Is home ownership really concentrated in Barcelona?

BarcelonaThe structure of residential ownership – that is, whether the apartments belong to small, large, or megaforksAnd its impact on housing prices and access, especially for rent, is one of the most polarized topics of debate in the housing crisis, particularly in cities like Barcelona. Recently, this public debate has incorporated a new concept, until recently discussed only by unions, activists, and opposition parties, and which is now in the crosshairs of both the Catalan government and the Spanish government: speculation. To discuss speculation—understood as the use of housing solely as a financial asset—data on the ownership structure has typically been used, assuming that this practice is concentrated primarily in the hands of investment funds, REITs, or asset management companies. But this week, two studies examining the same phenomenon from different perspectives have been published, arriving at seemingly divergent conclusions.

On the one hand, the Chamber of Urban Property has presented a report based on cadastral data from Catalonia, the Barcelona metropolitan area, and the Catalan capital with an explicit objective: to determine whether this data supports the narrative of an "alleged speculative concentration linked to large investors." On the other hand, the Barcelona Metropolitan Housing Observatory (OHB) has published a new study that measures property concentration by counting dwellings in the city.

The cadastral snapshot

According to the Chamber's study, in Barcelona there are 529,881 registered property owners – individuals or legal entities – associated with 706,624 residential cadastral references. The average is 1.33 references per owner. 95.97% of the owners are individuals and hold 89.56% of the properties, while private legal entities represent only 3.04% of the owners and hold 8.1% of the properties. With this data, the Chamber concludes that there is no widespread speculative concentration of residential property and that the housing problem is mainly explained by structural factors related to supply, regulation, and demographics.

However, the same report warns of a key limitation: a property is equivalent to a cadastral reference, not a dwelling. A single reference can correspond to either an individual apartment or an entire building in a vertical ownership structure with dozens of units. This makes the land registry very reliable for identifying formal owners, but insufficient for measuring how many dwellings each owner actually controls. For example, a large landlord may statistically appear as a small landlord if they concentrate many apartments within a single building. "It's clear that the vast majority of property owners in Catalonia, the Barcelona metropolitan area, and the city itself are small landlords. If you look at the evolution from 2024 to 2025, the only data we have, the greatest growth in properties is among individual owners," explains the study's author, Òscar, in statements to Ara. He also argues that comparing cadastral registration with new housing is erroneous because most registrations correspond to developers acting as functional intermediaries and not as the final recipients of housing.

And what about the Housing Observatory?

The OHB study takes a different approach. By cross-referencing the alphanumeric database of the land registry with the Municipal Cadastral Register, it confirms that in 2025 there were a total of 525,440 property owners in Barcelona and estimates that the housing stock consists of 792,884 cadastral properties for residential use. According to this data, the average number of homes per owner is 1.5 units—a value similar to the 1.33 reported by the Chamber of Commerce—bearing in mind that 83.5% of owners have only one home, but they account for 55.3% of the housing stock. Who owns the apartments in Barcelona? The difference is particularly marked between types of owners. Individuals, who represent 96.3% of owners, have an average of 1.3 homes. Conversely, legal entities – 3.7% of owners – account for 15.2% of the housing stock and have an average of 6.2 homes per owner. Within this group, companies own 12% of all homes in the city.

Two compatible conclusions?

Thus, the two studies are not as contradictory as they might seem. The main difference is that the Chamber of Commerce counts one property per cadastral reference (706,624), but these properties can be single dwellings or multi-unit buildings. The OHB (Housing Observatory of the Basque Country) estimates 792,884 dwellings based on cadastral records to identify those located in buildings without horizontal division and obtain a more accurate estimate of the housing stock. The difference is 86,260, a number that would represent the number of dwellings in vertical properties without horizontal division. Therefore, the Chamber's study, using cadastral references, shows a highly fragmented property market, and consequently, one without significant speculative concentration, while the OHB study confirms that, when dwellings are counted, a significant portion of the housing stock is concentrated in the hands of a minority of owners, especially companies and large landlords.

One of the possible conclusions of both studies is that regulating speculative purchases or limiting the accumulation of housing, which is what is currently being considered by public administrations, may free up thousands of apartments, but will hardly resolve the underlying issue: a structural supply deficit.

The question that looms over both studies is what counts as property ownership when designing public policies to improve access to housing: if cadastral references are used, Barcelona appears as a city of small property owners, but if dwellings are counted, the city shows how a minority—mainly companies and large landlords—controls a significant portion.