New Builds in BCN 2016
Not all Predictions for 2016 are Positive
Among the many summaries of 2015 and predictions for Barcelona’s property market in 2016 an article by Oscar Munoz appeared in the Spanish daily newspaper La Vanguardia. The report predicts that the hype given to the recovery of Catalan’s building industry is over rated. Many experts have pointed out a rise in the number of new homes being built in Barcelona and Catalonia indicating that this is a sign of good things to come in the Barcelona property industry. Last year the number of new builds increased and the surface area being built rose by 26 percent. This is almost four times the increase in new builds in Barcelona recorded in 2014. However the recent article in the Spanish daily points out that most of these new projects were actually planned during the boom years and simply put on hold through the worst of the property crisis. Now as things seem to be improving many of these projects have been reactivated. Munoz also points out that most of the building took place in the first half of 2015 and then slowed down dramatically. This would indicate that new build figures are dropping or at least not as significantly increasing as predicted by most speculators. The increase is still too low to indicate an eminent recovery in the Spanish new-build property market. In 2015 planning was approved for 6,351 new homes in Catalonia; this was an improvement on 2014 but still much lower than the “normal” level” of building activity which should be 20,000 new homes given the demographics. In conclusion we can say that there have been signs of improvement but it is too early to crack out the Champagne and declare a recovery.