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Madrid’s Biggest Landlord? U.S. Investment Firms
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: July 7th, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/realestate/spain-rents-pr...
A few dozen people gathered inside a graffiti-clad building in the Carabanchel district of Madrid. They had come to commiserate about the American investment banks and private equity funds that controlled their homes. Some at this meeting of the Sindicato de Vivienda de Carabanchel (the Carabanchel Housing Union) were fighting eviction orders or skyrocketing rents. Others had lost their homes through mortgage foreclosures. One attendee, Elsa Riquelme, described her yearslong battle to stay in the 600-square-foot apartment where she raised her three sons, which is now owned by Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm. Over the past decade, Blackstone has become Madrid’s largest private owner of residential real estate, and the second largest in all of Spain. Ms. Riquelme’s apartment is one of 13,000 that Blackstone currently owns in Madrid, and among 19,600 it owns nationwide. Across Spain, around 185,000 rental properties are now owned by large corporations, half of those by firms based in the United States. Rental prices have increased 57 percent since 2015 and home prices 47 percent ... even as more than 4 million homes sit empty. After the pandemic pushed Spain’s unemployment rate up to 15 percent, evictions nationwide spiked. In Madrid, tenant groups estimate that 20,000 renters in the city currently face the threat of eviction. These days, just 2 percent of Spanish homes available for rent are public housing. In France it’s 14 percent; in the Netherlands it’s 34 percent.
Note: This article is also available here. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and financial inequality.
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