What do the portals check on my adverts?
Since Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 the platforms display the registration number, check it at random and report host activity to the authorities monthly. An advert missing its number — or carrying somebody else's — comes down by machinery, not by complaint. Listing monitoring reads your advert pages, at your request, and answers two questions per advert: is the registration number there and right, and does the energy rating match the register.
What changed with Regulation (EU) 2024/1028
Enforcement stopped being complaint-driven. Platforms must show the registration number on the advert, make random checks that the number a host declares is real, and pass host activity data to the authorities every month. What used to be a paperwork risk at inspection time is now a continuous machine check on a page you publish.
The consequence is unglamorous: the advert is the exposed surface. A licence can be perfectly in order in the register and the advert still be wrong, because a number was mistyped, a property was renumbered, or an advert was copied from another unit.
What we check on each advert
Two things, and we report them separately, because they fail for different reasons and are fixed by different people.
- The registration number is present on the page, and it is this property's number
- A number is present but belongs to a different property — the copied-advert case
- No number at all, on a property that has one on file
- No number on the advert and none on file either, which is a register problem, not an advert one
- The energy rating shown matches what the register holds for that dwelling
- The rating is absent, unreadable, or disagrees with the register
- The advert has changed since the last run — a number, rating or price edited under you
Which sites can be watched?
Airbnb, Booking, Vrbo (including Abritel and Fewo-direkt) and Idealista, over https only. The allowlist is deliberate: this feature fetches URLs you supply, and an open URL field would be a probe pointed at whatever you typed. Anything outside the list is refused when you add it, not silently skipped later. Up to five adverts per property.
How the pages are read
One polite fetch per advert per run, spaced out, on the pages you have asked us to read. Extraction is a text scan, not a per-platform parser: we look for the property's own number, normalised, and for anything shaped like a Spanish tourist-licence number. Parsers break at every portal redesign; text containment survives them.
A page that refuses automated reads is reported as blocked, and one that has gone is reported as gone. Neither is ever guessed at. This matters more than it sounds: an advert nobody has managed to open keeps showing its last answer, so a stopped run and a clean portfolio look identical unless the run itself is reported — which is why the state of each advert is shown beside its finding.
What it does not do
It does not log in, book, scrape at volume, or evade a portal's protections, and it reads only the adverts you have given it. It does not decide whether a property may be let — it compares the advert against the register and dates the comparison.
And it cannot see an advert you have not told it about. A rogue advert put up by an owner on an account you do not control is outside its reach.
What it costs to run
The billed unit is an advert checked at least once in the calendar month, not an advert held on the list. An advert that sat idle all month is not billed for, and the figure on your invoice is the number of adverts actually looked at.
Check a licence number
Free, no sign-up, nothing stored. Try VUT/MA/102186.
Sources
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 — data collection and sharing for short-term rentals
- Real Decreto 390/2021, art. 17.3 — the rating must appear in the advert
- Real Decreto Legislativo 7/2015, DA 12ª — advertising infringements
Verified against the sources above on 2026-09-20. LicenceDesk is operational guidance, not legal advice.
Related
- What must a property sale advert show? — The energy rating, on every sale advert and in every medium, and the publisher answers for it. The rest of th…
- The 48-hour ad-removal rule — Platforms must remove a flagged Spanish holiday-let advert within 48 hours of receiving the administrative re…
- Does my rental advert need an energy rating? — Yes. Every property advertised for sale or rent needs a registered energy performance certificate, holiday le…
- Agency liability for the unlicensed listing — Whoever advertises it is liable. In Andalusia, Law 13/2011 holds the marketing agency liable even for simple …