Medellín is paying the price of his own success. The city transformed its slopes and its industrial economy to become the preferred magnet for digital nomads and global investors, but the tourism boom ended up colliding head-on with the reality of its inhabitants: today getting a roof at a fair price is almost an impossible mission.
In this scenario of tension, the review of the Territorial Planning Plan (POT) has become the battlefield where The Mayor’s Office seeks to bring into line to the multimillion-dollar tourist housing business, in a regulatory move that will redefine the destiny of the capital of Antioquia during the next decade.
The Administrative Department of Planning of Medellín officially stated that the city faces critical challenges due to limited formal construction, the low supply of new housing and the sustained increase in rental costs for traditional residents. Faced with this scenario, the District Administration was clear and cited that “20 out of every 100 households do not have a decent place to live”, making visible an alarming quantitative and qualitative deficit.
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POT Medellín. Photo:Medellín Mayor’s Office.
To respond to this problem, the POT review establishes incentives aggressive measures to promote social housing, but at the same time introduces a framework of restrictive rules for the short-term rental market. The Mayor’s Office now explicitly recognizes tourist housing as a lodging service, stipulating that its exercise requires the National Tourism Registry (RNT) for stays of less than thirty days.
Even more forceful, The new order restricts its location exclusively to specific areas of high mix and certain sectors of medium mix, additionally requiring adaptation licenses if there is a change of use of the property. The main objective, according to the administration, is to mitigate the impacts of overflowing tourism, avoid conflicts of citizen coexistence and firmly protect the residential vocation of the neighborhoods.
Faced with these new and strict regulatory guidelines, the prevailing need to analyze the real weight that decentralized tourism has in the city’s economy arises. Airbnb referred to the financial impact that has reached this sector in the city. During the year 2025, the activity of hosts and guests through the popular platform generated more than 520,000 million pesos Colombians in exclusive tax revenues for the city. These million-dollar resources directly nourish the local public investment capacity, reinforcing the premise that tourist housing has become an indisputable macroeconomic engine for the city’s progress.
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Airbnb in Medellin Photo:Taken from Airbnb
But the macroeconomic impact is only one side of the coin; at the microeconomic and social level, the short rental model has been transformed in an indispensable lifeline for thousands of ordinary citizens. In the same year, local hosts in Medellín obtained direct income that was greater than 435,000 million pesos, an astronomical figure that even amounts to more than 550,000 million pesos if the entire ecosystem of the department of Antioquia is considered.
To understand who this benefit benefits, it is extremely important to highlight that more than 70% of the hosts registered on the Airbnb platform individually manage a single space throughout the entire territory of Colombia. This statistic confirms that This activity fundamentally acts as a lifesaver economic and a complementary source of vital sustenance for multiple local middle-class family economies. Furthermore, the economic benefit generated by this model benefits popular commerce in a decentralized manner, given that more than 40% of guests’ total spending is made in the same neighborhoods where their accommodations are located.
This results in direct injections and organic fresh capital for neighborhood stores, corner restaurants and local transporters, undoubtedly strengthening the community commercial fabric of the capital of Antioquia.
Not responsible for rent increases
Despite these financial benefits, There is a generalized and installed perception in public opinion that tourist housing is the great and main culprit of the harsh rental crisis that is raising the standard of living and expelling local residents from their original areas.
Nevertheless, The academy has recently provided rigorous support of data that demystifies this popular narrative. According to a study by the Javeriana University, the increase in the cost of long-term rentals is due to much deeper and more complex structural and multi-causal reasons. The report, which analyzed in detail more than 15,000 blocks located in Medellín and the Aburrá Valley between the years 2015 and 2025, crossing price sources, concluded that there is definitely “no sign or causal evidence that tourist housing is putting upward pressure on traditional long-term rental rates.”
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Study carried out by the Javeriana University. Photo:THE TIME.
On the contrary, the study indicates that the true causes of the increase in prices lie in a complex cocktail of productive scarcity and accelerated demographic changes. Analysts showed a dramatic reduction 47% in construction licenses per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure that went from 121 approved licenses in 2015 to just 64 licenses in 2024. This precarious and slow new supply collides head-on with a constantly increasing urban demand for smaller homes, added to the progressive tightening of credit conditions that make it difficult to acquire real estate. Furthermore, Medellín has experienced a drastic and historic transition in the last decade: owner households fell from 60% to 47%, while renter households rose from 36% to 45%, today bordering on a delicate scenario of almost housing parity.
When referring to this phenomenon, researcher Andrés Felipe Giraldo was categorical when ruling: “Regarding the availability of housing for long-term rental, the variables and instruments analyzed do not allow us to conclude that there is a negative effect.” In the same technical sense, professor and researcher Ángela Fonseca indicated that the real public policy challenge for the city requires “increasing the supply of units that respond to the current needs of the population: smaller homes, better located and with more affordable prices.”
What the guild says
In the midst of this highly polarized panorama, the official union of the hosts also intervenes, who express a deep and justified fear about the severe financial implications that the imposed regulatory review will bring. Asohost made its concerns known on the new Territorial Planning Plan of Medellín, believing that the aggressive location restrictions proposed by the Mayor’s Office would completely prohibit activity in large traditionally residential areas.
This urban policy, as the spokespersons warn, would put livelihood at imminent risk of thousands of Antioquian families who today depend on this flow of income. The new regulations, argued by the Colombian Association of Tourist Service Providers through Digital Platforms, impose infrastructure requirements and legal loopholes that are directly impossible to meet for ordinary citizens who currently generate income formally with their properties.
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Mayor’s Office officials verifying hotels and short-rent properties in Medellín. Photo:Medellín Mayor’s Office.
The greatest anguish for this massive economic sector lies in the total absence of a clear, fair and applicable transition regime. Those entrepreneurs who today operate under the legal framework would face the titanic and multimillion-dollar task to move its operations to the limited areas authorized by the new POT.
Although the draft of the official project lukewarmly mentions the figure of “established use”, Asohost strongly warns that this guarantee would not cover to those who currently provide tourist housing in residential areas, leaving them immersed in a dangerous legal limbo. Therefore, the forced concentration of activity in a few district polygons could, paradoxically, generate exactly the same harmful levels of tourist saturation that the Territorial Planning Plan attempts, in theory, to prevent in the territory.
In active defense of the hosts, Juan Camilo Vargas, current president of Asohost, presented an extremely conciliatory but very firm position towards the Council of Medellín and public opinion: “The people and families that offer tourist housing comply with the rules, contributing to orderly tourism and the economy of the neighborhoods of Medellín. We want to continue building an organized citybut we need clear and achievable rules that do not affect our incomes and homes.
Vargas made a strong and urgent call to the institutional good sense to listen as a priority to the technical arguments and design consensual alternatives that manage to harmonize community residential life without destroying the thriving local economy that today keeps the city afloat. Furthermore, the union does not hesitate to emphasize that Law 2068 of 2020 at the national level has already granted legitimate qualities and rights to those who carry out these activities in residential homes, legal guarantees that must be, by obligation, respected and protected by the local administration.
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Rental prices through Airbnb in Laureles. Photo:THE TIME.
In the midst of this discussion, The capital of Antioquia today has a challenge before it capitalization of regulatory balance and long-term vision. On the one hand, the urgent state need to promote the rapid construction of new housing solutions, guarantee the sacred right of access to a decent habitat for the working classes and regulate the heavy urban and cultural impact brought by the exponential and daily growth of foreign visitors to its slopes is simply undeniable.
On the other hand, the city would be affecting a sector which, based on economic and academic evidence, is neither the true nor the direct culprit of the chronic rise in real estate prices, but it does effectively distribute vital income in dozens of neighborhoods and popular enterprises that do not survive in any other way.
The definitive design of the new Territorial Planning Plan must necessarily seek intelligent consensus that avoid unleashing a painful socioeconomic crisis for small and medium-sized hosts, promoting true inclusive planning.
David Alejandro Mercado
Medellin.
