🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Is this any way to run a housing market? (Or is it even a market?)

"Todos somos Maricarmen.” The shouty housing debate of recent weeks has focused on evictions — and the tale of Maricarmen, the 87-year-old who died days after enduring one.

That's understandable. But it also masks a deeper argument between two very distinct views of what property is and how it should be used. And the solution to Spain's current housing crisis — and it is a crisis — is very different, if not diametrically opposed, depending on which view you subscribe to.

Worse, if you split the difference between the two housing theories — as Spain has done so far — it only gets worse.

So what are the views? El País laid out the two sides well in an article this week, as a disagreement between two political views represented by José García Montalvo, an economics professor at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and Javier Gil, a sociologist at the CSIC, Spain's public scientific research body.

García Montalvo’s view is essentially a supply argument. Rents are high because there aren’t enough homes — specifically, enough public housing — and small landlords are filling the gap the state left. They charge market rates not out of malice but because the market allows it.

Gil starts from a different premise entirely. He’s less interested in supply-and-demand mechanics than in what the landlord-tenant relationship actually does in society: it transfers wealth from people who don’t own property to people who do. Even a well-meaning landlord with a single inherited flat is participating in a system that makes some people richer at the expense of others’ stability.

Underneath all of this is a more fundamental clash — is housing an asset, or isn’t it? Where you stand on that defines what you do to fix the problem.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Props’ first reader mailbag

What a week it’s been! When I asked last week for suggestions from Props readers about how we might fix Spain’s housing crisis, little did I know I’d also get two failed housing decrees and a snap election. I mean, when it rains, it pours, amirite?

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who wrote in. The suggestions were innovative, eye-catching, and very much not the run-of-the-mill ideas that Spain’s two main parties trot out when they feel pressured to do something — anything — about the country’s very real housing crisis. Thank you!

Now let’s get into the mailbag. I’ll break the ideas down by subject, because many of you had common targets for your commentary. (The comments have been condensed for length.)

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Can Spain fix its housing problem by decree? Or does it need us?

There's one story in Spanish real estate this week — the eviction by judicial order of Maricarmen Abascal, who was forced out of the apartment where she had lived for 71 years.

The sight of a tearful Maricarmen being forcibly removed on a stretcher set off protests in Madrid — "fury", in the FT's words — first in front of Madrid regional presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso's €6.3m penthouse attic, and then in a march of tens of thousands and, finally, in a tent encampment that continues in the city's central Puerta del Sol.

The explosion of fury was set off by Maricarmen's eviction, but it wasn't about that, or at least not just that. (There are worse tales — like Olga, a 52-year-old who committed suicide five months after being evicted from her home of 20 years in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, near Barcelona.) It was born of widespread anger at a property market that for generations served as a kind of ally, a tool that allowed people to find stability and some wealth and start families. But that recently has become something to be feared — a predator. 🧌

Why? The fears are many.

• When your lease ends, your landlord demands a 100% increase to re-up your contract. “It's the market price. 🤷‍♂️ Sorry.”

• The only apartments you can find are 11-month pisos de temporada, meaning you have to gird yourself for possible annual moves.

• A fund buys your building and kicks you out when your lease expires, in preparation for selling your place.

• The price to buy anything has risen so high you can't imagine saving enough for the down payment — not to mention the monthly mortgage checks, which have shot up alongside inflation from the 🍊 Menace's adventure in Iran.

• You'll never leave your childhood bedroom in your parents’ home.

• You'll definitely never start a family.

Now, there's been a happy ending of sorts (at least for Maricarmen). She accepted a new rental contract offered by the business that bought her apartment, and will return to it at the same rent. And, in the face of public fury, the PSOE-led government passed two decree laws to offer some protections to renters like Maricarmen and young people looking to buy.

But the decrees are band-aids. Spain’s housing crisis is structural, deeper, and decades in the making. We want to know what you think actually fixes it — bold ideas, half-baked theories, things that worked elsewhere, anything. Send your best thinking to ian@thebubble.com, and we’ll run the most thought-provoking responses next week. Don’t be shy.

Let's look at what we're facing:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Madrid gets all “big data” on the housing crisis

We're still waiting, with bated breath, for Madrid’s big-eyed, non-blinking presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso to burst out with, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up." But until that happens — and we may be waiting a while — let's talk about her newest proposal to improve the region's surveillance state lack of accessibly priced housing.

There it was — a map. During the Debate of the State of the Region about two weeks ago, tucked at the bottom of the announcement of policies her government would use in its push to develop 70,000 homes with some sort of official protection during this legislature, was the statement that Madrid would “create the first regional map of disused or uninhabited properties” that would allow for the “precise identification of these assets” in order to accelerate their entry into the rental market.

But how would that work? Several articles published this week show how.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Madrid, we have a problem

Are you up for something different? This week, as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is being raked over the coals (at least in the media), for engaging in supposed housing vaporware — announcing tons of new housing but not actually, um, building it — I thought it might be useful (and interesting!) to step back and ask the big questions: How many homes does Spain really need? Where? And how confident should we be in any of the answers?

The numbers, such as they are, paint a stark picture. Since 2021, Spain has formed 1.2m new households — a mix of people striking out on their own, starting families, or arriving from abroad. Over that same period, only 474,000 new homes were completed. Do the math, and you get a deficit somewhere north of 730,000 homes, depending on who you ask. CaixaBank Research puts it at 734,000. The Bank of Spain says 750,000. OBS Business School lands at 740,000. The differences are marginal.

As for the scale of what’s needed, choose your own nightmare. CaixaBank Research calculates that Spain would need to produce around 330,000 homes annually over the next five years to absorb the existing deficit — roughly quadrupling the current completion rate. (Spain completed 102,000 in 2024, its best year in over a decade. ) Or look at it this way: Spain currently starts just 2.7 new homes for every 1,000 residents. Before the 2008 financial crisis, that number was nearly 20 per 1,000. The gap between where Spain is and where it needs to be is a canyon.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Spain launches its own housing portal

You know you’ve got a housing problem when the government gets into the online real estate business. And look, state housing is a perfectly respectable thing. But when the government goes full Silicon Valley — “Wanna see my app?” — desperation is in the air.

Enter CASA 47: Spain’s new state-run listing portal. It's essentially a state-run Idealista, but for affordable rentals only. It's got a paltry 800 listings so far. But PM Pedro Sánchez, like any good startup pitchman, has dreams — big dreams — for his MVP (minimum viable product, natch).

The elevator pitch. Sánchez showed up for the launch to declare that the market is “broken, dislocated, and excludes hundreds of thousands of families from housing” — solid framing, five stars — before pitching his startup’s mission: “Making a home a realistic aspiration, within reach of everyone, with realistic rents for real wages.” We like the direction, but do you have metrics, Mr. Handsome?

Numbers! He went on to claim that regions applying his government’s Housing Law (rent caps, essentially) had seen rents drop 4% or more. Regular readers know we’ve flagged the other side of that story — rent caps have come at the cost of a big drop in available units as landlords pull apartments off the market — but we’ll let him have it today.

And the name? Not addressed. Given Sánchez’s complicated relationship with a certain Donald J. Trump, it's doubtful that the “47” is a nod to the Orange Menace’s job as the U.S.’s 47th president. But a subtle troll? Honestly, wouldn't that be fun?

But enough tongue-in-cheek. What CASA 47 offers to the lucky few who can snag one of its houses is pretty intriguing.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

And now the plateau…or the fall?

We’re back from summer break! After Philadelphia, Santander, and Cádiz (talk about schizophrenic travel!) I’ve returned to suffer revel in Madrid’s wilting 40°C heat, mumbling to myself repeatedly, “At least there’s no humidity.” Then again, I shouldn’t complain; that’s why god made cañas.

But this real estate market could drive anyone mad. It flies higher every month without a visible source of propulsion. Like…magic. Fine, I'm exaggerating. There are a lot of visible motives. Like, say, a) massive immigration, especially into the biggest metro areas, b) Spain's soaring global cachet, c) a lack of new housing, and d) cheap mortgages.

Still, all good things must come to an end, right? At least that's what my parents told me. Oh my god…did they lie? But seriously, everything must come to an end, and the relentless rise in real estate prices might not be a complete “good thing” anyway.

Now, however, there are new signs that the market's peaking. The question is what comes next. Do we just plateau and say, "Well, that was a ride,” or crash and say nothing because we're, like, dead? We're betting that we're finding the new equilibrium, not a tipping point before the rollercoaster drop.

Let us count the ways (or the whys):

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

Like all good Spaniards, this newsletter is taking August off to relax, refresh and spend some time on the beach. 🏖️ See you back here in September!

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Real estate takes no vacation. OK, it does.

Summer is finally here, blessed be the lord! Seriously, we’ve been driving on fumes the last few weeks as that most holy of times — summer vacation — comes into view.

And you know who else is running on fumes? The government. Between the fires, the trials, and the World Cup (¡Vamos 🇪🇸!), they haven’t had a moment to focus on the long term. Most importantly — considering this is a real estate newsletter — they haven’t been able to focus on housing.

The government was meant to roll out its long-awaited housing decree yesterday, after seeing an earlier version repealed in April. So why did it fail? Basically, Jenga. As in, in order to please all the political parties whose support it needed, it had to pile on so many rules that the law collapsed from its own weight.

But that doesn’t mean the decree is dead. It just means it will come back with a vengeance in September, just like us. And the decree, if it finally passes, will have massive effects on the real estate market and everyone in it — people, perhaps, like you! 🫵

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Spain's housing petri dish

Catalonia in general — and Barcelona specifically — have served as a kind of petri dish for Spain's housing policy experiments: rent controls, subsidized housing quotas, restrictions on tourist lets, and more.

And the outcome of these experiments? Well, a new batch of data has come in during the last week, and the results are, to put it charitably, mixed.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

As sales slow, prices will _____

We banged on about this last week. And in our inaugural edition.

The number of home sales is slumping, dropping 7.6% in May compared to the same month a year ago, for the fifth monthly drop in a row.

The question is when a slowdown in sales translates into a slowdown in prices. Every increase in prices, or in interest rates, pushes more potential buyers out of the market — and, as we'll see, investors too. And yet the prices keep rising.

Let's dive into what's holding the market up — and what could finally bring it down:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Imagine the sound of air leaking from a balloon

Okay, we exaggerate.

People are still buying homes. Lots of homes. But the arrow is pointing 📉👇⤵️ in a way that suggests we've reached a turning point in the real estate market — the proverbial cambio de tendencia — from a time when there were a bazillion eager buyers for every home on the market to one where there are…fewer.

The proximate cause for this frightening diagnosis 😱? The number of home sales in May fell 7.6% compared to the same month a year ago, to 61,140. That's according to the Colegio de Registradores, the people who, you know, register property sales. And it's not a one-off: after years of booming sales (March 2025 sales were up 40.2% year-over-year), May marks the fifth monthly drop in a row. Andalucía was the only community to see a rise in May, of 4.3%.

Let's get into why:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

We have the diagnosis, but you may not like the cure.

Spain's central bank is getting worried about the housing market. Like, seriously worried. After warning in its most recent annual report that the country has a housing deficit of about 750,000 units and that about 3.3% of the country's total housing stock (some 900,000 homes), are either owned by foreign non-residents or used as tourist rentals (i.e. not available for locals), bank governor José Luis Escrivá appeared in parliament and asked legislators to address the housing issue as something really, really important — specifically, as a “national emergency.”

That sounds…serious. But what does that actually mean? And more importantly, what would the bank, or the government, do to try to fix the situation?

That's where things get tricky. “We are talking about intrusive measures,” Escrivá warned the MPs — ones that could generate unintended consequences, like worsening access to housing for many. “We see it as a dilemma, a trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness,” the bank boss added. “We are studying it, and we will make decisions based on all the evidence.”

That sounds like a good idea, considering what has happened since the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez passed the housing law of 2023, which was meant to increase the supply of affordable housing but has done pretty much everything but.

Let's dive in:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

Props is a paid newsletter. Your first 60 days, however, are free — grab a trial here and decide if we're worth it.

Also, I’ve spent the last few months building a real estate app that lets you track properties across Spain's various real estate portals in one place, value properties using actual transaction data, and drill into sales and pricing by neighborhood. It's in beta. If you want early access, drop me a line.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

This should be good news, but…nope.

Landlords aren't dumb. When they want to dodge rent controls or government attempts to unilaterally extend rental contracts, they shift their rentals to seasonal (less than 12-month) contracts. (After Catalonia put in rent caps, these contracts jumped 56% in a year.) Now, this pisses off renters because under these contracts, they pay more and may have to move every year. So the news that seasonal contracts became a smaller part of the rental pool this year should be cause for celebration, right?

Right?

Well, no. What on the surface certainly looks like good news turns out to be just another sign that Spain's housing law of 2023 is the poster child for the law of unintended consequences — i.e., it was meant to increase the supply of affordable housing but has done everything but.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's real estate newsletter. You're here because Spanish real estate is fascinating, insane, occasionally enraging, and — if you have a little money and play it right — profitable. Every week we bring you the data, the deals, the people making it happen, and the ones making it worse.

Props is a paid newsletter. Your first 60 days, however, are free — grab a trial here and decide if we're worth it.

Also, I’ve spent the last few months building a real estate app that lets you track properties across Spain's various real estate portals in one place, value properties using actual transaction data, and drill into sales and pricing by neighborhood. It's in beta. If you want early access, drop me a line.

So sit back and enjoy! And send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

We don't want to get your hopes up, but…

Here’s a number that may make you feel a little tingle of warmth and fuzziness: in May 2026, Spanish rental prices rose just 3% year-on-year. That’s the slowest rate of growth in nearly three years.

Now, before you break out the cava or the MDMA (we won't judge), let’s be clear about what this does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean rents are cheap — Spain’s average rental price hit a record €14.76 per square meter per month, and Madrid’s is nearly €22. And it doesn’t mean the housing crisis is over, or even close to over. What it does mean is that after years of brutal, relentless double-digit increases, the rental market may be running into…not a cliff, but maybe one of those emergency brake ramps for out-of-control trucks?

And the reason, according to analysts? It’s not that supply has improved (as we've said, households are growing faster than housing). It’s that tenants have simply run out of money.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's new real estate newsletter. Every week, we'll bring you the trends, news, scoops, scandals, and personalities in Spanish real estate.

This is one of our newsletters for paid subscribers. But that doesn't mean you can't read it! Sign up for a 60-day free trial.

So sit back, read, and enjoy! And please send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.

Subscribe now

Demand met supply and kicked its butt

It's, like, the most basic theory of Economics 101: Supply and Demand. That is, as supply goes up, prices go down, and vice versa. Where they cross in the middle is the point of perfect equilibrium, where there is neither excess supply nor demand and everything sells at a correct, market-clearing price.

Well, we can safely say that Spain's real estate market exists in nothing that resembles perfect equilibrium. There's barely anything on the market — to rent or buy — and what's there is either a) crazy expensive or b) ugly as sin. Several studies and pieces of news got us thinking about that this week. TL;DR: Is it going to change? Yes. Anytime soon? No.

Let us count the ways:

Read more

🚨 Welcome to Props — The Bubble's new real estate newsletter. Every week, we'll bring you the trends, news, scoops, scandals, and personalities in Spanish real estate. From deep dives on prices to exclusive Q&As, you'll get everything you could possibly want (and more!) on Spain's property market. So sit back, read, and enjoy! (And please send your tips, comments, suggestions, and all-cash offers to ian@thebubble.com.)

Also, this edition of Props is free — but it won’t always be. We’re moving to a paid model next week, and early subscribers get a 60-day free trial. If you like what you’re reading, now’s the time.

Subscribe now

Is this the end?

Here's a provocative idea: Spain's real estate boom is over.

No, we're not saying we're in a bubble that is about to pop and send prices plunging. In fact, we published a deep dive titled 5 Reasons We’re Not in a Property Bubble, and we meant it. Instead, we're saying the property market has run out of road. The prices may soon stop rising. The crazy boom could be over. Se acabó.

Let us count the ways:

• The big problem? Demand destruction. Prices have risen so far, so fast, that the great majority of Spaniards just can't afford to buy a place. “Upper-middle-class buyers in Madrid, Barcelona, ​​and Valencia are not willing to pay the high prices property owners are asking,” the economist Gonzalo Bernardos of the University of Barcelona wrote recently. Or in the words of María Matos, the director of studies at Fotocasa, “Prices are pushing the limits of access for a growing segment” of the population.

• Plus, the larger economic and social situation is changing. “All the factors driving demand and supporting prices are about to lose steam: migration flows will slow, leading to a gradual cooling of the labor market, while interest rates are rising again,” wrote Ángel Talavera, chief economist for Europe at Oxford Economics, in the recently published Housing market gets hotter, but could be turning a corner. “Affordability is being compromised, especially in the most expensive areas where most demand is concentrated, which has led to a drop in sales at the beginning of the year. We believe this foreshadows slower price increases going forward.”

• In fact, a slowdown may already be here. According to INE, the national stats service, housing sales have slipped 2.6% during the first trimester of 2026.

  “Rather than a change of cycle, we are entering a phase of moderation or slowdown in the traditional residential segment, where access to financing and the loss of purchasing power are setting a ceiling in some zones,” notes José Antonio Muro, CEO of Grupo Tecnitasa.

• So unsold houses are piling up. Idealista is seeing “a slowdown in purchases that is causing a gradual accumulation of unsold properties,” says Francisco Iñareta, an Idealista spokesman. “Although we are still at historically low levels [of available properties], prices are beginning to react; they are still rising, but not at the rate of last year.”

• As sales slip, an increasing number of sellers are cutting their asking price. Evidence? On Idealista, 14% of listings cut their prices during the first three months of the year, compared to 11% a year. ago. Big cutters? Barcelona (21%), Madrid (20%), Málaga, Sevilla, Valencia, and Zaragoza (18%).

• And prices are actually falling in some places. According to data from the property portal Pisos.com, prices actually fell in April in almost half of Spain's provincial capitals — including Valencia.

• Mortgage rates are about to rise, too. Investors expect the European Central Bank to raise interest rates 0.75 percentage points this year in an attempt to fight rising inflation (thank you, Orange Menace), which will flow through to more expensive mortgage rates and push more buyers out of the market.

• A final warning. We said we don't believe this is a bubble. And we're sticking to that. But the IMF has worries: In its latest report on Spain, the organization warned of the “potential risks arising from the rapid increase in housing prices.” Specifically, it has observed “the first signs of a relaxation of bank lending criteria.” And this could, in the long run, create “vulnerabilities in the financial sector.” Not great.

🏗️ Property News Roundup

1. Spain is the most attractive European destination for hotel investors for the third year running. Maybe that's why Azora is preparing to sell a €500m piece of its hotel portfolio — and Merkel Capital is preparing to invest €400m in hotels and student housing.

2. Rafael Nadal has apparently found his post-tennis career. Palya Assets — a real estate development and investment firm co-owned by Nadal and hotelier Abel Matutes Prats — is backing Armani Residences Marbella, the Italian brand’s first branded residential project in Spain.

3. Everybody's building housing in Tetuán (Madrid). Like 25 new-build projects in the last three years. Darya Homes is just the latest builder to announce plans.

4. This monstrous spaceship of a villa in La Moraleja (Madrid) was sold twice —most recently for €14m — before its construction was even begun.

5. Catalonia will give you a 40-year “emancipation” loan to pay for the 20% of your first home that banks won't cover, if you are 35 or under.

💎 Property of the week

This villa in Las Rozas can be yours for €7.9M. Add to cart before someone else does!

🇪🇸 The Bubble is Spain's #1 English-language newsletter (and according to Substack, we’re “bestselling” too!).

🚨 This is one of The Bubble’s expanded feature articles that dive in depth into the most pressing issues Spain faces today. (To read the entirety of our deep-dive articles, you will need a paid subscription.) We’d love to hear from you about this piece via a “like” or comment. Enjoy!

Subscribe or Upgrade

Spain’s property market is boiling. Here are 5 changes coming to it

Spain’s property market isn’t cooling down—it’s boiling over. And while the government’s rent caps, tax tweaks, and headline-making mega-developments like Madrid’s Nuevo Norte grab attention, the reality is simpler: people are being priced out of where they want to live, and they’re scrambling for alternatives. The pressure points aren’t just in Madrid and Barcelona anymore—they’re spreading like an oil stain into suburbs, commuter towns, and entirely different cities. That means the map of “affordable” housing is about to look very different, and not necessarily for the better.

Let’s start with the first shift.

1. 🏡 Locals will head to the peripheries of big cities

“Living in Madrid is a luxury now.” — renter Vinicius Silva to El País on looking beyond the M-40.

It’s a classic squeeze: prices in city centres are already high, and mass tourism pushes them even higher. In Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga, Valencia and Sevilla, locals are heading to the edges — not for the romance of a long commute, but because it’s the only place they can (sort of) afford.

There are numbers to prove it. Some 36,000 people left Barcelona for other towns in Catalonia between 2021 and 2023; during the same period, Barcelona’s second ring Vallès and Maresme areas have gained 15,000 residents. The towns of Sabadell (+974), Vilanova i la Geltrú (+713) and Terrassa (+634) have been big winners of intra-Catalonia migration.

Why? Prices, obvs. José Alberto Marín, who leads Catalonia’s notaries association, told La Vanguardia that his group’s database showed that the price to buy a house drops by half just 30km outside of Barcelona.

“One of the solutions to improve access to housing is called public transportation.” — José Alberto Marín

And it’s not just Barcelona, with its stifling overtourism, where locals are fleeing the city. New data from Idealista shows the most in-demand rental zones, as measured by the most renter interest per listing, are increasingly outside the core. Nine of Spain’s 10 most in-demand rental areas are in Madrid or Barcelona’s peripheries — Leganés leads the list. Barcelona and Madrid themselves? They are way down, at #20 and #32, respectively. And while Spain’s Big 2 may be the trend-setters, it’s happening everywhere from Valencia to Sevilla and Málaga too.

But there’s a problem with this plan—those cheaper outskirts aren’t staying cheap. In many commuter towns, rental prices are rising faster than in the cities they surround (see chart above). And when it comes to sale prices, 47% of municipalities of over 25,000 people saw 10%+ year-over-year increases during the last quarter of 2024—for example, Valencia outskirts Manises (27,8%), Mislata (27,3%), Xirivella (26,7%), and Burjassot (25,7%) saw over 25% annual increases. In parts of Madrid’s southeast, average prices have tripled in a decade—in Ensanche de Vallecas, the price has risen from €143,000 in 2014 to over €430,000 today.

So it might be time for another workaround…

2. 🏘️ Locals will skip the suburbs entirely — and move to smaller cities

The old escape plan from big-city housing hell was simple: move to the edge of town. Now, more Spaniards are blowing past the beltways and heading for smaller provincial capitals — places that once bled residents and are suddenly stealing them.

Take Valladolid. After decades of losing people to Madrid, it flipped the script, growing its population by 5,000 in the last two years and posting a positive migration balance with the capital (of +491) for the first time, like, ever? Credit high-speed rail (under an hour to Madrid) and Madrid’s brutal housing market.

The trend isn’t limited to Valladolid. Madrid lost nearly 21,000 residents to other Spanish towns in 2023; Barcelona’s balance was also negative (-11,553). The leavers aren’t 20-somethings — they’re mostly 35+, university-educated, and trading cramped flats for bigger homes and saner mortgages.

Eight small capitals — Lugo, Cáceres, Guadalajara, Toledo, Ciudad Real, Huesca, Soria and Teruel — reached record high populations in 2024. Ourense brought in 3,155 people from other parts of Spain in 2023, including 755 from Madrid and 615 from Catalonia, and Asturias is now the second-most popular destination for internal migration.

Affordability may be the hook — but it’s fading fast. In many of these “cheap” markets, prices are rising as fast as in the big cities they’re poaching from. In May, Valladolid’s average sale price was 7.8% higher than a year earlier, with its hottest neighborhoods up more than 20%. “There are fewer and fewer affordable options for those who want to buy a home, and this translates into greater tension in large cities, but also in medium-sized ones,” says Simone Colombelli, mortgages director of iAhorro. Today’s bargain could be tomorrow’s next housing headache.

3. 💸 Landlords will pull more apartments off the market in “stressed” areas

Surprising no one, when the government passed a 2023 housing law letting regions cap rents in “stressed” areas — places where rents gobble more than 30% of average income and are rising faster than inflation — landlords didn’t exactly throw a party. Instead, many yanked their flats from the market and went hunting for better-paying gigs.

Read more

🇪🇸 The Bubble is Spain's #1 English-language, bestselling newsletter. We offer paid subscriptions, and we’d be thrilled to have your support!

🚨 This is one of The Bubble’s expanded feature articles that dive in depth into the most pressing issuing Spain faces today. (To read the entirety of our deep-dive articles, you will need a paid subscription.) We’d love to hear from you about this piece via a “like” or comment. Enjoy!

Subscribe or Upgrade

We wish we had better real estate news, but…

By now you’ve heard it in the checkout line, on the terraza, or shouted by someone rage-scrolling Idealista: Spain is in a housing bubble. Prices are too high. Wages haven’t kept up. The market is irrational. It feels like 2008 all over again. We’re all going to die!

Except it isn’t like that (well, we will all die—just ask Sen. Joni Ernst). And if you’re holding your breath for the crash, you might want to exhale. Slowly.

This is not a speculative bubble fueled by cheap money and bank-issued opium like the 2007-8 crash, when half of Spain seemed to buy a second house in the España profunda or some beach where no one goes before realizing, as the economy slowed, ”¡Jolín! I don’t have the money!”

Instead, it’s a chronic shortage of housing in the places cities people actually want to live, made worse by surging demand, shrinking supply, and government policy that seems specifically designed to make absolutely everything worse.

What does that mean? Spanish housing prices have risen 77% since 2014, according to Oxford Economics. The price of an already existing home (i.e. not new) rose 18.8% year-over-year in November—the biggest recorded rise ever—according to real estate portal Fotocasa. And so? People who would have bought in the past now rent—in 2024, 20.4% of Spanish households were renting, up from 14.9% in 2014—and those who used to rent? They commute to work from Farawayistan, or live in Chez MamiyPapi.

And prices? They’re going to keep rising.

Let’s break it down—because, honestly, if we don’t, who will?

1. 👶 The population is growing. Fast.

Spain is having a growth spurt—and it has nothing to do with birth rates (though we do like that baby emoji). This is an immigration story. In 2024, Spain’s population jumped by more than 508,000, hitting a record 49.1m. All of that increase came from foreign born people, according to the national INE statistics service.

That’s not a one-off. In just five years, Spain has added over 1.7m residents (we’re now at 49.4m), almost the population of Barcelona—and about 97% of those new residents are foreign born. And where are these newcomers heading? Not Teruel.

The growth is concentrated in job-rich regions like Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga, and Valencia. The kind of places where housing is already tight. The kind of places where you’re competing with other buyers, renters, tourists, foreign investors, and—god forbid—a remote worker from Amsterdam with a relocation bonus and the desperate need to be near a beach.

“​​If 500,000 more people arrive in Spain each year, many of them in very limited locations…this creates the perfect combination for housing prices to continue rising,” says Antonio de la Fuente, director at Colliers. “We estimate that prices will rise several percentage points above inflation.”

This isn’t irrational exuberance. It’s math: more people chasing too few homes.

2. 🏗️ We are not building nearly enough

Yes, Spain is building more than it was during the pandemic. In 2024, the country issued 127,721 permits for new housing—up 17% from the year before, and the highest number since 2008, according to El País.

Sounds impressive—until you consider that Spain faces a 600,000-home deficit, according to the Banco de España, and was permitting 900,000 units a year during the real estate boom (and bubble) of the early 2000s. The result? Between 2022 and 2024, the number of new households exceeded the numbers of new homes by 3-to-1.

Even when homes do get built, delays are long. There’s not enough land zoned for residential. Permitting can take well over a year. And dense urban construction (you know, where people actually live) is the hardest to greenlight. That doesn’t mean cities aren’t trying—a new Madrid law allowing offices to be turned into housing without redoing zoning laws has so far led to licenses for 1,500 new units. But that’s a small number, and even that takes time.

CaixaBank Research and CBRE both see housing permits rising this year—but only to the range of 135,000-140,000. And Madrid and its metropolitan area are at work on large-scale projects like Madrid Nuevo Norte, Valdecarros, Los Berrocales, Los Ahijones, Los Cerros and Valgrande, with over 200,000 homes between them (many with affordability protections). But they are years (if not a decade) from completion.

And you know what makes it worse? The Bank of Spain estimates that the country needs 1.5m more “social” (government subsidized/affordable) housing units. Only 1% of Spanish housing is “social”, putting it at the tail of Europe.

If this is a building boom, it’s the slowest boom in European history.

3. 🏚️ Yes, there are millions of empty homes. No, they’re not where you need them.

Every time someone dares mention housing scarcity, someone else retorts: But there are 4 million empty homes in Spain!

They’re not wrong. But they’re not right, either.

Read more