Illegal letting: How’s anyone supposed to make sense of the figures?

Even though they give the impression of not doing everything possible to stamp out illegal letting, let’s not place the blame solely at Airbnb’s virtual door - virtual because although they have office real estate, they don’t possess physical accommodation. Unlike, for instance, hoteliers, who have to go to the trouble of operating pesky hotels, laying on all manner of services, and employing armies of people. No, it’s not only Airbnb’s fault. Of course not. But then one does have to ask - fault for what? Or rather, fault for how much?

We are once again in the shadowy world of illegality and its stubborn capacity, a natural byproduct of illegality, to offer verifiable numbers or numbers that don’t appear to be contradictory and so numbers that everyone can agree upon and accept. We have had Spain’s consumer affairs ministry offering a figure of 7,000 illegal lets for the Balearics, a lower figure than the Tax Agency in the Balearics came up with not so long ago - that was 8,700. The ministry’s 7,000 was higher than a Council of Mallorca (and so just Mallorca) 6,192 in March last year. Or was this much lower, given that the tourism councillor reckoned there were between 10,000 and 15,000 illegal places (beds)? Were to have presumed that the illegal properties averaged out at around 2.5 places? We must have been. And yet, the previous October there were 30,292 illegal places. Apparently.

We are at least on reasonably firm ground in understanding that the consumer affairs ministry’s number is a more likely one than the bizarre suggestion of around 235,000. To remind you, the then Balearic housing minister, Marta Vidal, said back in 2023 that 36% of all dwellings in the Balearics were illegal lets. Well, she wasn’t minister for much longer, so we can safely disregard that nonsensical number.

It is perhaps the nature of illegal letting that arriving at a true figure is far from straightforward. Taking snapshots at given times will result in varying figures, if calculations are based on adverts. These ads come and go. It is also well known that platforms like Airbnb are avoided because they can be scrutinised. Hence the offers on social media and only at certain times, e.g. when inspectors are tucked up in bed. This said, one would have thought that by now the wizardry of big data, the blockchain and AI could have started nailing the numbers once and for all. The Council of Mallorca unveiled its intelligence unit last March. How intelligent is it proving to be?

To add to an unsatisfactory situation, we have all this business with tourists supposedly staying with friends and family. The National Statistics Institute’s Frontur survey of tourist movements periodically presents this figure. In 2024 it was down slightly from 2.3 million in 2023. Hoteliers are not alone in wondering if the 2.2 million in 2024 disguise, at least in part, illegal letting. But they can do more than wonder, as the methodology for arriving at this figure is open to serious question.

One has to bear in mind that Frontur is a survey. The figures are in large part statistical extrapolations that one trusts do indeed have a very high level of reliability and accuracy. In respect of accommodation, the survey distinguishes between that which is paid for and that which isn’t. Under the latter, for example, the assumption has to be that no money changes hands for family and friends. But under paid-for accommodation, there are six types of accommodation, one of which is ‘accommodation rental’. Whether one has been renting legal or illegal accommodation, one has been paying for it. Hasn’t one? Or is some further assumption being made that people lie and put opt for family and friends? This said, why would they?

There is then another section (C9), the second part of which is type of accommodation. Again there are paid or unpaid options, but some more than the previous (A14). Under paid-for, therefore, there are possibilities for tourist apartments, whole property rented or a room rented in a private home. A potential problem with this is surely what is meant by tourist apartments, which can easily be mistaken for holiday rentals, when they are not, as in terms of official classification they are a registered category in their own right. Can we make sense of all this? Someone may well do. I’m blowed if I can.