Every owner in Medellín has heard a version of the same story: a neighbor's apartment on Airbnb, an assembly meeting that turned into a vote, a listing that disappeared. The stories are true and they are usually told without the rules that produced them. The rules are short, and knowing them turns a worry into a decision.
There are three of them, at three levels — national, building, city — and one number that runs through all three. Thirty days. A stay shorter than that is tourist lodging and answers to everything below. A stay of thirty days or more is a lease, and answers to none of it.
Rule one, national: the RNT
Colombian law treats anyone who habitually hands over a property for money for stays of under thirty calendar days as a tourism services provider. That definition comes from Decreto 2590 de 2009, now compiled in Decreto 1074 de 2015, and the general tourism law, Ley 2068 de 2020, hardened the obligations around it. The consequence is one license: the Registro Nacional de Turismo, the RNT, the same register a hotel is in.
In practice it means three things. You register the apartment in the RNT before the first short-stay guest, through the chamber of commerce platform. You renew every year, in the window between January and March, or the registration lapses. And you show the RNT number on every listing — the platforms display it, and a listing without one is the kind that gets reported and removed. Operating short stays without it exposes you to sanctions under the tourism laws that run to serious money, and the listing comes down either way.
Rule two, the building: Ley 675 and your reglamento
The national license does not override your building. Ley 675 de 2001, the horizontal property law, hands each building's assembly the power to write its own reglamento, and the reglamento decides whether tourist lodging is allowed in the units at all. The 2009 decree itself asked buildings to update their reglamentos to say where they stood, which is why so many towers in El Poblado and Laureles now have a clause about it.
Read yours before anything else. If it forbids vivienda turística, that is the answer. If it is silent, do not read silence as permission: the safe reading is that short stays are not an approved use until the assembly says so. Changing a reglamento is a reform of the building's constitution and needs a qualified majority of the coefficients at the assembly — the threshold the law sets for reforms is seventy percent — which is why a single owner rarely gets it done, and why an administrador, who cannot rewrite the rules, can still enforce them with fines and a word to the portería.
Rule three, the city: how Medellín enforces it in 2026
Medellín has not banned short stays and has no neighborhood-by-neighborhood map that does. What it has is inspection, concentrated where the density of tourist lodging is highest — Poblado first, Laureles close behind — and an increasing habit of checking RNT numbers against listings. The pattern since 2024 is simple: buildings with a clear reglamento and owners with a current RNT are left alone; listings without a number are the ones that get attention.
The thirty-day line: the door out of all three
Now the number. A stay of thirty days or more is not tourist lodging. It is a lease of a furnished home, governed by the Civil Code and the housing law rather than the tourism regime. No RNT. No hospedaje contract. No reglamento clause about vivienda turística, because the tenant is a resident, registered at the portería with a name and a contract, the way any tenant is. Your building is not merely tolerant of a monthly tenant; it prefers one.
That is the whole reason the monthly furnished market exists, and it is the business we are in. We have compared what each model earns, honestly: peak nightly rates are higher, but a month is thirty nights sold at once, with one check-in, one cleaning and no empty midweeks, and the income arrives on a date. For most apartments in most buildings the monthly number over a year is close, and the operating life is unrecognizably calmer. Here is the same line seen from the tenant's side.
Doing both, properly
Some homes suit both: monthly tenants most of the year and short stays in the December peak or during the Feria de las Flores. That is legitimate as long as the short stays have the license and the reglamento allows them. The rules follow the length of the stay, not the platform, so a home that does both needs its RNT current and its building on side for the short part — and nothing at all for the long part.
If your building says no, the monthly route is not a consolation prize. It is the version of the business your neighbors will vote for. This is how we run it: furnished, monthly, contracted, with the building's rules built into the tenancy rather than fought over at the assembly.
