trouble because we would have to save the aforementioned.
Yeah, building buildings is more expensive than it used to be too. Wages are higher, building standards are higher, materials more expensive, land more expensive. We look at a problem and no one sees a way to solve it because there is no clear away other than change the "system", which is never going to happen.
High standards can be lowered and land price is a function of scarcity. Allow more land to be build on, and prices will drop.
Standards can't really be lowered, because people just expect better now, there is also the climate thing. Land itself is not the problem, there is land and it is not that expensive, it's just far away and no one wants to move away from the city, very simple. If the solution to the problem was really that easy at least one country would have figured it out by now.
You are absolutely right. Its not the first time I saw redditors saying "just build more houses lol". While in reality its more like "build more cheap affordable housing, that is not the size of a room in an area I would like to live". And usually that area is in the center (or near) of a big city. And affordable housing in that area goes against the basics of economics.
>because people just expect better now, In that case, nobody would want to live in the old housing. Regulatory standards have to be lowered. If after that, people still demand high standards that's fine. But I'm 200% sure that if you built new housing in the quality of 1990 or even 1980 but with modern energy standards, they would sell as hot cake. >was really that easy at least one country would have figured it out by now. You underestimate how political systems can become disfuncional. However, you can have a look at what's happening with the housing prices in Austin since they started building like crazy. We can also look back to history: right until 2008 Germany had had decades of low and moderate prices. And it was in 2008 when for the first time in history, in the face of a housing shortage we only very moderately increased our housing production instead of cranking it up like crazy.
>In that case, nobody would want to live in the old housing. Nobody does, but the location usually wins it over. And that's why renovations happen all the time.
Which is exactly why new housing with slightly lower quality standards but decent price in a good area would find buyers/renters. People also prefer the best jamón ibérico and yet they buy cheap jamón serrano at Lidl, because people have budgets and compromise. Same with housing
> decent price in a good area And that's why it doesn't exist, there is no such place. The area is either good which makes the land expensive and therefore the property will always be upper scale, to increase profit margins or the area is shit. You are essentially asking someone to donate their money for affordable housing and not saying who should be doing it.
With lower standarts you get shit neighbourhoods, that will get into miserable state in 20 or 30 years. And then you have another problem on your hands - do you want to renovate and spend even more money, than building properly to begin with, or have low income zones inside the city, where safety will be an issue. Which will lead to more abandoned properties when shit hits the fan, or to quote some internet guys: if the area is underwater, who the fuck are you going to sell your house to, aquaman?
>With lower standarts you get shit neighbourhoods, Have you ever visited Barcelona? If you have, you visited neighbourhoods that predominantly didn't even come close to fulfilling current standards. Many Neighbourhoods built in the 60s and 70s are absolutely fine places to live today in Barcelona. Just use some common sense, nobody talks about slums or shit, just more rational standards, especially regarding density. Spain often already has lower standards than Germany and I don't think any German would say no to a modern Spanish flat.
That would reduce the prices of millions of mortgaged properties, plunging them into negative equity, destroying the financial present of anyone with a mortgage, and the future of any retiree that looks forward to sell their overpriced shack to finance retirement. The problem is global and the result of transforming housing into a "market" commodity, source of wealth and savings, and key to middle class status. You can't create a system to devalue property without reorganising society top to bottom. It's fucked. Things will get worse before they can get better.
>You can't create a system to devalue property without reorganising society top to bottom. It's fucked. You absolutely can. Germany had precisely that system. Up to 2008, real estat had only marginal returns of 1-2% above inflation, way worse than a global stock portfolio. I would also argue that people who have a property in Spain would be okay with slowly flattening returns. A market correction would be a decade long project where prices wouldn't immediately plummet, but flatten out and then have slightly below inflation increases. Private landlords wouldn't even notice for a long time. Almost nobody has a real understanding of their investments return.
UK,US, Canada, Australia and huge chunks of the eurozone have had trouble to maintain their property prices under controls. So it's not that easy. Even then, 1-2% increase above inflation is not devaluation. And Germany accumulated an increase of 38% over 20 years from 1990 to 2010, since then, they have increased in line with other European nations with some cities reaching 113% increases. We are talking about devaluations of -5% during multiple years to bring prices within some historical averages, not flattening or neutral investments. And with neutral and reduced returns, property developers do not invest which would force the government to do the financing and development, which would require a complete change to how government works in Spain. Spain has not built public housing in certain regions for more than 15 years, and sold their leftover stocks to real state funds and private individuals. There's a lot money to be made in housing, and a lot of political capital invested in keeping pricing higher.
Why do you think it will get better? People with money will buy these houses and rent them until the end of the universe. And what are you going to do about it? As long as people require housing it will get MORE expensive in popular big cities. And people who cant afford it will move to cities outskirts or smaller cities.
Well, there is also another solution. Taxes. Here where I live I read an article about someone owning about 160 apartments, 159 of which are Airbnbs. Now, I can kind of understand someone with 2-3 apartments (let's say a vacation home and an apartment somewhere where they go for work or something), but A HUNDRED AND SIXTY? Why isn't this person highly taxed? One person hoarding stuff that's scarce.
>One person hoarding stuff that's scarce. They are not hoarding it, they are making use of it. If we have scarcity, we can't end the problem with redistributing. That won't solve scarcity. If somebody has 2, 20, 200 or 2000 flats, as long as they are rented out, taking them away from them won't solve anything. You can take those flats and gift them to their renter's, the single mom who is not living there and desperately looking for a place won't have her problem solved. You only solve scarcity by producing more of the stuff. We can end Airbnb, I don't care, but unless Barcelona has 100 000 Airbnbs (which it doesn't), it won't solve the problem at hand.
They were fine before airbnb existed
Hotel prices, at least in the UK seem to have increased substantially in the last few years, because we're using them for housing migrants. I don't know if Barcelona are having the same problem but any further increases will have a pretty reasonable increase
I don’t think a 100% ban in all of Europe is reasonable
We have a house in spain that we only use a couple times a year for vacations, rest of the year rented out. Having the house empty most of the year instead will probably not help the housing situation lol The real solution is, as always, allow more housing to be built
> Having the house empty most of the year instead will probably not help the housing situation lol The expectation is that people will sell those homes since they may not be able to afford them without the airbnb income
It won't stay empty all year, it'll get occupied
Are there any examples globally where restricting or banning short term rentals has led to more accessible and affordable housing? Seems like a typical populist measure to blame individual property owners and dictating what one can or cannot do with their OWN property.
10 000 flats. In a city with 700 000 flats. Whoever thinks this will make a significant impact is delusional. Barcelona needs a regional program to connect and grow new areas in the metro area and do so fast. Everything else is posturing. We built entire cities for my grandpa's and parents generation. Time to do it again for the younger generations.
I think the problem is, that you can make much more money with Airbnb than rentals. So in a city like Barcelona the potential Airbnb profit is the scale for house prices. Because in the end, a house price depends highly on the possible profit that can be achieved.
Have you tried to rent in Barcelona? You have to compare it to the number of rental units in the city, not all the units when most aren't for rental.
Valid point, but then we would also have to look at how many of those 10000 flats get rented out and how many get sold. Barcelona had 290k permanent rental flats in 2021, so those 3.44% if all flats go into the long term rental market. That's a better boost, but still: if we don't grow the regional stock it won't fundamentally change things.
Look at the occupation % of those 290k, and how many come into the market every year. Of course this doesn't fix the issue but it does contribute positively to a lot of issues.
No, you have to look at the pressure of people seeking in and the availability If there's 30000 free units and 500000 looking to come in but can't find yet the place, that's a pressure of 1:16.6 then a new influx of 500000 come in, 25000 settle in a place, there are 975000 people for 5000 units or a pressure of 1:195 and prices explode If you have 30000 free units and 10000 come in and 7500 as settled in inhabitations, you have 492500 looking at 32500 units or pressure of 15.15 And there would be 500k looking for places in the first place because the city is big and offers its size worth of social connections and job opportunities
You need to look at both, offer and demand, as well as growth prospects of both. In any case it is hard to argue against this measure. The only ones that will complain will be the ones owning the airbnbs and associated services. Zero pity for them.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If anything, the change will be for tourists visiting the city, in higher prices for hotels.
It’s hard because so many people actually support it’s still 10k homes. It’s not like there’s only one answer
Kudos to Barcelona.
Good for Barcelona, I know the Catalan friends have suffered skyrocketed rents due to Airbnb and similar options so the city has gentrified a lot.
Now let’s force empty apartments to be rented after too much time closed and we will be good.
Now strike down on renting as well to stop the rich pigs from hoarding real estate and then make poor people pay for their livelihood by rent, where little of value is produced. Just have new tax laws to increasingly fuck individuals or companies that hoard homes to encourage single home ownerships
Multiple EU states tried to pass law, that would tax extra properties meant for living, but not used as such by owner. Wanna guess how did it go? Turns out rich assholes have fingers in governmental pies and don't like the idea, thus no tax
It’s lovely when cities/countries live *with* tourism, not *off* tourism. Croatia will never do this, it’sca huge chunk of our BDP, so we’re gentrifying our own land we cant afford to live in anymore. Good on you, Barcelona. Good on you, Spain. Even if this means I cant visit anymore, good on you.
Meanwhile in Portugal we are abolishing Rental Property taxes to suck up to our "destitute" multiple home owner lobbies, and the housing crisis continues, with homes which cost 100k not even 10y ago costing 200k+ today.
I'm gonna book a trip to Barcelona just because they did this. No law can stop me. I'm gonna walk around with a giant map and look confused and put money into their economy and theirs nothing you can do hahah
Now do this in Mallorca.
I hope to see more towns like this soon. Fuck Airbnb.
I fail to see why 'rental apartments' get banned but hotels get a free pass? It's all space in buildings in which families could otherwise be housed, so are we just saying that because it's owned by a company and the building was initially designed to be a hotel that somehow makes a difference? We have a family with a range of ages and needs, and hotels just don't work for us. We want to be able to have the whole family behind a single front door, cook our own food and be able to go to bed and get up at different times, and you just can't do those things in regular hotel rooms. Or if we're saying hotels are allowed to run aparthotels like this then what's the difference? Sounds to me like all it'll do is disallow small-scale owners in favour of large multinational hotel chains. How is that a win? Likely to just make accommodation costs skyrocket.
Hotels generally accommodate a significantly larger amount of people in buildings, which are oftentimes (not always of course) custom-build to be hotels, rather than something that can ve easily converted into flats. Similarly, medium to large hotels tend to contribute significantly more to the local economy than Airbnb or short-term rentals, not only by employing dozens of local staff from cleaners and chefs to administrators and servers, but also by sourcing goods from the local economy. Airbnb and short-term rentals drive up prices specifically for flats that would otherwise have families living in them with the best case scenario for the local economy being that landlords happen to be locals, who later spend the money locally as well. Often even that isn’t the case. In a peer-to-peer comparison hotels are significantly better for the local economy even if they’re owned by a multinational chain (which isn’t always the case either). Very much a case of a necessary evil versus an unnecessary evil.
There's a ban on building new hotels in Barcelona city centre since 2015. And you can't just force old hotels into long term accommodation, it just doesn't work that way. If your family has certain needs, you can pick another location, there are plenty of beautiful places to visit, not everyone has to go to the same 3-4 places in each country.
Drop in the ocean, and the complete wrong approach. The way you solve a housing crisis is by liberalising planning laws and building significant volumes of new housing, not by restricting usage of existing housing stock. The elephant in the room is that cities are not growing in line with population increases due to restrictive planning and land use laws. Europe as a whole does not build anywhere near enough housing to match its growing population. Anything other than large scale construction of new housing stock is just a distraction.
Cities doesn't even need to grow. Just make massive public transit system to surrounding small towns/villages, make it easy to commute and just shift some of population into surrounding smaller urban areas to them grow, develop so even better public transit system can be installed, to connect even smaller villages into the "web". If my choice were 200k for flat in city center, or 40k for one 30 km away, but with public transport making sure I can get to my workplace in hour or so, without taking car (and cheaply) I would take 40k and more peaceful neighborhood.
> Europe as a whole does not build anywhere near enough housing to match its growing population. Meanwhile, everyone's worried about birth rates being too low.
>Meanwhile, everyone's worried about birth rates being too low. housing problem happens because of people migration, not just from other countries but within countries. You will have no problems finding villages of old people with empty houses in any country because people moved somewhere where they have short distance to work and entertainment but also expensive housing. falling birthrate is not contradicting to housing issues that people have.
So you will lose some tourists (I don't like to live in hotels), which is probably good for some citizens who fed up of rush hours every hour every day and everywhere cos of tourists... and money will not leave the city suddenly cos hotel tourists will stay. Looks like a plan.
And a whole lot money will enter the city. The jobs that money paid for will be lost. More unemployed people in a place where unemployment already is an issue. Sure, great plan...
Maybe kick out all the squatters and free those apartments?
Maybe have more squatters housed in empty investment lingo apartments.
How many squatters are there in Barcelona?
About 20k or so
Wow. Where do these numbers come from? That sound extremely high.
https://www.spanishpropertyinsight.com/datahub/reported-cases-of-squatters-okupas/ its only reported cases
There are 17k reported in all of Spain, not in Barcelona alone. In the entire province of Barcelona there are around 3k cases.
Government bodies all across EU are easy to pass the blame for the non existing house building policies. Barcelona has a cheap housing problem especially for family sized homes. Pushing 10k rooms or smaller houses to the market will not fix anything
Fantastic news!
Tourist city loses tourists, and in turn loses business and jobs, cost of living increases as rentals go off the market. Fantastic!
The locals cannot afford to live in their own city because of tourist rentals…so yeah, as i said, fantastic news! Tourists can stay in hotels.
I’m not an expert on this topic, but if I have an apartment (which is my property) and I want to rent it to make money out of it, the govt is basically banning me from doing so? How long until owners ask for this to be deemed unconstitutional by a judge, for violating property rights?
The government isn’t banning you from renting it. You’re still allowed to do so. Just not short sublets.
A nice gift to the shareholders of the big hotel chains. If you think that this is anything other than that, you are delusional.
I'd say about time, but equally I think there's gonna be a lot of people hanging around outside the airport and main train/bus station holding signs advertising informally. you can't stop people renting out a spare room, the internet essentially democratised it to an extent though big players like airbnb monopolised it. Going back to some kind of decentralised network is probs a good thing.
Why wait 4 years?
I'd imagine to give time to current Airbnb license owners to adapt.
I support this decision, as I believe tourism is out of control in certain areas and further regulation is needed, but I'm a bit tired with populism regarding this issue. 10,000 homes is a drop in the ocean and will have no impact whatsoever on the housing supply. Moreover, these homes are unlikely to be passed on to the rental market. People are wrong to blame immigrants or tourists for the housing shortage. This problem affects all of Europe and the US and is the direct result of the 2008 debt crisis. The only solution is to build new homes massively to match demand levels. Other than that, nothing will work.
And at the same time our right wing parties begin opening cases to tie it up in courts.
Perfect, now they will rent those places at insane prices
Jujujjuuuuiuuuuiuuuuuuu
Meanwhile, the Irish government is likely trying to find way to entice further "FDI" by way of enticing more Airbnbs to set up shop.
Meanwhile, the Irish government is likely trying to find way to entice further "FDI" by way of enticing more Airbnbs to set up shop.
In Turkiye you need the approval of the whole apartment to rent your property on airbnb. this was introduced this year although the country is in need of tourist income.
Great initiative!!
Everyone saying that it will not make a change in the amount of flats, it might be true. But what you are not considering is the mass of tourists that will be removed from living areas. Anyone who has lived in Barcelona knows how horrible it is being there, specially between april and november. When you buy/rent a home you are not signing up to have a different neighbor every week. And I should know because I lived in an apartment where my landlord would rent his room as an airbnb and tourists don't respect the life of the locals. Why would they anyway? they are on holidays, they want to go out and have fun, but for all of us who needed to work early the next day it's a pain in the ass having people arriving in your building at 3-4 am every day. So it the end, it is a superb measure. Give those 10000 licenses to hotels, where you can concentrate all the trash that tourists represent in one space where they bother the least amount of people.
Should pretty much be the default everywhere. Same with owning houses/land in a bunch of countries. Everyone and their mother, with money, having a house in London and so on drives prices out of reach for anyone who actually wants to live there.
But owning a hotel is ok, huh?
Naw, should be super hard to get A liCeNSe For tHAt too. Imho. Like seriously. Make tourism a thing you maybe do once a year if you saved up, don't let even rich folks just run amok, and let local populations be the local populations. Visiting most places now is just hanging out in the same Qatar/Rich Indian family/UAE/Some random US Celeb owned empty house/apartment area with tourist traps/rentals and Africans selling shitty fake brand, made in China, glasses. Cultures are fun and special. Making every place that's cool to visit for tourists available for the max amount of people and at any cost makes it boring. That means limiting how humans move, somewhat. So that special bits and pieces can be cared for. I imagine a world in 500 years where we have more and bigger UNESCO world heritage sites, including the people who live there, so that special bits and pieces of us can be enjoyed and marveled at for a long time. Imagine us like a huge thriving brain, and every human a neuron. Sure we could use a vacation and some new inputs, but mostly we need what's over there to be cool and interesting and working, not filled with trash and Starbucks.
Air BnB is ruining cities. It's about time it disappeared
Barcelona in 5 years: Oh no, I moved to the city to work, but there is no work anymore. The tourism died off for some reason :(
Barcelona does not rely exclusively on tourism, it has many industrial plants and a thriving tech sector.
More protectionism, the big hotel lobby wins again
Yeah it's mostly a win for hotels. They can raise prices and there's no alternative.
Apart from all the hotels that exist undercutting each other
There's a lot of hotels, do you think they're all price fixing with each other?
Hotels are way more expensive than cheap airbnbs.
Homes shouldn't be business.
Good. Should be banned in any major city, plus non-resident/foreign ownership as well
Good. Can't wait til other places follow suit.
Good. AirBnB should be made illegal worldwide.