Housing is becoming one of the major political debates in Spain and, I suspect, a key issue in the upcoming election campaign, so it is worth addressing it with data (as the saying goes, “in God we trust; all others must bring data” ;).
The root of the problem is that the number of households is growing much faster than the available housing stock. In 2021, Spain had 18 million households, and today it is approaching 20 million. Meanwhile, construction remains far below the necessary levels, and the Bank of Spain estimated an accumulated deficit of nearly 600,000 homes by 2025.
The consequences are well known to everyone: higher purchase and rental prices, a greater financial burden to access housing, and increasingly delayed emancipation. In 2025, Spaniards left the family home at an average age of 30, almost four years later than the European average. Regulating the market and protecting those who truly need it may be necessary, but no price control measure can replace the creation of new housing.
Increasing supply requires freeing up land, reducing bureaucracy, streamlining permits, industrializing construction, expanding the public housing stock, and attracting private capital. Systematically disincentivizing and stigmatizing entrepreneurs and investors is contradictory when we specifically need funding to build and renovate.
Technology can also contribute here by better connecting savings with real estate investment. Crowdfunding was a first step toward democratizing assets traditionally reserved for large estates. Tokenization goes a step further, enabling fractional investment, international diversification, collateralization, and, ultimately, greater liquidity and more efficient use of capital, which can increase the traditional returns of the same underlying asset by up to 30% annually.
At Reental, we have been working in that direction for years with our partners and stakeholders. For example, our alliance with PropHero and Core Capital aims to mobilize 120 million euros and bring more than 1,000 homes to the market over the coming years. Private investment, when properly regulated and oriented toward creating supply, can be part of the solution.
Spain will not solve the problem by managing scarcity, but by creating the conditions to build more housing and mobilize more capital toward it.
Fernando Ors, President of Reental and author of Impacto 3.0andSmarter Capital
