US Construction Firm Promises to Build Thousands of Home in Spain

US Construction Firm Promises to Build Thousands of Home in Spain

Seems like lots of countries are coming to invest and

build in Spain once again the carinas are arriving.

A lot of time and thought goes into every decision made by a major Wall Street investment firm. This is why many will welcome the news that Lone Star Funds – which began investing in the construction sector of Spain back in 2015 – have promised to increase their Spanish house building over the next few years.

This private equity-backed investment firm built 2,000 homes across 2016, and are pledging to build over 3,200 homes each year leading up to 2020; which says a lot about the way the Spanish property market has matured.

In the years between 2009 and 2016, bank lending to the Spanish real estate industry dropped 65%. This brought the construction industry of Spain to the point where any large-scale construction project would need significant private backing to succeed.

This meant that many Spanish developers were left out in the cold, hoping to receive more money from the bank or the government. Analysts say that US firms are a breed unto themselves, though.

Fernando Rodriguez, the general director of R.R. de Acuña& Asociados, a Madrid real estate firm, says that Lone Star uses an Anglo-Saxon model; meaning that they research every little detail and won’t build property in a place where demand won’t exist for the next two years at least. This approach is just what is needed by the sector, which was damaged by the Spanish method of just building whatever, whenever, and wherever. Spanish developers would just build as many houses as they wanted, which is a bad strategy.

There were around 675,000 new homes built in Spain each year between 1997 and 2006. The result was that around a million-and-a-half properties were left empty or not even finished during the crash. Most of these homes have found an owner now, but many of them are likely never going to be sold. They were built for urbanisations and towns that were never completed. Only 39,890 new homes were built in the country during 2015.

Even so, there’s now a lack of new properties in the most popular areas of Spain such as Madrid, Barcelona, and the Costa del Sol. There isn’t enough of a supply to keep up with the demand in these areas. Market analysts say that the plans Lone Star have to build a select number of houses in select areas shows that they have definitely done their research.

The wider Spanish property market – including resales – grew by over 13% last year. It’s expected that the growth will continue in the double digits for 2017 as the market continues to “normalise” and reach levels unseen since the boom period between 2007 and 2008.