The measure was one of a dozen unveiled on Monday by the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, as the government seeks to quell mounting anger over housing costs that have soared far beyond the reach of many in Spain.
Sánchez sought to underline the global nature of the challenge, citing housing prices that had swelled 48% in the past decade across Europe, far outpacing household incomes.
“The west faces a decisive challenge: to not become a society divided into two classes, the rich landlords and poor tenants,” he told an economic forum in Madrid.
The proposed measures include expanding the supply of social housing, offering incentives to those who renovate and rent out empty properties at affordable prices and cracking down on seasonal rentals. In Spain just 2.5% of housing is set aside for social housing, a figure that lags drastically behind countries such as France and the Netherlands, said Sánchez.
we need this in berlin too
And everywhere else. Along with banning corporate ownership of residential property and banning short term rentals.
Banning them just sounds so…bureaucratic. cant we just eat them?
Can we get this in Washington State please.
I hope there is an exemption for people buying houses that they reside in full time. This type of policy is incredibly anti-immigrant otherwise.
Yeah, it would only apply to people from outside the EU that also don’t reside in Spain.
Source (in spanish): https://www.eldiario.es/economia/ventajas-fiscales-alquiler-asequible-limites-extranjeros-no-residentes-sistema-publico-garantias-nuevas-medidas-vivienda-gobierno_1_11959199.html
You can rent for some time until you have your residency solved/accepted.
Non-EU residents. Right there in the title. If you are residing in Spain then you are a de facto EU resident.
Ffs.
Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But also it says “resident” so I guess you don’t have to be a citizen to buy a house?
I agree with the measures I hope they address companies doing it too as it could be a loophole.
We were thinking about a move to Spain soon and in years to come possibly renting out the home we buy and live in South America to be closer to family.
I imagine in this case , as a non EU resident despite being an EU citizen the tax would apply.
I’d guess so, and that makes sense to limit the people wealthy enough to buy property and not live in Spain
Not saying you’re a rich landlord
Just make it so the dwelling has to be occupied by the owner for 9-10 months a year. Every month it is unoccupied, the owner has to pay the value of a monthly rent as tax multiplied by the number of months it has been unoccupied -->
month 1 = rent x 1 month 2 = rent x 2 month 3 = rent x 3
I think that’ll be hard to ignore for most landlords - foreign or not.
Occupancy is hard to monitor and easy to fake though. Purchases are impossible to miss and are a single point of enforcement as opposed to an ongoing burden like you’re suggesting. Though I do appreciate the spirit of your plan.
How do you confirm whether the property is occupied?
You have to make a rental agreement. Here in India it has to be registered with the government and pay a nominal registration charges. So when filing your taxes you join your lease agreement, which can be verified by the registrar.
That’s not really relevant.
The proposition is to tax people who own property but do not reside there in.
My question is how does the Gestapo know where an owner lives.
For example, if my wife and I own our home and have a holiday home by the sea, we would simply say that one of us resides in the holiday home, and it’s not practically possible to disprove that.
How does the state know which house you occupy / where you live?
They do not.
They don’t. They trust what I tell them.
Great. Would you be willing to declare your primary residence at another dwelling you don’t live in just to help out a friend? Do you expect that to be an easy thing to do every month in order to trick the system? Do you think the landlord of the residence you’re living in would simply lie down and take a fine if they know you’ve signed a contract to live there and declare it as your primary residence?
My wife or son or daughter or nephew would certainly be willing to declare my holiday home as their residence. They probably spend some time there anyway.
Again, if they do, they won’t be able to declare another home as their primary residence. So, sure, your daughter can declare your holiday home as her primary residence, but then her landlord in Madrid will get in trouble and as we all know: shit rolls downhill. The landlord will pass the fine on to your daughter. And if she is the landlord, good job, she’ll have to pay the fine directly.
Most people don’t live alone though.
I declare our actual home as my residence, my wife declares our holiday home as her residence, my daughter who lives in an apartment she owns lists her boyfriend as the tenant and she declares our other holiday home as her residence.
Also, what about people who legit need a second dwelling. Loads of people have an apartment in the city for the work week and a home in the country for the family, or split their time between two cities for business / work reasons. Are these situations illegal now?
It’s just a dumb idea that sounds edgy that you haven’t really thought through.
Customs
I don’t understand.
Everytime you leave the country you need to have your passport stamped at customs, and eventually you’ll need to re-enter the country and show your ID or passport. At re-entry, you can be checked. This plus a yearly in-person check mandate can make sure you stay there.
Yeah… Which customs? I can just step in a car and drive trough multiple countries without ever needing to show my passport.
The comment I replied to isn’t really talking about foreign ownership, but ownership in general. That is, owners need to live in the properties they own or pay taxes. Obviously many locals have never left the country and never cleared customs.
Additionally, most countries don’t bother to stamp your passport anymore, a kiosk just scans the chipped page in your passport and takes your photo.
Finally, a yearly in-person mandate to check where people are living is absolutely bonkers. Absolutely no one wants the gestapo coming to their house every year to confirm that they really live there.
The post is about non EU residents right? Spanish citizens might own multiple properties and I cannot stop that. And also, nobody is going to come and check if you live there, all that’s necessary is a physical letter to the location requiring you pass by a police office or citizen’s bureau in person and identify. Literally 1 minute’s worth of a job. And it would only be for non-EU residents.
This comment chain is not specifically about non-eu residents.
Letters do not confirm where someone lives. It would be trivial to work around that.
This might shock you, but if you announced a law whereby everyone has to go to the police station once a year to confirm where they live there would absolutely be blood in the streets. It’s a ridiculous over reach and a gross invasion of privacy.
In tax legislation the goal is to be broad based, which means easy to administrate and difficult to avoid.
The solution to this problem which people have been talking about since the 1940s is land tax. Tax the fuck out of all land, but allow people to apply for an exemption for 1 property. It will never become law because the powerful people that make law own property and do not wish to pay tax.
Brutal, I love it
I’d have assumed that the majority of landlords were EU citizens… then remembered about Brexit.
That’ll upset the brexiters, and they’ll howl about the mean Spanish government…
I remember back during the Leave Referendum that many Briton pensioners living in Spain voted Leave “To keep the Spaniards from entering ‘our’ country” and later were very suprised that they themselves were also impacted and had to apply to live in Spain (and apparently after the end of the transition period some even got expelled from Spain because they couldn’t be arsed to register and became illegal immigrants).
That is the most Brexit thing I’ve ever heard. The audacity to complain about the Spanish in your country while the British loudly and palely swarm Spain every summer.
Tbf, most of the complaining was about Poles and Romanians.
Mostly because they were the lower income additions to the EU, and the absolute poverty wages being paid in the UK farming and construction industries would have seemed like a fair deal to them.
Oh and this cunt who convinced his empty headed followers that millions of Muslims would be coming here under EU rules from famous EU member, Syria.
Yeah, I was an EU immigrant in Britain at the time and the Delusions Of Grandeur of the locals were really placed in sharp relief and some of those were pretty shocking. These were especially bad for the Brexiters but for example many Remainers claimed that the UK should “Stay in the EU and shape it from the inside” (so a “we Britons know best than the rest” view, and remember that the Leave Referendum happenned after the UK Government demanded from the EU, once again, even more special treatment and was told “No”).
In Britain the mindset that led to Brexit had been heavilly pushed by the Press and Politicians for decades, so this outcome wasn’t totally unexpected. In fact I only know about Britons being expelled from Spain after the end of the transition period since they didn’t register, because some British newspapers which had supported Brexit published outraged pieces about how Spain was expelling Britons), so even after the whole Brexit thing was done, at least part of the Press still pushed (and Britons still believed) the whole idea that Britons should have special treatment even whilst not reciprocating it.
As I see it Britain and Britons are suffering from one hell of a post-Imperial Hangover, which makes it very problematic for them to cooperate with other nations in any format other than “purelly competitive and always trying to gain an advantage over others”, so they were always the odd one out in the EU and, frankly, De Gaule was right when way back he did not want to let the UK into the EU.
post-Imperial Hangover
LOL 100%
On the surface it seems like a good idea: if the home isn’t going to be your primary residence you pay extra—a lot extra—to curtail a housing shortage caused in part by foreigners buying and inflating.
That said… if the issue there is anything like it is here in the states, the buyers will have more than enough capital to buy anyways and just pass the cost along to tenants… making the problem worse?
See below, the idea is for rent control to take care of that, which is part of the package. Along with the government supposedly planning to build their own company to compete.
If they were able to manage getting this implemented, which is dubious for political reasons, it probably would work, but it’d take at least a few years and there are many ways the increasingly anarchocapitalist conservative forces around it can disrupt it. We’ll see. As a model for other places… it’s probably a good place to start looking, it just needs a legal framework where you can deploy all of it (rent control, direct government development and rental, fiscal pressure on speculative property purchases). Just one piece alone probably won’t do it.
rent control
Rent control is such a poor substitute for building massive amounts of social housing. I wish it would stop taking up oxygen in the debate already so that we can focus on effective solutions instead
You’re literally replying to a comment about rent control being part of a multi-pronged approach, one that INCLUDES building massive amounts of social housing, not a substitute for anything.
Sounds like you want building to be the ONLY prong, which wouldn’t work for anyone except the developers that would get to build and thus profit more.
Literally just building more houses does work though.
Not in itself, no. With no additional levers, developers will just build more luxury condos and “investment properties”, since that’s what’s most profitable.
You need to be MUCH more specific than just “build more houses” to solve the affordable housing crisis.
There’s significantly more empty homes already than there are unhoused people, but unaffordable homes existing doesn’t help.
The bigger issue is that it’s quite easy to “hide” that you are foreign. To do so, simply set up a holding in Spain that buys the house on your behalf.
The legislation being proposed also has a bunch of regulation regarding Spanish holdings buying property, including rent price controls. Depending on how you look at it, forcing foreign groups to set up shop domestically and be restricted by that regulation is the entire point of the tax hike.
Spanish media were reporting recently that some existing rental holdings were starting to dump real estate in response to the rent control, at least in Barcelona.
The bigger problem will be whether the legislation package passes in Parliament, where it needs support from conservative regionalists and then gets implemented at the autonomy level (think states, if you’re American), which is largely controlled by conservatives.
At some point you wonder, why not just prevent them from owning homes if they’re not citizens? Kick em out and tell them to come back when they’re EU citizens, problem solved.
So immigrants all have to be renters? I don’t know the wait times in Spain, but in the US, it can take 20 years to become a citizen despite being on long-term visa or already a permanent resident. Meanwhile, citizens are allowed to engage in exploitation freely?
That’s a separate US issue.
At some point you wonder, why not just prevent them from owning homes if they’re not citizens?
Money. Foreign investment also appreciates the value of domestic property owners as well. Aka fuck you I got mine syndrome.
Yeah bur a 100% tax is tantamount to a ban.
Just for those not wealthy enough to not care
Even wealthy people aren’t going to buy a home they can only sell for half the price they paid.
I think you underestimate what it is to have so much money that you don’t have to care about how it’s spent. A billionaire could spend a million a day for three years and still be left with millions because of the interest they make.
The number of people who have so much money that they don’t have to care about how it’s spent are infinitesimal.
That number is increasing
Its quite clever way to do it though. Straight out ban would easily rise more opposition because it seems more severe and this way there might be some income too so its likely easier to suggest.
I suspect it’s a legal thing.
Banning foreign ownership probably contradicts some centuries old precept of international law.
Do that there, do that here, Do that everywhere. Better for you and me, From see to sea.
It should be non-Spain but ok i guess, lets keep letting the rich countries in EU destroy our chance at a home…… (which i assume by fare are the most prevalent)
The problem is that there are EU freedom of movement rules. It would be hard to justify Spain-only in the face of those rules
Not really. Spanish residents only. Not citizens. So you can freely move into Spain and reside there. Once you reside there no 100% tax on buying a house. This should have nothing to do with freedom of movement.
Which, to be honest, is one of the many things fueling anti-EU sentiment at the moment. Immigration being the biggest one.
Yes, I think you can live and work in Spain indefinitely if you are from the EU.
So someone could be living in Spain for decades with an EU passport. It would make sense for them to be able to buy a main residence.
