In Barcelona, the 40.15% of households rent, a figure that rises to 65.10% in the Ciutat Vella district. This is indicated by the last Barcelona Sociodemographic Survey for the year 2020 published by the City Council of the Catalan capital which highlights, in contrast, that Sant Andreu (69.57%) and Horta Guinardó (64.25%) are the districts that concentrate the highest percentage of owned homes, while Les Corts is the area where the proportion of rentals has risen the mostwith an increase of 8.39 percentage points in three years.
Access to housing is the fourth most serious problem for the people of Barcelonaaccording to him last municipal barometerand the debate on what to do with the rents is one of the main topics of conversation in the political and media sphere. The number of rental flats in Barcelona stands at 290,416 homesaccording to the estimate from the Barcelona Metropolitan Housing Observatory (O-HB), but do we know who their owners are and how many apartments they accumulate?
36.1% of rental flats in Barcelona belong to large ownersdefined by state regulations as those who have more than ten homes for rent and which rThey represent 2.1% of total rental owners in the city, according to a 2021 estimate carried out by the Barcelona Metropolitan Housing Observatory. The observatory estimate drops to 31.9% in the case of large owners defined according to Catalan regulations, that is, natural persons with more than 15 rental homes or legal entities with more than 10.
Nevertheless, the O-HB warns Verificat that “this percentage could be higher& rdquor;, since the corporate links between legal persons are unknown and, in addition, the number of large owners has been counted solely based on the homes they have in Barcelona. In other words, “there may be more large owners than those identified in this work due to the ownership of other homes outside the city,” according to its communication department.
Bail
The O-HB report also offers data broken down from the rental contracts that have the deposit deposited in the Catalan Land Institute (INCASÒL), which “represent a high representativeness & rdquor;, since they cover 69.7% of housing for rent in Barcelona. According to these figures, most of the rental apartments (38.7%) belong to people who only have one rental apartment in the Catalan capital, that is, 79% of the owners.
Total, six out of ten apartments are in the hands of owners who own five or fewer rental units. The INCASÒL data also indicates that large owners, defined according to state regulations, represent 2.1% and have 29.6% of the apartments, a percentage lower than that estimated by the observatory.
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Most of the rental flats in Barcelona are in the hands of individuals (63.5%), who represent 87.1% of the owners, according to INCASÒL data. Companies, which account for 7.7% of the owners, account for 24.3% of the homes and public administrations account for 3.1% of the city’s rental apartments. The rest of the flats belong to communities of property or owners (6.9%), non-profit entities (0.8%) and religious institutions (0.2%).
However, if we only take into account rental housing in the hands of large owners, one in ten belongs to a public administration. Flats belonging to individuals fell to 22.7%, while companies, which represent practically half of the large tenants in the city, account for 55.9% of rental homes in Barcelona.