Flats at €60,000 in 2013, €800,000 now: the gap

Flats at €60,000 in 2013: who looked and who didn't buy

Where was everyone who now throws their hands up over housing prices when flats were being given away for €60,000 in 2013? The question comes up in any conversation about property and has no good answer. The country that bailed out its broken banks with public money, and that still keeps the SAREB (Spain's bad bank) alive with losses of hundreds of millions, is the same one now complaining that the market has become impossible. Memory here is selective.

A price comparison making the rounds paints a stark picture: 80-square-metre flats near the Ventas bullring in Madrid, now valued at €800,000. In 2015, with €250,000 in cash, the buyer called the shots. Now that money barely covers the deposit on a flat on the same corner.

The bailout that was never repaid

The most repeated argument is uncomfortable: those who today pose as free-marketeers were bailed out with everyone's money. The claim is that they never paid back a single euro and that the SAREB is still running, losing hundreds of millions to prop up the fiction of these prices. It's a catchy argument and hard to refute with the numbers on the table.

And some lay the blame on the other side. They argue that many buyers were waiting to be handed a flat for free and never considered working and saving to pay for one. That reproach has its audience, though it sits badly with another reality: some people were asking for homes at €25,000.

Why can't young people with jobs leave home?

Here the narrative splits down the middle. Some recall cases close to them of twenty-somethings who work and still can't move out, not even into a rental. This group would be right if they were protesting in Sol square, one participant admits, before clarifying that what matters is who promotes the protest and what interests lie behind it. The underlying problem, they say, is real and affects young Spaniards: entry-level wages, zero savings and prices from another league.

Eight years of free market and four months to the polls

On the political front, the diagnoses clash. A co-worker summed it up like this: for eight years the free market was allowed to run, which sent prices soaring, and now emergency intervention is called for over rampant speculation. Others see the U-turn as pure electoral opportunism, with four months to go before the vote. And some compare the situation with the one Zapatero left behind: ruin to force cuts on whoever comes next, channel the discontent, blame the right and return four years later.

Among the harshest critics of the current government, resignation creeps in. They're going to leave a colossal mess for whoever comes next, laments someone who announces a vote for VOX because he thinks the PP doesn't go far enough. He doesn't expect much from anyone else either: no party further to the right convinces him.

In the end, the only certainty is that the party is paid for by the usual suspect: the one who bought late, the one who never could, and the one still living with their parents at thirty. Buying at €60,000 — that part is not coming back.