The owner of a home loses between 30% and 60% of the value of the property if he is the victim of a squat and instead of facing the expenses and uncertainty of a long legal process, he decides to sell it, according to data from the Alfa network Real estate and the Idealista portal. Jesús Duque, vice president of Alfa Inmobiliaria, estimates the average discount that an owner must apply to an occupied home to try to sell it at 30%, but this discount skyrockets in areas where there is little demand for housing or many houses available, such as in the rural zones. Thus, a study carried out by Idealista found that discounts have reached 65% in Asturias; 53% in Euskadi, 48% in Castilla y León and 46% in Cantabria.
The loss in value stems from the time the owner has no income, during which he often has to take care of supplies as well. According to Duque, in the best of cases, an occupied home takes between three and six months to be recovered by its owner. However, the Government suspended evictions during the pandemic and has now extended the moratorium until the end of the year, so that for thousands of homes that period exceeds three years, recalls Montserrat Junyent, head of legal advice for the general council of Colleges of Real Estate Agents of Spain (Coapi).
To this, Duque emphasizes, we must add the cost of lawyers that the owner must incur to evict the squatters and the repairs of the damages that they generally cause when they are finally going to be evicted.
Faced with this situation, a third of the owners of occupied flats choose to sell the property, a process that lasts about ten months, according to Alfa Inmobiliaria, due to the reluctance of potential buyers before a home of which it is not possible to have photos or know the state it will be in when you finally get possession of it. The obligation to pay the Property Transfer Tax according to the cadastral reference value, and not the real value of the property, forces sellers to assume more price discounts.
It is estimated that there are currently more than 120,000 occupied homes in Spain, 43% of them in Catalonia. Many come from inheritances, says Duque. “By being empty for a long time, these properties are more unprotected and are easy prey,” he acknowledges.
Another easy prey for squatters are commercial premises. According to the proptech Brickbro, in Barcelona there are 30,500 empty premises and about 20% of them are squatted. The Col·legi d’Administradors de Finques de Barcelona i Lleida recalls that this was the case in Plaza Tetuan, in Barcelona, ??where a fire in an occupied premises caused four deaths. “An occupation not only harms the owner of the property but also creates a problem of coexistence and insecurity for the rest of the residents of the building, the neighborhood or the urbanization,” said Enrique Vendrell, president of the College, who regretted that the administrators they are forced to deal with serious problems on a daily basis “without having legal means or police coverage or assistance to solve them”.
The API Council considers that the legislation does not help to “act with diligence and speed” in the face of an occupation, for which it calls for a State pact to stop the phenomenon. Junyent points out that Spain should clarify the legislation so that illegal occupants can be evicted in one or two days, as is the case in other countries. “Now the police can only act in flagrante delicto, that is, if they are forcing the door, but not once they are inside,” he lamented.
Junyent proposes that if there is no title that justifies the presence in the property, the eviction be immediate, as a precautionary measure, and that in a quick trial, a few days later the judge assesses whether the occupants have the right to be in the property. He also proposes tougher penalties: the non-violent usurpation of an empty house is a minor offense that only carries a fine, so it is not a deterrent to mafias that forge contracts and sell keys to families in need.
