'My flat is on every website twice — but it doesn't exist': Barcelona renters speak out on duplicate listings crisis

Scroll through Idealista or Habitaclia on any given morning and the same apartment in Gràcia appears to be available for €1,200 a month — and also, somehow, for €1,450. Same parquet floors. Same narrow balcony overlooking Carrer de Verdi. Same potted fern in the corner. Two listings, two agencies, one property that may already be rented or may never have existed at all. This is Barcelona's duplicate image problem, and for the thousands of people searching for rental housing in the city right now, it is costing them time, money, and what little optimism they have left.

The issue has sharpened in urgency this summer. Mayor Jaume Collboni's administration has been tightening the screws on short-term tourist rentals since late 2023, accelerating the expiry of around 10,000 Airbnb-style licences. The theory was that converting those tourist flats into long-term rentals would ease pressure on residents. In practice, the apartments have moved slowly back into a long-term market that remains chaotic, under-regulated at the listing level, and flooded with recycled photographs, copy-pasted descriptions, and properties that vanish the moment you call the number.

Families in Poblenou and Sant Antoni describe a grinding search

Community members who spoke with The Daily Barcelona — none willing to be named for fear of landlord retaliation — described losing deposits on viewings that turned out to be duplicated ghost listings, or spending weekends travelling across the Eixample to visit flats already signed away weeks earlier. One woman searching near the Mercat de l'Abaceria in Gràcia said she had visited four properties over three weeks before realising two of them were the same flat, photographed from different angles and listed by different agencies under slightly altered addresses on Carrer de la Torrent de les Flors.

A family looking to relocate from Hospitalet de Llobregat to Poblenou said they had submitted documentation — payslips, rental guarantees, employment contracts — to three separate agencies, only to discover that all three were marketing the same ground-floor unit on Rambla del Poblenou. None of the agencies had informed the others. The flat eventually went to a tenant who applied in person rather than online, bypassing the digital pipeline entirely.

In Sant Antoni, where one-bedroom rents have risen sharply over the past three years, residents' groups affiliated with the Federació d'Associacions de Veïns i Veïnes de Barcelona have been cataloguing complaints since early 2025. The federation, which represents neighbourhood associations across the city's ten districts, has logged a growing number of grievances related to misleading online listings, though the organisation has not yet published aggregated figures from its internal records.

What the platforms are — and aren't — doing

Spanish law under the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos requires landlords and agencies to provide accurate property information, but there is no national regulation specifically mandating deduplication of rental images on listing platforms. The Generalitat de Catalunya's housing agency, the Agència de l'Habitatge de Catalunya, has a complaints mechanism but its enforcement focus has been on price-cap compliance under the Catalan rent-control index introduced in 2020 rather than on listing integrity.

Idealista, Spain's largest property portal with more than 2.5 million listings nationally as of its most recent published figures, has automated image-matching tools but acknowledges that cross-agency duplication remains a persistent issue. Habitaclia, the Catalan-focused competitor, has not publicly outlined a deduplication policy. Neither platform responded to a request for comment by publication time.

The practical toll is measurable. A 2024 report by the Barcelona-based think tank IERMB — the Institut d'Estudis Regionals i Metropolitans de Barcelona — found that the average rental search in the Barcelona metropolitan area now takes more than seven weeks, up from under four weeks in 2019. Duplicate and phantom listings are cited among the structural inefficiencies distorting search behaviour.

For now, housing advocates are urging searchers to cross-reference any listing against the Registre de Fiances de la Generalitat, which records active rental contracts, before submitting documentation or paying any fees. The Oficina Municipal d'Habitatge, with offices on Carrer de Llull in Poblenou and at Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 533, offers free verification appointments. With Barcelona's rental vacancy rate near historic lows, the margin for wasted viewings is essentially zero.