Home or Hotel?

For a family with two young children life must have been looking pretty good in 2021 when they bought an apartment in Madrid, in a great central location in the La Latina barrio, on the corner of Calle de Toledo and Calle de López Silva, just 600m south of the Plaza Mayor. Unfortunately, It turned into a horror story, one that’s happening in other cities, not only in Spain and Europe, but across the world, all because someone in San Francisco had a great idea back in 2007 with the financial meltdown just getting started. Use our platform to rent out spare bedrooms in your home they said, to help pay the bills. I doubt anyone could have foreseen what that idea morphed into, not even the founders of Airbnb.

A Horror Story

For our family in Madrid their property purchase turned into a four-year battle to get someone to listen to their story. A story about vomit and urine in the elevators and common areas, parties around the clock spilling out into corridors and on to staircases, rubbish everywhere, sleepless nights year-round, constant police call-outs, and anxiety and depression leading to the mother losing her job. Because what they didn’t know was that of the sixty apartments in the building, forty were being operated as short-term lets to tourists, in effect as a hotel but without any of the associated responsibilities.  Predominantly from overseas, these tourists came to Madrid to party, sleep and repeat, - after all, the city is known as one of the best for street life day and night anywhere in the world. The conflict starts when then partying goes on, day in and day out, not outside on the streets but inside, next door to a privately-owned apartment whose occupants want to get a good night’s sleep so they can get the kids to school on time and then head to work. How unreasonable is that?

Their options were limited. With only 25% of the building still in the hands of owner-occupiers appealing to the Community of Owners was a non-starter, they would always be a minority if they tried to get short-term rentals banned. On top of that, the President of the Community also owned tourist apartments in the building so no prizes for guessing which way he would vote. So, in 2023, they turned to the Town Hall and an immediate closure order was issued, plus fines totalling €16,000 were levied against the companies operating the businesses. Nothing changed, the mayhem continued.

A Solution?

In spite of one of the companies trying to buy them out, our plucky family stood their ground and took the offending companies to court, basing their case on the violation of their fundamental rights, specifically the right to privacy and family integrity. And we now know they got a ruling in their favour in June with a judge ordering the closure of ten of the apartments as tourist lets and the payment of €37,000 compensation to the family by the four companies that own those ten. In handing down her ruling the judge cited case law from the European Court of Human Rights and the Spanish Constitutional Court and Supreme Court, stating that the right to property has limits. 

The family’s lawyer called the judgement ‘ a groundbreaking ruling’. If it holds it might just be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel but the judgement can be appealed so it’s not over yet. It’s quite clear that if hotel guests behaved in a similar fashion at the very least security staff would intervene and warnings issued and if it continued they would probably be arrested and their reservation terminated.  So what makes it acceptable in a residential building? I can’t see any way that tourist landlords can be made to operate to the same standards and the conclusion has to be that tourist apartments cannot coexist with owner occupiers. It’s estimated there are already two hundred buildings in Barcelona city centre with no actual residents in them and Madrid, Valencia and Málaga seem to be heading the same way, theme parks for tourists and few residents. Has anyone got a solution?