The Spanish Ministry of Housing has identified and notified online platforms of 53,876 illegal holiday rentals across the country, ordering their advertisements be taken down. Nearly 900 illegal rentals were detected in Tías and Yaiza.
The Ministry has notified online platforms of 8,698 illegal tourist properties in the Canary Islands alone. These are properties that applied for the mandatory registration number by the July 1st deadline but were rejected for failing to meet legal requirements.
The primary goal of the government is to return these dwellings to the conventional residential rental market, increasing the availability of long-term housing for residents. Platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com must now remove listings for these properties, which may be advertised on multiple sites simultaneously.
For Lanzarote, two of its municipalities are among the top six in the Canaries with the highest number of rejections. Yaiza leads locally with 442 illegal properties identified, followed closely by Tías with 427.
The nationwide action is powered by Spain’s ‘Registro único de alojamientos temporales’ – a procedure carried out at the Property Registry that allocates a unique registration number to each property and allows it to be offered on online short-term rental platforms (Booking, Rentalia, Airbnb, etc.).
Since its launch, the registry has received 336,497 applications. Of the 264,998 that were for tourist use, 53,786 (20.3%) have been revoked.
A revoked code means the application contained incomplete data or did not comply with regulations for a tourist rental, and the issues were not corrected in time. The various digital platforms must now proceed to remove all advertisements for these nearly 900 non-compliant properties in Tías and Yaiza.
