The Minister of Territory, Ester Capella, announced today that the Generalitat is going to present a request against the state government because it considers that the rent control index violates the Housing law. The requirement, to which the Pedro Sánchez government must respond within a month, is the previous step to present a contentious administrative appeal before the National Court against the state index, for which the Generalitat will have an additional period of two months. . “We hope to have a political response that makes it unnecessary for us to move forward through legal means,” Capella said.
The councilor explained that the index approved by the socialist government fails to comply with the second additional provision of the Housing Law, which established that “the autonomous communities may define their own reference index specifically and adapted to their territory.” The councilor assured that in January the minister showed her willingness to accept a “system of indices”, which in her opinion is the simultaneous and overlapping application of the two indices, the state one and the Catalan one, but she assures that in recent weeks has turned back.
Territori proposes that the Catalan index (which has no range unlike the state one) be applied as a rent limit when its value is within the range of the Spanish index. When the Catalan index is outside that range, they agree that the end of the state index closest to its value should be applied.
This system of combined application of the two indices would produce a more intense reduction in income. To begin with, the ministry’s spokespersons point out, the Catalan reference index is lower than the state one in 79% of the sample. Thus, a study carried out by the department analyzing data from 23,000 homes indicates that the state index would reduce rents in 36% of cases, while the Catalan index would reduce rents by 54%. If the two indices are applied in combination, the rent would decrease in 57% of the cases.
The fall in rents, likewise, would be more important: rents would fall by 3.5% on average with the state index, a percentage that would increase to 6.4% if the Catalan index was used and an even greater reduction, 6.8% if both are applied in combination.
According to the spokespersons for the department, the combined application of the two indexes causes the rent to fall especially in the apartments that have the highest rents, and in those in the city of Barcelona, ??compared to the decrease that occurs by applying only the state index.
These decreases, Territori spokespersons recalled, will only apply to new rentals of homes owned by large owners (those who own 5 or more homes), which represent approximately 12% of all rentals, and to the homes that are put up for rent for the first time, unlike what was provided for by Catalan law, which was declared unconstitutional, in which the rent cap affected all homes.
The decreases in rents indicated by the Generalitat studies are very far from the studies carried out by the Real Estate Agents (Apis) of Catalonia. The average discount that the index will force them to apply to the rents that are now perceiving, with “a great dispersion”, since depending on the neighborhoods and the characteristics of the properties it ranges between 4% and 42%.
