In a cold winter night, a few people tenn gathered inside a building dressed in graffiti in the Carabanchel district in Madrid. Almost all were in the middle of a dispute with their owner, but the thesis maintains typical complaints about leaks with leaks. They had come to commission about US investment banks and private capital funds that controlled their homes.
Some at this meeting of the Carabanchel housing union (the Carabanchel Housing Union) were fighting eviction orders or shooting rentals. Others had lost their homes through mortgage executions. An assistant, Elsa Riquelme, described his battle of years to stay in the 600 square feet apartment where he raised his three children, which is now owned by Blackstone, the world’s largest private capital firm.
He was far from being alone: during the last decade, Blackstone has become the largest private owner owner in Madrid, and the second largest throughout Spain. The apartment of Mrs. Riquelme is one of the 13,000 that Blackstone currently has in Madrid, and between 19,600 it has throughout the country.
Throughout Spain, around 185,000 rental properties are now owned by large corporations, half of the companies based in the United States, in accordance with a review of property records by non -profit civio. Rent prices have increased by 57 percent since 2015 and housing prices of 47 percent, according to PWC, largely because the country has not been able to build enough homes for its growing population, even when more than 4 million homes remain empty. After the pandemic exceeded the inempting rate of Spain to 15 percent, evictions throughout the country shot. In Madrid, tenant groups estimate that 20,000 interest rates in the city currently face the threat of eviction.
Mrs. Riquelme, an ex officio accountant, emigrated from Chile in 2000 and bought her apartment for 56,000 euros of the real estate bubble, making mortgage payments to Caixacatalunya, a bank now missing. After she and her husband separated, she could no longer keep up, and the Anely Anely bank. Caixacatalunya looked € 150,000 ($ 170,000) in rates and mortgage arrears, then sold his apartment in an auction for only € 40,000 ($ 45,000) to a subsidiary or Blackstone.
What once were the mortgage payments are now the rental payments. And his ability to do them is under threat, he said, since the interest control provisions that allowed him to remain in the apartment at 550 euros for months have expired. She said that Blackstone is resisting to double the rent.
“This is my neighborhood. My children get used to school here,” said Riquelme, 60. “Now I wake up every day wondering if Blackstone is going to push me to the streets.”
Mrs. Riquelme’s apartment was one of the 400,000 private units throughout the country bought a decade ago by three US capital firms: Blackstone, Cerberus and Lone Star. Blackstone offers at least 27 different national subsidiaries and investment funds in Spain that use a variety of models to buy private and public housing. Some funds have focused on buying seized residences or converting complete buildings into short -term rentals. Others have collected public housing units from the city’s governments with liquidity problems and then have privatized them. Even more bought houses, since the government cleared its asset books with problems after nationalizing several banks in the midst of the Eurozone debt crisis.
“There was a collision between the collapse of housing property, the assets in difficulties and an impulse of the European Commission to sell public debt,” said Jordi Bonshoms, a researcher at the Law Department of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
For Blackstone, it was an expansion of a real estate plan that Root Tok following the 2008 housing accident, when and other Wall Street companies spent billions of properties buying properties in the United States. When the values recovered, the heritage was transferred from the owners to the corporations and their shareholders.
In 2013, the Government of the City of Madrid sold 5,000 public housing units to Blackstone and another American investment bank, Goldman Sachs. Blackstone bought 1,860 apartments in 18 complexes for € 128.5 million ($ 146 million), including hundreds of units in the development of Pau in Carabanchel. That amounts to only € 69,500 (around $ 78,000) per unit, on average.
An audit required by the Court of the Agreement then revealed that sales were made at market rates well below the market. The then mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, along with seven others, received the order to pay 26 million euros in sanctions for implementing the sale. Since then, the fine has been expelled in the appeal, but the Goldman Sachs failure is found, he thought it has been difficult to implement since many of the apartments in question have already been resolved.
These days, only 2 percent of the Spanish housing available for rent are public homes, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In France it is 14 percent; In the Netherlands it is 34 percent.
Many of Mrs. Riquelme’s neighbors were in the 2013 privatization wave, including Carmen Robledo and her husband, Francisco. Blackstone bought the Robled Building in 2013, and its public housing rental contract extended until 2016. Then they signed a three -year lease contract with comparable conditions. When that ended, Blackstone sought to increase the rent by 40 percent, with the climbs in the contract every year, said Mrs. Robledo, a custody of a local primary school. The couple finally lost the apartment in February 2024.
Now they share a 590 square feet apartment with two roommates. But Mrs. Robledo, 64, still visits her old house. Doves, drums for ms. Robledo feeding them in the afternoon, continuous to meet on the balcony. “I need to continue coming,” he said.
A Blackstone spokeswoman Sneha Patel said that the company has honored all pre -existing housing contracts, and that when those leases end, “the tenant could buy the property or continue renting the property at the rental level of the market.”
“We have no capacity to impact the general market or interest rate,” Patel said, and said the company has less than 0.12 percent of Spain’s total supply and has invested 180 million euros (around $ 204 million) to improve the properties it owns. “Since it is evidence, the challenges in the Spanish real estate market can only be resolved by building more homes.”
But Carme Trilla, the former director of Housing Policy for the Spanish Region of Catalonia, said that many of the investment funds that benefited from the mortgage executions after the crisis are now also evicting the rolers. “We have a situation in which there are multiple evictions for the same family,” said Trilla.
Duration A political discourse in January, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez shouted the role of “speculators” and “the so -called vulture funds” in market distortion, which said he has led to “the incredulous use of housing as a financial asset.”
Achieving things rather for many owners was the lack of legal protections, such as the inability to make the properties collateral for mortgages. In the years after the crisis, the lenders of recovered properties for unpaid mortgages while insisting that the borrower pays the balance of the loan. The coalition government led by the Socialist Party of Spain placed a moratorium on the mortgage execution of households classified as “vulnerable” through the vulnerability of 428 thoughts, a case by case is judged.
Recently, the Government proposes a 100 percent tax to housing buyers outside the European Union. But this would not apply to international companies that operate through local companies, including Blackstone, which works through its national subsidiaries.
“It’s not that the market is not regulated,” said Dr. Bonshoms. “It has a regulated leg in a way that benefits corporations.”
He thought that Blackstone’s properties are concentrated in Madrid, also has around 2,500 apartments in Barcelona and its surroundings, which has been a bastion of progressive housing policies in recent years. The city is eliminating the short -term rentals by 2029, and its government can match any offer in the sale of a residential building, then convert the affiliated apartments into public homes.
A Blackstone tenant in Barcelona, Enric de Orta, has lived in the Sant Antoni neighborhood for most of his life. As the rental limits of the Pandemic era they expelled and their lease expired, he saw that his rent will increase from € 850 to € 1,400 per months ($ 960 to $ 1,600), which he refused to pay. He has bone fights in court with the help of his housing union.
“I can’t understand how my neighbors in this building complain, and complain, but they don’t take any measure at all,” he said. “That really bothers me. Just when you go to manifestations, you see that we are not enough.”
On a recent visit to Mr. The Orta’s building, seven from 19 apartments on his floor seemed vacancies. The owner had installed steel security doors to prevent illegal occupants from occupying empty apartments.
“Any suggestion that we leave deliberately vacancies for rent is false and famous,” said Mrs. Patel or Blackstone. “The properties are only empty between re-arreation or while they are renewed.”
Back in the Carabanchel district of Madrid, the tenant union meets most of the nights of the day. On a recent night, union veterans informed 13 beginners to learn their situations. The cheers exploded when a member, Victoria Rivera, reported how his son, now cultivated, had just bought the apartment that the family had lost in mortgage execution when he was a child. The seller was a scrutador, a subsidiary of Cerberus.
“We fight for 15 years,” he said, sharing chips and soft drinks to celebrate.
The Syndicate wants to stop all the evictions in his neighborhood, said Natalia Tapia, 27. Together with affordable rentals, they seek renovations in buildings and apartments, with many complaints or lax maintenance. Perhaps it must be significant, the group wants to negotiate with corporate owners as a collective, not as individuals.
“This is not an NGO,” Tapia said. “This is the people who fight to change the rules.”
