Challenges, opportunities, threats. At the end of the year, the real estate sector, as one of the basic pillars of the Spanish economy, faces its particular letter to the Three Wise Men for 2025. Talking about housing today is bringing to the debate one of the main problems of the Spanish people, as they remind us the surveys proposed in this regard by the most reputable demographic institutes, and those that once were, in the country. And to pose the problem and challenge of housing is to pose the absurd and incomprehensible scarcity of the essential raw material that supports its existence, of land suitable for building. In Spain there is no shortage of land. Whoever maintains such an argument will be maintaining a fallacy, another one, which has become classic for some opinion leaders, who know everything, but understand little.
The Spanish economy has grown during 2024. It has been doing so at a constant pace since the pandemic, although global inflationary pressure and difficult international relations and geopolitical tensions continue to subject the most advanced economies to significant challenges that, in the case of Spain, were to become opportunities, as I will try to explain. In the real estate sector, trusting the materialization of these opportunities, of what classical economists call the situation, to the national political task, although sad as it is, places us in the scenario of trusting that situation to the bargains, to the figs, to the balances. or, as hard as it may be, to chance, to chance, to a fluke.
Our GDP has not stopped increasing. A favorable climate, an enviable geostrategic position, a safe country like Spain, at least in terms of absence of risk or danger of instability, places us in a favorable scenario, characterized by the push for investment, consumption and tourism. . A panorama in which the increase in this investment and private consumption and, although to a lesser extent, disposable income, is more than likely to place the Spanish GDP at the end of 2025 above the 2.5% that everything points to The end of fiscal year 2024 will approach. The sectors with the greatest domestic demand seem to be the ones that will have the greatest growth next year. Hospitality, retail, Activities related, directly or indirectly, to tourism and, if not above all of them, then at higher rates, digital services, will concentrate the highest growth ranges of these incomes.
Even Experts advance that the dynamics of our labor market will continue to improve regarding the exercise that ends. This is despite erratic policies marked by unfavorable and overly political regulations, which put the results of progress on the shoulders of the misunderstood self-employed, knowing that they will continue to carry the weight of growth, as they always have, seeking the limit of their capacity. , of its proven resilience. This alone would be enough to set off all the alarms in the system. We are attending an opera in which pushing the tenor to the limit and exceeding it would mean lowering the curtain early.
For its part, the tourism sector will continue to contribute figures greater than 12% of the GDP in Spain, driven by a strong industry, solid and recognized companies and that high degree of geopolitical stability that places Spain as a favorite destination compared to our biggest rivals. direct.
The resilience and involvement of the real estate sector is more than demonstrated, as well as its indisputable contribution as the engine of the Spanish economy, and this despite the stigma that always accompanies it and that some insist on inciting, pointing out real estate as the culprit of the housing shortage and high prices when it is, precisely, Thanks to the companies that make it up, it has never lost its status as a support for our economy. It is this sector that, if not at its own pace, then with little help from the state, best knows how to combine the ingredients that I refer to so that growth opportunities materialize. It is real estate that has proven, over the last five years, its resistance to devastating crises and criminal pandemics, taking advantage of the loopholes that adverse circumstances have created, proposing solutions and offering alternatives to those who wanted to listen.
Beyond occurrences and electoral announcements of difficult or impossible feasibility, some challenges that require moving quickly must be faced by real estate and the different administrations. A viable solution must be provided for Spanish youth to access housing. A too high percentage of this essential sector of the population cannot access home ownership in large cities, which leads them to purchase small properties and in areas where the price is more contained. This access to lower-value homes, far from their workplaces, prevents first investments near them, greatly penalizes mobility and increases an increasingly deep gap between generations, drastically reducing the probabilities of contribution and recovery of value and wealth in the vital projects of young people.
A similar conclusion can be drawn for rents, whose prices make access to housing difficult under this formula, harming fundamental ratios for the immediate future of Spain, such as the very poor birth rates or the geographical mobility of the workforce, in addition to preventing savings to new generations for the acquisition of home ownership, in the medium or long term. Efforts must therefore be directed at facilitating access to housing, under any tenure regime and for youth and those with lower incomes, in large cities and their areas or zones of influence. This requires a combined effort, a state pact that involves administrations and the sector as a whole, so that the enormous deficit in affordable housing on a national scale begins to be immediately alleviated, completely insufficient to meet a growing and unstoppable demand. Do not lose sight of the fact that the main promoter of subsidized housing in Spain, in a proportion of eight out of every ten subsidized housing placed on the market, They are not public administrations, but the private sector. ANDIn this sense, the update of the maximum sales prices for protected housing, operated by communities such as Madrid or Cantabria, will encourage an increase in supply, helping to alleviate the tremendous shortage. This review of sales prices is one of the best weapons to confront the current inflationary context, aggravated by the continued increase in construction costs.
Here, taking into account the aforementioned data that confirms the private sector as the main promoter of protected housing, there must continue to be an abundance of public-private collaboration that allows its rapid generation. These processes are being confirmed as the most appropriate in addressing the shortage of affordable housing, as demonstrated by the enormous progress in this regard that the Madrid administrations are favoring. There is no place for triumphalism, although these actions give rise to deepening such collaboration mechanisms, their consolidation and ensuring the bidirectionality of the processes.
Tourist use is today a problem of capital importanceboth for the sustainability of our cities and for the medium and long-term viability of our tourist destinations. Some cities, such as Madrid with the announced Reside Plan, are addressing this problem before circumstances prevent reasonable solutions. In this sense, the proposals must focus on sustainability and tourism innovation. The tourism sector in Spain is knowing how to assume and adapt to our reality, improving the quality of its offer and consolidating trends such as the favoring of cultural tourism, as a dynamizer of the offer in our cities, ecotourism, where the advisable escape from an absurd gamification of the countryside imposed in recent years and derived from European regulations, or the increasingly vigorous, in an aging society such as Europe, health and well-being tourism. The administration is responsible for modulating these trends and preserving the identity of destinations.through a programmed and adequate intervention in the regulation of residential tourist uses. In this way, the extreme volatility to which geopolitics subjects national economies, as we are seeing, can be avoided when necessary. Promoting the identity of our cities and singling out the character of our destinations. And the thing is that, in tourism, unlike with money and financial investment, Spain must flee from globality, enhancing its uniqueness.
The large Spanish cities are, and must continue to be, epicenters of opportunitiesculture and urban innovation. Not in vain are they still among the top ten of the prestigious annual Best Cities world ranking by the consulting firm Resonance, with Madrid occupying seventh place and Barcelona eighth. Hence, actions to promote and preserve its urban centers such as the aforementioned Madrid Reside Plan mean an incentive in its confirmation among the best cities in the world to visit and reside.
The real estate sector must enter, definitively and without complexes, into modernization and digitalization of its different processes. Artificial intelligence, data analytics, and all the advances brought by high-tech industries must form an integral part of them, under penalty of losing momentum at the head of the Spanish economy and the large Spanish real estate companies losing relevance. with respect to its competitors and the European markets. In this sense, we must also continue to insist in 2025 on the necessary implementation of industrialized construction, which is increasingly gaining prominence and growing significantly, although still scarce, in its application for multi-family buildings. This form of construction reduces execution times, minimizes cost deviation in the construction process, generates less waste and implies lower water and energy consumption during construction and during the useful life of the finished product, considerably increasing the sustainability index of the activity of the sector.
The sector must also continue to demand a legal security law by 2025 that guarantees the production of land suitable for building within reasonable deadlines and that provides certainty to all the agents involved. The levels of insecurity reached as a result of the deficient regulation of certain guarantees, as is the obvious case of public action in matters of urban planning, place many urban processes aimed at the generation of that land at the limit of viability and, in Ultimately, to increase the minimum volume of housing that guarantees the production of affordable housing. All this without forgetting, I insist once again, the absolute urgency of the reformulation of our urban planning system that allows the rapid, efficient and safe generation of land suitable for urbanization, first, and to build the homes that are so needed, later. . Without this real possibility of speeding up the processes of generating developable land, neither the commitments of a more than involved sector, nor the innovations, nor the intentions, will serve to address the pressing housing problem in Spain.
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