In the last decade, Catalonia has become one of the main laboratories of housing regulation in Spain. The puzzle of the housing emergency has left behind a trail of measures promoted by administrations to protect the most vulnerable households, expand the stock of social apartments or contain rents in the face of the unstoppable escalation of prices, while new rules have been introduced to define who is a large holder or limit the use of seasonal contracts. The last of these laws promoted by the Generalitat, against the “speculative purchase” of real estate, has not passed the examination of the Consell de Guaranties Statutàries this summer. The Catalan executive has committed to modifying the rule, which has been strongly criticized by employers and entities in the real estate sector, considering that it will aggravate the supply crisis. While homeowners warn that overregulation has generated even more legal insecurity, the movement for the right to decent housing warns of the loopholes in these regulations.
More than ten years have passed since, in 2015, in full recovery after the harshest effects of the financial crisis, the Parliament of Catalonia approved a law promoted, among other entities, by the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH). The regulations introduced measures against evictions at a time when mortgage foreclosures were in the thousands. Although the Constitutional Court invalidated some of its key articles, that law opened a new stage of reforms that, during the following decade, have expanded and modified the rules of the housing market.
One of the measures that has generated the most reactions – and continues to do so – is the rent cap. The Catalan law of 2020 was the first attempt to contain rents through an index that limited the prices of new contracts. Two years later, the Constitutional Court stopped these aspirations when it considered that the Generalitat invaded state powers. However, the measure came into force again with the new regulation of the Spanish Executive, which reestablished this control in 2024. Catalonia was the first community to request and apply this price limitation by declaring 271 stressed municipalities, which are now 302.
For the professor of Economics at the Pompeu Fabra University José García Montalvo, the Catalan law of 2020 was “harmful” and “terrible” because it did not take into account key differential characteristics of the apartments and penalized rehabilitation. Regarding the state law, the academic believes that, as a consequence, the owners have become more “selective”, renting their apartments to families with more resources and expelling the lowest incomes towards informal or room rentals. Furthermore, García Montalvo does not trust Incasòl guarantees as a statistical source to analyze the evolution of this price containment as a result of the cap. “Only those who have been able to rent appear,” points out this economist.
The second vice president of the Col·legi d'Agents de la Propietat Inmobiliària and general director of Amat Immobiliaris, Guifré Homedes, regrets that the supply "has collapsed" and that many owners have decided to sell or give apartments to family members rather than put them up for traditional rental.
In the area of creating protected housing, in 2018, Barcelona City Council – then with Ada Colau as mayor – promoted the reservation of 30% of new real estate developments and large renovations for officially protected housing (VPO). After eight years of application, the current council recognizes that the measure has only allowed the incorporation of 34 completed affordable social homes, well below initial forecasts. For the president of the Association of Developers of Catalonia (APCE), Xavier Vilajoana, the 30% reserve has “drastically” reduced housing production in the Catalan capital and has put a brake on renovations, which increases the risk of degradation. “We will be the Havana of Catalonia,” he laments, and considers that political leaders have a “supreme ignorance” of the real functioning of the market.
For its part, Homedes observes a “consensus” within the sector on the need to rethink the standard, due to the unfeasibility of applying it in small developments and the lack of land. On the other hand, from the Llogateres Union, its spokesperson, Carme Arcarazo, criticizes that non-compliance with this regulation is “absolutely flagrant”, since investors have evaded the rule by rehabilitating the homes floor by floor, without sufficient inspections.
Within the mission to attract more social housing, the anthropologist and co-founder of the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (IDRA) Jaime Palomera also highlights the importance of the legislative change that allowed the new officially protected housing in 2019 to become permanent. "It puts an end to the historical anomaly of making housing with temporary protection, which lost its qualification after a few years. In this way, Catalonia follows the example of Euskadi, which changed it twenty years ago," he adds. In 2025, the Government also expanded with a decree law the administration's rights of first refusal and withdrawal, which allow it to buy a home before or after it is sold to a third party. García Montalvo welcomes the measure as a quick way to grow the social housing stock.
Some of these regulatory modifications have also redefined what is meant by large holder in Catalonia and have applied conditions to “favor residential demand and penalize speculative demand,” Palomera recalls. Although the state definition establishes a large holder as someone who owns more than 10 urban properties for residential use, in 2024 the Generalitat activated the possibility of setting the threshold at five or more floors in stressed areas.
For economist José García Montalvo, “ideology” has prevailed in the definition of who is a big holder. In his opinion, the Spanish housing market is very atomized – with a majority of “small owners” – and no one has enough power to control prices. “They are legislating madly to try to affect not even 10%, because the real big stakeholder is the public administration,” says Vilajoana, from APCE.
The rent cap was a great victory for the Llogateres Union, which considers it “evident” that it is working. Even so, Arcarazo denounces that prices are not falling as much as they should because no sanctions are being applied to owners who fail to comply with the rule. He also celebrates that at the beginning of the year the Government moved this limit to seasonal rentals, but denounces that the portals are still full of advertisements that exceed the prices established by the index. However, Homedes believes that the regulation has not managed to return these apartments to the long-stay market, since demand (for example, students or workers who are passing through) has not decreased.
After the implementation of this string of regulations, the debate to find a stable solution to the housing problem in Catalonia remains open.
