Remote work is no longer a safe haven: buying in Madrid becomes a must

Remote work is no longer a safe haven: buying in Madrid becomes a must

100% remote work was the new sweet deal of the Spanish economy: you lived in a cheap village, earned a Madrid salary and laughed at the city. Until the client decides to drop you. Then the subcontracting company pulls out the 15-day clause, plants you in Las Rozas and you discover your geographic freedom was a borrowed treat. The case of an IT technician who watched his colleague go from full home office to the Las Rozas office in one month has peine an uncomfortable debate: if your job depends on a client, your remote work is not your own.

The problem is not just losing remote work. It's what comes after: if you decide to move to a village in Toledo or in emptied-out rural Spain to save on housing, and the project falls through, you're left without a job and with a house you can't sell. Or they force you back to Madrid within two weeks if you're registered as a resident outside the region, according to the contract cited in the discussion. The only way out the protagonist sees is buying a flat in Madrid, even though it's the worst possible moment: another participant compares it to 'getting into Bitcoin at 100,000 bucks'.

The fine print of remote work: 15 days' notice and off to the office

Remote work agreements are not a declaration of love, they're a contract. And in the fine print it says that if the client or the project requires it, you get 15 days' notice and show up wherever they say. A company that has closed its offices and placed everyone in remote work has nowhere to put you, but that doesn't save it: if you have to go to Las Rozas, you'll go. The colleague's case is illustrative: one month without a project, and off to the head office to see what they assign you. Meanwhile, in Madrid, those who bet on lockdown and remote work are swallowing 200-kilometre round trips every day.

Those who defend remote work as irreversible cling to one fact: there are companies that have shed a whole batch of office leases at once and would have nowhere to put their workers if they wanted to turn back. The savings are real. But the other view is harsher: there are no remote work unions or anything like them. And as artificial intelligence matures, many remote workers will discover they were the dispensable part of the workforce. If they ask you to come to the office, that analysis says, be glad: it means they still count on you.

Transport: the other weak leg

Buying in Madrid is not just about price. Those looking south or to the villages of Toledo run into the Cercanías commuter rail, which has become the region's bottleneck. There is a project to extend the metro, Line 11, which draws a big semicircle to connect the south with the north, where most of the offices are. But along the way, Cercanías remains a black hole: there's a political reading, a central government unwilling to release investment for Madrid, and a more prosaic one: the metro and commuter rail are not extended so people can get to work, but so tourists can reach the centre to take photos. So congestion, the marathon commuting day and housing prices form the perfect cocktail that keeps Madrid an expensive city that is, at the same time, impossible to fully leave.

The comparison with Paris is inevitable and painful: there they are working on a huge plan of metro and RER connecting suburb to suburb, because offices have been decentralised. Madrid, on the other hand, which had a big push at the start of the century, is nearly at a standstill. The result is that the commuter towns that could ease housing prices grow if they have decent transport, and in Madrid they don't.

Buying at the worst moment: rent or take out a mortgage?

To the question of whether it's time to buy, the most common answer is not the most optimistic: if money isn't spare, rent, because in a new place you don't know what awaits you. But the one who has lived through the subcontracted colleague's experience is clear: renting is burning money without building an anchor. If you have a family, kids and a 'zipotecón' — a huge mortgage — as the protagonist puts it, an owned flat is the safety net that lets you weather a project change without being thrown out of your home. Those without a family, on the other hand, face the same dilemma with less of a safety net: if they take the project away, what do I do with the mortgage?

There are, of course, those who argue the problem is not housing but the contract: if the contract is well drafted, everything is tied down and there are no surprises. The empirical evidence going around is that most remote work contracts are not well drafted, and that technicians who are truly valuable, if squeezed on returning to the office, just leave. The rest, cannon fodder of subcontracting, depend on luck: having joined the right place at the right time, like the factory worker who rises from zero. In a world of rowers who mistake their luck for their worth, the mirage of 100% remote work vanishes when the client says 'everyone's coming back tomorrow'.

And meanwhile, in central Madrid tourists take photos in the Plaza Mayor, and in Las Rozas there's an IT technician waiting to be assigned a project.