Legislation · 23-07-2026

Airbnb in Apartment Buildings: What a Cyprus Committee Can and Cannot Do

Here is the fact that surprises most Cypriot management committees: under the current short-term rental law, an owner does not need the committee's consent to run an apartment as an Airbnb. The licensing framework, the Regulation of the Establishment and Operation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation Law of 2019 as amended in 2020, deliberately removed any requirement for the consent of the building's committee or co-owners. What a committee can do is real but indirect: it runs the common areas, enforces the building's registered regulations, and holds hosts to the same rules as everyone else. This guide covers what the law says, what you can and cannot do, and the playbook that keeps short-term rentals from becoming the building's permanent agenda item.

What the law actually requires of the host

Since February 2023, anyone advertising or renting out a "self-catering accommodation", which includes an entire apartment on Airbnb or Booking.com, must register the property with the Deputy Ministry of Tourism in the Register of Self-Service Accommodation. Registration carries a fee, lasts three years, and the listing must display the registration number; platforms are expected to police this, and unregistered operators face penalties. The host also carries the ordinary obligations of any landlord: taxes, safety of the unit, and compliance with planning rules.

What the registration does not do is ask the building's opinion. The 2020 amendment removed the earlier requirement for committee or co-owner consent, so objecting to the registration itself is, in the current framework, a dead end. Committees that write angry letters to the Deputy Ministry are spending energy on the one lever that does not exist.

What the committee can actually do

Enforce the registered regulations. The building's regulations under Cap. 224, where they have been registered, bind every owner, including hosts. If they restrict commercial use of units or regulate the use of common areas, they apply to a short-term operation like to anyone else, and the committee can enforce them through the general meeting and, ultimately, legally. What committees cannot do is invent restrictions ad hoc: a rule that exists only in a WhatsApp message binds nobody, as we noted in the building rules guide.

Apply the same rules to guests as to residents. Noise hours, pool rules, parking allocation, rubbish disposal: the host is responsible for their guests' compliance the way any owner answers for their tenants. A committee that documents violations per incident, with dates and photos, builds the record that turns a general-meeting complaint into an enforceable position.

Charge fairly, not punitively. Short-term units generate more wear on lifts, more rubbish and more key-and-fob churn. Where the building's expense allocation has a usage-based component, or where the general meeting adopts reasonable rules such as charging for replacement fobs, the extra load can be priced legitimately. A vindictive "Airbnb surcharge" with no basis in the regulations, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of decision that collapses when challenged.

Require a working contact. The committee should insist on a phone number that answers when a guest floods a bathroom at midnight. A host who operates remotely with no local contact is the real problem case, and general meetings are entitled to press the point, since the leak downstairs does not wait for check-out.

The coexistence playbook

The buildings that handle short-term rentals well do three unglamorous things. They put the house rules in writing and give hosts a one-page guest version, in English, for the apartment door. They log every incident, noise complaint, parking violation, damage, against the unit rather than against the mood of the moment, so patterns are provable. And they keep the conversation at the general meeting factual: not "we hate Airbnb" but "unit 12 generated six documented incidents this quarter, here is what we propose". Hosts, for their part, tend to cooperate faster than committees expect, because their ratings depend on the building being pleasant.

All of it runs on records: which units operate short-term, who the contact is, what incidents occurred, what the meeting decided. That per-unit memory is what Folio keeps as a matter of course, every report, photo and decision attached to the apartment it concerns, so that when the discussion returns, the committee argues from a file rather than from frustration.