The rules that move this trade, as we read them.

The rules that have tightened since 2023 are about tourist flats — homes let by the night under a VUT or HUT licence — because they compete with housing. A hotel, a hostal or an aparthotel sits under a different regime: a hospitality use, with its own categories and stars, inspected as a business rather than as a home.

That is why the buildings on this shelf are hospitality. A licence for a hospitality use transfers with the building in most regions, and a moratorium on tourist flats does not touch it. Each card's "what has to be true" says whether the licence is in hand, transferable, or still to be granted.

Since the Catalan decree of 2023, a tourist-flat licence in a stressed municipality is granted for five years and must be renewed. Barcelona said in 2024 that it would not renew the roughly ten thousand it has, so the stock of flats let by the night is expected to run down toward the end of 2028.

Hospitality buildings are outside that clock. The city's own hotel plan limits new hotel openings in the centre, which makes an existing hospitality building with its licence the scarce thing. That is the argument behind the Gràcia raise on this shelf.

The islands froze the creation of new tourist accommodation places in 2022, and the freeze has been carried forward. A place is the unit the licence is counted in — a bed, in effect — so a building cannot add capacity, and a new building cannot open, without places bought from one that closes.

Existing places keep their value and move with the building. A refurbishment that does not add beds is not caught; one that does needs places from the pool, at a price.

Madrid has moved against tourist flats inside residential buildings in the centre, and licences for new ones there are in practice not granted. What the city keeps granting is a hospitality use for a whole building that already had one: a hostal that becomes an aparthotel, a hotel that changes hands.

So the question on a Madrid building is its use as registered, not the street it is on. A building whose ground floor was a pensión in 1990 carries an argument a residential block does not.

A second-hand building bought from a private seller pays transfer tax, ITP, set by the region: from six per cent in Madrid to ten in Catalonia and Valencia, with steps in between and above in the Balearics. Bought from a company as a going concern, the sale may instead carry VAT with a waiver of the exemption, which changes the arithmetic and is worth a lawyer's afternoon.

Stamp duty, notary and registry come on top, and are small beside the transfer tax. Every plan you can download prints the regime it assumed and the amount it produced, so the tax is a line you can check, not a surprise at the notary.

A moratorium is a council suspending new licences in a zone while it writes a plan, usually the old town, usually for a year that gets extended. A building bought in one is a bet on the plan, and we do not make it with your money.

So when a moratorium lands on a building we are studying, the deal is parked, not modelled around. The Cádiz aparthotel on the firm's book is parked for exactly that reason, and it is not on your shelf.