Regulatory Strategies for Short-Term Rentals in Spain: What Explains Regional Differences

Platform-mediated short-term rentals (STRs) have become a salient “public problem” in European cities because of their negative externalities on housing availability and affordability, neighborhood livability, and the governance capacity of local authorities. Spain constitutes a particularly informative setting to study regulatory variation: while national-level rules set broad parameters, the country’s quasi-federal distribution of competences grants regions—and, to a degree, municipalities—substantial discretion to design regulatory instruments and organize enforcement. Yet we still know relatively little about how enforcement choices are made in practice, and why regulatory strategies diverge across jurisdictions within the same country. This paper asks: Which regulatory approach(es) do regional and local authorities deploy to govern STRs, what explains cross-regional differences in those choices, and how are enforcement strategies operationalized on the ground? We focus on enforcement as a set of organizational decisions about priorities, resource allocation, detection, and sanctioning tools, and on the practical challenges of regulating markets mediated by digital platforms. Conceptually, we combine regulatory governance and enforcement scholarship by distinguishing between (i) regulatory approaches (the overarching logic of governing STRs) and (ii) enforcement strategies (the operational choices of enforcement agencies). The framework maps three ideal-typical approaches that can coexist in hybrid form: risk-based regulation (prioritizing high-risk actors/areas under resource constraints), responsive regulation (graduated enforcement and escalation), and self- and smart regulation (meta-regulatory reliance on regulated entities and intermediaries). Building on enforcement research, we expect variation to be shaped by (a) state capacity (staffing, budgets, and data/technology), (b) the risk profile of local STR markets (e.g., concentration of professional hosts), and (c) the feasibility of information access and collaboration with platforms and third parties. Methodologically, the paper adopts a comparative within-country research design centered on four high-tourism regions—Catalonia, Valencia, Andalucía, and Madrid—and their key municipalities (including Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Málaga, Sevilla, Granada, Cádiz, and Córdoba). Evidence is triangulated through systematic analysis of legal texts and regulatory instruments, inspection guidelines, and semi-structured interviews with regional and local officials responsible for tourism, urban planning, and inspection services. The paper’s contribution is twofold: empirically, it offers a fine-grained account of how Spanish jurisdictions combine enforcement logics under digital-platform conditions; theoretically, it clarifies how capacity constraints and information asymmetries drive the selection—and hybridization—of risk-based, responsive, and self-regulatory strategies in contemporary urban governance.