Sánchez announces a €30,000 grant for young people to rent subsidized housing with an option to buy.

BarcelonaNew announcement from Pedro Sánchez on housing: the Spanish Prime Minister explained that the Council of Ministers will approve a package of measures that will include a new grant for young people of nearly 30,000 euros for renting social housing with the option to buy.

"We will create a new rental grant with the option to buy of almost 30,000 euros so that young people can reside for years in a permanent social housing unit and eventually acquire it," Sánchez said this Monday in Congress, during an intraparliamentary meeting of the Socialist Group. The money will be used to pay the rent before the purchase, which will already count as an advance payment on the future price of the home.

"As this is a permanently protected home, its price will be fixed and cannot be freely set by the seller. This means that if this home is to be sold in the future, it must be sold at a fixed price and to a person who meets the same requirements as the previous owner," explained sources from the ministry.

This measure is similar to the one announced a few months ago by the Government, which in this case announced aid in the form of an interest-free loan to pay the down payment on the condition that the acquired properties—which in this case do not need to already be protected—will become permanently protected.

In fact, the condition that they be protected already has several implications. On the one hand, it means that the measure is limited in the protected housing market, something that will not be available where there is none. And on the other hand, this requirement could avoid one of the main risks of purchase aid measures, which is that they are capitalized in prices, which entails a transfer of resources from the Administration to the sellers, especially in areas with restricted supply. This is warned by Ivalua, the Catalan Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies, in its latest systematic review of the academic literature on affordability policies. "In this way, we protect homes paid for with state resources from speculation," the same ministry sources assure.

Guarantees for homeowners

Regarding the other measures in the package, Sánchez also announced up to 10,800 euros for the purchase of a home in rural areas and insurance against non-payment of rent for young people. These announcements come just one day after the president himself announced that The Spanish government will require platforms to remove 53,876 illegal tourist apartments.The €10,800 grant for rural housing may not exceed 20% of the acquisition cost and will only be available in municipalities with 10,000 inhabitants or less.

The default insurance—aimed at rents that do not exceed 50% of the household's net income—is a measure that already announced in January This was widely requested, especially by landlord associations such as the Catalan Landlords' Association and the president of the Habitat 3 Foundation and president of the Metropolitan Housing Observatory (OHB), Carme Trilla. The State will act as guarantor for affordable housing so that tenants can access it and landlords can be guaranteed payment at the end of the month.

Sánchez also announced that he will send the previously announced proposal for the National Housing Plan to the autonomous communities with the commitment to triple state investment in housing—and reach 7 billion euros in the next five years—if they also commit to promoting social housing. The president He raised it at the last Conference of Presidents, and Catalonia is one of the five communities who want to benefit from this state plan.

This financial incentive for the autonomous communities is a common measure taken by the Spanish government to encourage the different territories to implement the measures it has adopted in housing, especially the application of the rental price cap, included in the state housing law approved in May 2023 and which many PP-led communities still refuse to apply.