Disparate figures in the Madrid City Council’s campaign to fine illegal tourist apartments. Municipal sources assure that 183 penalties of 30,001 euros have already been imposed, although the latest report from the Activities Agency, with data from January to September, puts the total of these penalties received by the owners of Tourist Use Homes (VUT) at 69. ) without a municipal license to carry out this activity.
The sanctions of 30,001 euros are the first of a range of fines that has been increased in Madrid since last spring, when Almeida’s team decided to increase the amount significantly to try to discourage the opening of illegal tourist apartments, which amounted to more than 12,000. estate. Previously, sanctions of 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 euros were imposed, procedures that have continued to be processed through the Activities Agency (ADA) and that so far this year have reached another 51 VUT.
Of the 69 fines imposed included in the ADA report, only in 16 cases the companies reported decided to take advantage of the reductions provided for prompt payment (between 20% and 40%), so it is likely that a good part of the The rest have appealed the sanctions and they are not yet final. The total amount of money claimed by the council amounts to 1,890,063 euros, according to the aforementioned document.
Although the Madrid City Council is currently processing a law to make it easier to reduce the number of unlicensed tourist apartments, at the moment its efforts are focusing on closing the existing ones, sending the message to the owners of pirate VUTs that there is “zero tolerance.” with this type of illegal apartments,” Almeida said last summer. “We have demonstrated it by already processing all those files and imposing those more than one hundred and seventy sanctions (…). “We must put a stop to illegality in the city now.”
The message was reinforced in August by the Urban Planning delegate himself, responsible for the Activities Agency and the inspection campaigns, ensuring that thanks to the measures adopted, “almost 500” VUTs had been closed in the last 18 months. That figure today is 523 homes, they add from the area. In this case there is also a disparity between the current figures and those included in the ADA report, where there are 221 illegal tourist homes this year, until September, that have returned to residential activity after their owners received the threat of a fine. by the council, which gives a first notice before starting the procedures to impose financial fines.
The report shows an increase in this period from January to September in the complaints that are coming against the tourist apartments, both from the neighbors (692 compared to 431 in the same section of the year 2023) and from the Municipal Police and other areas of the consistory (251 versus 83). After these complaints, the Agency’s inspectorate detected 448 VUTs, most of them illegal.
As a result of this action, 289 files have been opened affecting 312 homes. In parallel, these teams have ordered the closure of 356 homes for tourist use, some of them with files open since last year.
More listings on Airbnb despite the moratorium
At the same time that the amount of the fines increased, the Madrid City Council decreed a stoppage in the granting of VUT licenses. It did so while processing new regulations that will prevent its opening in communities of owners with long-term residents. Its intention is to initially approve it in two weeks and for it to come into force definitively before the summer.
But the moratorium and fines do not seem to be intimidating some of the owners who are renting out tourist apartments without a license: since April there have been a thousand more apartment listings on Airbnb, even though their number cannot have increased. legally.
From Más Madrid, which attended the meeting of the ADA Governing Council this Wednesday, they indicate that the figure of 69 fines is lower than those imposed last year, despite the fact that the Government team “assured us that it had reinforced the service of inspection on ten more people.” His councilor José Luis Nieto adds, in statements to this newspaper: “We know that everything that Almeida sells is smoke, but that does not mean we have stopped being shocked when we discover that this government lies more than it talks and that its measures and sanctions are fake. ”. “So where does Almeida get the data that the City Council has imposed 176 fines between April and July of this year, when they don’t even reach 70?” he adds.
Nieto explains that “the Activities Agency’s own report from January to September of this year has uncovered the lies of the municipal government about its policy with the VUT and adds that “Almeida would have only gotten them to stop illegally exercising 197 VUT, despite the fact that the registered complaints have not stopped growing: from 514 in 2023 to 943 in 2024”, which is why it demands “immediate explanations from the mayor and the Urban Planning delegate, who have lied to us without the slightest shame, to us “all citizens.”
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