The housing crisis also impacts employment: reducing housing prices by 30% would create 410,000 jobs.

The general secretary of the CCOO (Working Workers' Union), Unai Sordo , has been repeatedly stating that the difficulties in accessing or renting housing due to its high cost will be the main challenge for job creation in the coming years . He reiterated this point during the union's 13th Confederal Congress, where he was reelected to the position this Saturday and where he offered a series of data based on a study the union conducted on the subject. According to the estimates projected in this report, to which EL PAÍS has had access, reducing the cost of housing by 30% would mean the creation of 410,000 new jobs in five years and a boost in aggregate demand of €25 billion, as households would allocate this surplus to consumption.

The text, prepared by the union's research team, addresses the issue of housing as "Spain's main social and economic problem." It describes it as such because it is an impediment for families in accessing "a basic good" and because of the "income extraction" this causes, which, for example, negates the recent wage increases. Taking this as a starting point, the study analyzes the macroeconomic effects that a hypothetical 30% reduction in housing prices would have on the market (including the labor market), both in the short term (5 years) and in the medium term (10 years). That is, what impact would it have on those households most exposed to the cost of housing—whether through renting or buying—as well as on aggregate demand (the total sum of all goods and services that a country's different economic agents are willing to purchase) and on job creation.

“Lowering housing costs by 30% would have a very significant impact on the macroeconomic level,” the text states. “In the short term (five years), this could boost aggregate demand by €25 billion, which would lead to the creation of 410,000 jobs,” it adds. In a more medium-term projection, ten years down the line, the number of jobs would increase to 780,000, and this reduction in prices “would generate a boost of €50 billion.”

According to the document from Comisiones Obreras (Workers' Commissions), in the case of rentals, and taking the INE's Household Budget Survey as a reference, a reduction of almost a third of the price of these rents would free up €7.042 billion—representing 30% of the total €23.472 billion allocated annually to these payments. "If we take into account the different propensities to consume (landlord-owner and renter household) and assume that 25% of landlords are institutional and have no propensity to consume, we can estimate that between €2.4 and €2.6 billion [of the total €7.042 billion] would go to consumption," the text details.

In the case of a home purchase with a mortgage, the study also expands the impact of this 30% discount. Based on the INE Mortgage Statistics, it is concluded that the average monthly mortgage payment is €730 for new buyers, which represents an annual aggregate amount of €3.711 billion. Thus, by subtracting the projected discount, €1.114 billion in income would be "freed up," "of which between €739 and €933 billion would go toward consumption," the report states.

Replicating the same assumption, but this time for the down payment on a home purchase —the average of which is €85,000, according to Bank of Spain statistics—it means that €36.254 billion is spent annually on this. A 30% reduction in the down payment "would correspond to a total amount of €10.876 billion, which would imply between €1.443 billion and €1.823 billion in additional expenditure," the report explains.

Safe investment

Before carrying out the simulation of the reduction, the CCOO report portrays how home ownership has historically been considered almost a safe haven for families. So much so that buying a home has been the preferred way to save and invest at the same time, with virtually no risk. "To this day, it remains more profitable than any alternative investment , whether productive or financial," the union's report argues. In fact, to support this assertion, it notes that at the end of 2024, the gross annual profitability of housing (rent plus change in housing price) stood at 12.9%.

"A double-digit return that far exceeds low-risk alternatives for families, such as term deposits (annual return of 2.2%) or investments in 10-year government bonds and debentures (annual return of 3.2%)," he adds. "In the long term, the return on investment in housing is 4.5 times that obtained from public debt and 52% higher than that achieved by productive business investment," the text concludes.