I've spent more than 16 years managing short-term rentals in Barcelona and Madrid. I know both cities as my own. I love them, and in some way our work is to be their ambassadors: for many of the visitors who arrive, we're the first people they speak to. We are the face of the city.
From the inside, with full knowledge of the matter, I want to say something that almost no one says: short-term rentals are not the problem. Irresponsible management is.
The distinction matters because public debate has collapsed the entire sector into one category: "Airbnb". As if every apartment were the same, every one generated the same externalities, every one were opposed to the balance of the neighborhood.
It is not so.
The data backs it up. Spain welcomed 96.8 million international visitors in 2025 — a historic record. Tourism contributed €115.1 billion in spending, the highest figure in Europe. A large share of the lodging that receives those visitors is legal short-term rentals — the extra-hotel offering at the center of the debate.
Behind every one of those apartments there is an owner family, a management company that employs local teams, and a guest who pays VAT, tourist tax and other taxes.
The investment-fund myth
The press has installed the idea that short-term rentals are the product of foreign investment funds that empty out neighborhoods. At MyRentalHost it is not so, and our case proves it.
Our owners are private individuals — not funds. The majority has ONE single apartment with us. One. It's a supplement to a salary, preparation for retirement, an inherited asset they chose not to sell, a home they no longer use. They aren't speculative portfolios: they are families that, with one well-managed apartment, generate legitimate income.
The reality of the sector, at least in professional and local management companies like ours, is much closer to that than to the "international fund" narrative. There are many more private owners with one apartment than there are funds with many. Our numbers confirm it.
The jobs we sustain
When someone says "short-term rentals", the mental image is usually a key, an occasional cleaning, a payment. The reality is much bigger.
Every well-managed apartment depends on a direct chain of local services that sustains real jobs. At MyRentalHost we work with:
- Cleaning teams on payroll, local, with contracts.
- Industrial laundry services — sheets, towels, linens rotating among hundreds of apartments.
- Transport of linens between apartment, laundry and back.
- Hosts and check-in technicians 24/7 in five languages.
- Maintenance teams for day-to-day incidents.
- Renovations and minor works — painters, plumbers, electricians, carpenters.
- Air conditioning, boilers and technical repairs.
- Professional photographers so every apartment looks great online.
- Administrative, accounting and owner-care staff.
And to that direct chain we add another, less visible but equally real layer: the indirect employment we generate every time a guest experiences the city through us. An airport shuttle, a taxi or a VTC for an outing, the neighborhood restaurant we recommend for dinner, a babysitter for a night out, a private guide, a reservation at a local shop. Every interaction the guest has with the city can pass through our hands — and every recommendation is one more customer for a neighborhood business.
The number of people who live off this ecosystem is enormous — and entirely local. We aren't talking about offshore jobs or platforms that extract value abroad. We're talking about suppliers, freelancers and small companies in Barcelona and Madrid that invoice, pay taxes and feed entire families thanks to a sector that the public conversation paints as if it were just a couple of empty apartments.
Limiting the sector without nuance does not only affect owners. It affects that entire chain, direct and indirect.
What sets a well-managed short-term rental apart
The difference between a legal short-term rental and an improvised one isn't aesthetic. It's operational. An apartment with an HUT/VUT license is registered, pays taxes, has insurance, operates under regulation. An illegal apartment isn't registered, doesn't pay, has no insurance, operates below the radar.
Public criticism focuses almost exclusively on the first — the visible one, the one that complies. While the second, the one that truly harms the neighborhood, falls outside the debate because it's hard to police.
At MyRentalHost we say we are "the human side of hospitality". It sounds like a slogan, but it means something concrete: every one of our apartments has a human team behind it. A host who recommends neighborhood restaurants, not chains. Who answers messages in minutes. Cleaning, maintenance and guest-care teams 24/7 in five languages, all local.
An international hotel doesn't give you this. Neither does an unmanaged apartment.
Mid-term rentals: the other front
Catalonia has taken another turn. Law 11/2025 — a Catalan regional law, in force since January 1, 2026 — redefines mid-term rentals by cause, not by duration. If the tenant comes for work, studies or medical reasons, the contract is subject to the price control of stressed-market zones (national Law 12/2023). Only rentals with a vacation or recreational purpose remain free of the cap.
In practice, this puts the "real" mid-term rental — the one that has for years housed professionals on short projects, Erasmus students, doctors on rotation, families in transition — under caps that make it unviable for an owner to offer. Data from the first half of 2025 spoke of 9,394 mid-term rental contracts registered in Barcelona alone and 15,535 in Catalonia. Behind each one is a tenant with a concrete need who will now be left without an option.
We've been doing mid-term rentals for years. It works. It works for the owner, who gets stable income and a responsible tenant for months. It works for the professional or student guest, who needs more than a month in the city and can't find a reasonable alternative. It works for the neighborhood, which welcomes people who live, not just pass through.
The Catalan legislator has its arguments — closing documented loopholes, protecting residential stock, exercising the constitutional right to housing under article 47 of the Spanish Constitution. I acknowledge them. But the remedy applied has a large side effect: an entire market is eliminated to pursue the deviations of a few.
And here I want to be clear: eliminating something is always the worst way to solve a problem.
The solution is not in closing doors. It is in how the options coexist. Because behind each model — short-term rental, mid-term by cause, traditional residential — there are people who deserve to be able to work, live, invest. Eliminating one to "save" another is a shortcut that loses everyone.
Madrid, so far, has not taken this path. National regulation remains flexible and the city has not replicated the Catalan model. The contrast matters: two models, two cities, two outcomes still to be seen.
The way: coexistence, not elimination
What's needed is not to empty the sector. It is to strengthen the difference between the professional and the informal: more inspection of unlicensed apartments, more recognition of the well-managed short-term rental as part of the local economy, real dialogue among administrations, owners and management companies, public data on who pays what, where and how much.
And the numbers should be put in scale. Legal short-term rentals in Spain represent around 1.4% of the total housing stock (381,837 tourist apartments in May 2025, against total residential stock — source: INE, experimental statistics). We are responsible, in fair measure, for the problems we generate. But you cannot blame 1.4% for the problems that affect the remaining 98.6% of the market — a market with far more structural causes: lack of new construction, restrictive residential regulation, stagnant salaries, real-estate speculation by large capital.
Defending well-managed short-term and mid-term rentals is not defending chaos. It is defending hospitality with human care against two worse extremes: the international hotel that extracts value without leaving it in the neighborhood, and the improvised rental that offers the experience without the responsibility.
Today more than ever, the sector needs voices that recognize nuance. Cities need tourism, but tourism managed by people who live there, who take care of the asset, who understand the neighborhood, who love the city.
That is the human side of hospitality. And that is what we defend when we defend a sector that creates jobs, sustains families and connects people with two of the most vibrant cities in the world.