"Hello, I have fallen in love with your home. If one day you decide to sell or rent it, please contact me. Have a good day!". There is no logo. Nor the name of a company. Nor a business card. Just a small piece of paper, apparently handwritten, with this message, a name (María) and a phone number. These days, the note has appeared in the mailboxes of several homes in El Molinar, one of Palma's most sought-after neighborhoods. Everything suggests that whoever left it is a person who has fallen in love with a specific house and is trying their luck in case the owner decides to sell it one day. But a simple phone call reveals a very different reality.

In any town or city in the Balearic Islands, you can see how a large portion of the new construction is the work of a foreign developer. German, Swedish, and English families fill the construction signs, except for apartment blocks. We see it in coastal towns, with villas that will sell for at least five million euros, but also in traditional neighborhoods. In the Terreno de Palma area, there are about ten projects that consist of taking a traditional house, part of the urban landscape, with its roof and shutters, and turning it into an eyesore as large as the regulations allow. These speculators are known as investors. People who buy properties taking advantage of the insatiable demand from northern countries and sell them for five or ten times the price. This keeps happening in the name of the free movement of goods and people within the European Union. The trickle of dispossession doesn't stop.

Real estate agencies are dream factories: like Hollywood, but smaller. Or we can consider them, depending on how you look at it, a first step toward living the way Hollywood stars are supposed to. It's curious that, in the age of social media and algorithms, real estate agency windows still display photos of the type they sell: houses, apartments, and building plots (an adjective that has lost much of its meaning because now almost all of them are buildable). But these windows must be effective, because they achieve what they want, which is to attract attention. This is at least the effect they give when we see people stop in front of these windows and open their eyes for a while, sometimes for a long time, in front of the advertisements, which are generally A4 sheets hung on the glass with a suction cup. The sheets in question usually have a printed photo, as well as the main details of the property for sale: location, square footage, room layout (if there is more than one, per room), amenities (if there are any in the house or in the area), and, of course, what everyone wants to see, what everyone wants to know and understand: the price. And this is where a truly important change has occurred.