Drastic measures call for drastic decisions, as they say.
Short-term rental options for tourists are set to be prohibited by Barcelona by November 2028, according to Barcelona city mayor Jaume Collboni.
The Spanish city, which is the country’s top tourist destination, made the announcement in late June 2024, in an effort to curb the already unlivable housing prices in Barcelona. Collboni said that in this way, the city is “confronting what [they] believe is Barcelona’s largest problem.”
Barcelona, according to the Business Insider, is the “largest global city to effectively ban short-term rentals.” The drastic measure was made by city officials as a way to keep housing prices in the city affordable for the residents, who have been protesting the city’s over-tourism.
One such protest held in July 2024 took things to the extreme with protesters spraying tourists with water guns while others carried signs that read, “Tourists Go Home You Are Not Welcome,” and “Barcelona is not for sale.”
A study done in 2020 saw that Airbnb activities in Barcelona had increased the rental prices of some popular districts in Barcelona by about 7%, and even ramped up the housing market by 17%.
As of writing, Barcelona currently has about 10,000 apartments listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb and other platforms. Once their licenses are cancelled, Collboni said that “the apartments will be used by the city’s residents or will go on the market for rent or sale.”
While Barcelona is the most recent city to impose such measures on short-term rentals, it is not the first European city to ever do this. Experts say that cities such as Lisbon and Amsterdam, which have taken the same measures to regulate short-term rentals have seen a drop in housing prices.
In Lisbon, for example, although they have recently just suspended all new licenses for short-term rentals in 2023, they started their regulation efforts in November 2018.
The Portuguese capital first started regulating the registration for short-term rentals in some of the city’s historic neighborhoods, and while that did help in making housing costs still affordable for local, there were still some policies (such as the Golden Visa) that still contributed to the rise in housing costs in the country.
In the case of Amsterdam, their policy is not as restrictive as the previously mentioned Barcelona and Lisbon. The city’s solution to regulating home costs is the capping of the number of nights that a host can rent out their apartments to 30 a year.
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