Crises are an opportunity for politicians who love regulation and control. The covid, followed by the energy crisis, the problems in the supply chain and, mainly, inflation discourages the citizen and leads him inevitably to the search for saviors who are capable, by blows of the baton, ordinances and laws, of put order. Nationalisms, populisms and regulatory episodes are direct descendants of popular dissatisfaction.
Nobody denies that there is a problem in access to housing. That young people have problems renting and that the right to a decent place to develop their personal lives is constitutional, no one doubts.
But from there to treating the owners as the cause of the problem is a long way off. Regulating and capping prices is not easy. It is very, very complicated and we have recent cases of countries where the regulation of housing rental prices has produced drops in supply that have led to problems with renting and upward pressure on prices.
There is a mistake in thinking that for the owner the priority is to rent at the highest possible price. Anyone who has minimal knowledge of the rental market knows that this is not the case. A default is much more painful. An eviction is horrible. And the damages that occur between careless tenants produce costs that destroy any profitability of the asset, even at high prices. No. The landlord much prefers legal certainty and protection against non-payment.
Trying to make the free market cover the deficiencies and needs of the social rent can only be done through incentives, not through punishment. The owners are going to flee from normal contracts like the plague and are going to fall into the arms of seasonal rentals or any other modality that allows them to escape price regulation and the difficulties in evicting defaulters.
The bill introduces possible incentives for owners who offer their homes with relevant discounts. That is the way. If the State assures an owner the income and deducts the income, in exchange for offering a price much lower than the market, I assure you that there would be a queue of properties that would be accepted. And not from Sareb.
