The Ministry of Housing has announced a measure to transform illegal tourist apartments into affordable housing. The intention is correct: it attacks speculation and seeks to ease access to housing. However, the headline says it all: they are ten years late. While the problem worsened, the market was already deeply distorted, and now the solution depends on the inspection capacity of each autonomous community, generating inequalities and slow implementation.
Regional inspection: the technological bottleneck 🛠️
The measure clashes with the reality that each autonomous community has its own inspection system. Many lack integrated digital tools to cross-reference data from tourism platforms with census and housing registries. Without a centralized system that detects non-compliance in real time, the conversion will depend on slow, manual processes. Technology could streamline the identification of illegal apartments, but its implementation is not guaranteed, creating a risk of uneven enforcement across regions.
The perfect solution: arriving when the apartment is already a hotel 🏨
The plan is as timely as putting up blinds after the storm. While the ministry fine-tunes its proposal, illegal tourist apartments continue to operate as low-cost hotels with views of the neighbor's ruin. Of course, now owners will have plenty of time to turn the property into a museum of speculation before the regional inspector arrives. Good thing bureaucracy always arrives when the problem has already gone on vacation.