Even in these times it is not common on a word-based advertising website to use the expression “Please”but this is what one of the most recent notices, from last week, on the MilAnuncios page asks for. “I’m looking for registration please” (sic) is titled; “I really need anything,” he says. In this case it is aimed at interested parties in Guipúzcoa who have a house and the desire to charge for registering that person as a resident… even if you don’t live there.
Other signs are less begging, but are equally peremptory, like this one from the 15th: “I am looking for registration for two people urgent in Guadalajara”. And like that, hundreds of ads on the usual channels. Registration is a valuable asset… for slow and scarce.
The haste is usually the main ingredient in the problem. It doesn’t only happen in Ripoll. This newspaper has also detected stuck foreigners in the registration process in Madrid, Valencia, Euskadi and Andalusia. He blocking to register that suffer, mainly, immigrants and the urgent need for a paper that certifies the roots has become the basis of a clandestine business for those who want earn a few euros at the expense of other people’s needs and the administrative jam.
The rate is not too high: payments that range between 50 and 600 euros per month are offered and demanded – say police sources, who put the average at 100 euros – depending on the service offered: whether it is a mere fictitious rent or a real rent for substandard housing or a bed in a room in a shared apartment, always in the lowest echelons of the real estate market. After all, those who can afford a chalet generally have no problem registering.
Greed or precariousness
One hundred and fifty euros is offered by the couple looking for papers in Guadalajara. And 400 in Osuna (Seville) a foreign applicant who published her advertisement on January 13 at eleven at night: “I am looking for a room with registration for a 14-year-old boy and his mother. I have work papers up to date” (sic).
In these cases, these are immigrants who have decided not to resort to the residency mafias and papers, of fake marriages and fake jobs. “They go on their own, and frequently trust other immigrants,” explains a police source who is an expert in this type of fraud.
Often it is a foreigner who already has a home and residence who exploits another. The administrative filters do not make it as easy as before to list six, ten, fifteen people in the same home as residents, because that agglomeration attracts inspection and the business ends. But “More than greed, it is precariousness,” explains the police officer. In other words, the prototypical case of a foreign worker who manages to rent a house, but who uses a large part of what he earns to pay for that roof, and decides to dedicate a room to rent to whoever wants to help him with the expense.
Commercial appeal
All these demands that fill the websites with short advertisements hang like tassels on the rental market. They have even become a sales argument, a commercial attraction.
“I rent a room for a quiet, clean and tidy girl, who likes animals and is currently working. Services and registration in the price”says an owner from Badalona. Size: 10 square meters; Price: 400 euros per month.
How is it possible sell a right such as registration as a rental service It is one of those clandestine mysteries of the free brick market. In Guadarrama, in the mountains of Madrid, an owner explains in a call received by this newspaper: “The registration depends on the stay, the time let him stay”. If six months or more are agreed upon, the City Council accepts it. If not, it does not meet the minimum to be considered a neighbor.
The fact is that a 20-meter apartment in the modest Madrid neighborhood of Usera is offered in MilAnuncios not as a “housing”, or “apartment”; or “rent”, but directly as “Registration in Madrid.” That it measures only 20 square meters, or how far away it is from the Metro, or whether the heating is gas or electric does not matter as much as the real reason for charge 250 euros per month: registration.
For another more expensive option, 810 euros, things get complicated. The advertisement is supported by the Spotahome network, which connects homeowners and tenants. They offer one room of the six that has a “furnished apartment.” -and ready for the pengüe fractional rental business on Hilarión Eslava street in Madrid. So there are 164 square meters and two bathrooms to share between the occupants of six rooms.
The aforementioned 810 euros of rent per month have conditions: “There is an entrance fee of 90 euros without registration per person. There is a price of entry with registration 299 euros per person…”, says the advertisement.
In this type of business, the landlord tries to wash his hands of possible documentary falsification: he rented the property; if the tenant does not go there… It’s your thing.
Serial lawsuit
The cheapest rate for a registration found these days by this newspaper is between 60 euros and 65 euros in one payment. The amount varies depending on the location, according to a peculiar phenomenon of supply: in MilAnuncios a chain of five ads was published with that price and the same title, “we are looking for registration,” with just three minutes between each publication.
The first, broadcast for Pamplona at 10:59 last Saturday, says: “We are a married Spanish couple of 37 and 42 years old who We are looking for registration in Tudela or towns near Pamplona or in Pamplona (sic) price for both registrations together 130 euros for both together, single payment.
The second announcement, published at 11:02, says exactly the same, only instead of the provincial towns it is “the province of Tarragona, near Tarragona or Reus.” Price: 130 euros.
Related news
Three minutes later, the same for Logroño. And at the same price as in Baix Camp… The technique allows us to suspect an evolution of the business towards the acquisition of serial registrations, although police sources do not know of any resales.
The Spanish police usually have recurring interventions against register falsification networks. The last significant one was Melilla on November 9. The Police caught five members of a network of false rental contracts, which They took 2,000 euros from Moroccan domestic workers for one that entailed fraudulent registration in a house in Melilla. The worker from a city agency fell. He forged the signature of his wife, the owner of a house. Bureaucratically, he added 36 immigrants.