Bitcoin Magazine The Real Estate Market Is Dead in Spain. Long Live Bitcoin.

Spain has just shown every property owner in Europe that the rules around their asset can be rewritten by decree. Bitcoin is the one asset where that cannot happen.

I direct the Masters in Bitcoin at the Universidad de las Hespérides. My field focuses on how people build wealth over decades, not weeks. In Spain, for generations, the answer to long-term family wealth was land and property until now.

Last week the government made that path close to impossible. I am not writing to dismiss real estate. I am writing because Spain has just threatened one of the few long-term wealth-building tools ordinary families had, and they will need another one.

On 29 September, the Spanish government approved two emergency decrees on housing. They took effect within days, and a planned hearing in Congress was on Friday, October 2, and the decree didn’t pass, though it was a very close vote. 

Spain’s government did not pass these rules as a normal law. On 29 September, it approved two emergency decrees (reales decretos-ley). The Constitution reserves this tool for cases of “extraordinary and urgent need”. A decree-law takes effect immediately, and Congress then has thirty days to validate or repeal it. The government split the reforms into two so each could be voted on separately, rather than one controversial measure sinking everything.

The first decree capped rent rises until the end of 2027. A rent already above the maximum set by the official reference-price index could not rise at all. In every other case, the parties could agree to an update, and without a new agreement, the increase could not exceed 2%. Spain’s inflation in September was 4.9%, according to the national statistics institute, so an owner’s real income would shrink every year by law.

The second decree went further. At the end of the minimum term, if neither side has given notice, the lease renews compulsorily in successive five-year periods, or seven if the landlord is a legal entity. A landlord who ends a contract without a reason listed in the law must compensate the tenant. The payment is calculated, where possible, on the state rent-reference system, and can never be less than one month’s rent for each year the tenant has lived in the home. In practice, owners lose much of their freedom to recover their own property or re-let it at current prices.