Building more social housing is the government’s main policy response to the real estate sector’s problems, but this alone won’t lift the Spanish construction sector out of its slump, the Andalucian Federation of Real Estate Developers has said at a congress in Cordoba.
Furthermore, encouraging more social housing is unviable because “there is no ready and urbanised land for it,” argues the Federation.
So what about the government’s plans to bung money, work, and jobs at the construction sector by increasing public infrastructure projects? Just a short term stopgap that won’t do much to create jobs, sniff the developers.
So what does the Andalucian Federation of Real Estate Developers propose?
“The only immediate solution to prevent the situation deteriorating for several years is to unblock the construction sector,” says the Federation. Specifically, what they want is a roll back of urban planning regulations, including the new quality standards they argue drive up costs. If the quality standards are not watered down, they want the government to subsidise the costs of implementing them.
They also demand that the banks to start lending freely to the real estate sector, as if that could be mandated by law, and that business administration costs be cut to help them “survive with less revenue.”
And lastly, they call for a reduction in the costs of utilities such as water and electricity, which get “more expensive by the day.”