The Guardian: Over 200 Bucharest apartments vulnerable to earthquakes rented to tourists illegally

Over 200 rental properties in the Romanian capital with a combined capacity of over 1,000 people are listed on short-term rental sites like Airbnb and Booking.com despite being at risk of collapsing in the event of an earthquake, according to an analysis by British news outlet The Guardian.

Since 2024, Romania has banned both short-term and long-term rentals in seismically vulnerable RS1 buildings. In Bucharest, there are at least 404 such buildings, where any rental is illegal. Fines for violating the law range between EUR 1,000 and EUR 2,000. However, only a small part of the city's building stock has been officially assessed, and the number of buildings at risk may be higher.

Despite the law, owners of apartments in these at-risk buildings still rent them out to tourists. Written by Andrei Popoviciu and Carmen Aguilar García, The Guardian article cites data collected by Re:Rise, a Romanian organization working on seismic risk reduction, which identified 207 illegal tourist rental properties advertised on the two popular sites at the end of May. Of the total number of apartments, Booking.com listed 116 of them, 47 were on Airbnb, and 44 listings were on both platforms.

Bucharest is the most seismically vulnerable capital in the EU, with two major earthquakes in the last century, the most recent of which, in 1977, killed more than 1,500 people, injured more than 10,000, and brought down 32 buildings in under a minute.

“Experts believe another such quake is inevitable, warning that the damage could well exceed that of previous disasters because much of the city’s building stock has become structurally unsound in recent decades,” The Guardian article noted.

A 2022 assessment estimated that 23,000 buildings would be severely damaged in a major earthquake. The same assessment estimated approximately 6,500 deaths and 16,000 people seriously injured.

The risks, however, are not presented to tourists when they book their stays on Airbnb or Booking.com. Instead, the platforms deflect responsibility to the owners of the apartments, according to Matei Sumbasacu, a structural engineer and founder of Re:Rise.

Of the confirmed listings, only two found by The Guardian disclosed in their descriptions that they were located in a building with high seismic risk. “But even they sought to downplay the danger,” according to the article.

Re:Rise eventually took matters into their own hands. Volunteers began plastering hard-to-remove stickers onto the key lockboxes mounted outside RS1 buildings with holiday flats, each printed with a QR code linking to a website where tourists could read about the seismic risk of the property they were about to check into.