Barcelona City Hall The new seasonal rental regulations will be applied “immediately” – agreed between the PSC, the ERC, the Commons and the CUP – once Parliament has approved the bill this Thursday. This is what the mayor announced this Wednesday, Jaume Collboniwho ensured that thus “The fraudulent leak” of contracts ends and, therefore, also how to avoid the rental price cap.
Collboni explained that, from March 2024 to March 2025, seasonal contracts increased by 60% and that in the second quarter of 2025, they represented 28% of the total contracts signed. He stressed that this measure, “requested for a long time” by the municipal government, It has “complete legal guarantees”, since it benefits from the approval of the Consell de Garanties Statutàries (CGE).
The mayor insisted on the need to pursue offenders and urged Salvador Illa’s government to act “with great caution” by doing inspections and apply appropriate sanctions.
He also highlighted that Barcelona is the “the only large city in Spain” that currently has rental price regulations, which caused “the control of rent prices, or even a slight drop”.
Junts and PP delayed the debate for more than a month
On November 5, the debate on this law was to open in the Catalan Chamber. Junts and PP paralyzed it by taking the rule to the CGE. The post-convergent formation accused the groups which support the text of “devaluing the local world” and generating “legal insecurity”. In the case of popular, They criticized that the regulations they want to implement are “anti-statutory and unconstitutional.”
Both groups criticized the CGE despite knowing that the movement would not end approval of the standard because The resolution of the entity is not binding. The only thing they managed to do was to delay the debate for more than a month, since the CGE’s opinion was delivered on December 4 and the debate in Parliament began on Tuesday.
As the Government hoped, the CGE approved the bill considering that “it does not modify the fundamental regime of the State in terms of contractual obligations”., as the PP had claimed, and assured that this does not contradict the fundamental regulations of the State nor modify the compulsory regime. In addition, he considered that the Generalitat “correctly exercised its powers in matters of civil law” without modifying the nature or essential elements of the rental contract..
The CGE also concluded that the choice of the regulatory instrument “corresponds to the freedom of configuration of the legislator”, therefore The Catalan Executive may choose to include the regulation in a housing sector standard. Junts questioned the fact that the regulation was incorporated in a sectoral law and not in the Civil Code of Catalonia.
Instead, despite the adoption of the bill aimed at regulating seasonal rentals, questioned the automatic expansion of officially protected housing (VPO) in distressed areas.
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