Gold Coast's Short-Term Rental Crackdown: How It Stacks Up Against Barcelona, Amsterdam and Beyond

Queensland's short-term rental registration scheme, which came into force statewide in late 2023, has placed the Gold Coast in direct company with cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam that have spent years trying to clean up duplicated, fraudulent and ghost listings on platforms such as Airbnb and Stayz. The comparison is not flattering in every dimension.

Duplicate listings, where a single property appears multiple times across booking platforms under different names, photos or pricing tiers, have emerged as one of the murkier problems in the short-term rental economy. In some markets, they artificially inflate apparent supply while masking the true concentration of ownership. On the Gold Coast, where the Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach corridors alone host thousands of short-term rental properties, the problem has real consequences for renters trying to find affordable long-term housing.

What Queensland's Registration System Actually Does

The Queensland Government's short-term rental accommodation register requires hosts to obtain a registration number before listing a property. That number must appear visibly on any advertisement. The theory is straightforward: a single registration number tied to a single property makes duplicate or ghost listings easier to detect and report. Gold Coast City Council, which covers an area stretching from Coolangatta in the south to Yatala in the north, is among the local governments working alongside the state framework on compliance.

Barcelona moved far earlier and far harder. The city announced in 2028 it would not renew the roughly 10,000 tourist apartment licences it had previously issued, a policy that has been litigated through European courts. Amsterdam capped short-term rental nights at 30 per year per property as far back as 2019. New York City's Local Law 18, which took effect in September 2023, effectively banned most short-term rentals under 30 days unless the host was physically present, cutting Airbnb's entire-apartment listings in Manhattan by an estimated 80 percent within months of enforcement beginning, according to industry tracking data published at the time.

Queensland's approach sits well short of those measures. The register creates accountability infrastructure without imposing night caps or ownership limits. For a city like the Gold Coast, where tourism contributes substantially to the local economy and where the 2032 Brisbane Olympics will bring venues at Coomera and Robina into international focus, a Barcelona-style ban would be politically radioactive in LNP-held seats.

The Duplicate Listing Problem Up Close

The practical failure point in any registration system is verification at scale. Platforms are required under Queensland's framework to ensure listings carry valid registration numbers, but auditing tens of thousands of active listings across multiple platforms simultaneously is not a simple task for any council. Surfers Paradise, where high-density towers like those along the Esplanade pack dozens of individually owned apartments into a single address, is particularly prone to the kind of listing fragmentation that registration systems are designed to catch.

Gold Coast City Council's planning and local laws division handles complaints relating to short-term rental breaches, but the council has not published a dedicated compliance report specific to duplicate listing detections under the new scheme as of the date of this article. That absence of publicly available enforcement data is itself a point of contrast with Amsterdam, where the municipality has published annual short-term rental enforcement statistics since 2020.

Residents and housing advocates in suburbs like Mermaid Beach and Palm Beach have repeatedly raised concerns that the rental register has not meaningfully reduced the conversion of long-term housing stock to tourism use. The Gold Coast rental vacancy rate was sitting below one percent for much of 2024 and into 2025, according to data published by the Real Estate Institute of Queensland during that period.

The next test for the local framework comes in the lead-up to 2032. As Olympic infrastructure spending accelerates around Coomera Indoor Sports Centre and Robina Stadium, investor interest in the short-term rental market is expected to intensify. Whether Queensland adds teeth to its registration scheme, mandatory platform audits, financial penalties tied to duplicate detections, or night caps of the kind European cities have used, will determine whether the Gold Coast ends up in the column of cities that got ahead of the problem or the ones that didn't.