Gov’t Says RE Recovery Is More Intense Than Expected

30 May 2017 – El Mundo

The Secretary of State for Budgets and Expenditure, Alberto Nadal, has highlighted that the growth of the economy in Spain is being favoured not only by the country’s exports, but also by the recovery of the construction and real estate sectors, which is proving to be much more intense than the Government had expected.

Those were the declarations made by the Secretary of State during the presentation of Inmonext 17, an event organised by Idealista in the context of Madrid’s International Real Estate Fair (SIMA) 2017, where he noted that GDP growth this year is set to exceed the official forecast of 2.7%.

During his speech, Nadal emphasised that this increase in growth is being supported by exports, which will continue to be very strong and by the recovery of the construction and real estate sectors. “The coffers don’t lie, people don’t pay taxes if they don’t have any cash”, he added.

In this sense, he said that the real estate sector is going to play a fundamental role in the growth of Spain and he reminded his audience that the sector was oversized during the years prior to the crisis and that real demand for housing was not well founded because prices were growing and the volume of credit exceeded the borrowing capacity of families. “Economic growth was unbalanced and was heavily concentrated in the real estate sector”, he said.

In his opinion, a reasonable cruising speed would be the creation of 50,000 homes per year and he added that the recovery is reaching the real estate sector later than other markets, perhaps because it was oversized before. For this reason, he said that the logical thing would be for the sector to operate at a reasonable average, leaving behind the extremes seen before the crisis and over the last few years.

Nadal said that the data shows that there is not a bubble now and he emphasised that the outlook of the Spanish real estate sector depends on the faith that Spaniards have in the future, especially in their jobs and salaries.

Original story: El Mundo

Translation: Carmel Drake