Spain: In three years, with new laws, property owners withdraw 300,000 apartments from rental market

Spain housing market

In Spain, in 2024, a total of 717,338 homes were put up for rent. The figure alone doesn’t say much. The comparison with previous years does. That’s 96,512 fewer properties than were rented a year earlier (which implies an 11% drop) and nearly 300,000 fewer homes than during the height of the Covid pandemic, whether compared to 2020, when the economy was at a standstill, or to 2021, as explained by the digital outlet La Información.

These are the latest calculations presented by the Housing Observatory, launched by the Safe Rental Foundation and Rey Juan Carlos University, which provide a snapshot—not reflecting the flow but rather the stock of housing available for rent at a given moment—that prompts reflection. “The general legal insecurity,” explains José García Montalvo, professor of Economics at Pompeu Fabra University and one of the leading experts on housing in our country, would be behind this withdrawal by property owners. The inability to evict tenants who stop paying rent and declare themselves “vulnerable,” along with the protection of squatters under new laws…

From his perspective, another factor that may also be constraining the supply of rental apartments has been the change in contract duration regulations following the reform of the Urban Leasing Law enacted in 2019. Data from Fotocasa Research points in the same direction. In just 2024, the supply of rental apartments has plummeted by 17%, according to their calculations.

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The Corner
The Corner has a team of on-the-ground reporters in capital cities ranging from New York to Beijing. Their stories are edited by the teams at the Spanish magazine Consejeros (for members of companies’ boards of directors) and at the stock market news site Consenso Del Mercado (market consensus). They have worked in economics and communication for over 25 years.