After the first approval of the two housing decrees passed by the Sanchez government, advertisements for long-term rental properties in the main Spanish cities are decreasing. This is according to an analysis by the EsadeEcPol research center which examined properties for rent and for sale on Idealista in the period between 29 September, the day of the approval of the two “Maricarmen” decrees, and 5 October. For the analysis, the same search criteria were used for each city and the number of advertisements was recorded at the same time of day, in order to make the data comparable.
The decline in rental advertisements
Rental advertisements decreased in number in all 10 cities examined and in six cases the decline was greater than or equal to 6%: Murcia (-12.5%), Madrid (-9.2%), Valencia (-7.5%), Alicante (-7.2%), Las Palmas (-6.3%) and Palma (-6.0%). Most of the decline, the think-tank explains, occurred between Wednesday 30 September and Friday 2 October, the day on which the Spanish Congress rejected the two measures (which in the meantime had been published in the Official Journal). A few days later, on 7 October, the Council of Ministers re-approved the decrees which, however, to come into force must have the approval of the Diputación Permanente, the constitutional body of the Spanish Parliament which guarantees the continuity of parliamentary functions when the Chambers are dissolved.
As regards properties for sale, the variation was between -0.7% and +0.7% in seven cities, while there was an increase in advertisements in Barcelona (+1.5%), Malaga (+1.9%) and Murcia (+2.4%). In short, on the sales front there is very little to report. Returning to the rental situation, after the rejection of the two housing measures on Friday 2 October, there was no recovery in the market.
The limits of the research
The study has limitations that the think-tank’s experts highlight clearly. The data is based exclusively on the advertisements on the Idealista portal and not on the number of contracts signed. A removed advertisement, we read on the search center’s website, “does not necessarily mean that a property is off the market”. The owner could very well have moved the advert to another portal. Not to mention that the rental market is quite volatile and deviations are the norm.
The uncertainty may have convinced owners to wait
Speaking to El Mundo, EsadeEcPol director Jorge Galindo said the findings “are consistent with a preventive withdrawal of rental ads in most large cities during the week of the decrees,” but refused to establish a cause-and-effect relationship. According to Galindo, there are also other factors that may have influenced the owners’ decisions, not least the Sanchez government’s decision to call a general election.
On this point, El Mundo hypothesizes that “uncertainty about the extent of the measures” launched by the government has led “some owners to remove the offers from their shop windows or simply not advertise them” until there was clarity on the rules.
Fotocasa data
The Spanish newspaper also reports the results of a similar research carried out by the real estate portal Fotocasa, according to which between 1 and 6 October the offer of long-term rentals published on the portal’s website decreased by 1.7% and that of short-term rentals by 3.2%. Even Fotocasa avoid directly attributing the effect of the decline to the approval of the housing measures: “It is too early to draw conclusions or attribute a trend”, they explain, also because a decline of 1.7% cannot be considered “representative”, but can also reflect the normal weekly fluctuations of the market. In any case, it should be underlined that Fotocasa’s data collection begins only two days after the approval of the two decrees.