The determination of the Government of the Generalitat of Catalonia to restrict speculative residence purchases to facilitate entry to residents is a compulsory response to the disastrous functioning of this market. The initiative, agreed between President Salvador Illa and Jéssica Albiach, chief of the Comuns, has been harshly contested by the president of the Foment del Treball employers’ affiliation. Josep Sánchez Llibre has described the measure as “philo-communist.”
The Catalan Government’s proposal should be positioned inside the framework of the runaway rise in housing costs in Spain. An increase that’s intently linked to the rising financialization and hypothesis of housing in Spain and Europe.
Faced with this unsustainable actuality and with notable delay, final December the European Commission offered the primary European Affordable Housing Plan to confront the robust progress in costs, which have risen greater than 60% within the final decade. The Commission Services working doc acknowledges that “financialisation may be one of the factors contributing to the deviation of house prices from economic fundamentals”.
The doc, a 178-page research, specifies that “part of the EU’s real estate stock belongs to institutional investors, attracted by the expectation of reliable profitability. Institutional investment in EU residential real estate markets, including insurance companies, pension funds, credit institutions and private equity firms and non-financial corporations, has tripled between 2012 and 2020.”
And it acknowledges, in rigorously restrained EU language, that “the greater presence of institutional investors in major European cities could have contributed to the deviation of housing price-income ratios from long-term trends, weakening the link between local property markets and underlying economic and demographic fundamentals.” And he factors out that “financialization, speculative investments, golden visa programs and residency programs can contribute negatively to the dynamics of the real estate market.”
The European evaluation clearly displays the hyperlink between the value spiral and the tripling of economic investments in housing. In Spain, financialization has been rigorously studied by Jaime Palomera in The kidnapping of the house (Península) which factors out how the housing market works “like a rigged game of Monopoly that is breaking society” and by Javier Burón in The housing downside (Harpa) that distinguishes between “investing to obtain a profit and investing to speculate.”
This nation is a textbook instance of the havoc brought on by the acquisition of homes by speculative funds. Newspapers, radios and televisions report each day on the dramas precipitated. Market intervention is an pressing and essential measure, which has an extended custom within the United States because the Home Owners Refinancing Act, (Homeowner Loan Act) of 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, by the best way, was additionally accused of being a communist.
https://elpais.com/economia/2026-02-23/una-patronal-poco-europeista.html