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The housing crisis

Sareb will pay the property managers for each transfer to the Sepes public housing park.

The 'bad bank' will have to raise money from the sale of other assets, such as industrial land and parking lots.

Unverified translation
Sareb's home sales pace has picked up in recent days thanks to interest from US investment funds.
Sareb will pay the property managers for each transfer to the Sepes public housing park. Toni Garganté
Albert Rigol
06/10/2025
2 min

BarcelonaThe incorporation of more than 40,000 Sareb apartments, the bad bank The Sareb fund, which was established in 2012 to take over the toxic assets of Spanish banks, in the public portfolio of the new state-owned company (Sepes), created at the beginning of the year to manage and build public housing, should not entail additional costs for the public coffers. However, although Sareb will not sell the apartments now because they will be transferred to Sepes, it will have to continue paying the asset managers – also known as services– which until now were dedicated to managing and selling the tens of thousands of homes in the bad bank and that it could not manage on its own – it has a workforce of 290 workers. The difference is that while Sareb until now had the income from these sales to pay a commission for each sale to the services, will now have to offset them with other income.

Sareb has 9,275 available apartments in Catalonia: this is everything we know about the transfer to the public company.
An empty Sareb building, occupied by the PAH (National Association of Housing and Urban Development) in the Sants district of Barcelona.

"We are working with our suppliers on how this transfer will be structured. Sareb and Sepes are working on it," they explained to ARA regarding this transfer. services The two entities that have a current contract with Sareb are Anticipa and Hipoges, which previously received a commission on each sale. From now on, Sareb will compensate them for each home that is ready to be transferred to Sepes' portfolio.

Sareb currently has a portfolio of 37,000 homes on its balance sheet, but it also has several open legal proceedings, which could lead to its further growth, at least to the figure of 40,000 homes promised by the Spanish government. Until now, all of these homes were managed by these entities, which were responsible for everything from checking whether anyone lived there to registering the community papers. Now, with the change in use of Sareb's housing stock, these services They will stop preparing homes for sale and instead prepare them for transfer to Sepes, which entails changes in management and procedures, since public apartments will be delivered ready to move into, with electricity and water connected, among other procedures.

The Rental Association is taking 35 real estate agencies to court against Consum for publishing advertisements that violate rental regulations.

The Renters' Union filed a complaint this Monday with the Catalan Consumer Agency against real estate agencies and individuals advertising on real estate portals for "systematically" violating rental regulations. The union documented 50 apartment listings in Barcelona neighborhoods such as Horta-Guinardó, Eixample, and Gràcia that violate Decree Law 1/2025 on urgent measures to contain rents because "they do not include mandatory information such as the reference price index, previous contract, or status as a large tenant."

In total, 35 real estate agencies and five individuals have been reported, although the union warns that this is a very limited sample and that violations are systematic in the majority of listings. According to the union itself, these violations imply that one of the ways to circumvent rental regulations is to misinform tenants seeking a home about the price at which it should be rented.

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