Last week ended on Natura Súa's licencia turística and a warning that registration is not authorization. This week, the document that decides whether the brochure's rental plan is legal.
Start with the license, because there is no license. No Colombian statute creates a "licencia turística." The press uses the phrase for the Registro Nacional de Turismo (RNT, the national tourism registry), the registration every short-stay operator must hold and renew annually, which is how I glossed it last week. Developer marketing uses it looser: "con licencia turística" on a render means, at best, that the developer intends the building's reglamento de propiedad horizontal (the building's bylaws) to authorize tourist lodging. That intention is the whole game, because the RNT sits downstream of the reglamento.
The reglamento is the building's constitution. Ley 675 de 2001, the statute from Issue #4, has it created by escritura pública (notarized public deed) and registered against the property. Renting a furnished unit for under 30 days is vivienda turística (tourist lodging), a tourism service rather than residential use, and Decreto 2590 de 2009 makes it lawful inside a condo regime only where the reglamento expressly authorizes it. Silence is prohibition. The Consejo de Estado, the top administrative court, upheld that rule against a nullity challenge in 2021: express authorization, in the reglamento, before you operate.
The registry then leans on the bylaws. To obtain and renew an RNT, the operator declares the unit is authorized by its reglamento (Decreto 1836 de 2021). A declaration, today, not a document check, which is how buildings full of prohibited listings still show registered operators. A draft decree posted for comment this July would move to per-unit registration with proof of the building's authorization, the reglamento itself or a certificate from the administrador, and would have platforms purge non-compliant listings every six months; the platform-side trade groups are fighting it. Still a draft, but the direction of travel is toward checking the document this issue is about.
If the reglamento doesn't authorize short-term rental, adding it is a statutory reform, and Article 46 of Ley 675 prices it: seventy percent of the coeficientes de copropiedad (co-ownership coefficients), the coefficients the developer computed from your área privada construida in Issue #4. Seventy percent of the building, not of whoever attends; the law blocks taking that vote at a thin second-call meeting. In a 160-unit tower scattered across absentee owners in three countries, assembling 70% of the coefficients behind anything is a campaign. It cuts the other way too: the same supermajority can strip an existing authorization later, so a building that allows rentals today holds that permission at the pleasure of its asamblea de propietarios (owners' assembly).
Preventa is the one moment this is cheap. Before handover no asamblea exists; Ley 675 has the propietario inicial (initial owner, in practice the developer) submit the building to the regime and write the original reglamento alone. An authorization drafted in from day one never faces a vote. One left out needs the 70%. The difference between those two buildings is a paragraph the developer either wrote or didn't, in a document that exists in draft before you sign the promesa de compraventa. So the ask is concrete: the draft reglamento, before signing, with the vivienda turística authorization in it. "The building will have licencia turística" is not an answer; it is the question restated.
Enforcement is real enough to plan around, and here I owe you a correction. Issue #5 said Medellín was pulling over 1,000 non-compliant listings under a new registration decree. I can't trace that figure past an unsourced investor blog, and the decree is the pending draft above, so strike it. What the record supports: Medellín's own releases counted roughly 1,700 properties operating without required paperwork in a 2024 crackdown, and the city suspended 104 tourism establishments in 2025, 46 of them short-stay apartments. Cartagena operativos reported in 2025 inspected 254 establishments and suspended 16 operators, all in Bocagrande. The machinery reaches inside the building too: Ley 1558 de 2012 obliges the administrador (building administrator) to report unauthorized units to the SIC, the consumer regulator from Issue #4, on pain of a personal fine, and Ley 675 lets the building fine an infringing owner up to twice the monthly expensas (common-expense fees) per sanction, capped at ten times.
Now the math if the paragraph isn't there and the 70% never happens. The pro-forma selling these units assumes short-term rates: one promoter-side outlet pitches El Rodadero furnished units at 8-12% gross, its success stories at 70-75% occupancy. Independent data doesn't get there. Airbtics puts the Santa Marta market at a median $11,000 a year on 47% occupancy and a $64 nightly rate (data through January 2026); AirDNA's public snapshot reads about 39% on an $87 rate. On a $140,000 unit, roughly the mid-band 35m² coastal presale from last week's comps, $11,000 gross is 7.9% before cleaning, platform fees, and management. The fallback, a long-term Colombian tenant, yields 6.87% gross on Global Property Guide's Q3 2025 national average (Santa Marta itself isn't covered; Cartagena runs 3.56-7.5%), netting 1.5-2 points lower, paid in pesos converted at the TRM, 3,206.86 COP/USD as I write. At market-average occupancy the short-term plan clears the boring tenant by about a point of gross, before a cost load that runs far heavier than a tenant's; call it a wash. The promoter spread only opens if you run half again to double the market's occupancy. Some operators do. The brochure assumes you will, in a building where the right to try might not exist.
This is market research and my reading of the statutes and rulings, not legal or investment advice. Whether a specific building's reglamento authorizes vivienda turística is a question about a specific registered document, and a Colombian abogado needs to read that document, and your promesa, before any of this is worth money.
Next week: what the fiducia protects when you wire your deposit, and the three things it doesn't.
-Dmitriy