Data insight
More than 4,357 listings share a license on Airbnb in Mallorca
Across Mallorca, thousands of Airbnb listings reuse the same license number. In many cases, this reflects duplication, errors or misuse of a legitimate permit.
What is happening
Airbnb allows only one active listing per bookable home. When two or more listings reuse the same registry license for the same home, this directly breaks Airbnb rules for whole-home rentals, even if the license is genuine.
This means that in many cases it is not a data anomaly alone, but a direct breach of the platform’s own rules.
Reuse can also happen without authorisation: a different address or host attaches your license number to their ad.
Why it matters
When the same license is attached to many ads, inspection and traceability are harder and neighbours may see multiple listings for what is effectively one property. The distribution below shows how concentration is spread: most cases are small groups, but there is a meaningful tail of large groups with many listings sharing the same license.
On average, each duplicated license appears in about 2.8 distinct listings, which confirms the issue is structural, not marginal. 42.0% of listings in this dataset belong to a duplicate-license group.
34.0% of listings are flagged with duplicate licenses in RadarLicencias, including multi-unit property types where rules differ.
Hotels and similar multi-unit establishments may lawfully share one identifier across many units; duplicate-license irregularities are flagged for individual-property types when we classify listings.
Listings per duplicated license (distribution)
Tail: larger groups
These two measures show how much of the problem is concentrated in the largest groups (five or more ads sharing one license, and ten or more).
Distribution of listings by duplicated license
Row N counts listings that belong to a group of exactly N ads sharing one license. The last row includes every listing whose license appears on ten or more ads.
| Listings per duplicated license | Listings | % of listings in duplicate groups |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 1,854 | 42.6% |
| 3 | 885 | 20.3% |
| 4 | 572 | 13.1% |
| 5 | 385 | 8.8% |
| 6 | 246 | 5.6% |
| 7 | 126 | 2.9% |
| 8 | 88 | 2.0% |
| 9 | 54 | 1.2% |
| 10 or more | 147 | 3.4% |
| Total affected listings | 4,357 | 100% |
Most duplicated licenses appear in small groups of 2 to 4 listings, but a non-trivial share is concentrated in larger clusters, including cases with more than 10 listings linked to a single license.
The distribution shows a clear pattern: while most duplications are small, a small number of licenses are reused at scale. These cases drive a disproportionate share of the problem.
What this means in practice
- Owners: your license number may appear on another host’s ad without your consent, creating compliance and reputational risk.
- Agencies: duplicate ads for the same licence can create operational conflicts and duplicate exposure on the platform.
- Regulators: many listings per licence make it harder to prioritise inspections and trace cases.
- Neighbours: multiple ads for the same home can inflate the perceived supply of short-term rentals in a street or building.
How this relates to revenue exposure
Duplicated licenses are one of several irregularity types we use when modelling tourist revenue tied to listings that do not fully match the public register. For the full island-scale euro picture and the yearly breakdown, see the Mallorca Airbnb revenue exposure insight.
Duplicate licenses are one of the key signals behind the €219M in irregular Airbnb revenue across Mallorca.
For new licenses by official activity start year, see New tourism licenses on Airbnb by year.
