Housing and Land Observatory. Annual Bulletin 2012.

The GENERAL DIRECTORATE OF ARCHITECTURE, HOUSING AND LAND has published the 2012 annual bulletin of the Housing and Land Observatory of the Ministry of Public Works, offering on its first pages the most relevant data:

• The number of permits granted by local councils for the construction of new homes has continued to decline over the last few years, reaching 57,543 homes in 2012. However, the percentage of permits for renovation, which before the start of the crisis represented 31% of new homes, has grown progressively to reach 131% in 2012.
• Another characteristic indicator of housing construction activity is the number of permits for the start of construction, offered by official associations of technical architects. In 2012, the number of permits was 44,162, a figure that represents only 51% of the maximum amount obtained in 2006.
• As for the price of free housing, with a value of €1,531/m², it has fallen by more than 261% in the 5 years since the beginning of the crisis. On the other hand, the relationship between the price of protected housing and that of used free housing, which in 2006 represented almost 501%, has reduced the difference between the two to 251% in 2006.
• The number of housing transactions recorded last year amounted to 330,750, distributed equally between new and used housing. This figure represents a third of the figure recorded in 2005.
• A positive value can be found in foreign investment in real estate, which has grown by almost 171% compared to the previous year, reaching 5.54 billion euros.
• On the other hand, the market for transacted land has progressively decreased from 11,600 hectares in 2004 to 1,981 hectares in 2012. In other words, in 8 years the surface area of land subject to transaction has been reduced by more than 801%3T.
• The average price of urban land, according to data from the Ministry of Public Works, remained at €187/m² in 2012, with hardly any changes compared to the previous year, after suffering a significant drop from the maximum value reached in 2006 of €285/m².
• As regards the final qualifications for protected housing rehabilitation, which began in 2007 with 35,859 actions, there has been a progressive increase until 2011 with 80,114 actions, although in the last year there has been a decline of 11%, with a total of 71,101 actions.
• There are no official statistics on rental prices for housing that allow us to observe the movement of this market. However, we do know the statistical data corresponding to profitability, which has increased in recent years to reach a value of 4.28% in the last quarter of 2012.
• As regards financing, the decline in the granting of new mortgage loans for home purchases, formalised by credit institutions, continued, with 214,398, which represents a quarter of the figure reached five years earlier.
• Bad loans have reached values of 3.81% and 4.61% in the areas of housing acquisition and renovation, respectively, and those corresponding to credit to builders have continued to grow at a faster rate with 24.51% and bad loans to real estate activity which have reached 29.61%. That is to say, in these last two areas, one in every four euros of credits granted have resulted in failure.
• Recently, the Bank of Spain has started a series of statistics that allow an approximation of the foreclosure process. The data corresponding to the year 2012, recently published, limit the delivery of homes in this process to 39,167, of which 32,490 correspond to primary residences.
• An indicator that provides information on the economic accessibility of home acquisition is the one that relates the price of housing and gross income per household. The 2012 figure, provided by the Bank of Spain, is close to 6 years of gross income, having been significantly reduced from the maximum of 7.6 years in 2006.
• And finally, of the major indicators that reflect the future of the economy, one of the most important is the one that establishes the monetary value of the production of final goods and services. In this regard, it is necessary to highlight the interannual variation of 1.41 TP3T in the GDP of the last year for which data are provided, 2011, according to the preliminary estimate. Also noteworthy is the continued rise in unemployment figures, which reached 25 TP3T in 2012, and the comparison with the European average, EU27, which is at 10.5 TP3T.
• Finally, it should be noted that with the recently released data from the 2011 Population and Housing Census of the National Institute of Statistics, the national housing stock is established at 25,208,623.