This is a website for buyers, owners, and sellers of property in Spain, offering reliable information and resources to help you get things done with confidence. It is run by Mark Stücklin, author of the Spanish Property Doctor Column in The Sunday Times (2005-2008), and the book ‘Need to Know: Buying Property in Spain’ published by Collins.
Mark Stücklin
Lawmakers have rejected the opportunity to regulate seasonal and room rentals that far-left housing activists had been pushing for.
Having devastated the long-term rental market with a Housing Law in 2023 that drove landlords en masse into the seasonal rental market, the hard-left housing activists who seem to control Spanish government housing policy have been screaming for an amendment to the Housing Law to clamp down on seasonal rentals where landlords have sought refuge. This was lined up for a vote in the Spanish parliament on Tuesday that was unexpectedly overturned when the Catalan nationalist party Junts voted with right-wing parties to reject the amendment. Housing activists are incandescent with rage.
Junts were expected to abstain in the vote, which would have helped the amendment on its way. At the last minute they changed their mind and voted against it, which meant the amendment was rejected.
Junts is a political party that grew out of the now defunct right-of-centre Convergencia party that controlled the Catalan government for decades after Franco, but which fell apart with the doomed independence drive that tore apart Catalan society. Junts sided with left and far-left parties in the deluded bid to break away from Spain, and seemed to lose its bearings as a right-of-centre party in the process. That helps explain why the hard left have reacted with such fury at Junts siding with other right-wing parties on a question of housing policy. Weren’t they now left-wing?
Housing activists organised by the Tenants Union – a Marxist outfit that sponsored the amendment – immediately organised a protest outside the Junts headquarters in Barcelona because that’s the way they roll.
Seasonal rental oversupply
Landlords in Barcelona have stampeded into seasonal / mid-term rentals (know as alquileres de temporada in Spanish) more than anywhere else in Spain because Catalonia is the only region that has introduced rent controls.
The problem is there just isn’t enough demand for seasonal rentals, although the left claims that most seasonal rentals are fraudulent long-term rentals in disguise. I don’t buy that argument because any tenant can denounce a fraudulent seasonal rental and have it converted to a long-term rental with the landlord facing fines, so landlords would be foolish to try that trick. The vast majority of landlords are simply looking for a genuine seasonal rental client, and there aren’t enough of them. So I expect that, over time, many landlords will abandon seasonal rentals without any need for a government clampdown. And many of them will get out of the rental market entirely.
Temporary setback
The Spanish press reports that there will be another attempt to regulate seasonal rentals and room rentals next year. When it comes, it will do nothing to make rental housing more plentiful and affordable, assuming it passes next time. The government and its hard-left coalition have already damaged the Spanish rental market below the waterline. Foreign investors would be mad to invest in Spanish rental housing today, and Spain doesn’t have the money to go it alone. So the quantity and quality of Spanish rental housing will go into inexorable decline, just like it did when Franco introduced rent controls back in the 1950s. The situation won’t improve with a change of government because a generation of investors should have learnt by now that Spanish rental property is a toxic investment.
