On a chilly winter night, a few dozen people gathered inside a graffiti-clad building in the Carabanchel district of Madrid. Nearly everyone was in the midst of a dispute with their landlord, but these weren’t typical gripes about leaky pipes. They had come to commiserate about the US investment banks and private equity funds that controlled their homes.
Some at this meeting of the Carabanchel Housing Union were fighting eviction orders or skyrocketing rents. Others had lost their homes through mortgage foreclosures.
One attendee, Elsa Riquelme, described her yearslong battle to stay in the 600-square-foot apartment where she raised her three sons, which is now owned by Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm.
She was far from alone: Over the past decade, Blackstone has become Madrid’s largest private owner of residential real estate, and the second largest in all of Spain. Riquelme’s apartment is one of 13,000 that Blackstone owns in Madrid, and among 19,600 it owns nationwide.
Across Spain, about 185,000 rental properties are now owned by large corporations, half of those by firms based in the US, according to a review of property registries by Civio.
Rental prices have increased 57 per cent since 2015 and home prices 47 per cent, according to PwC, in large part because the country has failed to build enough homes for its growing population, even as more than 4 million homes sit empty. After the pandemic pushed Spain’s unemployment rate up to 15 per cent, evictions nationwide spiked. In Madrid, tenant groups estimate that 20,000 renters in the city face the threat of eviction.
Riquelme, a bookkeeper by trade, emigrated from Chile in 2000 and bought her apartment for 56,000 euros during the housing bubble, making mortgage payments to CaixaCatalunya, a now defunct bank. After she and her husband split, she could no longer keep up, and the bank eventually foreclosed. CaixaCatalunya sought 150,000 euros in fees and mortgage arrears, then sold her apartment at auction for just 40,000 euros to a subsidiary of Blackstone.
What were once mortgage payments are now rent payments. And her ability to make those is under threat, she said, as rent-control provisions that allowed her to stay on in the apartment at 550 euros a month have expired. She said she is resisting Blackstone’s push to double the rent.
Many of Riquelme’s neighbours were caught up in the 2013 privatisation wave, including Carmen Robledo and her husband, Francisco. Blackstone bought the Robledos’ building in 2013, and their public-housing rental contract ran through 2016. They then signed a three-year lease with comparable conditions. When that ended, Blackstone looked to raise the rent 40 per cent, with escalations built into the contract each year after, said Carmen Robledo, a custodian at a local elementary school. The couple finally lost the apartment in February 2024.
Making matters worse for many homeowners was the lack of legal protections, including the inability to make properties themselves collateral for mortgages.
Recently, the government proposed a 100 per cent tax on homebuyers from outside the European Union. But this would not apply to international companies that operate through local firms, including Blackstone, which works through domestic subsidiaries.
“It’s not that the market is not regulated,” said Jordi Bonshoms, a researcher in the law department at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University. “It has been regulated in a way that benefits corporations.”
New York Times News Service