Caribbean Short-Term Rental & Property Regulation Update: July–December 2023

Six Things to Know

• NYC Local Law 18 takes effect 5 September; Airbnb listings fall by over 80%
• Barcelona mayor announces 2028 phase-out of all tourist apartment licences
• EU passes landmark Short-Term Rental Regulation in December; transparency era begins
• Jamaica closes record 2023 tourism year; informal STR sector tops 12,000 active units
• Airbnb reports record US$9.9 billion full-year revenue; Caribbean a standout performer
• Jamaica hotel sector raises competitive fairness alarm over unregulated vacation rentals

New York City’s Landmark STR Law Takes Effect

If there was a single moment in 2023 that captured the direction of global short-term rental regulation, it was 5 September—the date New York City’s Local Law 18 took effect, fundamentally restructuring one of the world’s most active Airbnb markets. The law, which had been adopted by the New York City Council in January 2023 and had faced a legal challenge that was rejected by the courts, required all short-term rental hosts in the city to register with the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement and to be physically present in the property during any guest stay. The practical effect of the co-presence requirement was to make entire-home rentals—by far the dominant format on platforms such as Airbnb—illegal for the vast majority of hosts.

Within weeks of the law taking effect, the results were dramatic. Airbnb’s New York City active listing count fell from approximately 22,000 entire-home listings immediately before implementation to fewer than 3,000 registered listings by October—a reduction of well over 80%. The platform publicly criticised the law as “effectively a de facto ban,” and its chief executive Brian Chesky described New York’s approach as an example of what city governments should not do. The city’s hotels, by contrast, were bullish: hotel occupancy and average daily rates rose in the months following implementation as visitors absorbed the shock of sharply reduced STR supply and turned to licensed accommodation.

The immediate aftermath also revealed the law’s unintended consequences. Reports multiplied of whole-home rentals continuing to operate off-platform—listed on social media, offered through informal networks, or managed through shell listings on platforms outside the city’s regulatory reach. Enforcement resources at the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement were overwhelmed, and the city acknowledged that full enforcement of such a large market in transition would take months or years. For policymakers in smaller jurisdictions—including Jamaica—the NYC experience provided a detailed, real-time case study in both the power and the limits of top-down STR regulation.

Barcelona: A City Ending Its Airbnb Era

In November 2023, Barcelona’s Mayor Jaume Collboni made an announcement that reverberated through the global short-term rental industry: the city would not renew any of the approximately 10,000 tourist apartment licences currently in circulation when they expire between 2024 and 2028. Collboni, who had won the June 2023 mayoral election on a platform that included reducing the city’s dependence on mass tourism and improving housing affordability for residents, framed the decision as a necessary step to “give the city back to the people of Barcelona.”

The announcement was not a sudden departure: Barcelona had frozen new tourist apartment licences since 2014 and had imposed strict density limits on short-term rentals in central neighbourhoods. But the confirmation that no renewals would be permitted represented a qualitative escalation—the city was not merely restricting growth but actively winding down an established industry. Property investors holding Barcelona tourist flat licences faced a predictable collapse in the residual value of those licences, and early reports of accelerated sales and pivots to long-term residential leasing confirmed that the market was responding to the announcement with urgency.

Caribbean hoteliers and policymakers took note. Caribbean Journal reported in December 2023 that the Barcelona decision had been raised at a regional hotel industry conference in Barbados as evidence that “the tide is turning globally” on STR permissiveness. Whether Caribbean governments—most of which remain more dependent on tourism revenue than Barcelona—would draw the same policy conclusions was a matter of active debate.

The European Parliament Acts: The EU STR Regulation

On 19 December 2023, the European Parliament gave final approval to the EU Regulation on short-term accommodation rental services—completing a legislative process that had begun with a Commission proposal in 2022. The regulation establishes a common framework for STR registration across the EU and creates mandatory data-sharing obligations for platforms, requiring them to report host activity data to designated national authorities on a regular basis. Its adoption was hailed by housing advocates as a breakthrough in transparency and criticised by platforms as a compliance burden that would disproportionately affect small-scale hosts who lack sophisticated administrative support.

The regulation enters into force in early 2024 with a transitional implementation period for member states, but its passage before year-end 2023 means it becomes the starting point for all future discussion about how other jurisdictions should approach platform-based transparency. The OECD had previously published model reporting rules for digital platforms that informed the EU framework, and several non-EU countries—including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom—are at various stages of considering similar requirements for domestic platforms.

For Jamaica, the EU regulation’s most significant implication may be indirect: it compels Airbnb and other major platforms to build data collection and reporting infrastructure that could, in principle, be made available to Jamaican tax and tourism authorities if Jamaica were to request comparable disclosures. TAJ and the JTB have not yet formally requested such data, but the technical feasibility of doing so is now well-established by the EU experience.

Jamaica: A Record Year and an Unresolved Sector

Jamaica ended 2023 with tourism performance figures that would have seemed remarkable just three years earlier—at the depths of the pandemic. Preliminary JTB data indicated that total visitor arrivals for the year were on course to exceed 4.8 million when cruise and stopover passengers were combined, with stopover arrivals alone approaching 3.2 million. Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett confirmed in December that Jamaica was on track for a record tourism year in both arrival volumes and revenue per visitor—a particularly strong result given the global inflation environment, which had driven up the cost of international travel and accommodation.

Jamaica’s vacation rental sector contributed substantially to the record performance but remained almost entirely unregulated. Estimates from Airbnb’s own Caribbean inventory data and from JTB market research suggested that active short-term rental listings in Jamaica exceeded 12,000 units by the end of 2023, concentrated in St. James (with the highest absolute count), St. Ann, Westmoreland, and St. Elizabeth. Those properties collectively generated an estimated JM$20 billion or more in rental income during the year, a significant proportion of which may not have been reported to Tax Administration Jamaica.

The Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, consistent with its position throughout 2023, used its end-of-year communications to press the Ministry of Tourism for action. JHTA President Clifton Reader stated in a December press release that the association viewed the regulatory gap between licensed hotels and vacation rentals as “the most significant structural inequity in Jamaica’s tourism accommodation market,” and called for a licensing framework to be tabled in parliament in the first half of 2024. The Ministry responded with a statement of continued commitment to developing a framework but provided no legislative timeline.

Airbnb’s Record Revenue and the Platform’s Jamaica Strategy

Airbnb reported full-year 2023 revenue of US$9.9 billion—the company’s first year approaching the US$10 billion threshold and a new annual record. The result confirmed the company’s remarkable recovery from the pandemic-era collapse of its business and established it as a consistently profitable global corporation with a strong balance sheet. Management noted in the company’s year-end investor communications that Caribbean, Latin American, and South-East Asian markets had contributed disproportionately to growth, reflecting the company’s strategic pivot toward leisure-focused international markets in the post-pandemic years.

In Jamaica specifically, Airbnb maintained an active public affairs and host education programme throughout 2023, hosting events in Montego Bay and Kingston aimed at improving host quality standards and platform literacy among the island’s growing community of vacation rental operators. The company’s Caribbean team was also engaged with the Ministry of Tourism in dialogue about the shape of any future regulatory framework—a signal that Airbnb was taking the prospect of Jamaican regulation seriously enough to invest in shaping it, rather than simply opposing it.

Entering 2024, Jamaica’s STR sector faces a regulatory moment that its counterparts in New York, Barcelona, and Brussels have already navigated. The specific form that regulation takes—mandatory registration, tax reporting obligations, safety standards, or some combination of all three—will determine whether Jamaica’s vacation rental hosts are brought into a compliant, transparent framework or whether the pattern of informal growth and ad hoc enforcement continues. The global context has rarely been more instructive, or the urgency more apparent.