Our experience is that people who rent properties believe that a standard contract is valid for all leases and that the conditions agreed in the contract are always valid no matter what the law says.

These two errors are very common and they can be very expensive and cause a lot of trouble for both the owner and the tenant.

In this article, we try to give some basic advice about the most common types of lease.

Number 1, we have the lease of “tourist accommodation” Viviendas turísticas. Since the entry into force of the regulation in 2015 of this type of lease, the owners who rent their homes have been panicking and been running to register their homes as “tourist accommodation” for fear of fines up to 90.151,82.-€  that the law hands out to those who do not include their properties  in this special register.

However, not all rentals are considered “tourist accommodation”. Only those meeting the following conditions, number 2:

(1) When providing services specific to the hotel industry, such as cleaning, changing beds or doing laundry during the lease, and not only at the beginning or the end of the rental period or looking after the suitcases.

(2) When your rental is advertised through tourist channels such as web pages or tour operators.

If none of the above conditions are met, it will be considered an ordinary private permanent or seasonal rental and therefore, not subject to this special registration.

The most common rental is the private one, either permanent or seasonal. In these cases the owner is not obliged to register the dwelling nor the contract, in any register.

The fundamental difference between these two types of rental is that, if a tenant rents a permanent housing or habitual residence, the tenant has the right to occupy the dwelling for a minimum term of 3 years regardless whatever duration the parties have agreed in the contract. The law provides the tenant with a right to enlarge the rental period up to 3 years.

This means that if the owner has agreed a rental period of 1 year, the term of the year has expired, the tenant has the right to stay in the property for two more years, until the minimum term of 3 years, even if the owner does not want and wishes to recover the property for his own use. Under certain circumstances, this right of the tenant can be avoid.

For this important reason and others, we strongly recommend you to have the lease contract written or at least, supervised by a lawyer, who is the professional specializing on the law. Lawyer can save you a lot of money, troubles and headaches in the long run.