Since April 2025, a community of owners in Spain can vote by a three-fifths majority to authorise, limit, or prohibit holiday rentals in its building, even against an owner who already holds a valid tourist licence. Holiday letting in Spain used to be purely a licensing question: get the tourist licence, follow the rules, rent your apartment. It is now also a governance question, and a permission that exists on the day you buy can be voted away by your neighbours afterwards.
What changed in 2025
The reform of Spain’s Horizontal Property Law gave communities of owners an express power: by a three-fifths majority, a community can authorise, limit, or prohibit the use of apartments for tourist rental in its building. Before the reform, communities trying to restrict holiday lets faced a murky legal fight. Now the mechanism is explicit, the threshold is defined, and communities across Andalucía have been using it, in both directions. Some have formally blessed tourist use; others, particularly in buildings weary of key safes and wheeled suitcases, have shut it down.
The consequence for buyers is a genuine shift in the nature of the risk. A tourist licence used to be something you checked once, like a document in a file. Now the permission is alive: it depends on how sixty percent of your neighbours feel, this year and every year after. That’s not a reason to abandon the strategy. It’s a reason to underwrite it properly.
The registry confusion, cleared up
The picture was further stirred in 2026 when Spain’s Supreme Court annulled the new state-level single tourist registry that had been created by royal decree. Some coverage read that as deregulation. It isn’t. The state registry fell; the regional and municipal frameworks it sat on top of remain fully in force, and in Andalucía that means the regional tourist registration requirement still applies exactly as before. Practical translation: you still need your Andalusian tourist licence, your community still holds its three-fifths power, and the headlines about the annulment change neither fact.
How to buy a rental property in this regime
The checks are specific and none of them are difficult; they just have to happen before you sign rather than after. Read the community statutes for any existing restriction on tourist use. Then read the last two years of general meeting minutes, because that’s where a coming vote announces itself long before it passes, a motion raised, a working group formed, a neighbour’s complaint minuted. It’s the same discipline we describe in our guide to the four chapters of due diligence, with one eye specifically on rental politics. Confirm the property’s current licence status and how it transfers with the sale. And weigh the building itself: a community already full of professionally managed rentals has effectively voted with its keys, while a quiet residential block of permanent owners is exactly where a prohibition vote finds its three-fifths.
Property type matters too. The exposure is concentrated in apartments and townhouses, because the mechanism belongs to communities. A detached villa with no community faces licensing rules but no neighbour vote, one of several reasons villa stock trades at a premium among letting-minded buyers. And location shapes the politics: in short-let heartlands like Puerto Banús the rental economy is the building’s identity, while in family-first areas like Seghers the mood can run the other way. Know which kind of building you’re joining.
The honest framing
It has become fashionable to describe all this as hostility to holiday rentals. We’d frame it differently: Spain has moved the decision to the people who share the lift, and priced governance into the asset. For buyers that cuts both ways. It’s a new risk on the underwriting sheet, checkable in advance and monitorable after. It’s also, quietly, a moat: an apartment in a building that has formally authorised tourist use, in an area with deep rental demand, now holds a permission a competitor two streets away may never obtain. Scarcity of the right to operate is still scarcity, and this coast’s rental demand isn’t going anywhere.
So: check the statutes, read the minutes, verify the licence, and choose the building as carefully as the apartment. If letting is central to your plan, tell us at the start, because it changes which doors we’d walk you through, from golf stock with proven rental history to buildings where the vote you care about has already happened, in your favour.
The rental ban is one piece of a wider shift. Spain’s new housing decree, passed the same year, moves in a similar direction.
Questions people are asking
Can a community of owners ban holiday rentals in Spain?
Yes. Since April 2025, a three-fifths majority of a community of owners can authorise, limit, or prohibit tourist rental in the building, even against an owner who already holds a valid tourist licence.
Does having a tourist licence protect my right to rent out my apartment?
Not permanently. A licence used to be something you checked once, but the community can now vote to restrict or ban rentals after you already hold one, so the permission is effectively ongoing rather than fixed.
Do I still need a tourist licence to rent short-term in Andalucía?
Yes. Spain’s Supreme Court annulled a separate state-level tourist registry in 2026, but the regional and municipal frameworks remain fully in force, and Andalucía’s own tourist registration requirement is unchanged.
How do I check if a building might vote to restrict rentals?
Read the community’s statutes for any existing restriction, and read the last two years of general meeting minutes, where a coming vote usually announces itself first through a motion, working group or neighbour complaint.
Are villas affected by the community rental ban rule?
No. The mechanism belongs to communities of owners, so a detached villa with no community faces licensing rules but no neighbour vote on the matter.
Which areas are more likely to restrict holiday rentals?
Family-first residential buildings are more likely to vote restrictions through, while buildings already full of professionally managed rentals, common in areas like Puerto Banús, have effectively settled the question already.
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