Barcelona is the Spanish city where people pay the most for a room per month at an average of £475, according to the experts at Idealista.
Such is the cost of renting a room in the Catalan capital that workers on the minimum wage are using nearly half their income just to cover the cost of a roof over their heads. Since June, the national minimum wage in Spain has been fixed at £1,113 (€1,323) per month.
Despite the spiralling rental prices, overall rental stock across Spain has risen by a staggering 29 percent and in Barcelona alone the figure is 26 percent.
Curiously, notwithstanding the increase in rental supply, rental prices have gone up 13 percent in the last year, according to estate agent Incasòl.
Òscar Gorgues, manager of the Chamber of Urban Property of Barcelona, told ARA: “We are witnessing a more intensive use of housing: there are people who rent out the rooms of the homes they own, people who specialise in renting out rooms, and tenants who do subletting. Some owners manage the rooms in their home without living there.
“Regulating this market is very complicated. Regulating the price, which is what the regional government intended, would end up generating a black market, where you can escape very easily.”
He added that rooms being rented on the black market are rife, as he said: “Many of the rooms that are sublet are not on the market: what we see online is the tip of the iceberg.”
Last year, Enric Aragonès, spokesman for the Catalan Tenants’ Union, warned: “We have the highest rental prices we have ever had.
“And this translates not only into people spending over half of their salary to pay rent, but also more and more families being forced to live in substandard conditions because they can’t access decent housing.
“These are people who live in stores, on ground floors or basements that do not have a certificate of habitability.”
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