Brick company is one of the most important Catalan family-owned real estate companies. It has been in existence for 75 years and in its history has been able to successfully survive a number of crises, including the situation in the global economy in 2008.
However, today it is time for the company to leave its native Barcelona and move to the capital Madrid. This was announced a few weeks earlier in a message from Goma Costa, head of the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Catalonia.
Luis Marsa, a veteran of the construction industry and president of La Llave de Oro, points out that today legislative changes in Catalonia, approaches to urban planning and administration of the industry have proved harmful to the healthy development of real estate business.
In addition to bureaucratic delays in such aspects as the issuance of land for new construction, there are also problems such as a chronic shortage of public servants in vital positions. You can't jump higher than your head, so even if the government of the autonomous community suddenly decided to take the real estate market seriously, they simply wouldn't have enough workers.
Madrid, according to Mars, is a completely different world. Dynamically developing, efficient and with adequate development plans. That is why Brick decided to bet on this region. They already have three projects in development:
- 260 houses in "Las Sedas", "Alcalá de Henares" area;
- A series of family houses in "Villanueva de la Cañada";
- Development of a land plot in the south-east of the capital ("Los Hijones"), where it is planned to build 1,300 residential units.
Costa describes the situation in a broader perspective, pointing out that many developers are leaving Barcelona for Madrid today. This process is accelerating, driven, among other things, by the chronic shortage of land for construction in the region and problems with obtaining licenses.
There is also a purely mercantile reason for relocation — Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau has promoted a decree that now developers are required to allocate up to 30% of the area in their new projects for social housing. A large number of companies would rather completely move to a new market than cooperate with the new policy of the city authorities.
At the same time, the Barcelona City Council argues that developers should be jointly responsible for the development of the community's housing stock, since it is their main source of income. The Council also emphasizes the non-randomness of the new policy - it was the result of concrete and consistent political decisions of various municipal authorities.
Current data show that in 2022 the volume of housing construction in Barcelona fell to the level of 2015. Only 1,454 new apartment projects were approved for construction in 2022. This is 48% less than in 2021 and 38% less than in 2019. However, it should be pointed out here that the high indicators of 2021 were turned out due to the completion of previously frozen or delayed projects. Basically, these were large projects that were released to the market almost at once.
Information from the Madrid Data Architecture Institute (COAM) for the capital also indicates a drop in the volume of new construction compared to 2019, but it is not as sharp as in Barcelona. In 2022, 6,596 new apartment projects were approved, which is 29.38% less than in 2021 (9,340). This is also 29.45% less than in 2019 (9,350).
An extremely important indicator is the number of approved residential projects per resident of the region. In Madrid, one new residential project is approved for 303 residents of the community, and in Catalonia, one new residential project is approved for every 505 residents of the community.