Housing for all... The end of Spain's old rent regime

Felipe González's PSOE approved Royal Decree-Law 2/1985 in 1985, known as the Boyer decree, which eliminated the forced extension of rental contracts and liberalised the price of new leases. The 1994 Urban Leases Act (LAU), championed by José Borrell, established a transitional regime to wind down old-rent contracts.

Forced lease extension was not a social achievement, but a rule that arrived under Franco's regime. The 1964 Urban Leases Law froze rents and required contracts to be renewed indefinitely. The result was an increasingly small and ageing rental housing stock, because it made no sense for owners to keep a flat whose rent had not moved in years.

## The 1985 Boyer decree

The **Royal Decree-Law 2/1985**, approved during **Felipe González's** government, put an end to that framework. The law eliminated forced extensions and liberalised the price of new leases. It did not touch contracts already signed, but cut off at the root the logic that prevented rents from being updated.

The measure was unpopular among old-rent tenants, who saw their situation as protected. For owners, however, it was the first real way out of a system that had turned renting into a ruinous business.

## The 1994 LAU and the end of old rents

The **1994 Urban Leases Act**, championed by **José Borrell**, finished the job. It established a transitional regime to gradually wind down old-rent contracts and limited extensions. The Franco-era legal framework was definitively closed for new leases.

Since then, renting in Spain has been governed by fixed-term contracts with freely agreed prices, subject to whatever nuances later laws have introduced. The debate over how much intervention the market needs remains open, but the starting point is no longer that of 1964.