Barcelona Councils Move to Stamp Out Duplicate Property Listings This Week

Barcelona's housing enforcement arm confirmed this week that it has identified more than 340 property listings on short-term rental platforms suspected of using duplicate or recycled photographs to mask unregistered apartments — a tactic that allows landlords to keep relisting illegal lets under fresh identities after previous listings are taken down.

The development matters now because Mayor Jaume Collboni's administration is six months into one of the most aggressive short-term rental enforcement drives the city has run. The municipal moratorium on renewing short-term tourist apartment licences — first announced in late 2023 and extended into 2026 — has pushed some operators underground rather than out of the market. Duplicate imagery is one of the principal tools they use to evade automated detection systems run by platforms including Airbnb and Booking.com.

The city's Àrea de Drets Socials, which oversees housing policy, is working alongside the Agència de l'Habitatge de Catalunya, the regional body responsible for licensing residential rentals in Catalonia, to cross-reference listing photographs against a centralised registry of licensed tourist apartments. When the same interior image appears across multiple listing identities, or when a photograph already associated with a suspended licence reappears under a new host account, investigators flag it for formal inspection. Agents have focused the current sweep on Carrer de Provença and the surrounding streets of the Eixample Esquerra, as well as the lower slopes of Gràcia near Carrer de Verdi, two areas where short-term let density has historically been highest.

How the Duplicate Image Problem Works

The mechanics are straightforward. A landlord whose listing is suspended for lacking a valid número de registre simply creates a new host account, uploads the same apartment photographs with minor cropping or brightness adjustments, and relists the property, sometimes within 48 hours. Image-matching software of the kind now deployed by the Consorci de l'Habitatge de Barcelona can detect near-identical images even after basic editing, but only if platforms share data in close to real time — a cooperation that has been inconsistent.

According to figures published by the Ajuntament de Barcelona in its 2025 annual housing report, there were 9,724 active tourist apartment licences in the city as of December 2025, down from a peak of roughly 10,100 in 2022. However, independent monitoring by the urban research group Observatori Metropolità de Barcelona has repeatedly suggested the number of unlicensed listings operating at any given moment runs significantly higher than official figures capture. The city issued 2,300 disciplinary files related to short-term rental infringements in 2025, a 17 percent increase on the prior year.

What Landlords and Tenants Should Expect Next

Enforcement officers have indicated that formal inspection orders will go out before the end of July to the owners of properties flagged in this week's sweep. Landlords who cannot produce a valid tourism licence face fines that under Catalan housing law can reach €90,000 for serious or repeated violations. Properties that remain in operation after a closure order are subject to precautionary sealing.

For residents and prospective short-term renters, the practical implication is a sharper look at any listing that lacks a visible Catalan registration number — a nine-digit code beginning with HT that all legal tourist apartments in Catalonia are required to display. The Agència de l'Habitatge de Catalunya maintains a public database at its offices on Carrer de Calàbria, 147, in the Eixample, where anyone can verify whether a registration number is genuine before booking or signing anything.

City officials have also signalled that a new protocol requiring platforms to conduct image-hash verification before activating any new listing in Barcelona will be formally proposed to the European Commission's Digital Services Act enforcement desk in September 2026. If adopted, it would make the kind of duplicate-image relisting seen this week substantially harder to execute across all EU member states, not just in cities aggressive enough to catch it themselves.