More multi-property owners and more people without any apartment: the gap skyrockets in the Islands

PalmaReal estate ownership is concentrating in fewer hands in the Balearic Islands. Official data confirm that owners of a single house or apartment are becoming fewer and, like pure communicating vessels, the group of multi-property owners is increasing. In less than two decades, the proportion of cadastral holders with a single urban property has gone from 64.78% in 2007 to 54.61% in 2026. Meanwhile, all brackets of multi-property owners up to 25 properties per person are growing, and the jump is especially pronounced among small and medium-sized holders.

The data from the General Directorate of Cadastre outline a progressive transformation of the structure of ownership in the Islands. Because if the owners of a single real estate property are decreasing significantly, those who own two or more already account for 45% of the total number of owners, a figure never reached before. The evolution and breakdown of these multi-property owners perfectly show how accumulation is advancing at a very high rate, as the figures are from the last 20 years. Specifically, holders of two urban properties have gone from representing 18.58% to 20.85%; those who own three, from 7.73% to 10.21%; those with four, from 3.56% to 5.29%, and those with five, from 1.83% to 2.85%.

But it is from here on that the change becomes even more evident. Holders of between six and ten properties, a small group in absolute terms, are experiencing an exponential increase: they were 2.51% in 2007 and now already represent 4.64%, an increase of 84.9%. Those who accumulate between 11 and 25 have also grown strongly, from 0.76% to 1.31%.

Therefore, the picture that emerges from the data is not only –nor mainly– that of an increase in large holders. The big change is taking place among small and medium-sized multi-owners. “The general trend is that we are moving from ownership to multi-ownership,” summarizes geographer and UIB researcher Sònia Vives. As she explains, the growth “is concentrated above all on small and medium multi-owners,” particularly among those who have between two and five properties, while large holders remain comparatively more stable.

The data is from cadastral ownership of urban real estate, a category that does not exclusively equate to homes: it also includes garages, storage rooms, premises, and other urban properties. Therefore, these figures serve primarily to observe how the distribution of urban property evolves, rather than to state exactly how many homes each owner has.

Property, social border

For Vives, this movement has consequences that go far beyond cadastral statistics. Real estate property has become, he maintains, one of the elements that most determine social position. “Home ownership right now is the element that most conditions which part of the social stratification you are in,” he explains. On one side are those who have sufficient assets to acquire more properties and turn them into a source of income. On the other, a population that has increasing difficulties accessing their first property and is left at the mercy of an extraordinarily strained rental market. “This means that there are more people who are becoming poorer and more people who are becoming richer,” points out Vives.

The mechanism, according to the researcher, feeds on itself. Those who have to allocate a very high part of their income to rent have less saving capacity and, therefore, more difficulties entering the purchase market. Those who already have assets, on the other hand, can obtain income from them and have more resources to continue acquiring properties.

Vives places here precisely the increase in average owners shown by the Cadastre data: people who acquire more than one property to rent it out and who can progressively become rentiers. “The rentiers who are growing are getting richer and those who can no longer be owners and have to go to the rental market are getting poorer,” explains the professor from the UIB. From this derives, she concludes, “an ever-growing social polarization”.

The diagnosis coincides with that made by the Mallorca Tenants' Union, established this very year. One of its spokespersons, Òscar Martínez, also places the focus precisely on this intermediate landlord who often remains outside the debate between the individual who owns a single apartment and large investment funds. "The majority of rentiers are small landlords who own five or six properties," pointed out Martínez in an interview granted in May. His explanation is that whoever already has assets is also the one who has more capacity to gather the down payment necessary to acquire another property. "In the end, properties end up in fewer hands," he concluded.

The Union thus questions one of the most widespread images of the rental market: that of the individual landlord who simply owns a second home. Martínez considers that housing has progressively become an asset to obtain profitability and insists that the root of the problem cannot be attributed simply to foreigners who buy in Mallorca. "The responsibility is not the foreigners', but those who sell at these prices," he argues.

The Union calculates that more than half of tenants spend more than 30% of their income on housing and warns that in Mallorca finding a rental below 900 euros is already proving extraordinarily difficult.

A global phenomenon

A study published this year by the Ministry of Social Rights and Consumer Affairs in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy of the CSIC, specifically dedicated to the rental market, portrays that more than half of the homes rented by individuals in the State are in the hands of owners who rent out two or more. Specifically, multi-landlords concentrate 52.8% of the homes rented by individuals.

In Palma, this proportion rises to around 63%, one of the highest figures among the large cities analyzed. The result fits with the idea defended by the Tenants' Union: the owner with a single rental home no longer explains the structure of the market on their own, even though very different patrimonial profiles continue to exist.

The report, titled The problem of real estate concentration in Spain detects that, between 2008 and 2022, households with a single property decreased by 22%, while those that owned two or more grew by 54%. In parallel, households without any property increased by 63%. The trend coincides with that shown by the cadastral data of the Balearic Islands: the weight of the owner of a single asset is receding while that of multi-property owners is increasing.

For Sònia Vives, the fact that this trend has special intensity in a territory like the Balearic Islands is not a coincidence either. The researcher places this transformation within a broader state process of financialization of housing and expansion of the asset economy, but considers that the consequences are accentuated in heavily tourist-oriented economies.

“It is not a trend exclusive to the Balearic Islands, but of the entire State, but it is true that this process is more intense within tourist-oriented economies,” she explains. In the case of the Islands, Vives also adds the strength of foreign real estate investment. The entry of capital with a purchasing power higher than that of a large part of the resident population increases, according to the researcher, inequalities that are already produced by the accumulation of wealth itself.

The real estate sector shares the diagnosis regarding the extreme difficulty of accessing housing, but emphasizes a different cause. The president of the Official College of Real Estate Agents of the Balearic Islands, José Miguel Artieda, has said on different occasions that the Islands are immersed in a “housing supply crisis.” According to Artieda, the lack of available properties in the face of existing demand makes it difficult for both new buyers and people who already have housing but need another one to access it.