In Teguise, Lanzarote, a total of 1,826 homes are dedicated to vacation rentals, around 16.3% of the registered homes, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE). It is a high figure, the third highest in the Canary Islands only behind Yaiza (23.63%), another Lanzarote municipality, and La Oliva (24.16%), located in the north of the neighboring island, Fuerteventura.
Tourist rentals have been gaining ground in this town, characterized by its white buildings and palm trees, under a rule approved in 2015 that only requires presenting a responsible declaration of the activity before the Island Council and little else. The growth has been sustained, without the council or any other public administration intervening or imposing limits.
But that’s going to change in a few months. The law regulating holiday homes in the Archipelago, already in the regional Parliament after passing through the Advisory Council, obliges local entities to draw up a “verification and control plan” within a period of eight months from its entry into force. all tourist apartments, whose execution should not exceed four years.
The town councils must inspect each and every one of the houses operated for vacation purposes on the Islands, more than 50,000, and act on those that do not comply with the legislation. The problem is that, for many of them, like the one in Teguise, it is an almost impossible task to carry out. “We are not prepared. We only have two people in the classified activities department. It’s going to be real chaos,” says the councilor for Tourism in the municipality, Rita Hernández, from the Popular Party (PP).
The regional government has included this mandate in the draft law after “different public administrations, associations and groups” have revealed “the existence of tens of thousands of vacation homes outside of compliance with the regulations” for tourism and activities. classified. Sources from the regional Executive recall that the councils had already been assigned the competence of the latter in the 2015 decree and that the law “does not innovate” in this sense.
What has happened, De León pointed out at a press conference a few weeks ago, is that “many” of them “have not reported on compliance with the classified activity,” that is, on the data communicated or declared, the facilities and the activity carried out in tourist apartments, and now the world has fallen on them.
“No council has its own financial resources to face the inspection work that this law wants to impose. We do not have personnel to control each of the homes,” indicate sources from the Yaiza City Council, a town where almost one in four homes is a vacation home.
“We still do not know the real scope of the measures (…), in any case, it seems evident that local administrations are not prepared to have such an important inspection capacity. Depending on the level of responsibility, everything indicates that extraordinary resources will be needed that do not exist right now,” adds, for its part, the Adeje City Council, another municipality with a significant penetration of tourist rentals.
The Canarian Federation of Municipalities (FECAM) points out that the councils are “worried, above all, about the administrative burden” that awaits them. They believe that “the procedure is not simplified” and that “there must be real co-governance between the three administrations: Government, councils and city councils.”
The rule details that the responsible declaration of tourist apartments will be verified by the island corporation on duty through collaboration agreements or management assignments with the College of Property, Commercial and Personal Property Registrars. But the issuance of the classified activity license and its verification is a matter for the town councils. FECAM says it has “assumed” the first, but does not agree with the second.
“The inspections must remain in the hands of the Government of the Canary Islands. If the greatest burden of processing falls on the town councils, it will not be an efficient law, and could mean a significant bankruptcy for local administrations,” added sources from the Federation.
Given the rejection of local entities, it seems clear that the supervision of compliance with the legality of tourist rentals has until now been an exclusive exercise of the Inspection and Sanctions Service of the Ministry of Tourism. This department has fifty jobs, however, according to the latest update of the List of Job Positions (RPT) of the portfolio led by De León, fifteen are vacant. Among them are the positions of a tourism inspector, a head of the inspection section and another of sanctions. There is no open call to fill these positions.
Socialist deputy Rosa Cabella asked the regional Executive in writing if it is among its plans to expand the number of tourism inspectors in the Autonomous Community. The Government responded no and based its response on “the limitations established by budgetary regulations and those regulating budgetary stability and financial sustainability.” He added that, to increase the staff of this service, positions from others would have to be eliminated.
Tourism went a little deeper into its reply and specified that the Canarian Police has been carrying out tourist inspection functions “for some time”. Sources from the regional police confirm this statement and state that they act both ex officio and based on a complaint. They point out that the Administrative Surveillance and Inspection Unit is in charge of this and that in 2023 “many collaborations” were made, but that last year there were “less”, around thirty.
Official data show that in 2019 the total number of inspections carried out in holiday homes was 129 and in the first nine months of 2023 there were 128. Both figures come from written responses from the regional Executive to parliamentary questions. The Administration, however, has not responded to this newspaper’s queries to find out how many disciplinary files have been opened in the last two years for the irregular exploitation of tourist apartments. Nor has he responded to other questions related to this report.
A success story
After regulating tourist rentals for the first time, inspection is “almost as important or more important than the regulation itself,” in the opinion of Agustín Cocola, doctor in Human Geography from Cardiff University and researcher at the Institute of Geography and Planning for the University of Lisbon.
Cocola points out that there are “very restrictive” ordinances and gives the example of the city of Madrid, where there are around 1,000 licenses, but because the City Council has turned a “blind eye” the “informality” of the sector has proliferated. The capital City Council itself reported in April of last year that it had counted just over 12,400 illegal holiday homes.
The geographer, who has carefully studied how tourist rentals impact cities, raising rental prices and displacing the local population, recognizes that “it is true” that many city councils do not have the capacity to monitor the activity of the sector. But he clarifies that it is no less true that they could invest if there was “political will”, as cities like Paris, Amsterdam or Barcelona have done. “They saw it as a priority,” he emphasizes.
In Barcelona, licenses were frozen more than a decade ago and in 2016, with former mayor Ada Colau at the helm, a crash plan against illegal tourist accommodation was initiated, which is one of the few success stories in Spain in this regard. . The City Council has a team of 26 inspectors who check tourist accommodation and 50% terraces, twenty web page crawlers, in charge of analyzing the advertisements of the main marketers, such as Airbnb or Vrbo, two staff coordinators and six lawyers.
The data provided to this editorial office by the City Council shows that, since 2020, Barcelona has carried out more than 23,000 inspections and has opened nearly 8,600 files, of which 3,289 have ended with a proposal for sanctions. A small sample of these actions is on the part, that is, neighbors alerting of irregular activity, explains Eva Mur, director of the Inspection Service. But the majority are ex officio thanks, above all, to the team of visualizers.
Barcelona agreed with the marketing platforms on a protocol in which they give them the addresses of all the holiday homes that continued to be licensed after the suspension in 2014, around 10,000. From this census, the City Council’s trackers are in charge of analyzing the advertisements that do not appear in it and try to find their exact location through photos of the windows and their views. “Each of them has specialized in an area and with the images they end up knowing where the apartment is,” highlights Mur.
With this information and the comments of clients who claim to have been in the home for less than a month, the City Council is able to initiate a sanctioning procedure. Shortly after, an inspector goes to the house “to see if he is lucky” and finds a tourist who acknowledges his stay there to further strengthen the file. “What needs to be proven is that the entire apartment is rented for less than 31 days and with money exchanged,” summarizes the director of the department.
The Catalan capital imposes penalties of 60,000 euros for illegal accommodation. Mur remembers that when they began to be applied, small owners abandoned the activity and now “the issue has become very professional.” He explains that this inspection work has its purpose because a vacation home is not like any business. Agents cannot access it without a court order and it is only possible to obtain it if the owner or tenant has violated the seal “two or three times.” That termination order goes on one side and the sanctioning file on the other.
Barcelona City Council also sends the platforms a list of between 300 and 500 illegal advertisements each month so that they can remove them from their portals, not always successfully. This exchange of information falls within the agreement that the City Council signed with them years ago, an agreement that does not exist in all autonomous communities.
In the Canary Islands, Airbnb has limited itself to responding that “it is willing to work with the authorities (…) to establish rules that put local people first and allow them to benefit from tourism in the areas to which they belong, and avoid policies that continue to favor the dominance of hotels.” The company advocates for “effective policies” that “clearly differentiate between professional hosts” and those who do so sporadically and also calls for “the needs of rural destinations to be taken into account.”
In his opinion, the future regulation of the Canary Islands plans to “severely and without justification” restrict the activity of tourist rentals, despite the fact that it gives room for growth. Something that more than half a dozen geographers and even the Islands’ Advisory Council itself have warned.
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