Last Wednesday, May 9, the City Hall in Madrid announced new measures regarding the status of home rentals in Madrid’s historic center. José Manuel Calvo, who is the secretary for Sustainable Urban Planning, was the one to make the announcement.
According to The Local Spain, the main objective of implementing these new measures is to “preserve residential use of buildings in the central areas, putting a stop to permanent use (by tourists) and replacing it with temporary, thus preventing housing from becoming accommodation exclusively for tourists.”
These new regulations come as a consequence of the fact that many buildings in the center of Madrid are turned into rentals and most of them have no hotel license.
Landlords will not be allowed to rent apartments to tourists for more than 90 days per year. Moreover, those that choose to rent their properties to tourists, will have to ensure these properties provide a separate entrance to the street from permanent residents in the building.
This legislation will leave less than 6% of all apartments in the historic central zone of Madrid available for tourist accommodation. The ones left are all ground floor properties. The neighborhoods included in this area are Chueca, Sol, Malasaña, Lavapiés and La Latina.
There’ve been major changes in Spain in the past week, as numerous landlords disagreed with the government’s proposal.
A few days ago, Valencia was another city to introduce new rules related to this subject. Also, Palma, the Mallorcan capital, was the first Spanish city to impose such drastic regulations and private holiday rentals are now completely banned in the region.
The reason is simple: the officials are trying to maintain the city as ‘habitable’ as possible for residents. Furthermore, the officials mentioned that the price of housing in Palma increased by 7.4% in 2016, whereas the renting prices have increased by 40% since 2013, thus making it more difficult for the locals to rent properties in the region.
This new plan still awaits to be approved by the government. Meanwhile, Madrid has already taken some actions by suspending issuing tourist licenses for one entire year.
