The property regime has lost weight in the market in recent years in favor of renting and transferring homes. Despite the fact that in Spain it is still a country of owners (since three out of four households reside in one of their homes), in most of the CCAAs its weight has decreased in recent years.
This is reflected in the 2022 Housing and Land Observatory, published by the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (Mitma) and which draws on the Living Conditions Survey of the National Institute of Statistics.
According to official data, between 2007 and 2021, the home ownership regime in Spain has decreased by 5.4%, while the rental and transfer system has increased by 21.6%. Thus, at the end of 2021, 75.8% of families lived in their own home, while the remaining 24.2% lived in a rented or assigned house.
If we look at the evolution by CCAA, we discover that the evolution has been very uneven in Spain. Since the real estate boom, the property regime has grown in the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, with increases of 10% and 4.4%; and in Extremadura, with an increase of 4.3%, contrasting with the fall of 5.4% registered in Spain as a whole. It has also increased in the Balearic Islands (2.9%), La Rioja (2%), Murcia (1%) and Galicia (0.4%).
In the case of rental and assignment, leading the increases are Castilla La-Mancha (69.8%), Cantabria (59.2%), Madrid (45.4%) and the Valencian Community (44.9%), followed by the Basque Country (29.6%), Asturias (25.8%) and Navarra (24.8%). This tenure regime has registered a double-digit increase since the boom in other regions such as Andalusia (10.7%), Aragon (18.4%) and Catalonia (17%). In Melilla, renting and transfers have also gained weight compared to property, although the accumulated growth between 2007 and 2021 has been more moderate (5.7%).
The home tenure regime in Spain
The highest percentages of households residing under ownership in 2021 are registered in the Basque Country (83.8%), Extremadura (81.7%), La Rioja (82.8%), Castilla y León (81.2%), %), Murcia (78.1%) and Andalusia (78.3%). On the contrary, the autonomous communities in which the rental and transfer of housing constitute the majority tenure regime of households are the Canary Islands (35.4%), the Balearic Islands (36.2%), Catalonia (28.2%) and Madrid (28.2%), in addition to the autonomous city of Melilla (38.7%).