In Madrid there are fewer tourist apartments than this summer. The City of Madrid, led by José Luis Martínez-Almeida (PP), released on Tuesday data extracted from the Inside Airbnb platform, which collects the number of ads on the web, and which show that from July to today the number of homes of this type has decreased from 16,959 to 14,297. According to Martínez-Almeida’s team, the reason for this is the approval of the RESIDE Plan which, among other things, prohibits this type of housing from being located in buildings in the center of the capital where neighbors also live. What this new regulation does not do is apply new disciplinary measures in a city where more than 90% of these houses operate illegally, outside of any administrative control.
The municipal opposition, however, believes that the mayor is “self-aggrandizing” and is trying to take credit for having freed the houses that were previously occupied by tourists. The PSOE says that, first of all, the downward trend in the number of holiday apartments in Madrid began in July, as confirmed by the City Council in its statement, while the RESIDE plan only came into force on 4 September.
On the other hand, the socialists recall that, just in the month of July, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs of Pablo Bustinduy (Sumar) approved the Single Digital Rental Office and reached an agreement with the holiday accommodation offering platform Airbnb so that only apartments previously registered there could be advertised. In other words, those who did not have a driving license and, therefore, no registration code, could not advertise. “It’s all a coincidence,” they say ironically from the PSOE. “The minister has been doing the work that the City Council should have done for months,” adds Rubiño.
Almeida’s team defends the thesis that behind this phenomenon of degentrification There are the mayor’s “numerous” measures. In particular, they appreciate the RESIDE Plan because, as they say, “it protects the use of usual accommodation and moves tourist apartments out of residential buildings”, they say. «The Municipality does not grant licenses for tourist accommodation distributed in residential buildings in the historic center», they explain.
Although the City Council has tightened the criteria for giving permission to owners to convert their houses into tourist apartments, this has never been a problem for those who wanted to do so outside the law. Over the course of last year the municipality imposed only 94 fines, despite the fact that of the almost 17,000 holiday apartments in Madrid in July, only just over 1,000 were operating under a licence.
Más Madrid also recalls that, despite this decline, right now there are “around 11,000” more tourist apartments than in 2019, when Martínez-Almeida became mayor of Madrid. They criticize that in 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,” Rubiño says.
