Barcelona’s room rentals: Prices range from €500 to €1,400

Barcelona turns flats into luxury boarding houses

A builder in Barcelona has a full schedule, but he no longer does domestic renovations. He now specializes in dividing flats into more rooms. In recent months, work for the capital of Catalonia’s trendy real estate business—professionally managed temporary room rentals—has multiplied. The phenomenon existed in Madrid, but in Barcelona, hundreds of conventional flats are being converted to maximize revenue by renting out 4 to 12 rooms. Prices range from €500 (a tiny percentage) to over €1,400 (suites with private bathrooms in prime areas), almost always paid by transient foreign guests.

There are striking cases: properties with up to 18 rooms advertised as "shared flats," formerly student or elderly residences, covering up to 400 square meters. The news, published by El Periódico, landed like a bomb in a context where traditional rentals are regulated, tourist flats are being banned in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and the Canary Islands, and the Government is preparing a price index for tensioned zones. Owners seek loopholes. The State, so far, is closing them.

What is a boarding-house flat and why is it booming?

The model consists of renting rooms by the month, not by the night. That is the key. Since it is neither a primary residence nor tourist accommodation, the contract escapes the Urban Leases Act and hotel licensing rules. The owner or manager renovates, divides, furnishes, and rents each room separately. Profitability multiplies: a flat that would yield €1,200 a month under traditional rental generates €4,000 or €5,000 with six rooms at €700 each.

The business has become professionalized. It is no longer the widow who rented a room to a student. There are companies that renovate, manage, and squeeze profitability. The Barcelona builder sums it up: "dividing flats into more rooms." His schedule is full. The phenomenon is spreading to Madrid and other cities.

The room bubble: prices and profiles

Prices range from €500 for interior, poorly connected rooms to over €1,400 for suites with private bathrooms in prime areas. The typical tenant is a transient foreigner with a temporary contract who does not claim primary residence rights. This reduces risk for the owner. It also reduces coexistence to fights over fridge space and bathroom cleaning.

Some see this as a return to post-war boarding houses, where a lady made the bed and served dinner. The difference is that now there is no lady, no dinner, and no contract. Just a room and a shared bathroom with strangers. The boarding house format makes sense for a few months of study or a trial period at a new job. As an indefinite living system, it is something else.

Legal risk: temporary contracts and evictions

The Housing Act opens the door to regulating temporary rentals before the general elections. The fifth additional provision contemplates creating a working group to regulate leases for uses other than housing. The Government will approve limits for setting housing prices in tensioned zones in January. Ministry of Housing price indices are already published in the BOE (Official State Gazette).

Owners switching to room rentals do so partly to evade these rules. But also to reduce the risk of non-payment and squatting. A tenant who doesn’t pay in a shared flat is easier to evict than a family with a primary residence contract. Dividing into rooms mitigates risk. Or so they believe.

The underlying problem: lack of construction and land release

Housing prices don’t fall because not enough is built. A self-builder takes two years for the simplest urban plot development, buried in bureaucracy, red tape, and delays from town halls and oligopolistic firms. Construction hasn’t even started. Every time he hears that speculators are to blame for prices, he can only laugh.

If procedures were fluid and less obstructive, he wouldn’t be paying rent and wouldn’t pressure demand. The problem isn’t just speculation. It’s that land isn’t released, taxes don’t fall, and construction stalls. Meanwhile, room rentals are the escape valve. And escape valves, when the system is tense, become the system.

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The disorienting fact: there are properties of up to 400 square meters with 18 rooms advertised as "shared flats." It’s not a boarding house. It’s not a hotel. It’s a flat. And it’s rented out in parts.