Buying a home is the most important decision in the lives of Spaniards: it means committing decades of future income and assuming a risk that will affect family stability for years. Unlike the rest of Europe, for Spaniards, bricks are a true obsession: according to some estimates, almost 80% of gross wealth is tied to the real estate market (compared to 40% in Nordic countries). Having 80% of gross wealth in the real estate sector means there is a high concentration of risk in a single sector (and sometimes in a single asset that does not generate income and also reduces flexibility due to its illiquidity).
Paradoxically, while financial markets rest on demands for transparency, liquidity, supervision, and homogeneous information, the real estate market continues to be marked by opacity, illiquidity, informality, and deep information asymmetries. Added to this is now the scarcity of supply in some areas and a structural rigidity to meet demand that makes adjustments slow and painful, resulting in the traditional succession of overheating and recession cycles whose effects propagate directly through the balance sheets of millions of families. The question, therefore, is not extravagant: does Spain need a specific authority for the real estate market, a sort of CNMV for bricks?
A national body for bricks would not have to replace existing competencies, nor decide how much and how to build. Its value would lie in providing a technical, independent, and long-term perspective that helps with better coordination. It could issue non-binding recommendations on housing needs in each region based on objective variables (demographic evolution, household formation, employment, energy consumption, infrastructure, etc). It could also continuously assess systemic risks in the sector: detecting persistent situations of oversupply or scarcity, territorial imbalances, and analysing excessive concentrations of certain operators (in capital markets, positions capable of altering price formation are scrutinised, while in real estate, opacity and fragmentation are the norm).
Consumer protection should occupy a central place: abusive contracts, opaque clauses, misleading advertising, fraud in off-plan promotions, or risks associated with new forms of investment such as crowdfunding or tokenisation. Likewise, the fight against money laundering could be another of its regular tasks, as well as the development of common information standards for buyers and sellers: comparable metrics, costs, property condition, energy efficiency, legal risks, etc. In summary, help with its supervision to form a more transparent and mature market
Naturally, Spain does not need another layer of bureaucracy that duplicates competencies, slows down projects, or turns supervision into interventionism. Such an institution would only serve if it were purely technical, independent, and designed to coordinate. After all, if we supervise the markets where we invest part of our savings, it is hard to justify lower levels of transparency and information where millions of families concentrate almost everything they have… should we not aspire to equivalent standards?
