Vacation home rentals skyrocketed in many cities with the advent of Airbnb more than a decade ago. Thus, a point has come where regulatingthe sector seems a difficult task and no city has managed to find the right "formula". Barcelona, London, Berlin or Copenhagen have already put in place regulations to avoid chaos in the most popular neighborhoods and areas, but the truth is that many owners try to circumvent the rules, which makes compliance a great challenge.
To prevent a large number of homes from being dedicated to the tourist market, the governments of several cities have put in place some "lockdown" rules. This is the case of Dallas, which has banned vacation homes in certain residential neighborhoods; Barcelona, which has banned all short-term room rentals in private homes; or San Francisco and Seattle, which have put limits on the number of properties a host can have, as Bloomberg explains . Other cities imitatethe number of nights you can rent a property per year, such as Parisor London.
The ultimate goal of these measures is to prevent the "expulsion" of residents from city centres and the withdrawal of properties from the long-term rental market.
In Berlin, for example, the authorities recently relaxed regulations that were impossible to implement. In this case, the city banned short-term rentals in flats, but not in single rooms, in 2016, hoping to return properties to the long-term rental market and alleviate the German capital's real estate crisis. However, Airbnb and other rival websites refused to share data on specific hosts, making it impossible to know who was breaking the law, so on several occasions the courts sided with the companies.
For its part, Barcelona is, according to Bloomberg, one of the European cities that invests the most resources to regulate holiday rental platforms. Thus, it is the only major city on the continent that prohibits, for example, the rental of single rooms and a licensing system launched in 2011 requires companies to show license numbers in all advertisements.
Despite this, the city still struggles to control the market, as Inside Airbnb estimated that 30% of the 15,655 Airbnb properties registered in Barcelona at the end of June were illegal, having been published with false license numbers. Another 25% of hosts said they were exempt from licensing requirements, although Airbnb does not require proof.
Finally, in London there are reports of hosts sharing a property across different platforms. That is, they create multiple listings for the same property and change the description or use photographs from different angles. It is also common to advertise the same flat in two different places, saying, for example, that a property is in Westminster when it is actually in Camden.
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