Woman forced to squat in her own Barcelona flat after 'fake tenant' lists property on Airbnb

A Barcelona woman has become a squatter in her own home after finding out that her tenant was using the tourism rental website Airbnb to illegally sublet the flat in the city’s fashionable Barceloneta area.

Montse Pérez saw the ad for her bijou 32-square-metre apartment near Barcelona’s beach on Airbnb and decided to pose as a tourist, renting out a night from the imposter ‘host’ and barring herself inside her own property.

“We had no choice but to reoccupy our flat and change the lock,” Ms Pérez told the newspaper La Vanguardia, adding that her lawyer had said that it would take a year to expel her fraudulent tenant through the courts.

Ms Pérez explained that six weeks ago she had let the apartment to a 26-year-old man with double Russian and Chilean nationality, who said he worked as a financial advisor with a British company that had relocated to Barcelona. “He showed me a document saying his salary was €3,000 a month, so I thought OK, no problems here. Well, I was wrong,” said Ms Pérez, who was charging €950 a month for the apartment.

Ignoring a clause in the contract expressly forbidding subletting, Ms Pérez’s supposedly bona fide tenant wasted no time in putting the flat up for rent, at €200 a night in June and rising to €250 for the peaks months of July and August, meaning he could make up to €7,500 a month.

Ms Pérez said that she contacted Airbnb, but the company said that all it could do was “mediate between me and the host”. In the meantime, she saw how the name of the contact host for tourists entering the flat – converted into space for four with the addition of a sofa bed – changed three times “from Shairgei to Andrei and Eduard”, suggesting a possible organised network of fraudsters.

A spokesman for Barcelona council said inspectors had visited Ms Pérez and assured her that her fake tenant will be pursued and will face a fine of between €60,000 and €600,000.

“We have fined Airbnb in the past €600,000 as a repeat offender in advertising properties which do not have the tourism accommodation license. But they continue to break the law and simply carry on regardless.”

The spokesman said that other rental platforms such as Homeaway, Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Rentalia and Apartur were attending meetings with the council to draw up a protocol to help manage the impact from the city’s large amount of tourist apartments, but Airbnb had refused to participate.

In reply, Airbnb said it had suspended the listing of Ms Pérez’s flat while it looked into the the dispute between landlady and tenant. 

"We ask all hosts to certify they have permission to list their space and remind them to check and follow local rules before they list,” the company added.