Spain needs to have 2.4 million additional rental homes before 2033 to meet the accommodation demands of its population, according to the study The living property telescope prepared by the consultancy EY.
Javier García-Mateo, director of the consultancy’s real estate area, recalled that there is currently a rental demand for 800,000 homes, from people who cannot emancipate themselves or are forced to share a flat, which 1.7 million more homes will be added, due to pure demographic growth: it is expected that 2.2 million homes will be created during these years, largely due to immigration, 76% of which will be rented. Not only will the country gain population, but “the composition of society has changed, and there are more elderly people living alone, more single-parent households and smaller families, so we need more housing”, recalled García-Mateo . Added to this is the difficulty of facing the entrance fee, which today is equivalent to twelve years of the average savings of families.
The EY study points out that over the next decade, the construction of 800,000 homes in Spain is planned, but only 78,000 are projects promoted by public administrations to build affordable rental homes, in collaboration with the private sector. “It is barely 10% of the new housing supply and will not solve the problem that Spain has, which is a chronic shortage of affordable rental housing”, since according to the study’s data, 39% of tenants pay rents that exceed 30% of their income.
García-Mateo pointed out that the administrations have available land “that they could make available to private developers, with formulas such as the administrative concession or the transfer of the surface right, so that they could build affordable rental housing and manage it for a long period , of about seventy-five years, after which ownership and management would revert to the administration”. In his opinion, the formula would allow the administrations to create an affordable rental housing stock without public investment, while for private developers “it is profitable, because even if they rent the housing at low prices, 30% lower than those of the area, they do not have to bear the cost of buying the land and they are guaranteed high employment”, so that “it is a useful and equitable formula”.
The EY study also highlights that a large part of the housing stock in large cities is antiquated and obsolete and will have to be rehabilitated and transformed in order to adapt to the needs of today’s families. Thus, EY points out, half of Spanish homes are over forty years old, and the consultancy has identified 508,000 in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, ??Valencia and Malaga that should be “repositioned”.
In central areas, such as the Eixample or the Salamanca neighborhood, “we often find homes of more than 120 m2, which are not suitable for today’s families, who are smaller, who would need fewer meters of own use and more shared spaces”, and that they cannot pay for them.
García-Mateo explained that the same phenomenon takes place in other countries, and that, for example, in the United States, communities of owners are choosing to dispense with the porter and turn the home and the storage area into common spaces such as gyms or coworking , while the owners divide the homes.
In his opinion, there are several formulas to create housing, but “administrations need to look for realistic solutions, not populist ones”.
