The number of young people under 35 who own their own home has halved over the past twenty years.

Analysis by Marina Asencio, Marina García and Daniel Manzano shows that this occurs despite the preference of Spaniards continues to lean towards buying a house and that the number of households renting has increased from 10 to 20% over the past two decades.

“On the other hand, the transition to a new rental-based lifestyle faces the lack of a truly deep market of the type that mitigates the strong upward pressure on its prices. Here again difficulties arise with emancipation and, as a consequence, the creation of new young families in Spain,” the authors note in their analysis.

In this sense, the article points out that this simultaneously leads to financial wealth being more concentrated in high-income households. “So much so that currently and following the continued increase in this concentration, The 10% of households with the highest incomes account for almost 50%

of what is strictly the financial well-being of households. A concentration that is even more pronounced in the case of pension savings, so relevant in other countries around us, and whose presence is barely noticeable outside this most privileged segment of households,” explain the Funcas experts.

Buying without a mortgage

A parallel analysis by Santiago Carbó and Francisco Rodríguez also points to the cause of deteriorating access to housing in Spain. According to analysts, sustained price increases driven more by wholesale and non-resident demand than by retail demand for housing, inadequate long-term land policies and rising demand are adding to the difficulties for people in purchasing real estate.

This has become evident over the past year and a half, when only four out of every ten home sales transactions were carried out using a mortgage loan.