Treasury Requires Tourist Rental Platforms to Submit Quarterly Informative Returns

1 March 2018 – Expansión

The Government wants to put a stop to the fraud that is happening in the emerging market for tourist apartments. To this end, it is going to intensify the inspection of companies dedicated to the transfer of use of flats, such as Airbnb, HomeAway, HouseTrip, MyTwinPlace, Only-apartments, IntercambioCasas and Rentalia. For that, it is going to require them all to provide much more information and it will conduct a quarterly control of all of their activities. Through this, it wants to improve the “prevention of tax fraud for people and entities, in particular, the so-called collaborative platforms that mediate the transfer of use of homes for tourist purposes”, according to the draft ministerial order designed to put a stop to these kinds of irregularities, to which Expansión has had access. The text approves the so-called “model 179 informative declaration”, together with the conditions and procedures for presenting the required information before the Treasury.

The measure forms part of the strictest control that the Treasury wants to exercise over intermediaries in a rising sector, such as the tourist rental market, which has experienced a genuine boom in recent years and which now has 513,820 beds, 30% more than the sum of Spain’s hotels, hostels and B&Bs (393,838), according to data from Exceltur.

Until now, some of the main initiatives have been directed at users themselves, such as the warning issued last year by the Tax Authorities to more than 21,500 people that had leased their homes through these platforms, advising them that they must declare the money received in their tax returns.

The Treasury wants to close the door on the lack of transparency surrounding certain tourist rentals, behind which are sometimes even hotel chains, which lease homes through the platforms, and are in turn disguised as private users.

As a result, the ministerial order that the Department of Tax Management at the Tax Authority has prepared, emphasises certain concepts that may seem obvious, such as the importance of identifying the owner of the home or of the right “by virtue of which use of the dwelling is transferred”, if that is different from the rightful owner of the home. Moreover, all of the features of a property must be identified. Together with the general registry information, the specific details of each one of the operations that are carried out must be reported: the number of days during which a client leases the home and the price paid to the owner in exchange for its use.

This new order from the Treasury comes in addition to local legislation from many Town Halls such as those of Barcelona, Madrid and the Balearic Islands, which have proposed “ceilings” to stop the overheating of rental prices that has resulted from the boom of Airbnb and similar platforms. In fact, according to calculations from Urban Data Analytics for this newspaper, the upwards trend from the collaborative economy has caused rental prices to rise by an additional 6% in the Eixample district of Barcelona and by an additional 4% in the Centro district of Madrid in one year. That happens because the properties in question generate double the returns of a long-term rental property “A 40 m2 one-bedroom home in the Puerta del Sol area of Madrid generates €1,513 per month on Airbnb and a traditional rent of €700”, says the company by way of example.

Grace period

(…) This ministerial order (…) will apply to all transfers of homes for tourist purposes that take place on or after 1 January 2018.

The frequency of these returns to the Treasury will be quarterly (they must be submitted during the calendar month following the end of each quarter). But this year, in order to facilitate the process, those corresponding to the first two quarters of 2018 may be submitted up until 31 December 2018. Those corresponding to the third and fourth quarter will have to be submitted before 31 October 2018 and 31 January 2019, respectively (…).

Original story: Expansión (by Juanma Lamet)

Translation: Carmel Drake