“The administration should make more social floors and not pass the problem on to us”

2023-07-13 14:20:50

BarcelonaThe Catalan Federation of Tourist Apartments, which represents 27,000 tourist apartments in Catalonia, has come out ahead of the criticism the sector receives. The employers have wanted to distance themselves from the problems of access to housing, which according to them are “structural” and not a consequence of their activity. “We are held responsible for the ills of housing, but our sector is regulated according to demand, and the slowdown of the sector due to regulations is more than obvious”, lamented the vice-president of the Federation, Ester Torrent. They have also issued a warning: they say that without their activity “46% of the offer of places to spend the night in Catalonia would be lost” and would put “more than 26,000 jobs and the economic activity of many Catalan municipalities at risk” who live from tourism”.

The representatives of the owners of tourist flats have wanted to respond, in this way, to the words of the Minister of Territory, Ester Capella, who assured last week that her department would take all the measures at its disposal to limit tourist flats and rents seasonal According to the minister, the “fraudulent use” of these activities causes “price tensions and does not allow to guarantee the rental offer to the resident population”.

The owners of tourist flats, however, say that “they only represent 3% of the total housing stock in Catalonia”. “Rents are going up, but they are going up everywhere. Where there is a moratorium on tourist licenses and also in non-tourist municipalities, such as Lleida or Olot, which have virtually no tourist apartments,” Torrent assured, who affirmed that the problem of prices is “structural” and has more to do with inflation, Euribor and the lack of credit than with the activity of the private sector. “The administration should be much more proactive in its social housing policies and not pass the problem on to us. According to data from the Generalitat itself, between 2015 and 2022 only 2,000 rental flats have been completed social, for example”, said the vice-president of the employers’ association.

The employers’ association for tourist flats has also responded to criticism that its activity “reduces” the supply of regular residential flats. The organization estimates that 60% of tourist flats are, in reality, “second homes”. “Their owners put them up for rent for a very specific time, while they do not use them, and if these licenses were annulled, these flats would not end up on the rental market”, explained the president of the entity , David Riba, who pointed out that 86% of owners of tourist flats only have one property and that most are small owners. “Think that 40% need the money from the tourist rental to make ends meet,” he said.

In fact, the legal uncertainty and the withdrawal of licenses is what most “depresses” the sector, which has launched a warning in Capella: “You cannot change the rules of the game in the middle of a match”, Riba has warned. In this sense, Federatur has asked for “more dialogue and consensus” before moving forward with regulations or limitations. “We want to be taken into account”, they concluded.