Spain accumulates almost four million empty homes, but this data is not enough to alleviate the pressure on prices and demand in the most stressed areas because the vast majority of these uninhabited houses -four out of five- They are located in municipalities where the problems of access to housing are not pressing.
This is reflected in the study prepared by the real estate consultancy Atlas Real Estate Analytics based on data published last week by the National Institute of Statistics. According to the INE, there are 3.8 million empty homes in the country (400,000 more than the previous balance of 2011) and of that amount, more than 66% -2.2 million- are located in municipalities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. where access to housing is not a concern.
On the contrary, barely a fifth (18.8%) of the total empty homes are located in areas where the effort rate exceeds 30%, one of the criteria on which the new Housing Law is based to declare an area as stressed.
Consequently, Atlas points out that empty houses do not have an impact on the market, nor on prices, nor on demand, nor on the effort rate. “The areas with the most demand are those that exhaust the stock of houses and therefore that raises the rate of effort”, point out from the firm.
According to his study, the factors that weigh the most on the effort rate (the amount of income that must be used to pay for a home) are, in addition to the price of the property itself and the average income of the population, the ratio of houses per inhabitant and the supply ratio. Only in fifth place does the number of empty homes appear.