Borja Mateo: Spain's housing-bubble guru who vanished after a 2013 miss

Borja Mateo, the guru who saw a bubble and then disappeared

He was the most convinced prophet of a housing crash of the past decade. Or at least that's how it seemed. In 2013, with homes still cheap, Borja Mateo claimed in videos that he could already hear the cries of anyone signing a mortgage that year: they were going to squander their wealth. Today his X account is closed, he hasn't appeared on a TV set in years, and he has vanished from public debate.

Announcing a catastrophe that didn't arrive on time

His arguments were not simplistic. Those who defended him explain that the problem was not the diagnosis but the timing: he didn't count on 30 million new people being brought into Spain. The demographic factor, with the arrival of immigrant population tied to construction and to sustaining pensions, delayed the correction beyond what any model could foresee. Sceptics reply with irony: there is always a reason why your forecasts fail to come true.

The cost of being a guru

The story recalls the man who said in 1997 that the Internet had no future. The difference is that Mateo, despite his certainty, ended up retired and turned into an anecdote; the most repeated joke online now casts him as a Tecnocasa estate agent. His critics blame him for advising against buying property to people who would today hold wealth in bricks and mortar. There is no record of any legal liability: he was a prophet with the wrong timeline.

In economics, humility is the only asset that never loses value. The next bubble, of course, will already have someone predicting it with the same confidence. Until they are proved wrong.