Tag: PP

Madrid’s Town Hall Votes Against Operación Chamartín

19 May 2016 – Expansión

The Town Hall of Madrid has taken another step in its crusade against Operación Chamartín, promoted by Distrito Castellana Norte (DCN) – jointly owned by BBVA and San José – and has thereby buried the private initiative for the extension of La Castellana, backed by the previous PP regional government.

The latest chapter in the battle to control the development of the area in the north of the capital was written yesterday with the Committee for Sustainable Urban Development’s rejection of Operación Chamartín. Specifically, the Committee ruled out the project with votes from Ahora Madrid and the PSOE, its partner at the Town Hall.

By contrast, councillors from the PP and Ciudadanos parties, who are in favour of the project, voted against the proposal to deny the definitive approval of the Partial Interior Reform Plan promoted by DCN, included on the Committee’s agenda for the day.

The plans for Operación Chamartín were submitted at the beginning of 2015 by the previous Town Hall, the Community of Madrid and the Ministry of Development together with the development company, but it was not debated in the municipal Plenary because of the upcoming elections.

During the Committee’s debate, the PP councillor José Luis Martínez Almeida warned about the “criminal liabilities” that the Government team may incur for not basing its decisions on reports and for seeking to substitute a global agreement for the development of the north of Madrid with a 16-page plan.

Meanwhile, the Ciudadanos councillor Bosco Labrado asked the Government’s team to look for a real solution for DCN’s project.

By contrast, the PSOE councillor Mercedes González congratulated the Government’s team on the new proposal for the north of Madrid and asked that the minutes reflect that his political party vindicates Eduardo Manglada and all of the other people who have contributed to changing the city. He mentioned Eduardo Leira – the husband of the mayoress – and Enrique Bardají, amongst others.

The Committee’s rejection of DCN’s project, which still needs to go through the Plenary, comes a week after Manuela Carmena’s town planning team presented its own alternative for the development of the north of the capital, known as Madrid Puerta Norte, at a public meeting. .

The alternative project

These plans, amongst other things, drastically reduce the number of homes to be constructed, down from around 17,800 to 4,600, and cut the buildable surface area from 3,270,053 sqm, planned by DCN, to 1,750,197 sqm.

The Town Hall’s proposal, which was presented by the mayoress herself and by a representative from the Sustainable Urban Planning Department, José Manuel Calvo, has not been agreed with the Ministry of Development or the Community of Madrid, which together with the Town Hall own 82% of the affected land, or with BBVA and San José, the promoters of the plan and owners of the management rights over the land.

In order to understand the Town Hall’s plans at first hand, the Ministry of Development has called a meeting for this Friday to which it has invited the mayoress of the capital, the President of the Community of Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes, contacts from the property developer DCN, and representatives from BBVA and the construction firm San José.

Sources at DCN declined to comment on the plans presented by the Town Hall as they are waiting to be provided with further information.

Original story: Expansión (by Rebeca Arroyo)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Cifuentes Abolishes Madrid’s 3-Storey Land Act

11 December 2015 – Expansión

On Thursday, the Plenary Assembly of Madrid abolished the section of the Land Act that prohibits the construction of buildings of more than three storeys, thanks to support from members of the PP and Ciudadanos and despite the opposition votes by members of Podemos and the PSOE.

Enrique Veloso, one of Ciudadanos’s members, who defended the draft Law for the modification of the Land Act in the Community of Madrid, said that the now abolished law “has done a lot of damage to town planning”. He criticised the fact that this restriction to construct only three storey properties was applied in a blanket fashion across all towns, without taking into account the characteristics of each municipality.

Ramón Espinar, member of Podemos, said that this partial reform of the Land Act “has circumvented the agreement” that existed between all of the parliamentary groups to draft a new Land Act. He added that the current PP is “the same as ever” and he criticised its rejection of a comprehensive reform of the aforementioned law, which “understood that land was being preyed upon as a resource”.

The socialist member Rafael Montoya declared that his party’s town planning model is “compatible with the interests of residents and is respectful of the environment”, and he confirmed that the abolition of the three-storey restriction “would not help to generate consensus”. He advocated a comprehensive reform of the current Land Act and he criticised Ciudadanos’s collaboration with the PP, stressing that both parties “form part of the same right (wing)”.

The PP member Diego Lozano accused Podemos and PSOE of abandoning the motion for the reformation of the Land Act and said that they do not understand “the urgency” of the need for a comprehensive modification of the law that was approved eight years ago.

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake

International Funds Encouraged By Decline In Podemos Support

4 November 2015 – El Confidencial

An air of tranquillity has returned to the offices of the large international funds following the uncertainty that was unleashed on 24 May. Then, the success of groups linked to Podemos in the municipal elections caused many institutional investors to rethink their positions in our country, they slammed on the brakes and chose to move cautiously, as they awaited developments.

This attitude affected the rhythm of several sectors that were enjoying a real boom at the time, including the real estate sector, where large buyers were responsible for driving the recovery. The electoral calendar meant that they had no choice, with the upcoming regional elections in Cataluña (which Junts Pel Sí was trying to hijack as a referendum on independence) and the general elections scheduled for the end of the year, the second half of the year was set to be very quiet. But the latest election polls are changing everything.

The decline of the group led by Pablo Iglesias and the growing expectations surrounding the alliance between PP and Ciudadanos has given the large international funds reason for hope. The results of the opinion polls are showing them that our country’s politics will continue in line with the reforms undertaken in recent years and, above all, that it will not fall into the hands of a leftist coalition involving a Government seeking to resemble the Greek Syriza party.

As one source in the sector explains “now that Podemos is becoming weaker, our concern regarding the country’s political risk has decreased siginficantly – any scenario involving stability is welcome. In other words, the change in the perspective of the international funds has not been driven so much by the rise of PP-Ciudadanos, but rather because the decline in support for Podemos significantly reduces the risk of instability”.

In fact, to say that overseas investors have a preference for one party or another is, in the opinion of the professionals in the sector, completely incorrect. “Investors are not saying ‘I want this party or that party to win’, overseas investment in real estate has been the same under the PSOE and the PP. The good news now is that Ciudadanos is no longer regarded as a risk”.

Several investors specialising in the real estate sector acknowledge that this change of perspective is being felt by the day, a domino effect that has been accelerating with the wave of polls in recent weeks, all of which are marked by the common denominator of the decline of Podemos with respect to the rising trend that started with the European elections and peaked with the municipal elections, and the consolidation of Ciudadanos as the great emerging force.

Tensions continue in Cataluña

(…). The only exception to this rule is Cataluña, “where the separatist tensions mean that there is a great deal of uncertainty”, says one M&A expert. “I have decided to delay any decisions until next year, it only means waiting a few more months. What difference does that make?”.

Just as there is a general feeling of calm amongst the large international investors regarding Spain in general, their views regarding the future of Cataluña are divided. Many are convinced that independence is a utopia that will never actually happen, but there are others that regard it as a credible option, in which case they prefer to wait and see.

The direct consequence of these fears, besides the delay in terms of closing operations, is the downward pressure on the prices of those operations already underway. Similarly, the return of confidence is a revulsive in favour of the vendors, which still have almost two months to reach agreements (before year-end), but now with the factor of economic stability in their favour. Provided that is, that the opinion polls are correct.

Original story: El Confidencial (by Ruth Ugalde)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Carmena Creates ‘”Political Table” To Resolve Operación Chamartín

29 October 2015 – Cinco Días

Manuela Carmena, the mayoress of Madrid, wants to start to resolve the situation known as Operación Chamartín, a town planning project in the North of the city that has been up in the air for more than 20 years now. The project is being led by the company Distrito Castellana Norte, in which BBVA owns a stake of more than 70%; the remaining shares are owned by Grupo San José. In order to move forwards, two working groups will be launched, one political and one technical, comprising officials from the Town Hall.

The Town Hall of Madrid will constitute a so-called “political and social table”, which all four of the political parties that have representation in the local government (Ahora Madrid, PP, PSOE and Cuidadanos) will be invited to join. Neighbourhood associations and the company Distrito Castellana Norte will also be encouraged to participate, according to sources at the Town Hall.

The mega-project, which was initially going to be approved by the PP during the previous legislature, will involve private investment amounting to around €6,000 million, the development of land covering 3.1 million m2 and the construction of up to 17,500 homes, over several phases.

The political table will monitor the conditions that Operación Chamartín will have to fulfil to be accepted, based on those approved yesterday by Ahora Madrid and the PSOE, which in turn rejected proposals made by Ciudadanos to create the table immediately and resolve the project within three months.

Ahora Madrid and PSOE agreed instead to an amendment to replace the proposal submitted by Cuidadanos. That group had released a statement defending the immediate creation of the table with the municipal groups, in order to establish the basic guidelines for resolving the operation within a maximum period of 90 days.

Meanwhile, the representative for Sustainable Urban Development, José Manuel Calvo, responded that it does not make sense to limit the duration of the debate to three months, however he added that there is no doubt that the current situation needs to be resolved soon.

Original story: Cinco Días (by Alfonso Simón Ruiz)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Ministry Of Development: 100,000+ Homes Sold In Q2 2015

25 September 2015 – Cinco Días

Improved access to credit and the increase in employment have been spurring on house sales for almost a year now and the upwards trend continued in the second quarter of the year. In fact, more homes are now being sold than a year ago in 14 of the 17 autonomous regions, when just a few months ago, the increase was being observed in just half of the country. And for the first time in five years, more than 100,000 homes were sold in one quarter, a figure not seen since 2010. (…).

A shortage of new homes

The numbers published yesterday by the Ministry of Development showed that house sales grew by 13.9% during the second quarter of the year compared with the same period in 2014. In total, 104,530 house sales were recorded, the best quarter since 2010, thanks primarily to the boost in the market for second hand homes and the activity in large cities.

By type, 91,499 second hand homes were sold between April and June, an increase of 22.6% with respect to a year earlier. But the most significant result is that second hand properties accounted for 87.5% of the total market in Q2 2015 – the segment continues to gain weight quarter after quarter, as the number of unsold properties in new developments dries up. In fact, the purchase of newly constructed homes increased by just 2.5% YoY in Q2 2015, to 13,031 properties, a volume equivalent to just 12.5% of the total number of transactions closed during the quarter. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that the classification between new and second hand homes is clouded by the fact that many of the latter are actually new; they are classified as second hand because they come from developments that were included in real estate portfolios owned by banks or Sareb (and were finished more than two years ago). (…).

The other revelation disclosed by the Ministry of Development’s statistics relates to the classification of unsubsidised homes versus VPOs, which confirms the trend that has been observed in recent quarters: increasingly fewer VPO homes were sold in Q2 2015 for two reasons. The first is that the Government’s most recent housing plan tightened the conditions whereby individuals can sell those kinds of homes and the second is because no new VPO developments have been initiated since 2012, since the Executive of the PP has been more focused on (the promotion of) rental housing and renovations. Evidence of all of this is that only 4,590 VPO homes were sold between April and June, i.e. VPOs accounted for just 4.4% of all operations.

By autonomous community, house sales increased in 14 regions, led by La Rioja, where the volume of activity shot up by 44.2%, the Balearic Islands (+30.1%) and Cantabria (+29.4%). At the opposite end of the spectrum, a YoY decrease in house sales was recorded in 3 regions: Navarra (-14.7%), Extremadura (-1.5%) and País Vasco (-0.6%).

Another one of the findings from these statistics is that a few large capital cities behaved like hotspots in the market. Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia were the cities in which the most homes were sold between April and June, with 8,252 homes, 3,590 homes and 1,975 homes sold, respectively.

The housing market also recorded a positive result when we look at the figures for the last twelve months (July 2014 – June 2015), with 382,471 house changing owners, an increase of 13.3% compared with the previous twelve months (July 2013 – June 2014). In terms of the nationality of purchasers, the statistics reveal that foreigners bought 17.7% of all homes sold during the quarter.

Specifically, foreigners residing in the country acquired 17,307 homes, an increase of 17.2%, whilst operations closed by non-resident foreigners amounted to 1,244, up by 5% compared with the same period last year.

The provinces in which foreigners purchased most homes were Alicante (4,141), Málaga (2,517), Barcelona (1,470) and Madrid (1,173).

Original story: Cinco Días (by Raquel Díaz Guijarro)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Madrid’s Property Tax (IBI) Will Decrease By 7% In 2016

22 September 2015 – El País

In October, the Town Hall of Madrid will approve a 7% decrease in the property tax (‘Impuesto sobre bienes inmuebles’ or IBI) for all homes and the majority of commercial premises, offices and retail stores. This decrease, accepted begrudgingly by the minority Ahora Madrid government following its enforcement by the other parties (PP, PSOE and Ciudadanos), will be passed with equal reluctance next month by the socialists, who were seeking a higher cut. The 7% decrease in IBI will be equivalent to a €25 reduction in the average monthly bill (€350).

Yesterday, a Councillor from the Treasury, Carlos Sánchez Mato (pictured), announced a 7% decrease in the rate of IBI for all homes in the capital (1,448,765 households) and for the majority of non-residential buidlings.

Nevertheless, the rate will increase by 10% for those non-residential buildings that have a “higher cadastral (land registry) value”. The Town Hall defines this threshold as follows: for individual buildings, the increase will apply only to those that have a cadastral value of more than €35 million (there are around 30 such properties in Madrid); retail stores worth more than €860,000 (around 3,000 of more than 97,000); buildings used for sporting activities worth more than €20 million (around 30 in total); and offices worth more than €2 million (1,760 out of almost 32,000).

These targeted increases to non-residential buildings with higher cadastral values will almost entirely offset the decrease in the rate of IBI for the rest of the city.

IBI is the main source of income from the Town Hall, and therefore any change in the rate significantly affects its capacity to provide public services: IBI will account for €1,279 million of the €4,388 million that the municipal coffers will receive this year (i.e. it accounts for almost one in every three euros). The changes proposed by Ahora Madrid will reduce this revenue by just 3.7%.

A new tax

This fall in revenues (€49 million) will be primarily offset by the creation of a new tax to be paid by the companies that generate the most waste. The other municipal taxes will remain unchanged in 2016, although there may be an as -yet-unknown decrease in the price of certain services (sports centres, kindergartens, etc). (…).

Original story: El País (by Bruno García Gallo)

Translation: Carmel Drake

The PP Stops ‘Operación Chamartín’ Dead In Its Tracks

14 May 2015 – El Confidencial

Ana Botella has met with opposition from several members of her own party regarding the progress of the largest urban development in Spain, which was due to involve an investment of almost €6,000 million.

“I would like to settle the future of Operación Chamartín…it would be a real shame if the project does not go ahead”. Those were the statements made by Ana Botella in an interview with El País on Sunday, in which the now almost former Mayoress (of Madrid) summed up her legislature. With this assertion, she responded to a question about what was left for her to do and what she would like to finish before leaving. However, despite recent attempts by BBVA, the main shareholder, to push ahead with the largest real estate development in Madrid, the project that has been renamed Castellana Norte does not seem to be able to get off the ground.

According to sources at the capital’s Town Hall and shareholders of Dutch (the property development company), an extraordinary council meeting will not be held on Thursday to approve what was going to be the largest urban development in Spain. That is because 14 May is the last logical day from a political point of view for the authorisation of the new partial urban plan that would have to include the extension of the Paseo de la Castellana, promoted by BBVA and Construcciones San José.

Botella, has tried to the end to convince other members of the PP to approve a project that has been blocked since 1993 and which, was going involve an investment of €5,974 million. Of that amount, €3,300 million was going to flow to the coffers of the three Public Administrations involved in the project – the Town Hall of Madrid, the Community of Madrid and the Ministry of Development – and so the interest of all of these parties was evident.

Those figures were announced at the launch of the operation, an act that was blessed with the presence of the Chairman of BBVA, Francisco González, the Minister for Development, Ana Pastor, the Mayoress, Ana Botella and the President of the Community (of Madrid), Ignacio González. From that photo, two of the politicians are no longer in their roles and the owner of the infrastructure is waiting to see what happens in the general election. “There is no other project like this anywhere in the world”, said the Chief Executive of BBVA, the primary shareholder with 75% of the developer’s share capital, who added that “I don’t know if it will be profitable for the bank, but it will be for Madrid”.

The Director of Real Estate at BBVA, Antonio Béjar, has been putting pressure on Botella until the last minute to obtain authorisation for the project despite the opposition from various members of the PP and the reluctance shown by the Minister for Development. (…).

From the ranks of the municipal Government, they say that the 2,000 complaints made by various groups less than two weeks before the municipal and autonomous community elections make the approval of Operación Chamartín impossible. The authorisation would have been used by the opposition parties to link the PP to the financial system and the so-called “casta”, especially if we take into account that some voices link the arrival of Francisco González as the President of BBVA with that of José María Azar to the Government.

Sources at Dutch are confident that Castellana Norte will receive support from the new local government that emerges from the municipal elections on 24 May. Above all, because they consider that it will represent a significant economic boost for the capital, something which, in theory, no one should oppose. That has been recognised half-heartedly by the various opposition parties, such as the PSOE and Ciudadanos. But at the same time, they recognise that the (likely) diversity of the next local government will make any agreement more difficult, especially if we also take into account that there will be general elections in November and that the project also needs to be approved by the Ministry for Development.

The Castellana Norte District project involves extending the capital’s main thoroughfare by 3.7 kilometres and creating a new area where 17,000 new homes would be build, thanks to the burial (move underground) of the train tracks at Chamartín Station. The macro-project includes a green area measuring 24 hectares, two business areas with the construction of several skyscrapers of up to 320 metres tall and a new stop on the local train network.

Original story: El Confidencial (by Agustín Marco)

Translation: Carmel Drake

País Vasco Will Tax Empty Homes And May Expropriate Properties From Banks

5 May 2015 – Expansión

The Socialist Party, EH Bildu and UPyD are going to add their votes together in the Basque Parliament to push through a new housing law in Euskadi, which recognises the subjective right to have access to a home. The law will result in the forced and temporary expropriation of the use of homes owned by banks, as well as the introduction of a fee for homes that have been empty for two years.

This initiative – which stems from when Patxi López was the Basque regional president – has been rejected by the PP and the PNV, which governs the País Vasco. Nevertheless, the support of the three opposition groups guarantees 38 votes against the 37 of the nationalist and popular parties.

Through this law, Euskadi will become the first autonomous community to recognise the subjective right to housing, in addition to (the subjective right to) health and education, according to the socialists.

The text provides for the possibility of expropriating empty homes, and those with tenants that cannot afford to pay the rent, from banks for a maximum period of three years, even though this measure has been suspended by the Constitutional Court in other autonomous communities. Within five years, all public housing will be put up for rent. The fee for empty homes will be €10 per square metre per year, an amount that will increase by 10% per year, up to triple the initial fee.

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake