The eviction of Maricarmen Abascal in Madrid on September 23 awakened the social movement against the housing crisis and activated the drafting of two decrees to intervene in the market, especially the rental market. Many contracts pending signing were paralyzed in those days when their approval was up in the air, many operations were put on stand-by awaiting certainty and the announcements from the main real estate portals in the country were withdrawn. Because?
Uncertainty regarding the scope of the measures caused some owners to withdraw their offers from the windows or not make them public at all until they knew how the changes could affect them. Jorge Galindo, director of EsadeEcPol, speaks cautiously of a "preventive withdrawal of the offer" after analyzing, together with Carles Gómez Llabrés, the behavior of long-term advertisements between September 29 and October 5 in the ten largest Spanish cities. In all of them they registered declines and these falls reached or exceeded 6% in six: Murcia (12.5%), Madrid (9.2%), Valencia (7.5%), Alicante (7.2%), Las Palmas (6.3%) and Palma (6%). In all of them, furthermore, the declines are greater than in similar comparable periods. "Most of the fall occurs between Wednesday the 30th and Friday the 2nd, with the first decree already published in the BOE. After the repeal there is no general rebound: between Friday and Monday the announcements move as on any other weekend. The exception is Palma, which recovers part of what was lost (from 8.7% to 6%), more than what had risen in any control weekend," the experts report.
Their hypothesis is that the data "are compatible with a preventive withdrawal of rental offers in most large cities during the week of the decrees", but they reject establishing a direct cause-effect relationship between the two things. In conversation with this newspaper, Galindo assures that other factors that may influence the decisions of landlords must be taken into account, such as the call for general elections or the evidence accumulated in other places with similar cases.
Caution is also imposed in Fotocasa's analysis. According to their data, between October 1 and 6, when the debate on the measures took place, the supply of long-term rentals fell 1.7% and that of temporary rentals fell 3.2% on the real estate portal. Along the lines of Esade, Fotocasa avoids making a direct allusion to the effect of the decrees: "It is very, very early to draw conclusions or attribute a pattern" in the face of a drop of 1.7%, which they consider "not at all representative" and which is even "usual" within the weekly variations of the portal. They also add that they are not seeing a transfer from long-term rentals to other modalities, such as temporary ones.
However, as they explained this week at the V Housing Congress held in Barcelona, Fotocasa observes a great variation in room rentals, which experienced an increase of 11.9%, a trend that "is already common", according to what its spokespersons told EL MUNDO, within this tenure regime. "For us it is early to be able to give a supply trend, but this is the evolution of the last few days," they conclude.
The sector calls for caution and to continue observing the evolution of rent in the coming days, because although there is some instability in the rental market for small owners, "much of the journey [downward] has already been done," explains Ferran Font, director of studies at Pisos.com. This refers to the disappearance of the rental offer that has been detected in recent years, which the sector attributes to the feeling of lack of legal security for owners. When consulted about this, from the Idealista portal they explain that their methodology does not allow them to carry out rigorous analyzes on the variation in supply in such short periods of time.
