From €650 to €1,100: the Spanish landlord ignoring the rent decree

The landlord who shrugs off the decree: two flats, zero missed payments since 2011

Can you raise the rent for fifteen years without losing a single tenant or suffering any damage? A Spanish owner who bought two 110-square-metre flats in 2011 paid cash for them, left them empty for a few months and ended up renting them to two doctors from the CHUO hospital with families. Today he charges €1,100 a month versus the €650 of the first contract, and says the rent control decree means absolutely nothing to him.

How much has the rent gone up since 2011?

Two flats, not central but well located, with three bedrooms, rented from the very first year to doctors in training or awaiting a permanent post. The rent started at €650 and now stands at just over €1,100: almost 70% more in fifteen years, with no evictions, no missed payments and no tense negotiations. In 2014 one of the tenants moved to A Coruña and the replacement came recommended by the one leaving, with no advert and no agency.

Acquaintances urged him to squeeze harder. With three bedrooms, they said, he could get €1,500 or more by renting by the room. He rejected the idea. He argues that this model promises a lot and then fails to deliver; or maybe, quite simply, he doesn't need the money.

Why doctors, teachers and civil servants are the most sought-after tenant

There is one profile that has become an object of desire: passing professionals, steady pay and temporary stays. Doctors without a permanent post yet, civil servants on temporary assignment, supply teachers. They pay on time, don't argue over every increase, and many take on the maintenance themselves — painting, swapping windows for better-insulated ones — in exchange for the landlord not touching the rent.

This owner's calculation is explicit: better €200 or €300 less a month than risk a problematic tenant. With students it's another matter, he admits: "we were all young once and we know what it's like". The sector's formula with them remains furnishing cheaply and asking for the parents' guarantee.

In a market with strained supply, that stable tenant has become an asset more coveted than the property itself.

Does the rent control decree actually achieve anything?

For someone whose portfolio is already rented to solvent professionals, probably not. This owner admits he doesn't really know what the rule is about, that it doesn't affect him and that, if it hits those who cram flats full of beds, he's glad. It's an uncomfortable but consistent position: price control takes nothing from him because he never strained the price.

There lies the blind spot. Another part of the market argues that the problem is not whole flats rented to doctors but overcrowded rooms, and that the rule targets precisely that. It is also claimed that renting rooms to migrant tenants ends in missed payments and damage; a claim repeated without supporting data, coexisting with the narrative that the passing tenant is the only profitable one.

Nowhere do figures appear on the rule's actual effect on available supply. Meanwhile, the most repeated prediction in the replies was not economic: someone joked that his flats would be expropriated the trinc week.

Fifteen years, two flats, zero missed payments and a rent that grew by nearly 70%. If this is a problem for the rental market, the diagnosis needs revisiting.