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Madrid (CNN) — Spain’s prime minister is pushing for far-reaching action to ease the nation’s housing crunch, including a tax of up to 100% on property purchases by non-European Union buyers.
“There are too many Airbnbs. What’s lacking is housing,” Pedro Sanchez said Monday as he put forward a raft of new measures to help renters and house hunters.
“In 2023, non-residents from outside of the European Union bought around 27,000 homes and apartments in Spain — not to live in them but mainly to speculate and make money from them. With the housing scarcity that we have, we clearly cannot allow this,” Sanchez said at a housing event in Madrid.
The tax of up to 100% on property purchases, which would apply to UK and US buyers among others, would be much higher than current levies in Spain.
The proposed measures, which Spain’s coalition government will send to parliament, also include steeper taxes on people renting out apartments for short stays so that they “pay taxes like they should, as a business,” Sanchez said.
Tourist apartments have proliferated in Spain, one of the world’s leading tourism destinations, especially on the country’s Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, and in cities like Barcelona and Madrid.
A leading Spanish real estate firm, Gilmar, told CNN in a statement that it was “skeptical about the plan” announced by the prime minister, in part because it lacked details about how it would be implemented. Gilmar added that “the kind of property that is bought (in Spain) by non-EU nationals is very different to the type of housing the country needs to solve this crisis. This measure is for show and won’t have an impact.”
The plan may also face obstacles in parliament where Sanchez’s minority government has not yet won approval for its 2025 budget. Its coalition partner, the leftist Sumar party, welcomed the housing proposals but said they were not enough.
“We want much more,” said Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun, a senior Sumar official.
The government is already taking steps to improve the supply of homes. That includes putting a recently created public housing body in charge of 3,300 homes and 2 million square meters of land available for building more houses, Sanchez’s office said in a statement.
The-CNN-Wire
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