STR Unpacked

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STR Unpacked is a short-term rental industry podcast that reviews the key news stories of the week alongside an invited sector expert, providing commentary, insight and practical interpretation of how current developments are shaping the market.

  1. 2d ago

    In Force This Morning

    I am at the Vacation Rental World Summit in Lyon, and Spain changed the rules overnight. Its lower house threw out the 10% VAT charge on short lets on Friday 2 October. It was republished yesterday and came into force this morning. Royal decree law 29/2026 is in official state gazette 249, promulgated Tuesday 6 October. I pulled both decrees and diffed the operative paragraph. The short let wording is identical to the text the chamber killed 6 days ago, and it still takes effect on 1 December 2026. First, the mechanism. The hotel services test is old law and has been in the VAT act for years. What this decree adds is a second, alternative trigger: the exemption goes where the duration in favour of one and the same tenant does not exceed 30 nights. The decree says either of the 2 circumstances is enough, so the services limb and the 30 night limb each work on their own. The carve-out for a property in which the landlord has his habitual residence sits inside the 30 night limb. Second, something in this decree was not in the one that was repealed. A new article 20 requires a letting advertisement to carry the unit's identifying number, code or title, where applicable. The preamble names the municipal and regional codes for tourist use dwellings as its example. The 2024 rentals registry decree is why that matters. The state's own consolidated text of it records that the Supreme Court annulled the single registration procedure and the registration number references, in judgments of 19 May, 21 May and 1 June 2026. The duty is being rebuilt at statutory rank. That limb started this morning, not in December, it carries no penalty inside this decree, and the decree assigns a constitutional competence title to every article except that one. Third, the arithmetic. Both chambers were dissolved on Tuesday and the election is Sunday 29 November. The confirmation vote goes to the lower house's standing deputation under article 78 of the Constitution, inside 30 days of promulgation, which lands in the first week of November. 54 days to the tax date. Under 30 to the vote. What I would do this week. Stop modelling it as 10 points off margin, because a taxable supply unlocks input VAT on cleaning, linen and commission. Then look at payment terms, because the tax accrues when the price falls due and on deposits when you take them. A repealed tax is not a dead tax while the government still holds the pen. It holds it until polling day, 2 days before this one bites. If you are in Lyon, come and tell me how you are pricing December.

  2. 4d ago

    Ireland Moved The Number

    If you are working to a 14-day rule for short-term lets in Ireland, that number was repealed 7 months ago. Since 1 March 2026 the planning definition has been a letting "for a period not exceeding 21 consecutive nights". Section 30 of the Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2026 substituted it into section 3A of the Planning and Development Act 2000, and Statutory Instrument 67 of 2026 commenced that section on 1 March. The same substitution dropped the rent pressure zone limit, so short-term letting is now a material change of use anywhere in the state. So planning and the register finally count the same way: 21 nights. Last Tuesday the form arrived. Statutory Instrument 500 of 2026, sealed 29 September and notified in the official gazette on 2 October, creates Form 24. It accompanies the ordinary Form No. 2 on an application solely for retention of change of use to short-term letting. New article 33(4) limits the authority to further information on "matters of technical or environmental detail" needed for an environmental impact assessment or an appropriate assessment "or new matters raised through the planning application public participation process", and such requests "may only be requested once by the planning authority". Three things are not in that instrument and matter more. Filing is not a shield. Section 162(3) of the Planning and Development Act 2000: "No enforcement action under this Part (including an application under section 160) shall be stayed or withdrawn by reason of an application for permission for retention of unauthorised development." Section 162(2) adds that applying is not a defence to prosecution. A retention application also needs a newspaper notice and a site notice, so it puts your unauthorised use in front of the council and every neighbour.The two government bodies do not agree on the deadline. The department says "The register will open on 1 December and all hosts must register by 31 December 2026." The national tourism authority, which will operate it, says "Registration is not yet open" and "Registration for the short-term letting register will open once the necessary legislation has been passed." The Short-Term Letting and Tourism Bill has still not been published.Some operators have more time than the headline suggests. Providers in towns of 20,000 or fewer "have two years to meet national planning compliance requirements". And there is "a presumption in favour of granting planning permission for short-term letting where a dwelling has been used continuously for this purpose for at least seven years, and no enforcement action was taken".Plan for 31 December. Do not bet on it. And check which number your planning authority thinks it is applying.

  3. 5d ago

    Snap Election!

    Spain has called a general election, and the short-let VAT charge went down 3 days before it. On Friday 2 October the lower house threw out both of the government's housing decrees. Two separate resolutions in the state gazette of the same day, 1 per decree, under article 86.2 of the constitution. This morning the Prime Minister said he is dissolving parliament and going to the country on 29 November. Treat the date as reported: the dissolution decree is not in today's gazette, and electoral law puts polling on the 54th day after the call, so 29 November requires publication tomorrow, Tuesday 6 October. The 1 million euro fine in royal decree-law 26/2026 was never aimed at operators. Article 38 makes the short-term rental platforms the responsible parties, and the very serious breach is a platform failing to transmit data to the single rentals window. Your own registration number comes from Royal Decree 1312/2024, which built that registry, and it is untouched. Spain lost its fine on Airbnb and Booking. You did not lose an obligation. What did go is the VAT charge, and it never took effect. A furnished let was already outside the exemption if the landlord contracts to supply hotel-type services. The decree would have added a second trigger catching every let of 30 nights or fewer to 1 tenant, unless the landlord lives in the property. The whole amendment was headed with effect from 1 December 2026. An election does not park a decree-law. On dissolution the Congress hands its decree-law powers to a standing deputation under article 78 of the constitution, and that body can hold the confirmation vote itself. It has done it. On Wednesday 3 April 2019, 29 days into a dissolution, the standing deputation confirmed royal decree-law 7/2019 on housing and rental by 33 votes to 31 with 1 abstention, and in the same sitting refused to send it on as a bill. A housing measure, carried by 2 votes, with no parliament sitting. The government also keeps its full decree-law power until polling day, because under article 21 of the government act it only becomes a caretaker government once the election has been held. The honest limit: whether a decree-law could lawfully reach VAT has never been tested. The Constitutional Court has struck down decree-laws touching income tax and corporation tax as structural pillars, and upheld one changing a local property tax. On VAT there is no ruling, and the VAT act has been amended by decree-law more than 20 times without challenge. An election does not pause the decree-law power. It only changes who votes on it. Are you repricing December, or waiting for tomorrow's gazette?

  4. Oct 2

    Spain Votes Today

    Spain's statistics office published 2 surveys this morning and the demand line is the strongest in months. Non-resident tourists whose main accommodation in August was a rented home: 1,570,585, up 13.7%. Hotels managed 6.6%. More than double the rate. Then read the footnote. A tourist dwelling advertised on a booking platform lands in that rented-home category only if it is not on a regional tourism register. Registered ones are counted as tourist apartments instead. And the tourist apartment survey, published on Thursday, went the other way. Nights down 1.7%. Average stay down 8.4%. Prices up 5.8%. So demand for whole-home lets is growing fast, and Spain's own statistics put that growth outside the register. Which matters this week, because Spain is taxing the registered side. Royal decree-law 26/2026 takes furnished lets out of the VAT exemption from 1 December and puts them at 10%. There are 2 independent triggers and either one is enough. Supply a hotel-type service, cleaning, laundry or similar, at any length of stay. Or let for 30 nights or fewer in a property that is not the home you live in. The services trigger has no own-home let-off, so a cleaning round on a 2-month let is caught. The Congress of Deputies sits at 11 this morning to vote on keeping the decree or striking it down. It is the first of 2 decrees on the paper, so the vote follows both debates. The outer deadline is 29 October. A repeal would take the VAT rise with it, because it does not bite until December. Booking.com stopped putting guest phone numbers in the reservations feed on Monday, worldwide. On OTA the whole telephone element is gone. On B.XML the element stays and the value is empty. They were already absent for newly onboarded properties. The number is still in the extranet and in Pulse by manual lookup. Messaging still works, and images are the only attachment type allowed, so a door code as an image is fine and a PDF or a QR code file is not. Wales switched its register on yesterday. Registration is free, the duty to be registered is live, and the registration penalties at sections 7, 10, 13 and 15 do not commence until 1 April 2027. Note 2 things. The guidance says you must register by 31 March 2027 and the act creates no such deadline, it is simply the day before the fines start. And the duty to notify changes and the duty to apply for removal also commenced yesterday, while the service is in public beta and cannot yet do updates or deregistration. Get your unit counts right first. Which of these lands hardest on your portfolio?

  5. Oct 1

    Your Text Flow Just Broke

    Booking.com stopped sending guest phone numbers to connectivity providers on Monday 28 September. If you run units through a channel manager or a property management system, it is worth checking today rather than next week. From Booking's own connectivity changelog: "The Reservations API no longer includes phone numbers of guests globally as of September 28, 2026." The migration guide, dated 23 September, is wider than that line suggests. From 28 September all new reservation payloads omit the number, including payloads for past-dated bookings, modifications and cancellations. Numbers already in your system are not deleted, but you cannot pull one again. Four things that matter operationally. It depends on your integration. On the OTA specification the telephone element is removed from the payload. On B.XML the element stays and arrives empty. Those are different failures, and an empty field is the shape that can overwrite a number you already hold. Ask your provider which specification you are on and what they tested.Less stops than you would think. Text messages, WhatsApp and phone calls stop. Guest messaging does not, and the guest email alias is still present in the very example payloads Booking uses to show the phone number gone.The replacement channel has a limit worth knowing about. Booking's own help page says PDFs and QR codes are not supported as attachments in the chat, and that to share a PDF you should use the email alias. If you deliver door codes or parking permits as a PDF or a QR image, that is the thing to fix this week.The number itself is a manual lookup now, in the Extranet or the Pulse app, one booking at a time.Two honest notes. This was short notice, not no notice: Booking published it to operators on 21 September and to developers on 23 September. And it does not touch you at all if you work only in the Extranet and take no connectivity feed. One open question I would like answered. Booking says only accounts with permission to manage reservations and to view guest contact details can see the number. The access rights article it links to does not list a guest contact details permission at all. Your check-in automation just moved to a channel that will not carry a QR code. If you are connected to Booking, open a booking your system took in since Monday, not an arrival for next week, and check the phone field in your own system. What did yours show?

  6. Sep 30

    62 Days To Reprice

    Spain ended the VAT exemption on short-term rentals this morning. Royal decree-law 26/2026 was signed on Tuesday 29 September and published in the official state gazette today, reference BOE-A-2026-20266. From 1 December a furnished let of 30 nights or fewer to the same guest is no longer exempt. It is taxed at 10%, the hospitality rate. The exemption was already lost where the landlord supplied hotel-type services, and that test survives word for word. What the decree adds is an alternative trigger and it is pure duration: a let whose duration in favour of a single tenant does not exceed 30 nights, unless it happens in the dwelling where the landlord actually lives. The opening words say any of the circumstances, so that carve-out escapes the duration limb only. Supply hotel services in your own home and you are still taxable. Four things worth acting on. A let of 31 nights or more with no hotel services stays exempt. The same decree caps a tourist letting at 31 days in the leases act. 30 nights for the tax, 31 days for the housing rule.An exempt let recovers no input VAT and a taxable one does. From 1 December you charge 10% and recover VAT on new spend. Assets you already own come back only through the capital goods adjustment, and a mixed portfolio goes into partial recovery. Hold your gross price and you lose 9.09% of the net, not 10%.None of it applies in the Canary Islands, Ceuta or Melilla, which sit outside Spanish VAT.Property tax. Councils in a stressed residential market zone can surcharge a tourist-use dwelling by up to 50% of the net liability, 100% at 2 or more, 150% at 4 or more. It needs a municipal ordinance and applies to tax periods beginning after 1 October 2026, so the first accrual is 31 December 2027.The new sanctions title in the leases act sets 1 million euros for failing to transmit data, upliftable to 2% of prior-year global turnover. Article 15(3) of the EU regulation permits penalties on platforms "and, where appropriate by hosts". Spain has named only the platforms, while expressly preserving every other authority's power over hosts. Article 15(4) required those rules by 20 May 2026, so this is 133 days late. One caveat. It is a decree-law. The lower house has 30 days from promulgation to confirm it, so by 29 October, and it can be amended as a bill meanwhile. Plan for it, do not bank it. 62 days to 1 December. Are your December rates quoted gross or net of 10%?

  7. Sep 29

    The Duty With No Door

    Munich has had a short-term rental registration duty since 1 August, with a 50,000 euro fine attached, and no way to register. Both come from the city's own documents. The change-of-use by-law of 9 July 2026 creates the duty at section 5a. The council resolved it on 1 July, it was gazetted on 30 July, and it came into force on 1 August. Section 14 makes failing to register before you list, or failing to display the number, an administrative offence carrying up to 50,000 euros. Munich's council guidance page, as of this morning, says no registration duty yet applies to holiday flats, and that the necessary by-law amendment is being prepared. That amendment is 90 days old. The same page then links an information sheet, dated July, which says the opposite in the present tense: registration with the city is required before you offer a unit online. Under how registration works it gives the portal link as "not yet known". In June the city blamed a delay at the federal agency and said it would join another state's software. The agency's data hub went into live operation on 1 July, the day the council passed the duty. On Thursday 5 municipalities are scheduled to connect to that hub: Munich, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Frechen and Tubingen. Two points of precision. The federal list says these municipalities "plan" the introduction and its column heading is "planned publication". And it is not 5 new duties: Tubingen has required a municipal number through an online form since March 2022, Frechen joins a scheme its state has run since 2022, and Regensburg has no registration provision in its by-law at all, which expires on 31 December. Two things for anyone holding German stock. Scope is wider than holiday flats but narrower than it first looks. Any furnished unit offered through a platform counts, whatever the guest is there for, so contractor and corporate stays are in. Hotels, guesthouses and campsites are out, and so is anything let for a year or more. Both the fine and the delisting power are conditional on the municipality having actually introduced a procedure, so in Munich today neither can land. The exposure is the morning the portal opens, because there is no transitional provision anywhere in that by-law and no grace period for an existing listing. Separately, if you hold Puglian stock, the filing deadline there is tomorrow. The extension to 31 December announced on 23 September still has no instrument behind it, and Monday's gazette carries no amending law. If you list in Munich, put it in writing to the housing office this week: is section 5a in force against hosts today, and through what procedure.

  8. Sep 28

    Slovenia's 31 October Problem

    Koper's council sits tomorrow on a 270-day short-let cap, the most Slovenia's new law allows. It is still a cut, and Koper's own papers say so. Slovenia's hospitality act has applied since January. In May 2 ministers listed 14 municipalities where, for 2027 and 2028, the default falls to 60 days a year per dwelling. They include Ljubljana, Koper, Izola, Piran, Bled, Bohinj, Kranjska Gora and Radovljica. A listed council can substitute anything from 30 to 270 days. For that to apply from 1 January, it has to be adopted by 31 October, which falls on a Saturday, so the real deadline is the last council sitting before it. Koper proposes a flat 270 days municipality-wide. The analysis behind it mapped 3 zones, 90 days in Koper town, 120 in the wider urban belt and 270 in the rural hinterland, while also offering a uniform 120 to 270 option for the whole area. The proposer accepts its results, doubts the act will make housing more available, and asks for 270 everywhere, "which under the act is the maximum possible". Izola's paper has the arithmetic. On 2025 data, a 270-day threshold would directly reach 2 of the 432 establishments examined. At 180 days, 26. At 150 days, 51. At the 60-day default, 280. At 30 days, 387. So these councils are not choosing how hard to squeeze. They are choosing whether the default squeezes 280 businesses or 2. Even so, 270 is not generous: Koper notes companies and sole traders could let for 365 days under the old law. A natural person registered as a host is capped at 180 days nationally whatever the council decides, counted across every dwelling they operate. Izola took the same 270 figure on Thursday 17 September, at first reading only, with a new text and public consultation to follow. The moratorium operators expect does not legally exist. Parliament passed an act on 11 May touching these restrictions. It has never been published and is not in force. A public-sector union confederation lodged a referendum initiative on 18 May, parliament declared it inadmissible on 27 May, and the Constitutional Court annulled that on 24 July. Signatures restarted on 1 September and 40,000 are needed. Separate petitions against the letting provisions remain undecided, and nothing has been suspended. One rule outranks every cap. Letting in a building of 3 or more dwellings needs consent from co-owners holding over 75% of shares, plus every owner whose wall, floor or ceiling touches yours. It lasts 3 years and ends on any change of ownership. Consents under the old law run out on 31 December 2026. Which of the 14 are you in, and what is your council adopting?

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STR Unpacked is a short-term rental industry podcast that reviews the key news stories of the week alongside an invited sector expert, providing commentary, insight and practical interpretation of how current developments are shaping the market.

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  • Creator
    Ben
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    161
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © 2026 Ben
  • Show Website
    STR Unpacked