The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that the Executive will approve this Tuesday in the Council of Ministers the mobilisation of 50,000 Sareb homes for affordable rentals for young people and families.
Sánchez made this announcement at the closing of the PSOE's Municipal Convention, held over the weekend in Valencia, which was attended by the candidates for mayor of Spain's main cities.
He pledges that Spain will have 20% public housing as opposed to the current 3%, which will serve, in the first place, to bring forward the age of emancipation for young people. "If we increase the supply, not with more free market housing as the PP says, but with public housing, what we will be doing is cushioning and better controlling the evolution of the total price of housing in our country", declared the President of the Government.
In this sense, the government will offer 21,000 homes to municipalities and autonomous communities and will promote the social renting of 14,000 of these already inhabited homes. In addition, they will promote the construction of up to 15,000 public housing units on land available from Sareb.
500 homes in Valencia
During this year, the public entity has reached agreements with several regional governments. Sareb and the Regional Government of Valencia agreed to sell a significant number of homes, around 500, to increase the Autonomous Community's social housing stock. The acquisition could involve an investment of up to 50 million euros.
The sale is expected to take place in several phases, with the first step being the formalisation of an acquisition in April of around 335 homes and the rest at a later date. At present, the Sareb homes that will form part of this agreement have already been identified and the Generalitat Valenciana is visiting each property to check their condition.
15 units in Murcia
The entity has recently transferred 15 homes to the Region of Murcia for 884,000 euros, which it will use to repay part of its debt.
Thus, the sale agreement includes 13 garages and will increase the number of properties that make up the autonomous community's social housing stock. Five of the properties are located in Murcia, four in the municipality of Abanilla, another four in Torre Pacheco and another two properties in Caravaca.
This operation became the third agreement advanced by Sareb in 2023 to sell assets to the Spanish autonomous regions.
Agreement in Galicia
Previously, Sareb and the Regional Government of Galicia formalised the sale of 40 homes in 16 Galician municipalities to increase the social housing stock in the autonomous community.
The regional government's investment in this acquisition will be approximately 3.5 million euros. This amount will be used by Sareb to repay its debt.
With this operation, both parties took another step forward in the cooperation with which they have been working since 2015 in the area of social renting.
Of the 40 homes purchased by the Xunta to be rented, nine are in the city of Vigo and one in La Coruña. The rest are distributed in the municipalities of Arteixo, Cedeira, Cee, Culleredo, Lalín, Miño, Narón, Poio, Ponteareas, Porriño, Salceda de Caselas, Salvaterra de Miño, Silleda and Vilagarcía de Arousa.
All of them are homes that have been destined for social renting for years under the umbrella of an agreement signed between Sareb and the Xunta de Galicia that expired in 2023.
The sale signed in Galicia comes just a few weeks after Sareb took the first step towards formalising a similar large-scale operation in the Valencian Community with an agreement to sell around 500 homes to the Valencian Regional Government to increase its social housing stock.
