Madrid has fewer tourist apartments than this summer. The Madrid City Council, led by José Luis Martínez Almeida (PP), released on Tuesday the data it extracted from the Inside Airbnb platform, which collects the number of advertisements on the web, and which shows that from July until this moment the number of houses of this type has decreased from 16,959 to 14,297. According to the Martínez Almeida team, the reason behind this is the approval of the RESIDE plan which, among other things, prohibits this type of accommodation in buildings located in the center of the capital in which neighbors also live. What this new regulation does not do is introduce new disciplinary measures in a city where more than 90% of these homes operate illegally, outside all administrative control.
Almeida’s team defends the hypothesis that lies behind this phenomenon Removal of degeneration There are “many” measures of the mayor. Specifically, they appreciate the RESIDE plan because, they say, it “protects habitual residential use and moves tourist apartments out of residential buildings,” they say. They explained that “the City Council does not grant licenses for tourist accommodation distributed in residential buildings in the historic center.”
Although the city council has tightened the criteria for granting permission to owners to convert their homes into tourist apartments, this did not pose a problem at all for those who wanted to do so outside the scope of the law. The City Council imposed just 94 penalties throughout last year. Of the nearly 17,000 holiday apartments in Madrid in July, just over 1,000 were operating with a licence.
For this reason, the municipal opposition believes that the mayor is giving himself “self-aggrandizement” and is trying to take credit for liberating houses that were previously inhabited by tourists. The PSOE says the downward trend in the number of holiday apartments in Madrid began in July, as the city council confirmed in its own statement, while the RESIDE plan did not come into effect until September 4.
On the other hand, socialists remember that precisely in July, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs of Pablo Bustenduy (Somar) approved the Single Digital Rental Window and reached an agreement with the Airbnb platform offering holiday accommodation, so that only apartments that had been previously registered could be advertised there. In other words, those who do not have a license, and therefore do not have a registration code, cannot advertise. “It’s a big coincidence,” they say sarcastically from the Socialist Workers Party. “The minister has been doing the work that the city council should have done months ago,” adds Eduardo Robinho, Mas Madrid’s official spokesman.
From their party they also remember that despite this decline, at this moment there are about 11,000 more tourist apartments than in 2019, when Martínez Almeida became mayor of Madrid. They criticize that during these six years the government has done “absolutely nothing” to reverse this phenomenon and that there are still more than 14,000 apartments in the city. “There’s nothing to celebrate,” Robinho says.
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