Vacation rentals: why is the draft law so controversial?

In this draft bill, the Ministry estimates that there are 220,000 beds currently operational on the islands as vacation rentals. Is it a lot or is it a little? The Ministry answers the question with two other pieces of information: in a region with a park of 1,078,000 properties, those 222,014 places represent 37% of the total accommodation supply.

Yes. The draft law presented by the Ministry of Tourism establishes that at least 90% of the residential buildable area will exclude tourist use for lodging, a percentage that in the green islands (La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro) will be at least 80%, unless urban planning justifies a smaller reserve.

A lot. The general director of Planning, Training and Tourism Promotion, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, explained that, according to the preliminary project and as long as there were no tweaks to it, since it comes into force “there may be a tourist use” of the home “whenever I decide.” , core by core, “municipal planning through various instruments that do not have to be general planning plans”, but special ordinances or plans may also be articulated for this purpose – which are processed in six or twelve months, respectively – , as Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has already done, so that this area “is not left to the free will of the owners or the market.”

Yes. That condition is included in the final provisions. The preliminary project establishes, according to the Ministry, a transitional regime of five years, a time in which there cannot be even one more vacation home if it is not established by municipal planning, once it is justified that a series of “sustainability indicators” are met. . During those five years, owners who already market vacation homes will have to adapt to the new provisions of this law, since, otherwise, they will end up leaving the market. To overcome this transitional period, a series of exceptions are established, such as the one that will allow an owner to continue operating a holiday home for twenty years with the condition that he puts another home on the market under a long-term rental regime with a price that represents 30% of the average income registered in the population center where it is located, which must be the same one in which the property for tourist use is marketed.

These requirements refer to the installation of air conditioning and heating devices, minimum energy rating C or B, hot water through solar panels or similar, power outlet for recharging electric vehicles, road and paved access to homes and other factors. If these requirements are not met, the homes are left off the market.

Of course, those that do not comply with the new requirements already mentioned. Also, a housing that is officially protected or subject to any other type of regime is prohibited from commercial exploitation of any kind, neither tourist nor residential, and these “should not have been on the market from the first minute.”

The Government has not quantified a percentage of the protected homes that will have to leave the market and, for this reason, it will entrust management to the College of Registrars to cross-check data, since the property registry specifies which ones are dedicated to the vacation rental. This will help the Executive to cancel the responsible declarations of those homes operated as vacation homes, since they will automatically lose their registration code required by the recently approved European platform marketing regulation.

The future law will allow the platforms to be sanctioned if they do not remove these homes from their listings, as well as their owners, something that could already be done but that, says the counselor, “was more complicated to detect” only through a responsible declaration that “no one is going to look at you” due to the volume of cargo of the 35 inspectors on staff. The future law states that, after one year from its entry into force, if a home does not have economic activity, the responsible declaration will expire.

The rejection is centered on the Ascav employers’ association, which brings together businessmen in the sector, but is also shared by a large part of the hotel sector in Las Palmas. Vacation rentals have less impact on the island of Tenerife and that makes businessmen from Gran Canaria fear that this island will be the most affected by this regulation that the Ministry has put on the table, and which is understood to favor, above all, large hotel chains.