2023-06-30 16:23:47
Spain has always been a country of owners. Unlike other northern European regions, owning a home has always been a priority in this country. However, the difficulties that many young people and not-so-young people currently have to buy a house are changing this pattern of behavior and home ownership has been reduced significantly in recent years, to the lowest of the last four decades, for the benefit of those for rent.
This is revealed in a statistic published this Friday by the INE, which also offers a very striking fact: in this scenario in which many families have problems finding a home, there are almost four million empty ones, one in every seven. Specifically, of the 26.6 million homes in Spain, more than 3.8 million are unoccupied, representing 14.4% of the total, according to INE data for 2021.
Having unused houses is already penalized. This is how the Government decided and introduced it into the new housing law that it recently approved. Thus, homes that are empty for more than two years without justification are subject to a 50% surcharge on the Real Estate Tax (IBI), which rises to 100% if they have been in this situation for more than three years. and it even shoots up to 150% if the owner has two or more empty properties in the same municipality.
In any case, various justifications can be argued for not paying this extra, such as, for example, the transfer for work reasons, the change of residence because you are going to take care of a relative in another house, because they are under construction or because you are selling it. .
The towns are emptying
It should be noted, however, that empty homes are found to a greater extent in small municipalities. Thus, those with less than 10,000 inhabitants, in which 20.3% of the total population resided, recorded 45% of the vacant housing stock. On the other hand, cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants, where 23.8% of the population lived, only contained 10.5% of the total number of empty houses.
On the other hand, three out of four households, 75.5% owned their home, a minimum of the last four decades and a figure much lower than the 78.9% observed ten years earlier, to the 82.2% of 2001 or to 77.8% in 1991, according to the INE.
On the contrary, the percentage of rental housing grew in 2021 to 16.1% of the total, thus continuing with the upward trend registered in the last two decades and reaching maximums. In 2011 this percentage was 13.5% and in 2001, 11.4%.
Barcelona (31.1%) and Girona (30.9%) are the capitals with the highest percentage of rental homes in 2021, while Huelva (8.6%) and Jaén (9.8%) present the lowest percentages . In the last decade, the percentage of rental housing has increased in almost all the provincial capitals, mainly in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Tarragona and Ciudad Real.
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