Public information on how property ownership is distributed in Spain is still insufficient, at least when it comes to residential property in the hands of large landlords, meaning owners or companies with more than 10 homes or 1,500 m² of residential use.
The data on the actual shares, held by the national cadastre, anonymise who owns them. In areas such as the rental market, which falls under the remit of Spain’s autonomous communities, this information can be obtained by filing transparency requests to analyse tenants’ deposit payments. This means many types of housing (owner-occupied homes, empty properties, tourist apartments and so on) are excluded from the analysis, making it impossible to know exactly who owns them in real time.
Tracking property transactions so far in 2026, specifically those that companies themselves have publicised, does show who is making the most moves in the Iberian market. This does not necessarily mean they have overtaken the traditional players that have dominated the scene over the past decade, names already familiar in major cities such as Blackstone, CBRE IM, Renta Corporación, Cerberus, Ares Management or banking groups Santander and CaixaBank.
New investments (including on public land)
Fidere, a group of listed real estate investment trusts specialising in buying public and rental housing, has led the biggest deal of the year so far, worth 1.050 billion euros. Canadian group Brookfield bought it from Blackstone, thereby acquiring its portfolio of 47 buildings and more than 5,000 rental homes, in a transaction completed in March this year.
In May, Azora agreed to buy 1,200 rental homes in the Barcelona metropolitan area, one of Spain’s most strained regions with very high population density in municipalities such as L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, from Patrizia for more than 350 million euros. Patrizia had previously bought them from BeCorp in 2022 for around 600 million.
Many other operations have been signed even before the homes are finished. Barings is set to acquire 305 affordable homes from Aurora Homes in Los Cerros (Vicálvaro) for more than 70 million euros, with handover scheduled for 2029, and a further 188 homes in Valdebebas for over 56 million from the Grupo Ferrocarril.
Autonomous communities and certain city councils themselves are granting concessions of public land to this type of company, in some cases for periods of between 45 and 75 years, in a country where the stock of social rental housing does not exceed 1.72%, well below the European average of around 8–9%. The case of Culmia, the developer controlled by US fund Oaktree, is illustrative. In 2025 it handed over lot 3 of the Plan Vive social housing scheme run by the Madrid regional government to German asset manager DWS by selling shares in the concession holder, in a deal worth 255 million euros.
The Bavarian firm MEAG has also bought from Culmia a 50% stake in a portfolio that includes 1,137 homes under Plan Vive II (Community of Madrid), 437 in the City of Madrid’s affordable rental programme and 208 owned by the Generalitat Valenciana.
Is Spain’s housing bubble starting to burst?
Home sales in Spain are slowing slightly as a result of the sharp rise in housing prices. This is reflected in data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) compiled by Cushman & Wakefield and in studies such as BBVA Research, which forecasts a 7.3% drop in transactions this year, followed by a modest rebound of 0.6% in 2027.
In its report for the second quarter of 2026, the property consultancy identified a year-on-year fall of 3.51% in such deals up to May 2026, totalling 286,000 transactions. Its analysts also point out that worsening financing conditions mean families move into or remain longer in the rental market, adding further upward pressure on rents.
The C&W report notes “a spectacular 376% increase” year on year in investment in rental housing and states that “in the first half of 2026 the investment volume is already significantly higher than in the whole of 2025”, reaching 2.934 billion euros in deals involving large landlords and investment funds.
This figure may seem at odds with the decline in home sales, but the two indicators measure different realities. While sales statistics count the number of transactions, investment volumes show how much money is being spent on buying homes and property portfolios, which means a handful of very large deals can significantly boost total investment. In Spain, acquisitions of housing by legal entities accounted for 10% of transactions in 2025, according to the latest report from the General Council of Notaries.
In any case, these figures should be treated cautiously. They do not make it possible to verify the real number of homes owned by companies in Spain because of the lack of transparency about total holdings, only how sales are evolving in the housing market.
As for other research on the state of the housing market, Oxford Economics also noted in its May report that it expects price growth to moderate, with an increase of 5% in 2027, after reaching double-digit rates in 2025 (12.89%). The figure expected for this year could come close to 11%. However, according to current forecasts, this slowdown may only be temporary.
The deceleration in job creation, which is reducing incomes, and the recent interest rate hike by the European Central Bank in response to renewed inflationary pressures are among the factors seen as possible causes of this future cooling.
Housing has become the main concern for Spaniards. That is the view of 37.5% of respondents to the latest CIS barometer in September, who rank it ahead of other economic problems (21.6%) or immigration (19.7%).
This reality is becoming entrenched in the most pressured markets. Spain’s six main urban areas are home to 36% of households, according to the Bank of Spain’s annual report on the issue, and it is there that the gap between demand and the supply of available housing remains widest.
