Home » Plentiful empty housing means Spain will focus on renting and refurbishment

Plentiful empty housing means Spain will focus on renting and refurbishment

The Spanish Government’s recently published housing plan for the next ten years (2012-2023) will focus on renting and refurbishing.

New calculations by the Spanish Government find that there are between 4 and 4.3 million empty homes in Spain, which is why the main objectives of the Government’s housing policy for the next 10 years will be refurbishing and renting empty homes, rather than building new.

The estimated stock of empty homes breaks down as follows (see also chart above):

  • Empty used: 3.1 million, based on 2001 census. Likely that this figure will rise substantially when new census released at year end)
  • Empty new: 900,000
  • Empty new holiday homes: 150,000 to 300,000

The Government’s figures are based on data from the 2001 census, which is obviously out of date. A new census will be published at the end of the year, and some experts warn that the stock of empty homes could be as high as five million, or 20pc of the housing stock.

To put these figures in context, Spain has a population of 47 million, 17.1 million households, and a total housing stock of 25.8 million.

One calculation you can do is to subtract the number or households from the housing stock, which gives you a figure of 8.7 million homes that are not primary residences.

2 thoughts on “Plentiful empty housing means Spain will focus on renting and refurbishment

  • hi martk, i’d be very interested to see where this data is actually sourced from – could you expand on this please? new calculations for a ten year plan based on ten year old data seems absurd

  • Some of the info I got from a Govt. press release. The rest came from spanish press articles. As I understood, the data comes from the last population and housing census back in 2001.

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