Felip Massot (Belianes, 1945) is one of the promoters who has changed the map of Catalonia in the last 50 years. Still convalescing from surgery, he is as passionate about the public debate on access to housing as his company’s business plans.
You founded Vertix and turned it into one of the biggest companies in Barcelona.
I arrived in Barcelona in 1971, with 200 pesetas in my pocket and a suitcase. I’m from Belianes, a town in Lleida, and my father, who was a merchant, went bankrupt when I was studying high school. I started working as an employee at a petrol station, in Andorra, and at the age of 17 I tried my luck in Germany, but I saw that that country was not for me. So I came to Barcelona and started working at La Ballena Alegre, the Viladecans campsite, which had a real estate department. There I learned the trade, while continuing my studies and starting Law. But very soon I set up my own promoter.
This is what I recommend to young people now. Rather than accumulating master’s degrees, you need to get to work, because you learn the trade by doing. At the age of 28, I was general manager of the company, and now at this age many young people have practically not entered the world of work and live with their parents.
In the eighties, when Vertix grew the most, the real estate sector in Catalonia was in the hands of local entrepreneurs, like yourself.
The sector has changed a lot. Then there was Josep Lluís Núñez, who was very good. And the Marsàs, father and son, who created a large company such as La Llave de Oro is now. And Josep María Figueras, who created Habitat. I miss them so much. The merit of what they did has not been sufficiently appreciated.
Now those local groups have remained small compared to the large listed real estate companies, owned by the funds, which build many more homes per year.
At Vertix we build around 200 homes a year. We are a medium-sized company, with no debt, and we have no interest in going faster, or going public. As Josep Pla said, I now notice that my journey is coming to an end. I don’t have to answer to anyone. And I want to leave the company in order to my children and grandchildren, to leave it easy for them, because they are the people I love.
Isn’t it a handicap for a company to be so tied to a family?
It is true that a family business has a point of patriarchy, in which the command is very clear, but it also has another side: the company is the family and the people who work there. You know each one, their family, children and partners. They are the people who helped you make the company big. At Vertix there are people who have been with me for 43 years, many 25 or 30. With the crisis, around 2010, we suffered a lot, like the whole sector, and I reinvested my own money in the company to prop it up and cover debts. And we didn’t make layoffs: we felt that it was also our responsibility not to leave anyone behind.
Vertix has been a developer that has created entire neighborhoods, in Sant Cugat, El Prat, Gavà…
Since I founded the company in 1974, we have built around 14,000 homes. And we continue to develop land, but now it costs a lot. It’s hard for us to even replace the soil we use every year in the homes we deliver.
Why is it difficult for them to create soil?
Now we have a governance problem. I am a historical convergent, and I miss the old Convergence. I think that now the big parties should agree and work together to improve the country. Or change the electoral system and go to formulas with the second round. In Catalonia I would like a kind of social convergence. Because now in all the institutions, in the town councils, in the Generalitat, there are many parties and it is impossible to reach long-term agreements. But for things to work, someone has to be in charge.
The real estate sector came to be the engine of the Spanish economy at the beginning of the century, but even in the eighties and nineties it had a much greater economic weight than it does now.
Fewer homes are sold because there is less need for them. 20 years ago in Catalonia, between 50,000 and 60,000 homes were built a year, and now we only build 15,000. But then the people who arrived here found work in the industry, they could save and buy flats. And thanks to this, today they don’t pay rent and with the pension they have enough to live on.
Now instead, since 2020 Catalonia has gone from 6.8 to 8 million inhabitants. But those who arrive are foreigners, who find poorly paid jobs, with salaries that only come to them to pay rents of 300 or 400 euros, not to buy.
The public administrations, both the State and the Generalitat, propose to build social housing. Don’t you think this can be the new engine of the sector?
There is no land to build these homes. In Catalonia we would need to build around 80,000 social housing for rent in 15 years, between 5,000 and 6,000 each year. But to avoid creating the problems that exist in the suburbs of Paris, it is necessary to mix them with 50% free housing, as was done in the Prat de Llobregat Strategic Residential Area (ARE).
In one hectare of land, with a certain density, around 80 flats can be built. And therefore in Catalonia we would need to have 2,800 hectares of developable and well-connected land to build 150,000 homes. This does not exist. There are even town councils, such as that of Sant Joan Despí, which also approved an ARE and have stopped it for a decade. And neither the Generalitat nor the Provincial Council nor the Metropolitan Area have control over a town hall.
You affect the lack of land. Don’t you think that the biggest difficulty may be financial, since the social housing that will be promoted is for rent?
Building a flat on land that is already owned by public administrations costs around 150,000 euros. If financing can be obtained from EU institutions, with credits at 3% for 30 years, the town councils could pay the credit by collecting rents of 600 euros per month. And the administrations could give rent subsidies to families who can only pay lower incomes.
So I don’t think the problem is financial. But you have to put yourself into it. And it is urgent. The forecasts are that in 2035 Catalonia will have 10 million inhabitants. The housing problem will then be much greater than what we have now.
We cannot let it happen to us with housing as it happened to us with the drought: that the lack of water could be seen coming and now we regret all the years we have spent without doing anything about it. Developing land and building housing is a slow process and so that the lack of housing does not create a social outburst we must start now. I miss the times when Artur Mas or José Montilla presided over the Generalitat. Now the politicians are not interested in anything that forces them to look beyond 3 or 4 years of sight.
