184% more alarms in Catalan homes: "It doesn't deter, but it does warn."

BarcelonaThe call is due to a router problem, as the internet isn't working properly. Once the necessary arrangements have been made, the operator says one last thing before hanging up: he asks the customer if they have a home alarm, and hints that they have an offer that's hard to refuse. Another person goes to a bank to set up a direct deposit for their payroll. The conversation turns, again, to an alarm: they also have an offer that significantly reduces the price. These are two anecdotal situations, but they demonstrate how burglar alarms are present in our daily lives. They are offered by telephone companies and banks, and in some cases, they are required to sign a mortgage.

In May 2025, there were 858,093 private alarms connected to the monitoring center in Catalonia. In 15 years, this figure has multiplied by 184%, according to data from the Catalan Association of Security Companies (Acaes). And this, evidently, makes private security a booming market. According to the financial statements of the Professional Association of Private Security Services Companies (Aproser), in 2023 the value of this market was almost €6 billion, with a year-on-year growth of almost 6%. Of this total, 50% relates to the alarm market.

Sergi Mulero is CEO of Mood Seguridad and also the member of Instalaciones de Acaes (Acaes Installations). He laments that the alarm boom is not always accompanied by an improvement in home security. He criticizes some of these systems as "solutions that generate a dangerous false sense of security." He criticizes the fact that the same packages are often offered for very different homes, when the needs of an apartment are not the same as those of a house. "It's a strategy based on volume, quantity, not quality," he laments. For this reason, the Association wants to make it clear that the alarm is not a "fast-consumption" product and that service should be personalized, analyzing all the weak points of a home.

Along the same lines, locksmiths and sources from the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) warn that having an alarm is no guarantee against burglary. "Nothing could be further from the truth," they state. "It's a very good tool to know that someone has broken in, but it doesn't prevent them from entering. It doesn't deter, it just warns," they conclude. Thieves usually spend no more than three minutes in a home. And in many cases, more than 20 minutes pass between the alarm being activated, the owner being notified, and the police being called. The large number of connected alarms also, according to Mulero, results in a large investment of public resources to respond to the calls. He exemplifies this by saying that in 2024, 76% of the alarm notifications received by the Mossos d'Esquadra turned out to be false. And that's despite the fact that the alarm center operator is already filtering out the initial information.

The security guards

Acaes also detects another upward trend, especially in private buildings: more and more people are choosing to hire private security guards. Some blocks in the upper part of Barcelona, in fact, have replaced the concierges with security guards."We have to make ourselves visible so that thieves know we're there," says a security guard in the Bonanova neighborhood. One of the pioneering developments was Lucía, also in the upper part of the Catalan capital. They've had a security guard patrolling the streets of the houses for over 20 years. He says he's not sure why, but in October 2024, they stopped paying him, and there was a wave of burglaries. His parents were inside their house, on the ground floor, and the thieves sneaked in through an open window on the third floor. "Every day during that month, they broke into our neighbors' houses; we even compiled an Excel spreadsheet of all the burglaries," he says. They have an alarm, but since they were inside their house, it was disconnected. "We were at home, we felt very vulnerable," he recalls. Now, they have a security guard again and have formed a neighborhood group to report any suspicions.

In fact, there are more and more security guards. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, to which ARA has had access, there were 17,299 registered security guards in Catalonia in 2024. In 2019, there were only 13,879. This is a constant increase that means we are able to remember the number of workers in this sector each year. However, the number of companies remains more stable: in 2019, there were 204 registered in the Interior registry, and this year there are 201.