2023-04-26 02:03:56
An exponential increase in accommodation for tourist use which will further reduce the residential rental market in central areas of large cities that are already particularly stressed. That is what the experts fear will happen with the approval of the Housing Law, which is expected to be approved tomorrow in the Congress of Deputies.
The regulations agreed between the PSOE and its parliamentary partners will establish ceilings on rental prices in those areas that the autonomous communities declare stressed. However, does not introduce any limitation in the case of tourist accommodation. A hole through which it is feared that many homes that are now offered on a traditional rental basis will escape. The tourism alliance He is exalted has warned that there could be a “enormous transfer” of long-term rental houses to others for tourist use for this lack of cap, the absence of which they consider “surprising”.
Exceltur’s fears are also shared by the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation (Cehat)which has also warned that tourist homes are usually located in the center of cities, which coincides with the areas where the rental market is usually more stressed, so a transfer of flats from one use to another it would further narrow the offer where it is most needed and would further increase prices.
“Options such as tourist rentals or simple purchases will be more attractive than residential rentals and, therefore, the offer will narrow more,” Antonio Carroza, president of Alquiler Seguro, has also warned, when analyzing the effects that the limit on rents in stressed areas, a diagnosis in which it coincides with the Rent Negotiating Agency.
We can want and the PSOE doesn’t
To prevent tourist housing from being left out of regulation and causing this cut in supply, thereby further boosting prices in the most stressed markets, We can announced on Monday its intention to include, through a compromise amendment to the Housing Law, a limitation of tourist apartments in stressed rental market areas. The purple formation tries to prevent large holders or vulture funds from using “subterfuge” to avoid the regulation of rental prices, deriving homes from the residential market to the vacation market. His idea would be that in a stressed area with 10,000 inhabitants, no more than 200 tourist rental places could be offered.
Just yesterday, the leader of Podemos and Minister of Social Rights, Ione Belarraassured that they hope to find positive “feedback” in the rest of the groups and believes that “something can move” in the final stretch of this regulation in Congress, given that it will be voted tomorrow in plenary session of this House, he said.
From the PSOE, however, they closed the door to include any measure that has to do with tourist accommodation.Isaura Leal, general secretary of the Socialist Group in Congressassured that including this issue would mean a invasion of powers that correspond to town halls and autonomous communities. “We have reached the maximum level of regulation,” said Leal, who explained that the norm that will be voted on Thursday in the Plenary of the Lower House is part of a state framework under which it offers the autonomous communities sufficient tools to regulate the housing policies.
Tourist accommodation has grown strongly in recent months. After during the pandemic, many of these owners of this type of accommodation redirected them to residential rentals due to the collapse of tourism, the return of visitors to the cities caused the reverse transfer after the hardest part of the coronavirus. According to Exceltur data, tourist homes in Spain have passed from 66,000 in the first quarter of 2022 to the current 80,000.
The rental market has already narrowed quite a bit even without the Housing Law if one looks at the data collected by idealistic. According to the real estate website, the supply of rental housing has fallen by 28% in Spain in the last four years and so far this Legislature, the largest decrease in stocks has been registered in the communities of Madrid and Catalonia, with a drop of 41% in both. According to the report, Cuenca is the capital in which the offer has been reduced the most during these four years, falling by 59%. It is followed by the city of Barcelona, where it has also been reduced by more than half during this legislature (-51%). Next are the reductions in inventories of Pontevedra (-48%); Valencia (-45%); Madrid (-44%); Ceuta (-41%); Ciudad Real and Guadalajara (-39% in both cases).
The governor of the Bank of Spain also spoke yesterday about the contrary effects that the Housing Law can have in general on supply. Pablo Hernandez de Cos assured that, although “effectively in the short term it can generate a reduction effect”, he added that “The empirical evidence that we have is that it could generate the opposite effect in the rest of the markets in which it is not applied.”
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