Anyone with a basic understanding of economics knows the principle: when a good is scarce and demand increases, its price tends to rise. And when supply grows faster than demand, prices tend to ease.
Housing is no exception to this logic, although many other factors are clearly involved.
Over recent years, Spain and, even more intensely, Catalunya have experienced a significant imbalance between the creation of new households and the construction of new homes. The Bank of Spain estimates that between 2021 and 2025 the cumulative gap between completed homes and new households reached approximately 750,000 homes in Spain. In Catalunya, the Memòria Econòmica de Catalunya 2025 estimates a cumulative deficit of more than 140,000 homes, the result of the creation of around 200,000 households versus about 60,000 homes completed during that period.
These figures do not mean that there are literally 750,000 families without a roof over their heads. They measure the imbalance between the formation of new households and housing production. But they do help to illustrate the scale of the problem.
And when the number of households grows much faster than the number of available homes for several years, the consequences are fairly predictable: competition between buyers and tenants increases and prices come under upward pressure.
How did we get here?
To understand the current situation, we need to go back to the 2008 property crisis.
After the extraordinary construction boom of the previous years, Spain moved almost from one extreme to the other. Development projects came to a halt, construction companies disappeared, land remained undeveloped and there was a huge stock of housing waiting to be absorbed.
For years there were enough homes to satisfy restrained demand and new-build construction fell sharply.
From 2016 onwards, and with a clear acceleration after Covid-19, the housing stock was absorbed by demand supported by low mortgage rates.
The pandemic changed certain residential preferences, boosted demand in many areas and later coincided with strong population growth and an increase in the number of households. The problem is that the productive capacity of the construction sector did not recover at the same pace.
That, in my view, is one of the key issues behind the current problem.
We have not simply moved from cheap housing to expensive housing. We have gone from a situation with abundant available stock to another in which, in many of the areas where people want or need to live, far more households are being created than we are able to accommodate with new housing.
And that gap accumulates year after year.
Building more is not that simple
It may seem obvious that the answer is straightforward: if housing is lacking, build housing.
The problem is that we no longer have the same productive capacity we had twenty years ago.
A significant part of the professionals who worked in construction before 2008 left the sector during the crisis. Many retrained and never returned. At the same time, generational replacement in certain trades —bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, installers or structural specialists— has been insufficient.
Today we face a real shortage of skilled labour.
We must also add the rise in the cost of many materials, energy, financing and land itself, as well as urban planning and administrative processes that can take years.
So the issue is no longer just deciding that we want to build more homes. We must ask how, where, at what cost and within what timeframe we can build them.
In Catalunya, for example, 15,589 homes were started and 16,562 were completed during 2025. These are figures that are far removed from the cumulative growth in the number of households we have seen in recent years.
More population needs more housing
There is also a factor that is sometimes uncomfortable to bring into the debate: demographics.
Spain reached 49.8 million inhabitants in July 2026, around 444,000 more than a year earlier.
Population growth can be positive from many points of view. An economy that grows needs workers, consumers, entrepreneurs and professionals.
But that growth has material consequences.
Every sustained increase in population requires homes, schools, hospitals, transport, roads, water, energy and public services. We cannot analyse demographic policy, economic policy, migration policy and housing policy as if they were completely separate compartments.
The debate on the migration policy Spain should adopt belongs to the political and social sphere. From a real estate perspective, however, there is a much more objective issue: if the number of people and households increases rapidly, housing supply and infrastructure must also grow.
If they do not, the imbalance eventually shows up in prices, difficulty accessing housing and saturation of certain services.
And what about empty homes?
Another common response when talking about building is to point out that there are millions of empty homes in Spain.
That is true. But the property market has one fundamental feature: housing cannot be moved.
An empty house in a small inland municipality does not solve the housing shortage in Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Girona or in certain areas of the Costa Brava.
The Bank of Spain itself has noted that the residential deficit is especially concentrated in areas with the greatest economic and tourist dynamism.
Of course, it makes sense to encourage the renovation and reactivation of those empty homes that are in places where there is demand. It would be unreasonable to build new housing if we can recover existing stock at a reasonable cost.
But believing that the national housing problem can be solved solely by mobilising empty homes means ignoring their geographic distribution, their state of repair and, in some cases, even their location in relation to job opportunities.
Neither the public sector can do it alone nor the private sector either
Over recent years, the housing debate has become excessively ideological.
On one side, administrations are being asked to build large public housing stocks. On the other, the private market is expected to solve the problem on its own by increasing supply.
We will probably need both.
Social and protected housing has an essential role for people whose incomes do not allow them access to the open market. In fact, expanding this stock requires decades of planning, not just political terms.
But thinking that public administrations can build the hundreds of thousands of homes needed on their own also seems unrealistic.
We need private capital, developers, builders, owners and investors willing to take part in housing production and renovation.
And to attract that investment, reasonably predictable conditions are needed: legal certainty, available land, streamlined administrative procedures, financing and rules that allow the economic conditions of an investment to be known before it is made.
Public-private collaboration should stop being seen as an ideological issue.
Administrations have land, planning powers and tax tools. The private sector has capital, know-how, execution capacity and commercial experience.
It makes a great deal of sense to try to combine both.
Producing housing differently
We will also need to review the way we build.
We are still putting up many buildings through essentially artisanal processes: dozens of different professionals and companies take part sequentially in a project over months or years.
Industrialised and prefabricated construction can partially change this model.
Producing complete elements or modules in a factory makes it possible to work in controlled environments, standardise processes, reduce certain labour needs on site, limit waste and, above all, shorten delivery times.
That does not mean that in ten years every home will arrive finished on a truck.
Industrialised construction is not a miracle solution either. It still requires land, projects, permits, financing, foundations, infrastructure and professionals.
But it will probably be part of the solution if we want to significantly increase our housing production capacity.
We do not need one measure. We need many.
The housing crisis is too complex to solve with two election-driven decrees.
Regulating prices can temporarily change the way certain markets operate. Building public housing can help part of the population. Tax incentives for renting can bring existing homes back to the market. Speeding up permits allows homes to be built sooner. Releasing land makes new projects possible. Training professionals increases our productive capacity. Industrialising construction can reduce timelines. And providing legal certainty can encourage more capital to be allocated to housing.
None of these measures, on its own, will solve the problem.
We will probably need a combination of all of them.
And above all, we need to accept an uncomfortable reality: there is no immediate solution to an imbalance that took two decades to create.
A home we need today should have been planned years ago. And the homes we will need in 2030 should already be in planning now.
That is why housing policy needs something it has traditionally lacked: continuity.
We need to know how many new households we are going to create, where they will be concentrated, how much land we will need, how many homes we can renovate, how many we will have to build and what infrastructure will need to accompany them.
And then maintain that strategy for years, regardless of the electoral cycle.
Because in the end, we can debate regulation, investment, public housing, taxation, immigration, investment funds or construction models. All are legitimate debates.
But there is an economic reality that is hard to avoid:
if every year we create more households than we are able to house, housing will remain scarce. And as long as it remains scarce where demand exists, it will remain expensive.
Perhaps the first step to solving the problem is to stop looking for a single culprit and start accepting that we need to build, renovate and mobilise far more housing, for many years and with a strategy that survives political terms.