The title above says short-let yields on the western side of this coast are still climbing, and buyers arrive wanting me to put a figure on it. I won’t, and that is not a denial: what a short let returns is settled address by address, so a percentage that was true of a house you will never own answers nothing about yours. The percentage is the output of the decision, and the inputs are fixed long before a guest books.
Those four are the licence, the community, the season, and the costs that run on when nobody is in the house — in that order, because the first of them can end the conversation. Checking is cheaper than discovering.
The number you were shown is not evidence
An income estimate on a listing platform is a sales instrument. It is built from homes that are not yours, in a year already finished, by a party that earns when you publish rather than when you are right. It counts the money that arrives and never the money that leaves.
Nor will I publish an average for the coast. An average blends a flat in a town that trades all winter with a hillside house that needs a car for a loaf of bread. Nobody owns the average; you will own one address.
First: may this address be let at all?
Tourist letting in Andalucía sits under Decreto 28/2016, de 2 de febrero, and what owners misread is the direction of trust. You do not apply and wait to be approved: you file a declaración responsable — your signed statement that the home already meets the decree — and entry in the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía follows from that signature. Nobody looks at the house first. Afterwards the código de inscripción must appear in every advertisement, and since July 2025 a national Registro Único number alongside it — without that number the large booking platforms will not carry the listing.
Two things follow. The decree ties the home to its licencia de ocupación and the capacity shown on it, so a property that cannot produce that document is not a letting candidate yet. And the decree is only the regional layer: whether your street may be used this way is municipal, and the town halls here do not all answer alike.
So before an offer goes in I want the town hall’s own answer for that exact address, in writing and dated — not last season’s, and not a rule quoted in the next town. In order, what I ask for:
- the licencia de ocupación for that dwelling, and the capacity stated on it
- the town hall’s current written position on tourist use at that address, dated this month
- the community’s statutes, and the minutes of the last few general meetings
- if it is already let: the entry in the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía, the number in the national Registro Único, and both of them in the running advertisements
The building votes, and it votes before you do
Where the home sits in a building under horizontal division, article 17.12 of the Ley 49/1960 de Propiedad Horizontal requires an express agreement of three-fifths of the owners, representing three-fifths of the participation quotas, to approve, condition or prohibit tourist letting; that wording applies since Ley Orgánica 1/2025 took effect on 3 April 2025. The community may have decided already.
A block where most owners live here all year weighs guests differently from a block of absentee owners, and the minutes say which one you are buying into. An unsettled debate is information too.
The minutes of a community meeting are the least glamorous document in a purchase, and the one that most often changes my advice.
The season has a shape; the costs do not
Occupancy is not one number either. A year here has a shape: high summer carries it, and the rest depends on whether the place has a reason to exist once the visitors leave. Two municipalities twenty minutes apart can have quite different shapes, which is why the area pages carry the season place by place.
The costs have no shape. They arrive every month, including the ones with nobody in the house:
- the community charge, due whether the home is full, empty, or yours that week
- the IBI and the other municipal charges attached to the property
- the standing part of the utilities, plus the pool and air conditioning in high season
- cleaning, linen and changeovers — a cost that follows arrivals, not income
- maintenance of what guests use hardest, including the repair that cannot wait a week
- management, or your own hours: the guest register, the bookings, the keys, the midnight telephone
That last line is a legal duty as much as a chore: anyone carrying on a lodging activity must keep a documentary register of who stays, transmit the prescribed data to the authorities within twenty-four hours and retain it for three years, under Real Decreto 933/2021. Nightly, not annual. The distance between the top line and what you keep is that list.
When a long let, or your own use, is the better answer
A long let is not the consolation prize; it is another regime. Decreto 28/2016 excludes a dwelling contracted for more than two continuous months by the same user, so a winter tenancy is not a tourist let and is not governed as one. It falls under the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos instead, and how much of that law the two sides may contract around depends on the kind of tenancy it is — a question for your abogado before the contract is drafted, not after. The question is not what your contract says, but which term you can live with.
Three situations make me tell a buyer to skip short letting: when they want the house themselves in precisely the weeks that carry the year; when they cannot be here and will not pay somebody who can; and when the community’s position is unsettled and the purchase only works if the letting works. A second home with a known annual cost, free when you want it, is simply a different decision.
None of this is legal or tax advice, and I am not your abogado or your gestor. Letting rules here move — municipally, regionally and nationally — so read the above as the questions to put, not as the answers: have the licence position for your address confirmed in writing and dated, and what a let leaves after tax settled with the Agencia Tributaria or your own adviser, because that turns on your fiscal residence, the regime and the year. Send me the address you are weighing up and I will tell you which documents I would ask for first — and if the letting case does not stand up, I would rather say so while it is still a viewing.
