Mark Stucklin
Spanish property market in the dark
Spanish property, lost in the desert?
Where are you if you can’t see anything around you, and don’t have a map? Lost, most likely, just like the Spanish real estate market, where a lack of reliable data means we are all in the dark as to what is going on.
But it just so happens that the property market is the key to today’s economic crisis, so it wouldn’t half be helpful to have some visibility into the market. When it comes to transparency, the Spanish property market is third world.
But at last, I hear, the government plans to create a ‘housing map’ to quantify the scale of Spain’s housing bust. It will be the most “up to date and detailed analysis possible of the residential construction sector in Spain,” a spokesperson from the Ministry of Housing told the Spanish news website elconfidencial.com
One of the big questions to answer will be ‘how large is the surplus stock of new properties that is keeping Spanish developers and banks awake at night?’ Developers, with their vested interest, say between 650,000 and 700,000, whilst other experts and analysts say between 900,000 and 1 million. Could be much more.
“The Government has a major interest in knowing how much unsold stock there is. The longer we take to quantify it, the longer it will take for the housing market, and therefore the job market to recover,” said the Ministry of Housing. But don’t hold your breath for quick results.
It doesn’t help that Spain has the highest ratio of properties to households in Europe, and one of the highest in the world. With a housing stock of 26.2 million compared to 18 million households, there are almost 1.5 properties to every household in Spain, according to figures from the Bank of Spain. So it’s not as if there is an acute shortage of housing, though some would argue there is a shortage of the right kind of property, in the right place, at the right price.