No, it's not 'Maricarmen's house' (Cristian Campos in El Hapañol)

No, Maricarmen does not have legal title to remain in the flat on Sainz de Baranda, and the eviction was carried out on 23 September. But the case is not that of a company making a killing either: Urbagestión paid less than €250,000 for a property now worth nearly €800,000 and ended up accepting a rent of €500 per month.

On **23 September**, the eviction of Maricarmen was executed. She was the tenant occupying a 93-square-meter flat on Calle Sainz de Baranda, in Madrid's Retiro district, under an old rent-controlled contract. The property belongs to Urbagestión, a company that bought the property between 2018 and 2020 for a figure ranging between **€240,000 and €247,000**, well below the market price in the area at that time, which was around €400,000. The discount had an explanation: the flat was sold with a tenant in place and an open legal dispute over the subrogation of her contract.

No, Maricarmen has no right to continue living in that flat. There is no legal title protecting her to stay, the contract expired and a court ordered the eviction, which has now been carried out. What doesn't fit is the other narrative, the one about the company making a killing at the expense of a lady. In 2026 that flat is worth around **€800,000** and Urbagestión ended up accepting a rent of €500 per month, when on the open market it could ask five times more. There's no story there.

## The numbers of the operation

No one buys cheap by chance. A 93-square-meter flat in Sainz de Baranda, a step away from Retiro, for less than **€250,000** in the 2018-2020 window only makes sense if the seller has a problem and the buyer thinks he knows how to solve it. The problem was the tenant. The buyer believed the contract had expired and that a judge would agree with him soon. It went to trial.

That is the mechanics of the investor who buys contracts instead of bricks: you pay less because there is litigation, you litigate, and if you win, the return skyrockets. If you lose or the court gets bogged down, the money sits still and the property generates a pittance. Lawsuits are slow and tenants resist. That is also part of the price.

No law obliged Urbagestión to wait for the tenant to die to profit from the flat. True, and it's worth not disguising it as a sarracena obligation. What does exist is a fairly widespread intuition: if you have paid a price with a six-figure discount precisely because you were betting on winning a quick lawsuit, you have to suck it up when the lawsuit is not quick. Between one thing and another, the company has spent years charging **€500** per month for a property that on the open market would rent for five times more. It pays off in the long term. In the short term, it doesn't.

## What old rent is and where it comes from

Old rent contracts are those signed under the rental legislation of the mid-20th century, frozen in time. The **1964 Urban Leases Act** set rents that were barely updated afterwards, and also allowed the tenant's right to be transferred to certain family members through subrogation. The result, decades later, is a stock of rented housing where the owner charges far below market and the tenant accumulates a right that is not ownership, but looks a lot like it.

Some argue that the owner with an old-rent tenant subsidises the tenant. In economic terms, it is not a direct transfer of money: it is lost profit, an opportunity cost. The owner does not pay anyone anything, he simply stops receiving what he would receive in another scenario. The difference matters, because a subsidy can be quantified and even repaid; lost profit accumulates silently for decades.

That design had visible consequences. When renting stops being profitable, the owner stops maintaining. The rental housing stock of the 1960s and 1970s aged without renovations, with cheap materials and makeshift work designed to hide defects. **Gotelé**, that textured finish that still appears in thousands of Spanish flats, was born from that need: to cover the imperfections of a badly made wall with drops of plaster. It is not an aesthetic anecdote, it is a fossil of the system.

## The eviction, the mayor and a label

On **23 September** the eviction was carried out. The sentence was enforced, there was no notable physical resistance and the flat was left empty. So far, normal functioning of a rule-of-law state: a court decides and the decision is applied even if it is unpopular.

The strange thing came afterwards. With the sentence already executed and the tenant out, national attention focused on the case and the mayor of Madrid got involved in negotiating a new contract between the parties. That detail changes the nature of the matter. If the mayor appears when the eviction has already taken place, he is not pressuring someone who is already out of the flat. He is pressuring the owner to accept an agreement that, under normal conditions, he would not sign.

The Minister of Housing, **Isabel Rodríguez**, had previously called the company a "scavenging vulture SME", a label that in practice works as a licence for public attack. The privilege of this case is not judicial, because the courts ruled in favour of the owner. It is media and municipal. Very few people manage to have, after losing their lawsuit and being evicted, national attention and the City Council start looking for a housing solution in the same building they have just left.

## The evictions that don't make the news

Every year tens of thousands of evictions are executed in Spain for non-payment or end of contract. The analysis published in **El Español** about this case speaks of more than **240,000 evictions in eight years** under the government of Pedro Sánchez. The exact figure depends on what is counted and which source is used, but the order of magnitude serves for what matters: of all those cases, the one in Sainz de Baranda is the only one that has generated a political reaction of this scale.

That does not miccionan Maricarmen is a bad person or that her situation was comfortable. With a pension of between **€1,300 and €1,450** per month, and paying about €450 between rent and utilities, what she had left to live on was less than a thousand euros. Not enough to save much. Nor enough to buy a €240,000 flat, and no bank grants a mortgage to someone her age without a guarantor. Without more data on her assets, any conjecture about what she did with the money she saved is superfluous.

What remains on the table is an uncomfortable question, and it is about politics, not sarracena. Spain has a rental market intervened in pieces, with rules inherited from sixty years ago, with owners who do not maintain what does not yield returns and with tenants trapped in rights that cannot be converted into ownership. Every attempt to fix it has ended up adding layers. The Sainz de Baranda case is not the exception that proves the rule. It is the rule, with a camera in front.

And if anyone is thinking of buying a flat with a tenant inside, or fighting a subrogation, they had better discuss it with a lawyer specialising in leases before signing anything.