At the same time that the Generalitat presented the new regulation with which it hopes to reduce the number of homes for tourist use in Catalonia, the head of the show made an appearance on the main stage of the Smart City Expo World Congress: Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and director of Airbnb strategy.
Despite being unrelated to the most immediate current events, Blecharczyk criticized “the political urgency” that lies behind “the many models” that have been appearing in recent years in cities around the world to try to put a stop to the lack of real estate control linked to the tourist flats. Even so, the co-founder of Airbnb acknowledged when asked by journalist Mar Galtés that he sees “rules and regulations” as necessary and estimated that 80% of the cities have some type of regulation that affects the activity of the tourist rental platform.
One of them is Barcelona, and Blecharczyk took advantage of his visit to Barcelona to meet with the Barcelona City Council, as La Vanguardia has learned. The company's senior officials had held tense meetings with Deputy Mayor Janet Sanz during Colau's first term, but in recent years it was more difficult for them to see each other, although communication channels between the technical teams improved after the harsh municipal offensive based on sanctions that allowed the elimination of 7,000 irregular advertisements. The strategy director defined the current relationship as “quite positive.”
The meeting this time took place with the fourth deputy mayor and head of the Economy area, Jordi Valls. At the meeting, Valls explained that his model clashes with the housing problem that many European cities share. In that sense, Barcelona is part of an alliance of European cities for short-term rentals with cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and Vienna. All of them are working to ensure that European regulations stop the impact of illegal rentals, once they have confirmed that at the municipal level they do not have enough tools to confront the problem.
During the meeting, the municipal representative also asked one of the top managers of Airbnb to improve the agreements already in force for the exchange of information so that the data reaches the City Council more quickly and thus can more forcefully confront the owners who They decide to rent a home outside the law.
Blecharczyk took advantage of his time in Barcelona to also meet with representatives of the technological and digital ecosystem convened by the Tech Barcelona association.
