“The owners are afraid that their house will be squatted”

Occupation is a long-standing legal issue. “This is nothing new,” emphasizes the real estate advisor. ANDCovid was a key moment in this regardas many people have lost their jobs or found themselves in an ERE situation, a decree was therefore issued to protect the tenant in the face of “an extreme situation”.

The problem is that this protection has been maintained to this day and a person declared vulnerable can hardly be evicted from the place where they live even if they do not pay their rent. The same thing happened earlier this year at a property east of Seville. “The protection of tenants is a good thing provided that it does not transgress and does not transfer responsibility to the owner, because perhaps this person is not responsible for unemployment, but less the owner,” he adds. Faced with this legal insecurity, more and more people are fleeing the rental market.

Non-payment insurance and civil servants

This fear of occupation is one of the reasons for the current pressure on the rental market. There are far fewer apartments to rent. “There are obviously other reasons, but this one is important, because people decide not to rent it and sell it or even rent it in a different way, for example to students.” Moreover, More and more people are taking out non-payment insurance where if, for example, the amount for which a person rented their accommodation is 700, for a price which is equivalent to approximately half a month, they benefit from a year of non-payment covered. Faced with the possibility that their tenant will stop paying, owners have become more demanding, asking real estate agencies (which act as intermediaries) for very specific profiles. “There have been extreme cases of people who only wanted doctors or teachers.“Banqueri gives the example of tenants whose job stability is increasingly demanded by landlords.

“The owners have a lot of trust in our criteria (those of the real estate agencies), and it is ultimately us who meet the candidates and show them the apartments. They give me a series of guidelines that I must follow; For example, as long as they are educated, they look good, because they only want civil servants… the final decision is made by the owner of the house”, adds the director of Redpiso’s expansion in Seville. “We avoid as much as possible that it is a good profile, but in the end There is no way of knowing who can stop paying. and become a restless squatter,” he admits.