This is a website for buyers, owners, and sellers of property in Spain, offering reliable information and resources to help you get things done with confidence. It is run by Mark Stücklin, author of the Spanish Property Doctor Column in The Sunday Times (2005-2008), and the book ‘Need to Know: Buying Property in Spain’ published by Collins.
Mark Stücklin
A new government department led by Socialist Minister Isabel Rodríguez García has been created to manage housing policy in a clear sign of its growing political importance, 13 years after the last one was downgraded to an office within the MITMA ministry.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda has been brought back to life 13 years after former Spanish President José Luís Zapatero collapsed it into the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (MITMA), formerly known as the Ministry of Development (Fomento).
Reshuffling and restructuring his government after clinging onto power with the help of hard-left and regionalist parties, Socialist President Pedro Sánchez now leads a government with 22 ministers and four vice-presidents, including the new Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez, previously the government’s spokesperson and Minister of Territorial Policy. She’s no stranger to government or politics.
One of the new Housing Minister’s first messages was aimed at small investors, who have been badly treated by the leftist coalition. “Rest at ease because this government is in touch with the street and we are aware that, in Spain, many people, especially seniors, have dedicated all their effort, all their savings, to the purchase of a second home that compliments their income,” said Isabel Rodríguez.
That didn’t go down well with the Left. Iñigo Errejón, leader of the hard-left Más País faction, said this shows support for “the rentier class of society that then undermines any attempt to advance rights.”
Sra. Rodríguez also wrote on X that she intends to “consolidate the right to housing as the fifth pillar of the welfare state, a national priority.”
She also thanked the President for “making housing one of the principle matters of your new government.”
In her in-tray will be finding 183,000 affordable homes that her government has promised to deliver, setting up rental and mortgage subsidies for young adults, encouraging the upgrading of 500,000 existing homes, and getting more small investors to put their homes on the rental market.
She will also have to implement the new Housing Law in the face of opposition from almost everyone outside the government and the hard-left, and various judicial proceedings against it.
