With the housing law recently approved by Congress and about to pass through the Senate , the Government is working to have the price index ready as soon as possible that will allow rent control to be applied to those communities that request it. "We are going to try to finish this process as quickly as possible so that it is ready with market prices," confirm sources from the Ministry of Mobility, Transport and Urban Agenda. The Government hopes to fine-tune the final details in the coming months in order to guarantee an updated and reliable index this year. To do this, it will look at the Catalan model . "We are going to improve the current index to update it. The law has established that we will take advantage of what is well done from a legal point of view. The indexes that may exist in other territories such as Catalan can serve us to establish a homogenization mechanism with the state index", point out the same sources.
The truth is that the index is already (almost, almost) ready. The base will be the index itself created by this ministry a few years ago , when former minister José Luis Ábalos was still the head. At the beginning of 2020, Ábalos announced the publication of the first official rental price index (until then , there were no public statistics on the matter). The idea is to take advantage of this information, complement it with that of some communities and establish a homologation to be Country Email List able to use it in the state index. What works and what doesn't about the new housing law Apartment terrace housing Since passing law 11/2020 on rent regulation, Catalonia limits prices in stressed areas by establishing a reference price index as a basis . To calculate it, the index uses data from Incasòl, the Catalan Land Institute , where it is mandatory to present deposits for rented homes.We are going to improve the current index and work to update it. We have started a process of updating the index to be able to adjust it to current times, and from now on we will do it in coordination with the communities," say Ministry sources.
The Government index is more precise because it crosses data from the Tax Agency (income declarations of owners and tenants) with other sources such as the cadastre to offer in detail the average rental price at the regional, municipal, district or even level. census section, if you will. The problem is that the Ministry's current index is outdated and only offers data until 2021 , almost 2 years ago. Basically, because the bulk of the data on which the statistics are based is tax information, which has the actual offset of the income tax return . This means that, if a community wanted to declare a stressed area right now, it would set the market price limit for rentals in 2021, not 2023, and since then they have been able to continue rising . The Catalan index, on the other hand, shows data updated until to the information available on the Catalan Housing Agency website. One year of difference between the state index and the Catalan one, a gap that the Executive is now studying to reduce by focusing on mechanisms that allow obtaining more updated information, such as data on bail deposits, which also exist in other communities.