Airbnb is flooding Madrid's vacation accommodation market

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

Madrid has become the hot spot for tourist apartments. The Spanish capital has over 1,300 of these types of flats for rent, and they are all owned by 31 people, with 'Claudia' being the host who is associated to 200 of them.

In Madrid there are 31 users who have more than 1,300 flats on Airbnb. 'Claudia' is the name that appears as the main hostess in Madrid, with 220 advertisements for tourist flats, but only one office appears in her personal information. After asking the company for the alleged owner, they refused to answer.

Days after the recording, the photo of 'Claudia' disappears from her Airbnb profile: now they are advertised as 'Friendly and rentals', a sub-company of the hotel group 'Worldwide Witham'.

'Worldwide Witham' has a turnover of over 3,400 million euros, and was acquired by Platinum, an entity of Tom Gores, a great American tycoon owner of an NBA team, which is also the great host of Airbnb in Madrid.

This is the world's most unique case. A single neighborhood concentrates 60% of the tourist flats of Madrid. That's why the city council has put in place a special plan to regulate accommodation that consists of dividing the capital into four rings, all with something in common: buildings dedicated exclusively to tourist flats are prohibited. The City Council has already begun the inspections and in eight months it has opened more than 500 files and has closed 170 illegal apartments.

Alberto is the owner of five apartments in the most restrictive area of ​​Madrid. He assures that he had to "reinvent himself professionally" because his business did not work and, after renting an apartment for more than ten years, decided to start leasing it to tourists: "The last rent was 850 or there was less than 900 euros, and now we can get about 1,800 or 1,900 euros a month on average. "

On the ban of the City Council, Alberto says it is "a disguised prohibition" and warns that they will fight until the end.

One of the new measures of the lodging plan will be restricting renting of more than 90 days a year. 

Jose Manuel Calvo, Town Planning Councilor of Madrid City Council explained that, in order to prevent the problem from spreading to other neighborhoods, the plan should be revised as usual. Even so, the Airbnb tourist platform has started a campaign of protests and has expressed its discontent both to the City Council and the Community.

Javier Gil, spokesman of the Union of Tenants and Tenants of Madrid has dismantled the arguments of the platform, and has ensured that Airbnb "lies" when he says that apartments are rented on average 70 days a year, since "the general trend is that an apartment in Airbnb is rented 365 days because it is a commercial market."

"It is a fictitious fact, it is not a real fact, it is propaganda," he said.

The spokesman said that the business giant also lies when it says that 11% of families have avoided an eviction for renting their apartment on Airbnb: "they are a minority," he concludes.

Brussels, the paradise of the 'lobbies' in which Airbnb does not stop growing: "They have achieved thousands of agreements."

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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