Map of large landlords in Spain: number and location

The Spanish government has proposed a housing bill that is causing great excitement among large property owners. According to government data, up to 85% of the real estate in the country is in private hands. However, these owners have become one of the central figures in a future law created by the Socialist Workers' Party of Spain (PSOE) and the United Left (Unidas Podemos).

Investigating data from the Directorate General of Cadastre, a body dependent on the Ministry of Finance, the newspaper El Mundo tried to find out the number and location of these owners. According to the analysis, there are about 290,758 owners of 10 or more urban properties in Spain (excluding the Basque country and Navarra, which have their own cadastral agencies). This number includes both public and private owners. The government estimates that private owners have around 150,000 dwellings and these will be the main target and most affected by the housing law measures aimed at curbing prices.

The majority of large property owners are concentrated in Andalusia, Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Madrid, according to the data analysis. Most of them live in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, where there are more than 68,000 landlords owning more than 50 apartment buildings.

Madrid and Barcelona have suffered from increased rental growth in recent years due to an imbalance between supply and demand, leading to pre-pandemic price rises. However, coronavirus was the tipping point.

The northern coast of Spain, which includes Valencia, Murcia, the Balearic Islands and Andalusia, concentrates 36% of all large owners. With the exception of Murcia, where prices rose by 3.4% year-on-year in September, the other regions recorded price decreases of 0.8%, 3.5% and 1.9% respectively. Murcia is also one of the regions with the lowest rents in the country, the portal's samples show that the region pays 6.9 euros per square meter per month for rent. Northern Spain also has a significant number of large owners in Galicia and Asturias, where the total number exceeds 34,000.

The large owners nevertheless represent only 1% of the total number of property owners in Spain, which, according to the cadastre, amounts to almost 28 million properties. Most of them (15 million) have just one residential home. The bulk of these small owners are located in the regions known as "empty Spain": Aragon, Extremadura, and Castile and Leon, where there are about 6 million such owners.