With the bursting of the real estate bubble at the end of the first decade of this century, the housing market in Spain experienced a historic change. If until then it had nourished the mortgage business, in recent years it has based its profitability on rentals, expelling and preventing large groups of the population from owning property. If in 2004 13.9% of the population lived renting, in 2023 it would already be 18.7%, according to data from the INE Living Conditions Survey. In the heat of price increases, which have denied access to a decent and affordable housing solution to broad layers of society, especially younger households, the actors operating in this scenario have been reorganized: investment funds, Socimis and promoters.
The relationships between companies, groups and associations help to understand the framework around a basic good such as housing, whose enjoyment the Constitution guarantees, at least in theory, to the entire population. This same Monday, in an appearance in 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 hijacked,” he indicated, focusing on the Association of Rental Home Owners (Asval), with Helena Beunza at the helm.
Beunza was a senior official in the first governments of Pedro Sánchez, where he held the General Secretariat of Housing between 2018 and 2020. PSOE program For the 2019 elections, it indicated that the Ministry of Public Works, where this Secretariat was attached, had “adopted measures to contain the price of housing and promote social rentals.” Since the beginning of this year, the person responsible for these tasks has represented some 6,000 landlords, who in this time have seen the profitability of their properties increase, which in March of this year was close to 8%, with increases in rental prices above of 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 the owners in the face of their “concern about the regulatory wave that rentals face”, just when the coalition government was taking the first steps in the negotiation. of the housing law, finally approved in 2023. On its first anniversary, the association boasted of being a “key interlocutor before Public Administrations.” During its first 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 Governing Board dismissed thanking him for his “excellent work” at the head of the association and his “defense of landlords.” , in the midst of difficult conditions.”
During those years, Clos was part of the Consell Assessor by Salvador Illa. That is to say, it combined the defense of the interests of the owners with the task of advising the current president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, who has promised to build 50,000 public homes before 2030. The first large lot has been awarded to the real estate company Culmia, controlled by the Oaktree venture capital fund, to whom Isabel Díaz Ayuso entrusted two developments in Alcorcón with “affordable” rentals 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 before even receiving the opinion of the Office of Conflicts of Interest. In addition, 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 an 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 an “aberration.” “Limiting rents is a suicidal measurethe best way to break a market and destroy a city,” he considered.
Fiabci includes, in turn, the Association of Construction Developers of Spain and the Associations of Real Estate Agents of Barcelona. Its president is the businessman Gerard Duelo and one of its members is Carles Sala i Roca, who is also legal director of the API Collective and last week also appeared at the Congressional Housing Commissionwhere he pointed out that, although “surely” his vision was “subjective”, in the Spanish State “a housing law was not necessary.” In his opinion, what is needed is “a State pact, not exclusively political” but “cross-cutting.” “I think the messages have become very polarized and we are closer to finding the greatest common divisor than the least common multiple,” he considered. Sala i Roca was a deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia with CiU, from 2006 to 2012 and secretary of housing of the Catalan Government between 2011 and 2018 and from 2021 to 2022.
The most important vulture fund in the country, 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 nemesis of social movements in defense of the right to housing. This company, for example, was the one that the former mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, sold 1,860 homes at bargain prices social rental property owned by the Municipal Housing and Land Company.
The general director of Blackstone in Spain, Fernando Bautista, stated in January of this year that the company is not “a speculative fund.” The company brings together a large number of Socimis, the listed real estate investment companies that sprung up after the introduction, in 2012 with the Rajoy Government, of the 0% corporate tax rate. The figure, however, It was designed by the Zapatero Executive in 2009a year after Clos left the Government.
The SOCIMIs have become agitated in the last week over the attempt by Sumar and the PSOE to end tax benefits. Specifically, the partners consider that the 1% taxation “has not served to improve the housing supply.” However, “the majority is not dedicated to residential, neither by volume nor by number, but rather other segments such as offices, logistics, hotels and other assets such as residences,” he defended in the Idealista blog Grant Thornton Real Estate audit partner, David Calzada. This company presented in September together with Asocimi, the association created in 2018 to defend the interests of the sector, a report in which they showed how this formula allowed “attracting greater volumes of capital to the Spanish real estate market.”
Another of the sector’s lobbies is the Association of Real Estate Consultants (ACI), the “ethical reference of the sector”, which since 2013 has brought together the main consultancies operating in the country. Its president is Ricardo Martí-Fluxá, who is also non-executive president of the real estate company Neinor. After pursuing a diplomatic career, being in charge of the head of protocol and activities of the Royal Household, between 1992 and 1996, and of the Secretary of State for Security in the Ministry of the Interior until 2000, he has been linked to the world of 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) also tries to influence currents of opinion on real estate policies. “The Government’s housing law seems to us to be a total interference with the right to property,” its president, Antonio Garamendi, even said. 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 AxisPrimeGómez emphasized the lack of protection of landlords against squatting and the supposed legal uncertainty of the state law.
One of the companies that has the most influence in the real estate market, both rental and sales, 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 entry to other funds such as Apax and Oakley, which to date had 17% and 11% of idealista. Cinven acquired the appraiser Tinsa in 2016, on which the Bank of Spain imposed a fine of 300,000 euros in 2022 for deficiencies in its internal control, considering 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, its CEO and co-founder, Jesús Encinar, continues. The company is the organization that has the most information on the market, prepares reports and price statistics, often taken as a reference in the absence of other public sources, and shares relationships and agenda with the most powerful players in the market.
Another actor trying to influence public regulation is Airbnb, which has just post a letter for the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, to “rethink” the decision to extinguish the 10,000 licenses for housing for tourist use in 2028. A few days before, the company had addressed the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, to send you proposals to regulate short-term rentals, such as facilitating the dispersion of tourism “beyond the city center.” In addition, he warns the administration that the City Council’s proposal “will be very difficult to apply in practice.”
#senior #housing #official #minister #protocol #Royal #House #real #estate #lobby
