The majority of holiday lettings in The Canaries are illegal and the regional government is cracking down with swingeing fines
News has reached me from The Canaries (thanks to a helpful reader) that the regional government is cracking down hard on all unlicensed holiday lettings, which basically means most owners who rent out their homes to tourists from time to time. You can get more details from this article in Canarian Weekly.
The question of tourist rentals is a minefield of confusion and contradictions, as I pointed out in an article about rental licences and holiday lettings in Spain for The Sunday Times back in 2007.
In some areas you need a licence, in others you don’t. In those areas where you do need a licence, the law can be vague, contradictory, inconsistently implemented and arbitrarily enforced. On top of that promising start, most owners are blissfully unaware that such laws exist.
A powerful hotel lobby that sees holiday rentals as a threat is usually behind these laws, but given the glut of homes for sale, the state should be bending over backwards at all levels to encourage people to buy, which implies making tourist rentals as easy as possible.
But no. Instead they are issuing stunned owners with fines of up to €30,000 for renting out their holiday homes to tourists. If you engage in holiday lettings, you might want to bone up the relevant laws in your area.
I should add that so far I have only heard of problems in Mallorca, The Canaries, and parts of Barcelona, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be problems elsewhere.
