Trends in rental prices have a socioeconomic factor that constrains them in the first instance, then only a radical change in conception about the way we understand housing could stop their upward trend.
I type in the search engine “best cities to telework” and Barcelona always appears. Internationally, it is centripetal and desirable. It is becoming an undoubted business hub and attracts a foreign population with high salary expectations, who appreciate the quality of life emanating from the gastronomy, the climate, or even social security.
This population, especially northern or central European or North American, has high purchasing power to pay rents that the majority of the local population cannot afford.
Of course, we must not overlook two limitations that affect the provision of housing in Barcelona. One, a geography circumscribed by the Mediterranean and Collserola; two, and almost consequently, a meager real estate stock for the high demand.
The construction of new homes, from 2008 to 2019, had mainly stopped. But the population has continued to grow – in many ways – and new works, which are produced within two or three years, arrive in dribs and drabs.
The new Housing Law, of which the majority of measures will be applied exclusively in Catalonia in 2024, aims to solve the existing problem with rental prices and encourage an increase in the supply of affordable housing. However, the sector suspects that the new measures will have the opposite effect.
Oriol Payà i Majó, director of operations at Housfy Rental, fears that some measures of the Law will cause “landlords to choose to sell their home or resort to temporary rentals”, if this seasonal modality is not also regulated. And in the same way “people with rental investment capacity will allocate their financing to other types of assets.”
The perpetuated lack of supply would mean that fewer people would be able to rent. The more tenants there are per available home, the more selection power the owners will have, who will begin to choose very solvent profiles. As a result, the most vulnerable families will most likely be left behind.
The real solution may go far beyond legislation, but involves a radical change of mentality on the part of citizens to move to other cities in Catalonia. It is “complicated” and “it goes slowly”: after all, the clear centralization of infrastructure in the capital does not help.
But it could happen almost “automatically”, as if fulfilling that Smithian mantra according to which the market regulates itself: a high rental price would be the trigger for this change in the mentality of the population, which little by little will be transferred to the crown metropolitan area, which would relax the real estate market in Barcelona.
Of course, “this change must be accompanied by a public housing stock,” recalls Payà i Majó, taking into account that “the lack of public housing is not satisfying the demand” for this type of property.
A change of mentality of this magnitude also requires complicit urbanism. Increasingly, people are concentrating on “15-minute cities,” those where all basic services are within walking distance.
The four provincial capitals are very powerful in this sense and for this reason they also have a high rental demand. The situation is very similar to that of Barcelona: a capital with a tense market and a metropolitan ring with the potential to relax the market in the centers.
