Let me start with the hard part: you probably won't like me.
I've been managing tourist flats in Barcelona since 2010. For a good part of this city, that puts me on the wrong side of a housing argument that has been turning sour for years now. I understand that. And I'm not writing to tell you you're mistaken, because on almost everything you're not.
You're right about the suitcase clattering down the stairs first thing in the morning. About the key box bolted to the front door (something we don't do, but plenty still do). About not liking people you don't know coming and going. That isn't the exaggeration of someone who complains for the sake of complaining: it's your life, and it's become more uncomfortable. Real.
And you're right about something worse, something that hits close to home: a good part of my sector has thoroughly earned this reputation. Unlicensed flats operating in plain sight. Managers who take your money but vanish when a pipe bursts on a Sunday. Noise at three in the morning and no phone that ever answers. If your idea of tourist letting was formed by that, your idea is correct. The problem is that it's incomplete. Let me tell you the other half.
What Airbnb really meant, at the start
When this began, I saw it as something almost lovely: someone kicked over the tourism board.
Before, the money left behind by millions of visitors kept four hotel chains going, and they set the price. Suddenly, an ordinary person could let out their flat for the weeks they went away on holiday, pay for their own trip and even come out with a little extra — while a guest stayed happy and cheaper than in a hotel.
And that guest was also people like you and me. It happened to me: how many trips did we take, with family or friends, paying for a whole flat — with its kitchen, its living room, its two bedrooms — for a normal price, sometimes even a cheap one, instead of booking two or three hotel rooms we couldn't afford? That's the other thing Airbnb did, and it's no small matter: it got families travelling who used to stay home because a hotel for four or five didn't add up. It democratised both ends: the one letting out and the one travelling. That's why hotels hate it — it broke their price and their format. And that's annoying.
I've had friends on an employee's wage, the kind that only just makes it to the end of the month, who by doing this earned a decent bit extra that changed their lives. They got to take that trip they'd dreamed of. They got to do that renovation that had been impossible before. To give themselves a breather that, on their payslip, had once been unthinkable. Numbers you only ever reached as an executive at a multinational, suddenly within reach of an ordinary worker with a flat and a willingness to look after it.
Then came the restriction, and the ban. And those examples faded out. Back to the same old payslip. Let me ask you honestly, no tricks: that breather for all those people who work hard — was it wrong?
Because politicians love to ban things. It's the easy option. Banning something and pointing to a culprit is the ABC of politics today — it takes no thought, it builds nothing, and it always looks good in a headline. The hard part, the part that would actually be their job, is the other one: asking what we can do to make this better. Putting the sector in order instead of destroying it. Chasing the illegal operator instead of punishing the one who plays by the rules. It's been a very long time since our politics came up with a single idea to make our lives better — only to take things away from us and tell us whose fault it is.
Who really owns these flats
You've been told there are vulture funds and big landlords behind all this. It's a comfortable story. It's also, for the most part, false.
In Barcelona there are around 5,000 tourist-flat owners, and 88% hold a single licence. One. In our case it's almost the absolute norm: people with one single flat fighting for a pension that's an embarrassment, or to pay a mortgage and have a bit left over at the end of the month. They're not funds. They're your neighbour on the third floor, who inherited the flat from his parents and doesn't want to sell it. The 68-year-old lady topping up a 900-euro pension, who bet on having a tourist flat to see whether she could have a decent life. There are thousands of examples, I promise you, and that's what lies behind most of these doors, whatever the headline says. I understand it: manipulating people is the easiest route to more votes, more power.
The numbers, without inflating them
Legal tourist letting is 0.77% of Barcelona's housing stock. Fewer than one flat in a hundred. And it's frozen: the city hasn't granted a new licence since 2014. Meanwhile, there are 26,600 studios and offices operating inside residential flats — more than double the number of tourist flats — and 8,865 flats simply sitting empty. Nobody takes to the streets over those.
And here's the figure that breaks the whole thing: in five years, rent in Barcelona has gone up by 93%. With tourist letting frozen for more than a decade. Think about it for a second: if the cause of your rent shooting up were tourist flats, then with tourist letting on hold it shouldn't have budged. And it shot up anyway.
So the honest question isn't "whose fault is it?". It's "why does it really go up?". And the answer, uncomfortable as it is for a headline, is known.
Why rent goes up (this bit is true)
First, and above all: nothing gets built. Half the housing needed for the new households that form each year is what actually gets put up — that's BBVA saying it, not me. Across all of Barcelona, around 1,200 homes were started in a whole year. A shortfall that the Bank of Spain puts, across Spain as a whole, at between 450,000 and 600,000 properties. When flats are scarce, the price goes up. As simple and as brutal as that.
Second: nothing gets built because there's no land and the bureaucracy is suffocating. A project takes years to get off the page, between licences, paperwork and costs. Add on the tax bill for building and buying. The upshot is that making affordable housing barely pays, and the little that does get made, gets made late. And on top of that, add the absurd amount of tax if you want to buy a home.
Third: demand keeps growing. Barcelona is growing, and that growth rests almost entirely on people arriving from elsewhere to live and work. More people wanting the same scarce number of flats. The maths doesn't fail.
Fourth: there's no public housing to cushion it. In Spain, public housing is 1.5% of the stock. In Europe, 9%. Six times less of a buffer for anyone who can't reach the open market. No Airbnb owner caused that: it was caused by decades of not building social housing.
And fifth, the most uncomfortable of all: some of the rental housing that already existed has vanished from the market. With the price cap and the legal uncertainty, many owners have withdrawn their flats: they sell them, leave them empty, or switch them to seasonal lets. The Government says prices have come down a little; the sector replies that yes, they have, but there's far less on offer — Idealista talks of falls of more than 80% since 2020. Both things can be true at once, and both harm you if you're looking for a flat: less to choose from, and more people fighting over the same thing.
None of that is the tourist flat. The tourist flat is the 0.77% that's been frozen for a decade. It is, quite literally, the last box on the list.
Who really wants this to disappear
It's worth looking at who's applauding the ban from the front row. It's not just the tired neighbour. It's the hotel lobby, which has spent fifteen years watching a slice of the pie slip away towards thousands of small owners. For them, the tourist flat disappearing means something very concrete: recovering the monopoly on accommodation. Going back to setting the price themselves, with no competition.
And do you know what happens when they pull it off? You don't have to imagine it. It's already happened.
New York, or the film we've already seen
New York banned tourist flats with exactly the same argument: free up housing, bring down rents. It wiped out more than 90% of the city's Airbnbs.
The result? Rents didn't come down: they carried on rising, faster even than in comparable cities. Available housing didn't increase. The only thing that shot up was hotel prices, well above the national average. The big winner was precisely the sector that had lobbied for the law: the hotel one. And along the way, the outer boroughs lost more than 15,700 jobs.
They banned it, rent didn't fall, hotels went up, jobs died. That's the film. And we're about to give it a re-release in Barcelona with a different cast.
The jobs no one names
Because when a tourist flat goes dark, it isn't just a flat that goes dark. It's the woman who cleans it. The lad who does the check-ins. The technician who dashes over on a Sunday. The neighbourhood laundry, the linen delivery, the locksmith, the photographer, and a long list of people who make their living from this and who never appear in any headline.
It's terribly easy to blame the tourist flat. It's harder to look in the eye the families who live off it existing.
What no figure shows
And now let me tell you what this job really is when it's done with heart, because no report talks about that.
It's walking into a flat and finding one of the girls from the cleaning team singing while she works. It sounds like nothing. It isn't. On that day I know the people who work with us are well, and if they're well, everything else turns out well.
It's the message from a guest who's leaving and takes two minutes to thank us, to tell us Barcelona gave them a few days they'll never forget. After sixteen years, that still moves me. It is, quite literally, what we do this for.
And it's — this is the part almost no one in the sector takes seriously — the relationship with you. When a new flat comes under management, one of the first things we ask for is the WhatsApp of the neighbours nearby. Not to cover ourselves: it's to be there. So that, if something happens, there's a person on the other end who answers before you ever have to go down and knock on a door. Believe it or not, we have a really good relationship with the neighbours. And it's no accident, I promise you.
We have a phrase we always say among ourselves, and it sums up who we are better than anything else:
The neighbours come first. The guests come after.
Because the guest leaves in four days. You stay. You live there. And that, for us, is respected above everything.
The only thing I ask of you
And when tourist letting is gone, and rent keeps rising — because, for everything above, it's going to keep rising — a new culprit will have to be found. Maybe it'll be the turn then of the 26,600 offices tucked inside residential flats, many of them half empty, which I promise you are far more numerous than tourist flats. Homes are for living in. Of course they are. I agree. Let's apply that fully, not just to the half that bothers certain people less.
There are managers who treat a building like a cash machine, and there are teams who treat it as what it is — someone's home, in someone's neighbourhood. Lumping us all together is as comfortable as it is unfair, and you, who have suffered the first kind, are the one best placed to tell them apart. Judge me on that: on conduct, not on category.
We've spent sixteen years betting on something that sounds naive and isn't: that this can be done well. Profitable for the owner. Unforgettable for the guest. And considerate towards the neighbour who's still there once the guest has gone. That last part — yours — is the one no one in the sector names. I name it, and above all I look after it, because this city isn't a stage set to be let out by the night: it's everyone's home, mine included.
I'm not asking you to like what I do. I'm asking that, the next time you hear that the tourist flat is to blame for everything, you remember this letter and think: it wasn't as simple as they were selling it to me.
Because in the end this is about something very old and very simple: treating the person next door the way you'd like to be treated yourself. The rest is pure noise.
See you around the neighbourhood. Agus
The human side of hospitality · Barcelona, since 2010.