The Palma City Council has definitively approved the statutes and bases of the compensation board for the Son Ximelis Strategic Residential Project, a situation that opens the way to the urbanization of 143,649 square meters, where 1,080 homes can be built, according to municipal data. Of the total, 530 homes will have some type of public protection. The project had initial approval, but final approval was necessary to step on the accelerator.

Palma is processing three Strategic Residential Projects (PRE) with more than 6,000 apartments that have taken advantage of the law that allows these initiatives to be expedited—the Law of Urgent Measures for Obtaining Land—as confirmed to ARA Baleares by the real estate developers' association Proinba. These projects benefit from a single procedure that combines all the steps that were previously handled sequentially—urban planning, land readjustment, and urbanization—reducing the timeframe from up to ten years to between 18 and 24 months. "Even so, these timeframes can no longer be shortened, and we cannot expect anything very soon. In any case, these buildings will be under construction much sooner than if we had processed them through the conventional channels," explains Proinba's president, Óscar Carreras. In addition to the three projects being processed as strategic, there are two others, also "very advanced," Carreras confirms. All of this paints a picture with approximately 11,000 new apartments, some 5,500 of which, as stipulated by the regulations, "will be protected or price-limited, a significant portion of which will be managed by Ibavi to serve those most urgently needing housing who meet the requirements," the president points out. To access the price-limited apartments, beneficiaries will have to prove a minimum of five years of residency in the Balearic Islands. Regarding the possibility of building apartments in transition zones (rural land), which the regulations also allow, the president of the developers' association believes that it is not possible in the short term, partly due to the uncertainty generated by the appeal before the Constitutional Court. "As an association, we opposed it. Urban and developable land must be exhausted first, and in this sense, municipalities can always choose this option," he said.