Under a photo of the Minister of Homes and Urban Agenda and a logo that reads, ‘Housing: the Fifth Pillar of the Welfare State’, an article from Spanish Property Insight (the best English-language site on the subject in general) says ‘The Spanish government floats radical tax plan targeting British and other non-EU property buyers’.
They aren’t alone. Dozens of headlines say something similar. The Yahoo news site quoting some regional Brit newspaper, says ‘Warning to Brits after Spain reveals 'extreme' plans targeting them’ and The Telegraph says ‘Spain wants to kill off the British holiday home dream, here’s what you can do about it’. Some erroneous hyperbole quickly arrived from The EWN saying that ‘Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez shook the world with the ambiguous claim that his government planned to tax properties owned by non-EU nationals by 100 percent’.
My favourite one though comes from The Times, with a comic but despairing piece called ‘Spain’s anti-Brit tax is a reminder: no one wants to be driven out by immigrants’.
Ah yes, the British fear of Johnny Foreigner. No wonder they chose Brexit.
I imagine that well over half the people reading this are neither British nor American citizens hoping to move to Spain (although, for sure, it’s a good time to come).
Come quickly though, as Sánchez later refined his plan, to say that all sales to non-EU foreigners could be halted. "We will propose to ban these non-EU foreigners who are not residents, and their relatives, from buying houses in our country since they only do so to speculate", Sanchez said at a political rally in Plasencia, in western Spain, on Sunday.
For balance, know that all the Brits currently resident in Spain (around 300,000) or Americans from the USA (perhaps 64,000) are evidently a lot fewer in numbers than the 1,560,000 foreign EU citizens living here.
And there’s the key. I think we Brit/American commentators take an – perhaps understandably – parochial view of our importance to both the Spanish people and to their political concerns.
In reality, we are fairly small fry and, worse still, we live in small and relatively unimportant towns along the coast and islands. Andalucía has the most Brits (and that would be in Marbella, Mijas, Estepona or Níjar with around 3,000 in each), followed in order by the Valencian Community, the Canaries, Catalonia, the Balearics, Murcia and only then the Madrid Region. As a matter of fact, Pedro Sánchez when looking out of his window doesn’t see hoards of resident Brits tucking into an English breakfast on the Avenida de Castellana.
Madrid, by the way, has a population of 3,400,000.
The point being – the Spanish government will be looking at its own citizens (especially those that vote) rather than at the foreigners who, Bless them, come here with full wallets to buy a home on the coast.
In short, with this suggestion, the Government is looking elsewhere.
Two considerations here - the foreign vulture funds are the main buyers of property (to speculate usually as corporate landlords), and secondly, it’s the wealthy Latin Americans who are taking over choice properties particularly in Madrid (there are now well over a million of them living there: with some wealthy ones in the smarter areas, which is now known as el Miami de Europa, and with other poorer immigrants and perhaps even living without papers down in the workers’ neighbourhoods). Both issues being far more important than the plight of our British and American cousins who may have waited a bit too long…
Maybe Sánchez was reading a recent piece from El País which says ‘They are not guiris, they are the new Madrileños: today, 40% of the residents of the centre of the capital were born outside of Spain’.
The concern, then (at least in anglo quarters) is that the tax on buying a property could go up maybe later this year or next – or even to be closed off entirely – and this would certainly put some non-Schengen buyers (already concerned with the 90 in 180 day limit within the region) off. One way around would to be to rent and take out residence-papers, as the proposed surcharge is only for non-resident non-EU citizens. Or maybe there will be early elections, as La Razón hopes, and the PP will get in and smile on us foreigners once again.
From the Spanish point of view, the increase on property tax for non-EU foreign investors might be little more than wallpaper (there are a number of rather more useful proposals), but it shows that the Government is thinking of its citizens, for all that the conservative media runs articles about the inconvenience towards foreign-buyers.
Or maybe not: ‘Closing the country to rich foreigners might win some votes, but it won't solve the real problem’ says El Economista sententiously.