Ramón Bultó is worried about the future. Or rather his future living for rent at 57 years old. «Of course the situation worries me. I may extend my working life a few years to increase my pension, but even so it is likely that I will have to go to a town, very far from my daughters, friends and the city where I was born and raised.» He lives in an apartment in the Buenavista neighborhood of Getafe (Madrid) with his eldest daughter Gabriela, 21 years old and a student, and works in the IT department for a multinational. She pays 751 euros a month because three years ago, with the support of the Madrid Tenants’ Union, she refused to sign a new contract of 1,100 euros with the Fidere vulture fund. Iván Aranda, 46 years old, lives on rent in the district of Arganzuela (Madrid), is separated and has two children. He works in renewable energy consulting and recognizes his luck, although he does not hide his uncertainty and restlessness. «Today I have a good job, but it would be difficult to maintain the level of spending if next year I didn’t have it. I’m worried about what will happen when I retire, spending that amount of money every month that doesn’t translate into an asset that I own and after 20 years not having a place to drop dead. If there were a rental ecosystem with sufficient supply and at reasonable prices, everything would be much calmer.» He pays 1,300 euros a month, a low price for the area—where up to 1,700 euros are being asked—because the landlord is his friend. The place is not a whim: he has rented near where his ex-partner lives “so that the logistics with the children are more or less comfortable,” he says. There are many examples like these. Renting is no longer only and exclusively for young people. More and more older people are forced into this market due to the impossibility of buying a home. They want to escape from an uncertain and expensive rent. Spain, historically a country of homeowners where the house has been the best pension plan, is facing a new scenario. And it does not seem to be prepared for what is to come: the aging of the Spanish population in a rental. The baby boom generation—born between the late 1950s and mid-1970s—will be the first to collide with this harsh reality. “Time bomb”. This is how Josep Oliver, emeritus professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, describes it, who speaks of the urgent need for the Government and public policies to attend to this group that is approaching or is of retirement age. Time moves against him. «Access to own a home is increasingly difficult, mainly because people cannot save for the down payment on a flat due to the high prices we pay for rent. People are getting older, which makes it more difficult to save and be granted a mortgage that allows you to pay for a home in the time you have left until retirement. This is going to explode,» says Ramón Bultó. Although the bulk of rentals in Spain continue to be in the hands of people between 30 and 40 years old, CaixaBank Research confirms that the weight of tenants aged 45 to 65 has increased in recent years, since before the pandemic. And INE data confirm that this group continues to rise every year. In 2024, the latest figure available, the number of households aged 45 to 65 living under this modality was 14.9%, more than double that of 2004 (6.5%). The group headed by a person aged 65 or over was 5.2% in 2024, when two decades ago it was 3.2%. This increase reflects a structural transformation of the market, where rentals are no longer exclusive to young people and affect a broader age range. Professor Oliver dissects it. «By age, in Spain 32% of all rentals correspond to households whose reference person is 50 years old or older.» In terms of accessibility (rent divided by family income), they pay around 25% of their income. “The level of effort is less high, because they generally tend to have higher incomes,” they say at CaixaBank. Now, things change when the magnifying glass is placed on the level of family income. “We see concentration of rent in the poorest households,” says Oliver. More than 37% of the rent is concentrated in the third of households with the lowest income and they allocate 44% of these to pay rent, well above the 30% acceptable maximum. If other basic expenses are added, such as supplies, these households are left with less than half their salary free. “In this context of aging, there is a group, those aged 50 and over, who are not in the public debate, who focus only on young people, when in reality their weight is only 8% (under 30 years old),” explains Oliver. Elena Martínez, sociologist and head of Research and Evaluation at Provivienda, agrees: “There is a socially accepted image that housing is a problem that affects youth, but we have to take into account that within the rest of the age groups the reality is very heterogeneous and we find very worrying situations.” The need to resort to leasing responds to several factors. On the one hand, it is the natural market for middle-aged immigrants. On the other hand, prices do not stop rising and the conditions of access to financing are tougher. “After successive crises, a part of the population between 50 and 60 years old lacks the necessary capital to face the entry of a mortgage,” says Ana Solozábal, vice president of the Madrid Association of Real Estate Companies (Amadei).
Divorces and separations
Furthermore, “there are more and more separations in nuclear households that go from needing one home to needing two in the middle of their life cycle and also more single-person households, with less savings capacity,” says Elena Martínez. For this group, renting is a forced decision: “They cannot find or cannot afford to own housing,” says José María Alfaro, president of the National Federation of Real Estate Associations. And he adds: “There is a process of decapitalization of middle-aged people.” This is the case of Iván Aranda who, in addition, has experienced firsthand the two burdens of the market: both prices and supply. “Of 30 interactions with advertisements on portals, I did not manage to see any apartment.” And, of course, you cannot buy an apartment similar to the current one, with three bedrooms. He does not believe that the problem is rent per se, but rather doing it in the current context of limited supply and unreasonable prices. «I’m trying to think of a plan, but the truth is that I can’t think of any. Rather, I prefer to cross my fingers to continue maintaining my situation and being aware of the luck I have had with the apartment.» Neither does Ramón: «If the Administrations protected the tenant, renting should not be negative. My parents lived their entire lives with an indefinite old rental contract.» Pedro Martínez is 65 years old and, due to various consequences left by Covid, he receives an unemployment subsidy along with the Minimum Living Income supplement, around 650 euros per month. He has always lived for rent, in different cities, since he has worked as a cook. With the support of Provivienda, he has been able to access a subsidized apartment managed by the public housing company of the Provincial Council of Granada. Getting older and getting older in rent is an explosive mix as the market is today. “In many cases, it leads tenants to residential exclusion,” says Lena Martínez. And the older you are, the worse: 22.7% of households headed by people over 65 years of age are in residential exclusion. “Among people over 65 years of age, the level of effort is higher, as is the case among the group of young people,” they indicate in CaixaBank Research. For the Provivienda sociologist, “renting has become a factor of economic vulnerability at all stages and of course also in old age.” The loss of ownership is not limited to the youngest cohorts, but progressively extends to the rest of the age groups. According to analyzes by Provivienda, a non-profit entity, at the beginning of the 2000s, 66% of young households resided in a home they owned. Today that proportion has been reduced to 31.8%. «In some cases, entry into the property is increasingly delayed in the life cycle. In others, a growing number of households go through their entire residential itinerary in rental,» says Elena Martínez.
