On Friday 2 October, the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Spanish parliament, repealed two housing decrees that the government had approved three days earlier, one of which suspended until the end of 2030 the evictions of people with no alternative accommodation when the owner is a large landlord. It did so by 178 votes to 172 on the first text and by 184 to 166 on the second, margins of six and eighteen votes, nine days after a woman of 87 had been evicted by court order from the home where she had lived for more than seventy years, and five days before that woman died, on Wednesday 7 October, in a Madrid hospital. The sequence of dates needs no adjectives. For a decade Eurostat has measured a gap that hardly anyone wishes to face, the one between what it costs to buy a roof and what it costs to rent one, and that gap is the real subject of this text. A home that appreciates far faster than the service it provides needs someone to cover the difference, and that someone has an address and a tenancy agreement.
Three days between signature and repeal
Royal Decree-Law 26/2026, dated 29 September and published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the official gazette, the following day according to Ara, contained measures of substance. It suspended eviction proceedings against people with no alternative accommodation when the home belongs to a large landlord, and kept that suspension in place until 31 December 2030. It set an extraordinary extension of expiring tenancies, capped annual rent updates until 31 December 2027 and barred, until 31 December 2028, entities whose corporate purpose includes buying property from acquiring homes at less than seventy per cent of their appraised market value. Sumar drove the second decree, at the request of the Sindicato de Inquilinas, Spain’s tenants’ union, to introduce automatic renewal of rental contracts.
The first text won 172 votes in favour, from the PSOE, Sumar, ERC, Bildu, the PNV, Podemos, the BNG, Coalición Canaria and Compromís, against 178 from the PP, Vox, Junts and the UPN. The second drew 166 in favour and 184 against, with the PNV and Coalición Canaria moving into the rejecting camp, and the PNV argues that the text penalises small landlords. A pause on the arithmetic is in order. According to the seat distribution published by Euronews, the PP, Vox and the UPN total 170, and 171 with the deputy Ortega Smith of the Mixed Group. Junts’s seven complete the 178 votes of the rejection, so that, if the rest of the count had held, its vote separates a 172 to 171 from a 172 to 178. This is a reading of the figures and not anyone’s statement.
Between the signed decree and the repealed decree there was room for one case, and the case has a name. María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, aged 87, had lived on Calle Alcalde Sainz de Baranda, in the Retiro district of Madrid, for more than seventy years. The owner of the building, Urbagestión, had gone to court to recover the flat, arguing that the old-rent contract had lapsed some time earlier. According to the newspaper El Español, the Supreme Court upheld the view that the second succession to the contract had a limited duration, and the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights asked Spain to guarantee adequate alternative housing while the matter was examined. The eviction was carried out on 23 September, after three failed attempts. Maricarmen paid about five hundred euros a month under her old contract, according to Ara. The rent put to her varies by source. elDiario.es puts the figure the company demanded at 2,650 euros, and other outlets give lower amounts that none attributes precisely.
On 28 September, after about four hours of negotiation mediated by the Empresa Municipal de la Vivienda y Suelo, the municipal housing company, her representatives reached an agreement with Urbagestión. Maricarmen would have returned home on an eight-year contract at a rent of about five hundred euros, similar to what she paid before, capped at thirty per cent of her net income, once the doctors of the Gregorio Marañón hospital discharged her. Her lawyer, Beatriz Duro, confirmed the deal, and Maricarmen herself gave her approval on Tuesday and, according to Euronews, was very happy. Her belongings were still in the flat, so no new move would have been needed. The media consulted report no statement from the company on the agreement. The Sindicato de Inquilinas kept up the camp in the Puerta del Sol, begun on 26 September, and its spokeswoman, Carolina Vilariño, summed up the meaning of the protest in a sentence that the repeal of 2 October made almost ironic. “This goes beyond Maricarmen. The royal decree is the first step.”
Maricarmen never went back. She died on Wednesday 7 October in the Gregorio Marañón hospital, where she had been an inpatient since the eviction, according to El Independiente. None of the sources consulted gives the cause of death, so this text establishes no causal link between the eviction and the death. elDiario.es reports, for its part, that she had been left bedridden by the after-effects of the eviction. The Sindicato de Inquilinas says the agreement would have returned her to her home but came too late, and calls what happened avoidable. According to elDiario.es, Urbagestión will now be able to put the flat up for rent.
A roof worth more than it yields
Between 2015 and the third quarter of 2025, house prices in the European Union rose by 64.9% and rents by 21.8%, according to Eurostat. Between the fourth quarter of 2024 and that of 2025 the rise was 5.5% for prices and 3.2% for rents.
The figure contradicts one of the most repeated sentences in public debate, that rents have soared across Europe. What has soared, above all, is the purchase price, almost three times as much as rents. That rents rise more slowly does not make them bearable, because they are paid every month out of a salary that has followed neither curve, but neither does it allow the problem to be reduced to the greed of landlords. That greed exists and operates within a system that treats property as a savings account with a roof on top. Rent then serves a precise function, according to the reading this text proposes, that of paying the interest on a valuation the tenant did not decide and from which he or she will never benefit.
The Madrid case illustrates the mechanism. The protest in the Puerta del Sol starts from tenancies that expire and are renewed at prices the tenant cannot pay. A warning is nonetheless needed, one that militant accounts tend to omit. Part of the problem escapes the courtroom, because price evicts without any need for a judge, and it is an interpretation that the repealed decrees mainly protected those already inside. Nothing in them built housing.
Who owns the roof
To see what yield is expected of a roof, it is enough to look at one of Europe’s largest residential landlords. At the end of the first half of 2026 Vonovia managed some 528,370 homes of its own. The organic rent of its portfolio grew by 3.6% over the previous twelve months, its adjusted rental EBITDA reached 1,268.6 million euros over the half-year, 3.5% more than a year earlier, and the fair value of its property stood at 85,675.7 million euros on 30 June.
Vonovia’s general meeting approved a dividend of 1.25 euros per share for 2025, that is 1,060,538,816.25 euros in cash, according to its 2026 half-year report.
According to the company, the shareholder base identified up to August 2025, which covers nearly 94% of the capital, split into ninety per cent institutional investors and ten per cent private investors, with a free float of 86% at the end of 2025. The company does not break down on its website who stands behind each institution, and it therefore cannot be stated here in what proportion they are pension funds, insurers or asset managers. What is established is the design. Collective savings invested in housing need housing to yield, and housing yields when rents rise or when the appraisal goes up. The tenant in Berlin pays, without knowing it, a coupon.
Urbagestión belongs to another scale. El Español identifies it as Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión SL, a company specialising in property assets that belongs to a group active in Madrid and Valladolid, and whose real size has not been documented in the sources consulted. Ara describes it as an investment fund, a label that no other source consulted confirms and that this publication does not adopt. Its case teaches something different. For an old-rent flat to become a problem of more than sixteen hundred euros a month no fund is needed, an ordinary company, an appraisal and a court that reads the law strictly are enough.
Switzerland and a housing stock with no slack
Whoever writes from Switzerland cannot treat the European crisis as a foreign phenomenon. On 1 June 2026, according to federal data, the country had 45,493 vacant homes, or 0.93% of the stock, and the canton of Geneva barely 0.31%. The mortgage reference rate stays at 1.25%, so the rule meant to moderate increases in existing rents operates on a stock with very little margin of supply.
The structure of Swiss ownership allows an uncomfortable comparison. A study by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, circulated by Keystone-SDA in November 2025 on the basis of a survey of 228 institutional investors, found that up to 92% of pension funds’ property investments are in Switzerland, that nearly half of respondents plan to increase their direct holdings and that only 3% intend to reduce them. The second pillar, that retirement saving deducted from the pay slip, invests part of its capital in housing, and the housing is let to the insured. The higher the rent, the better the portfolio that will fund a pension performs, and the better the portfolio performs, the less pressure there is for anyone to question the rent. This is an interpretation of the whole and not a documented figure, since the study measures neither the exact residential share nor the effect on prices.
What is voted when a rent is voted
It would be convenient to conclude that the decrees failed through the malice of a few deputies. The truth is more uncomfortable. The rejection by the PP and Vox was predictable and that of Junts proved decisive. On the second text, the PNV relied on an argument that can be disputed but not dismissed, that of the small landlord who lives on a rent. The government, for its part, split its proposal into two texts, a manoeuvre Podemos went so far as to call a trap. What was missing was a housing strategy capable of confronting the gap that Eurostat measures.
The gap is still there, indifferent to the result of the vote. A company pays out more than a billion euros in dividends while its rents grow by 3.6%, and in Madrid a woman of 87 dies without having gone back to her home. The juxtaposition is the author’s, and it does not prove that one thing causes the other. It shows, instead, a continent that has decided that housing is the store of value of its middle classes and of its pensions, and that cannot protect those who live in it without touching those who own it, among whom are, in a proportion this investigation has not been able to measure, the institutions that manage the retirements of the generations to come. Maricarmen obtained an agreement because a lawyer, a union, a camp and sustained press coverage put a name and a face where a figure had been, and even that did not arrive in time. Most European tenants will have neither a camera nor a name in the headlines, and their rent will be decided in a spreadsheet where it appears as a coupon…
G.S.
Sources
- Eurostat, House prices and rents went up in Q4 2025
- BOE, Real Decreto-ley 26/2026, de 29 de septiembre
- Diario de Avisos, El Congreso tumba los decretos de vivienda del Gobierno
- Euronews, El decreto Maricarmen pende de un hilo, qué votará cada partido
- Euronews, Maricarmen acepta el acuerdo y volverá a su casa
- Euronews, Maricarmen podrá volver a su casa pero la acampada en Sol continuará
- Ara, Urbagestión llega a un acuerdo para que Maricarmen vuelva a su casa
- Ara, Desahucios de vulnerables prohibidos hasta 2030 y prórroga de alquileres, las claves de los decretos
- elDiario.es, Muere Maricarmen, la mujer que convirtió su lucha por la vivienda en un clamor que recorrió España
- El Independiente, Muere Maricarmen a los 87 años tras permanecer hospitalizada desde su desahucio en Madrid
- El Español, Urbagestión, la empresa que quiere echar a Maricarmen subiéndole el alquiler
- Vonovia, Half-Year Report 2026
- Vonovia, Shareholder structure
- Conseil fédéral, taux de logements vacants au 1er juin 2026
- Allnews, Le taux de référence pour les loyers maintenu à 1,25 %
- blue News, Pension funds continue to focus on residential real estate despite risks
