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The Spanish parliament has just passed significant amendments to the Tenancy Act that will, amongst other things, devolve the regulation of tourist rentals to the regional governments and make it more complicated and difficult for holiday-home owners to engage in holiday lettings. The amendments will become law when they are published in the BOE (soon).
With the stated objectives of stimulating and making the rental market more flexible, the key features of the new regulations are as follows:
- Regulation of tourist rentals devolved to the autonomous governments
- Rental increases no longer tied to the consumer price index
- Mandatory rental period agreements reduced from five to three years, and the tacit extension from three to one year.
- Easier for landlords to evict tenants if they need the home for themselves or their immediate family. Just two months notice required.
- Registry of troublesome tenants so landlords can identify the worst offenders before allowing them to occupy a property
- Eviction of tenants in arrears made easier and quicker (10 days) assuming no court case
- Easier for tenants to terminate their contractual obligations, providing just one month’s notice
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We are planning a trip to Spain this fall, to rent for 3 or 4 months. Many rental owners live outside of Spain. So how on earth will the Spanish authorities know that we have made an arrangement with an owner in say Ireland, paid the rent direct to them obtained the key and moved in.
The owners may or not choose to inform the Spanish, I will leave that up to your speculation. It seems to me that this sort of half baked idea will be totally ineffective. -
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A rent of 3- 4 months should not be affected by the changes in the legislation. The local governments should be clamping down on the illegal businesses, which are domestic homes that are used in the tourist trade, ie: 6 months of changes of customers every 2 weeks with fat undeclared profits and inadequate insurance.
Legal holiday home accommodation will still be available but in suitable areas, ie. within walking distance of the beach and local services etc.and with official complaint forms for the customers. -
Yet another half baked idea from the government.
The devolving of powers to the regional governments will cause chaos and is a sop to the hotel lobby. Unfortunately for the Spanish government only 30% of overnight stays in Spain are in hotels. The rest are being put at risk by making things too difficult to do. Example?
Well in Andalucia if you try to register your house for a holiday rental they won’t let you unless you have three properties. (Experience of various of my contacts down there) Therefore anyone with one or two are forced to do it in the unregulated, black economy. Stupidity writ large.
Regarding the Spanish government looking at utility bills to check whether a place is occupied I think this maybe an urban myth. So far I don’t know anyone in my area, Valencia, who this has happened to. And there are plenty of people renting places out.
On the long term rental argument the reduction in contract lengths is good news for landlords but the delinking to the RPI means that there is less stability for the tenants. That may be a problem with unscrupulous landlords of which there are many.
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In the Lloret de Mar the new “ordenanças “for the local police state that all holiday rental homes must have a contact telephone number given to the neighbors and the town hall when applying for the “alta” as a holiday venture.
Maybe owners who rent out illegally to large groups for larger profits should start worrying. Do these owners actually have any idea the number of times the police have to be called to attend the disturbances caused by large parties of holiday makers? At some point even the Lloret police will have to report a series of disturbances caused by different sets of tourists in an unregistered holiday property.
However as the local council in Lloret is better known for the ex-mayor’s custom of wining and dining with the russian mafia, it probably isn’t concerned that most of its tourist accommodation are not paying the correct contributions. -
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@GH wrote:
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Regarding the Spanish government looking at utility bills to check whether a place is occupied I think this maybe an urban myth. So far I don’t know anyone in my area, Valencia, who this has happened to. And there are plenty of people renting places out.
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I have a friend who works for Endesa and she tells me that hacienda goes through a lot of the bills and tries to cross-reference them with data on whether a property is supposedly inhabited or not.
However the central government simply doesn’t have the resources to go after everybody. I suspect they just try to pick out the most obvious cases and concentrate on them.
Furthermore the regional governments are so clueless that I doubt they could cross reference anything. So I don’t expect this particular law to be applied in a coherent way.
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The new tenancy act is now law – it was published in the official gazette on 5 June
http://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2013-5941 -
And here is an example contracto for ordinary lettings (not tourist)
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