227 charges imposed

Checks: City officials as Airbnb detectives

692 registered apartments in the city of Salzburg were inspected by a separate department within the city council.

(Bild: Tröster Andreas)

While scouring online platforms, the city of Salzburg came across many illegal offers for tourists. However, the state can be happy about the fines collected.

Since September 2020, landlords of vacation apartments on platforms such as Airbnb have had to register with the Salzburg municipalities. Since 2022, the city of Salzburg has been consistently checking reports from landlords and complaints from the public. Apparently with success, as the results for the first three years of the review show.

In addition to 692 registered apartments, there were 227 reports from the public and 44 reports via an online platform. The responsible municipal employees filed 195 reports. In 109 cases, the apartment was removed from the tourist platform and is therefore in principle available to the housing market again.

The state is happy about 300,000 euros in fines
This resulted in almost 300,000 euros in fines. The state can be pleased about this, as the spatial planning law behind it is a state law. Almost 169,000 euros of this was incurred in 2024 alone. "The controls are working. The number of new registrations for rentals is falling, while the number of deregistrations is rising. That's good news," says Deputy Mayor Kay-Michael Dankl (KPÖ Plus).

The checks are time-consuming. The officers have to find tourists in the property if they suspect an illegal rental. Finding an offer on the Internet is not enough. "We need a time of offense. The employees ask for what purpose the guest is in Salzburg. This then goes into the file," explains Johannes Holztrattner, head of the short-term rental department.

It is not known how many of the 109 apartments are actually available for conventional living again. Some of them are probably empty now. "If only some of them are rented out again, a lot has been gained," says Dankl. "Building 80 or 100 apartments costs many millions of euros. Then there is the preventative effect," he explains.