Nearly a quarter of Brussels’ Airbnb listings have disappeared in just one year after regional authorities cracked down on illegal tourist rentals.
Around 1,500 homes and rooms have been unlisted from Airbnb since June 2025, according to data from Inside Airbnb, reducing the number of listings from 6,171 to 4,750.
The exodus follows a wave of enforcement by Brussels Fiscality, which last summer issued around 1,900 fines and retroactive tourist tax bills worth an estimated €1.5 to €2 million.
For years, researchers warned that the rapid growth of short-term rentals in the city intensified pressure on the housing market. A study by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel found that neighbourhoods with more Airbnb listings experienced faster rent increases, while ING estimates that around 3,000 homes have been diverted from the city’s conventional housing stock.
Forest commune recorded the steepest decline, with listings down 35.8 per cent, followed by Uccle and Etterbeek, both down around 34 per cent.
Even Brussels City, home to the largest concentration of Airbnb properties, saw its stock of short-term rentals fall by 15 per cent.
According to data compiled by Inside Airbnb, entire homes, which make up roughly three quarters of the market, declined by 24 per cent, while private room listings fell by 20 per cent.
Brussels requires tourist accommodation operators to comply with registration and tax obligations since 2016. Yet enforcement remained patchy for years, largely because authorities struggled to identify hosts operating through digital platforms.
That changed when Airbnb eventually transmitted data to Brussels Fiscality, allowing the regional administration to identify non-compliant landlords.
But removing thousands of tourist rentals from the market did not quite solve Brussels’ housing crisis. Rents remain high, affordable housing remains scarce, and tens of thousands of households are still waiting for social housing.
Even if every one of the 1,400-plus Airbnb listings returned to the residential market tomorrow, it would represent only a small fraction of the homes Brussels needs. While Brussels has succeeded in shrinking Airbnb shokehold in the city, the platform remains commercialised.
More than half of all listings are still controlled by hosts advertising multiple properties, according to Inside Airbnb, indicating that professional operators continue to dominate much of the city’s short-term rental market despite tighter enforcement.
But Airbnb alone cannot explain the crisis. Housing affordability in Brussels was deteriorating long before Airbnb became a household name.
Construction has struggled to keep pace with demand. Social housing investment has lagged behind need for decades. Rising land prices, inflation and higher borrowing costs have all made new development more difficult.
