Spain has around 52,000 fewer short-term rental properties than a year ago. And yet the ones still on the market are getting better results.
That is the apparent contradiction in AirDNA's July data: less supply, fewer nights booked, but higher occupancy, higher prices and a higher RevPAR.
Spain is also the only one of Europe's five biggest markets losing properties on any significant scale.
So the question is not only how far the market has fallen. It is where things stand after the fall.
Spain is falling behind on the number of properties
In July 2026 there were around 365,000 available listings in Spain, 12.5% fewer than in July 2025, according to AirDNA.
In the other big European markets the opposite happened:
| Available listings | July 2026 | Year-on-year |
|---|---|---|
| France | 1.11 M | +4.0% |
| Italy | 563,000 | +3.6% |
| United Kingdom | 416,000 | +3.4% |
| Germany | 367,000 | +3.0% |
| Spain | 365,000 | -12.5% |
A year ago Spain was Europe's third market by number of properties. It has now dropped below Germany and sits last of the big five.
The Spanish fall stands out because the other four big markets grew by between 3% and 4%.
But the properties that remain are performing better
This is where the story turns.
Against July 2025, Spain posted:
| July 2026 vs July 2025 | Spain | Europe |
|---|---|---|
| Occupancy | +0.5% | -0.3 points |
| ADR (average nightly rate) | +10.1% | +8.2% |
| RevPAR | +10.6% | +7.7% |
In other words: there is less supply, but occupancy has risen, and both the average rate and the revenue per available listing grew faster than the European average.
Occupancy on its own is not the goal. A full calendar can hide a price that is too low.
But when a large part of the competition disappears, something far more interesting can happen: occupancy and price rise together.
That is exactly what has happened in Spain.
Where did those properties go?
AirDNA attributes much of the Spanish collapse to the removals driven by regulation, which began to accelerate in mid-2025.
The dates line up with several government actions.
In July 2025, Spain's Ministry of Consumer Affairs got Airbnb to take down 65,000 illegal listings and reported another 54,728 with no registration number.
In February 2026, the Ministry of Housing notified the platforms of 86,275 illegal tourist and seasonal dwellings, to be removed from sale. Andalusia, the Valencian Community and the Canary Islands had the most cases.
The regulatory framework changed along the way too. On 21 May 2026 the Spanish Supreme Court struck down the single rental registry created by Royal Decree 1312/2024, on the grounds that it invaded regional powers. The Digital Single Window and the platforms' duty to report data both survived, while the registries that now apply are the ones each region runs.
Not all of AirDNA's decline can be automatically pinned on these removals. But the timing is clear.
And there is another important point: the sources are not all measuring the same thing.
Three sources, three different figures
AirDNA is not an official register. Neither is PriceLabs, nor the experimental series published by the INE, Spain's national statistics institute.
The three of them give a different picture of the market:
| Source | Figure | Period | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| AirDNA (available listings) | 365,000 | July 2026 | -12.5% |
| PriceLabs (active listings) | 394,996 | 12 months, to August 2026 | -4% |
| INE (tourist dwellings) | 341,001 | May 2026 | -10.7% |
All three agree on one thing: the number of short-term rental properties has fallen.
The difference is in how they count them.
AirDNA tracks the properties published on Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking daily, and fills the picture in with data that managers and hosts hand over. For AirDNA a property counts as available if it had at least one day open to booking during the month. If it spent the whole month with a closed calendar, it does not enter the count.
The INE publishes an experimental series on tourist dwellings also based on web scraping of the three platforms most used in Spain. It then applies filters tied to each region's rules, and removes the dwellings that appear on more than one platform. The series comes out twice a year, with reference dates in May and November.
PriceLabs uses a different methodology, which it does not publish, and produces its own reading of the Spanish market based on a twelve-month average.
That is why the figures do not match.
And one difference between them matters more than the rest: AirDNA compares July 2026 with July 2025, while PriceLabs uses a twelve-month average and the INE counts dwellings on specific dates.
The PriceLabs average smooths the fall. AirDNA takes the whole of the last year's change in one go.
So is Spanish demand collapsing?
Yes, if we look at the total number of nights occupied.
But that figure needs context.
Nights occupied across the properties AirDNA tracks fell 11.8% in July. It is one of the worst readings among Europe's twenty largest markets.
Read on its own, it looks as if guests are abandoning Spain.
That is not what the rest of the data says.
AirDNA counts the nights of the properties still in its sample. If a large part of the supply disappears, so does the chance of recording any nights in those properties.
The proof is in the occupancy.
If guests had really left the market, occupancy would have fallen along with the nights.
But Spanish occupancy rose.
There are fewer properties competing for the same demand.
And that changes the reading completely.
Spain is not the only market that is changing
Spain's behaviour stands out against the other big European markets.
In July, demand across the five biggest markets fell 0.5% as a group. In markets with more than 80,000 properties it grew 1.5%. In those above 50,000, 3.9%. And in those below 50,000, 4.0%.
Within the big five, demand rose 4.2% in Italy, 2.5% in the United Kingdom and 2.0% in France. Germany fell too, by 4.3%, though nowhere near the Spanish drop.
Spain is therefore quite a particular case: it is the big market that has lost the most supply, and also the one whose composition has changed the most.
Less supply, better numbers per property
The end result is that Spain was the only one of the five big markets to gain occupancy, and it closed July with the best RevPAR of the five.
PriceLabs sees the same movement in its twelve-month data. Spanish occupancy goes from 58% to 60%, ADR from 121€ to 125€ and RevPAR from 73€ to 77€.
These are annual averages, so they cannot be compared directly with AirDNA's July figures. But the direction is the same: less supply, better results per property.
Greece shows something similar. It lost 2% of its supply, while occupancy rose 1.4% and RevPAR climbed 14.3%.
At the other end is Finland. Supply there grew 11.1%, and it was the only one of the twenty markets analysed to close July with a negative RevPAR, down 1.2%.
The relationship is not automatic, but the pattern is hard to ignore.
When competition increases, winning more occupancy can mean cutting prices.
When a large part of that competition disappears, the opposite can happen.
The average price has a trap in it too
There is another point worth having clear for anyone comparing their own results against the market.
AirDNA publishes two price measures.
ADR is the average nightly rate across every property it tracks.
The Repeat Rent Index compares only the properties that were present in both periods. Arrivals and departures therefore do not affect this index.
In Spain the Repeat Rent Index rose 7.3%, almost three points below the ADR increase.
The gap has a simple explanation.
The properties that have disappeared were not spread evenly across every price level. They weighed more at the bottom.
When those properties go, the market's average price rises even where some owners have not touched a single rate.
That does not mean the Spanish price increase is fictional. Hosts themselves have raised their prices too.
But it does mean that comparing your ADR with the ADR of a market that has changed this much can lead you to the wrong conclusions.
The 2026 market is not exactly the same market as 2025.
What this means for a property manager
For a manager, the most important figure in this report is probably not the 12.5% drop in supply.
It is another one.
Your competition has changed.
If some of the properties competing with you a year ago are gone, your historical benchmarks lose value.
The price that worked last year is not necessarily the right price today.
And looking at occupancy is not enough either. Higher occupancy can be the result of less competition, but it can also hide a pricing opportunity you are not taking.
That is why, in a market like Spain's today, it makes more and more sense to monitor three things continuously:
- how much supply actually competes with you
- what prices that competition is charging
- what occupancy it is achieving at those prices
The goal is not to fill the calendar.
It is to earn the most revenue possible from the demand available.
What can we expect from autumn onwards?
There is one last factor that will make the coming reports especially hard to interpret.
AirDNA expects Spain's year-on-year swings to moderate towards the end of autumn.
Not necessarily because the market has recovered.
The reason is that the period the new data gets compared against will already be a market that has been through most of the removals.
The red numbers will start to disappear from the reports because the point of comparison will have changed.
Until then, any comparison with 2025 needs an extra dose of context.
Spain has less competition than a year ago. Prices have risen. So has occupancy.
And that means historical data no longer describes exactly the market you are competing in today.
At ListingOK we monitor precisely that market, and we use that data to help managers with 6 or more properties make better pricing decisions.
If you want to see how we would do it with yours, request a demo.
Miguel
Miguel Roig Gimbernat is Partner at ListingOK, specializing in Revenue Management for vacation rentals and short-term rentals. With over 15 years of experience in technology, pricing, and revenue management, he helps property managers and hosts maximize their profitability on Airbnb and Booking.com through real market data and expert supervision. He combines expertise in data, platforms and technology with marketing to transform market intelligence into revenue decisions that boost profitability.
