Room rental cap would push payments off the books

Room cap would push rent off the books

Where will people who currently share a flat live when the price of their room can no longer rise? That is the question hanging over the announcement that the sum of rents for all rooms in the same flat cannot exceed what it would cost to rent the entire home, according to que.es. On paper it sounds like a cap. In practice, several participants take it for granted that the market already has its response ready: charging outside the contract what doesn't fit inside it. And that response doesn't need to wait for the text to be approved.

The logic of the measure is pure arithmetic: what the rooms in a flat add up to cannot exceed the price of renting that whole flat. So far, simple. The problem appears, according to that same reasoning, when the owner realises that the same flat divided into rooms rents for considerably more, and that giving up the difference is equivalent to losing money on the same walls. That, according to these warnings, is where the parallel market begins.

Contract for €200, charge €500

The example circulating in the debate is that of double paperwork: signing a room for €200 and charging €500, with the remaining €300 off the document. Another participant puts the proportion of room rentals currently charged wholly or partly off the books at 80%, an estimate that the person using it admits cannot be backed by data and must therefore be taken for what it is.

With the cap, they add, that route would cease to be a vice and become the only way to maintain returns. And off the books, everything holds up as long as it works. What is charged outside the contract is not documented, so whoever receives it takes it on without written backing.

The Catalan precedent: less supply, same problem

The most repeated argument against the cap is not theoretical. One participant points to Catalonia, where prices have been limited for months, as the laboratory where the result has already been seen: owners stop renting and supply is withdrawn, neither whole flats nor rooms. The diagnosis from the property side is that the rule doesn't make anything cheaper, it only reduces the number of available doors.

When legal supply dries up, demand doesn't disappear. It rearranges itself. And in that rearrangement, intermediate products with English names appear: coliving, rooms by the week, seasonal rentals. Formulas that sit on the margins of traditional leasing and, in passing, sidestep the framework that is meant to be capped. Another part maintains that the text won't even get through, that it is political theatre and that the problem will remain exactly where it was. Helping that thesis, according to one participant, is the fact that room contracts are governed by the Civil Code, much easier to terminate than an urban lease.

Where people who can't sign end up

What falls outside the capped price doesn't evaporate: it shifts, according to the scenarios sketched in the debate, to forced shared housing, to returning to parents' homes and, in the harshest case, to shanty towns and settlements. Comparisons with the post-war period circulate without embarrassment, applied to those who would have to live in rooms.

Part of the discontent crosses the issue with migration pressure and the state of peripheral settlements. These are opinions that the announcement does not back with any data and that do not by themselves explain the lack of supply, but they set the tone of the unease.

With these pieces, the measure has one incontestable virtue: for the first time, owner, tenant and legislator will know exactly what price appears on paper. What nobody signs is the price at which they will go to sleep.