Short-term rental rules in Medellín: what Airbnb investors need to know

The Airbnb pitch deck version of Medellín — 80% occupancy, dollar income, peso costs — sold a lot of apartments between 2021 and 2024. Some of those apartments are now excellent businesses. Others are locked out of the strategy entirely by a single page in a document their buyer never read: the building's reglamento. This is the honest state of short-term rental rules in Medellín, and how to buy without getting trapped.

Usual caveat, sharpened: STR regulation here is genuinely in motion — national decrees have been drafted, debated, and revised over the past two years, and city enforcement has tightened in waves. Treat this as the map of what to verify, and verify against current sources before wiring money.

The three layers of rules

Layer 1 — National registration (RNT). Any property offered for tourist lodging under 30 days must hold a Registro Nacional de Turismo and renew it annually. Platforms increasingly surface or require it; operating without one risks fines and delisting. This layer is bureaucratic but navigable.

Layer 2 — The building's reglamento. This is the one that kills deals. Colombian horizontal-property law lets each building's owners' assembly decide whether tourist rental is a permitted use. Many Poblado and Laureles buildings have voted it out — sometimes recently, after years of allowing it. A "great Airbnb building" in a 2023 listing description can be a prohibited one today, and assemblies can change the rules after you buy. Before any STR-motivated purchase: read the current reglamento, ask for recent assembly minutes, and treat "the admin doesn't mind" as worthless.

Layer 3 — City zoning and enforcement. Medellín's land-use plan (POT) governs which uses are permitted where, and the city has run enforcement pushes in tourist-dense zones — El Poblado especially — checking RNT registration and building permissions. Enforcement intensity varies; the direction of travel has been consistently toward more of it.

The honest math, 2026 edition

Even where it's fully legal, the spreadsheet most buyers arrive with is stale:

• Occupancy: the market-wide averages are meaningfully below the 80%+ that the 2022-era pitch assumed. Well-run, well-located units clear 65–80%; mediocre ones sit at 40–55%, where the model breaks.
• Operating load: cleaning, platform fees, utilities (owner-paid in STR), management at 15–25% of revenue if you're abroad, and the higher admin fees of amenity-rich buildings. Net commonly lands at 50–65% of gross.
• The comparison that matters: a good long-term tenant pays less per night but costs almost nothing to serve, never triggers an assembly complaint, and doesn't depend on a regulation staying friendly. On many units the net gap between a strong LTR and a mediocre STR is smaller than buyers expect — and the LTR sleeps at night.

We publish live occupancy-relevant signals — median rents, days on market by neighborhood and bedroom count — on the market data page, and every listing where we've verified the building's STR status says so explicitly on the listing page.

If you're buying for STR anyway

The strategy still works in the right building — here's the buying checklist we run:

1. Reglamento first, offer second. Written confirmation of permitted tourist use, plus the last two years of assembly minutes to see if a prohibition vote is brewing.
2. RNT feasibility for the specific unit, in your ownership structure.
3. Underwrite at honest occupancy — we model at 60–65% and treat anything above as upside, not baseline.
4. Price the exit. If the assembly bans STR in year three, does the deal still work as a long-term rental? If the answer is no, you're not buying an apartment, you're buying regulatory exposure with a balcony.

That last question — "does it still work as an LTR?" — is the single best filter we know. The rental-yield calculator runs both scenarios in about a minute; our income-property collection lists only units where we've done the rental math ourselves, STR status stated per listing. And if you want a human read on a specific building's politics — because that's what a reglamento fight is — ask us. We've sat in those assemblies.