With the bursting of the real estate bubble at the end of the first decade of this century, the Spanish real estate market underwent a historic change. If until then it had nourished the mortgage sector, in recent years it has based its profitability on rental, evicting and preventing large sections of the population from becoming owners. If in 2004 13.9% of the population lived in rental accommodation, in 2023 it would already be 18.7%, according to data from the INE Living Conditions Survey. In the heat of the increase in prices, which has denied access to a decent and affordable housing solution to large sections of society, in particular to the youngest households, the actors intervening in this scenario have been reorganized: investment funds, Socimis and promoters.
Relations between companies, groups and associations make it possible to understand the framework around a fundamental good such as housing, the enjoyment of which the Constitution guarantees, at least in theory, to the entire population. This same Monday, during an intervention at the Congress of Deputies, the spokesperson for the Tenants’ Union of Catalonia, Carme Arcarazo, focused on the revolving doors in the housing sector. “There is a question that the PSOE must ask itself. Its positioning in terms of housing is misused,” he indicated, relying on the Association of Rental Housing Owners (Asval), led by Helena Beunza.
Beunza was a senior official in the first governments of Pedro Sánchez, where he held the General Secretariat of Housing between 2018 and 2020. The PSOE program for the 2019 elections indicated that the Ministry of Development, where this secretariat was attached, had “adopted measures to contain the price of housing and promote social rents. Since the beginning of this year, the person responsible for these tasks has represented some 6,000 owners, who have seen during this period the profitability of their properties increase, which in March this year was close to 8%, with price increases of rent exceeds 30% in Spanish metropolitan areas between 2015 and 2022.
Asval was created precisely in 2020 with the objective of “defending the rights and interests” of owners in the face of their “concern about the regulatory wave facing rentals”, at the very time when the coalition government was the first steps in the negotiation. of the housing law, finally approved in 2023. On the occasion of its first anniversary, the association boasted of being a “privileged interlocutor with Public Administrations”. During its early years, the president of the lobby was the former socialist mayor of Barcelona between 1997 and 2006 and former Minister of Industry Joan Clos, whom the board of directors fired, thanking him for his “excellent work” at the head of the association and his “defense of owners”, in the midst of difficult conditions.
During these years, Clos was part of the assessor of the Consell de Salvador Illa. That is to say, he combined the defense of the interests of owners with the task of advising the current president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, who promised to build 50,000 social housing units before 2030. The first large lot was attributed to real estate. the real estate company Culmia, controlled by the Oaktree venture capital fund, to which Isabel Díaz Ayuso has entrusted two developments in Alcorcón with “affordable” rents that can exceed 1,000 euros.
But not only that. The succession of Clos at the head of Asval meant the frustrated signing of the former Secretary of State for Transport Isabel Pardo de Vera, who resigned from the presidency even before receiving the opinion of the Office of Conflicts of ‘interests. Furthermore, the former minister combined his work at the head of Asval with the presidency of the International Federation of Real Estate Professions (Fiabci) in Spain. At the international level, this lobby has been chaired since the summer for the first time by a Spaniard, the owner of Eurofincas Ramón Riera, who considers the rental price reference system to be an “aberration”. “Limiting rents is a suicidal measure, the best way to break a market and destroy a city,” he said.
Fiabci includes, in turn, the Association of Construction Developers of Spain and the Associations of Real Estate Agents of Barcelona. Its president is businessman Gerard Duelo and one of its members is Carles Sala i Roca, who is also legal director of the API Collective and also appeared last week at the Congressional Housing Commission, where he indicated that, although “surely” his vision was “subjective”, in the Spanish State “there was no need for a housing law”. According to him, what is needed is “a state pact, not only political” but “transversal”. “I think the messages have become very polarized and that we are closer to finding the greatest common divisor than the least common multiple,” he said. Sala i Roca was a deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia with CiU, from 2006 to 2012 and secretary of housing in the Catalan government between 2011 and 2018 and from 2021 to 2022.
The country’s largest vulture fund, Blackstone, has a lot of influence in Asval. It is, after CaixaBank, the largest landlord in Spain, with nearly 22,000 rented homes, according to data collected by Civioand the main enemy of social movements defending the right to housing. This company, for example, was the one that the former mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, sold 1,860 homes at great prices social rental building belonging to the Municipal Housing and Land Corporation.
Blackstone’s managing director in Spain, Fernando Bautista, said in January this year that the company was not “a hedge fund”. The company brings together a large number of Socimis, listed real estate investment companies born after the introduction, in 2012 with the Rajoy government, of the 0% corporate tax rate. This figure, however, was designed by the Zapatero executive in 2009, a year after Clos left the government.
SOCIMI became agitated last week following Sumar and the PSOE’s attempt to end tax benefits. Concretely, the partners consider that the 1% tax “did not serve to improve the housing supply”. However, “the majority is not dedicated to residential, neither in volume nor in number, but rather to other segments such as offices, logistics, hotels and other assets such as residences”, defended the audit partner on Grant Thornton’s Idealista blog. Real Estate, David Calzada. This company presented in September with Asocimi, the association created in 2018 to defend the interests of the sector, a report in which they showed how this formula made it possible to “attract greater volumes of capital to the Spanish real estate market”.
Another sector lobby is the Association of Real Estate Advisors (ACI), the “ethical reference of the sector”, which since 2013 has brought together the main consulting firms operating in the country. Its president is Ricardo Martí-Fluxá, who is also non-executive president of the real estate company Neinor. After having led a diplomatic career, as head of protocol and activities of the Royal Household, between 1992 and 1996, and Secretary of State for Security at the Ministry of the Interior until 2000, he was linked to the world. investment in the private sector. This organization brings together the main consulting firms, such as BNP Paribas Real Estate, Catella, CBRE, Colliers, Cushman&Wakefield, JLL, Knight Frank, Savills, linked to the brother of former Madrid president Esperanza Aguirre, Santiago Aguirre, after the merger of Aguirre. Newman.
The Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) is also trying to influence currents of opinion on real estate policy. “The government’s housing law seems to us to be a total interference in the right to property,” declared its president, Antonio Garamendi. Within the organization is the Federation of Associations of Real Estate Companies (Fadei), which brings together more than 5,000 real estate agents, under the presidency of Miguel Ángel Gómez. In an interview published last week in the specialized media EjePrime, Gómez focused on the discourse on the lack of protection of owners against squatting and on the alleged legal insecurity of state law.
One of the most influential companies in the real estate market, both in rental and sale, is Idealista. This summer, the purchase of 70% of the portal by the British venture capital fund Cinven was announced, for 2.9 billion euros from the EQT fund, which remains in the capital of the real estate portal with 18%. Previously, the owners had given access to other funds like Apax and Oakley, which until now held 17% and 11% of idealista. Cinven acquired the expert Tinsa in 2016, to which the Bank of Spain fined 300,000 euros in 2022 for deficiencies in its internal control, estimating that “the entity’s ability to know the situation of the operations of the real estate market in which it operates. »
At the head of Idealista, the leading real estate portal in Spain and Portugal, continues its CEO and co-founder, Jesús Encinar. The company is the organization that has the most information about the market, prepares reports and price statistics, often taken as a reference in the absence of other public sources, and shares relationships and an agenda with the the most powerful players in the market.
Another actor trying to influence public regulation is Airbnb, which has just published a letter to the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, asking him to “rethink” the decision to extinguish the 10,000 licenses for tourist accommodation in 2028. A few days before, the company had addressed the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, to inform him of proposals aimed at regulating short-term rentals, such as facilitating the dispersal of tourism ” beyond the center of Madrid”. the city. » He further warns the administration that the municipal council’s proposal “will be very difficult to apply in practice.”
