The president of the National Commission of the Markets and Competition (CNMC), Juan José Ganuza, has underscored the urgency of accelerating and modernizing land regulation in order to improve access to housing in Spain, warning that regulatory and institutional barriers are among the factors that explain current availability problems.
Ganuza spoke this Thursday at the opening of the event "Land transformation for housing: pending challenges in the modernization of urban planning," at which a CNMC study on the supply of land was presented. He emphasized that this element "is not always at the center of the debate," despite the fact that it can represent around 45% of the final cost of a home.
The CNMC president specified that, while in certain cities the scarcity of land is due to the lack of physical space, in many other cases it is due to "regulatory and institutional barriers" which, in his view, can be "reduced and expedited."
For this reason, he argued that the CNMC is "well positioned" to analyze how regulatory procedures condition the speed and efficiency with which land becomes an available resource for building new homes.
The report prepared by the organization includes specific proposals to improve the current regulatory framework. Ganuza stated his "hope and ambition" that the findings of the work "feed the public debate" on how to increase the availability of land and, consequently, facilitate access to housing.
Access to housing, a growing challenge for households
During his speech, the CNMC president warned that accessing a home is "increasingly more complicated" in Spain, with prices "very high compared with wages" and productivity advancing below the rise in the cost of properties.
He drew attention to the mismatch between the creation of new households and the pace of housing construction, in a context in which home purchases are declining while prices "keep going up and up" and the development activity continues to be "very weak."
Added to this scenario is the insufficient stock of affordable social housing for rent. According to the data presented by Ganuza, Spain is at the lower end of the European ranking, with only 2.5% of the market allocated to social renting, compared with 8.5% on average in the European Union.
The president of the CNMC has recalled that, according to the latest CIS barometer, 30% of the population identifies housing as the main problem in the country. The situation is especially serious for young people: around 68% of those aged between 25 and 34 say they are harmed by the situation in the real estate market, and the percentage remains high, at almost 57%, among people aged 35 to 44.
He has also pointed out that the wage effort that young people must make to pay rent exceeds 50% of their income and that Spain is among the five EU countries with the latest age of emancipation, close to 30 years, compared with 26.3 years as the European average.
"We cannot be oblivious to problems that affect society so much," Ganuza has stressed, insisting that the CNMC must always keep "the focus on consumers" and ensure that markets work "for everyone and, especially, for the most vulnerable sectors".
Along these lines, he has insisted that effective housing policy requires the coordinated participation of multiple stakeholders: private companies, local administrations, autonomous communities and the central government, so that each one contributes "part of what can be the solution".
He has nevertheless clarified that the aim is not to eliminate regulation, but to move toward rules that are "more agile and smarter".
Fewer administrative obstacles and more urban planning coordination
In the report submitted last June, the CNMC examines the regulatory framework and the functioning of the urban planning process that allows land to be transformed to build new homes, both private and protected and social, and concludes that the regulatory and administrative tangle is making it difficult to expand the residential supply in Spain.
The agency stresses that the availability of land is one of the key elements for understanding the level of prices and the supply of housing, to the point that the cost of land can represent up to 45% of the final amount of a home.
According to the CNMC, improving the efficiency of urban planning procedures would help to lower costs, reduce timelines and increase the number of homes, both private and social, thereby favoring citizens’ access to a home.
The study holds that Spain has one of the most restrictive land-use regulations in the OECD environment and identifies problems such as the excessive complexity of the planning process, legal uncertainty, the rigidity of the rules, or the slowness of administrative processing.
In the planning phase, the report warns that the very detailed delimitation of developable land and its uses limits the capacity to adapt to changes in housing demand and other economic activities.
It also points out that the nullity of urban development plans and the difficulties in modifying them can delay or even halt new developments, while the accumulation of procedures and documentation becomes, in some cases, redundant or unnecessary.
In the development phase, the analysis detects an overlap of technical and administrative processes that lengthens timelines and makes projects more expensive. In the building stage, the multiplicity of controls and administrative requirements can delay the granting of licenses and the start of new works.
The CNMC also warns of the growing weight of sectoral regulations—environmental, heritage-related, or infrastructure—and considers that the lack of coordination and proportionality between these controls creates duplications, contradictions, and new bottlenecks in urban development.
Among the recommendations to facilitate access to land and expand the housing supply, the body proposes simplifying and coordinating urban planning regulations, making planning more flexible, speeding up plan modifications, and reducing the complexity of planning instruments.
In addition, it proposes facilitating urban management and construction by streamlining licenses and promoting responsible statements, as well as improving the functioning and coordination of sectoral reports to avoid overlaps and delays.
The CNMC also argues for strengthening transparency and predictability in administrative intervention on land and for providing more resources to the public entities responsible for urban development processing.