Golden Visas 'make life easier,' says real estate agency as interest grows amid scheme's last days

The housing crisis across Spain pushed PM Pedro Sánchez to announce the end of the Golden Visa scheme on April 3, 2024. Since his speech last year, real estate agencies have recorded a "slight increase in interest," although the program has "never been the main reason to decide to invest in Catalonia."

Christoph Toelle, managing partner at Sotheby's International Realty Barcelona and Costa Brava, calls the Golden Visa scheme a "nice thing to have."

"At the end of the day, the Golden Visa, for our customers, makes their lives easier," as it allows them to stay in Spain for more than three months without returning home.

The real estate agency is "specialized" in offering products over €800,000, which is higher than the €500,000 minimum investment required to apply for a Golden Visa. For them, the scheme has "never had a huge impact."

"It was a bonus for our customers; there was less paperwork and fewer problems compared to when applying for visas with longer residency permits. It was convenient," Toelle told Catalan News.

"The main reason behind the growing interest was not to obtain residency, but more to take advantage of the convenience that obtaining a Golden Visa means," Toelle said, as it allowed investors to "enter and exit as many times as someone wished and to move around the Schengen Area freely."

He pointed out that after many non-EU nationals heard about Sánchez's announcement last April, they decided to join the scheme and ask for information, "but it was not the main reason why they were interested in buying a property in Barcelona."

The Catalan real estate agents' guild, API, has also noticed that the scheme has "generated a lot of interest" over the last year, as Carles Sala, institutional director of the legal department at API, told this media outlet.

Some interested parties even "preferred to pay €500,000 for a house to obtain a Golden Visa" despite the property being valued at a lower price.

Introduced in 2013 by the conservative People's Party to attract foreign investment, the program grants visas to foreign investors who commit at least €500,000 in Spanish real estate, as well as those who invest in company shares or public debt.

Data shared with Catalan News in January after a transparency request to Spain's foreign ministry shows that the number of Golden Visas issued until November 2024 surpassed those registered in 2023. These two years account for 60% of the 1,248 residency permits granted since 2020.

Most of these residency permits were granted to Chinese citizens, followed by Iranians, US citizens, and Brits.

Almost all assets in Catalonia were recorded in the Barcelona region. Of the 314 registered, 308 were in Barcelona, three in Tarragona, three in Girona, and none in the western province of Lleida.

No real impact

Data shared by Spain's foreign ministry with Catalan News showed that 314 requests for golden visas were made in Catalonia from January 1 to November 20, 2024.

With those figures, Teolle finds it "hard to see that this will mean a fundamental change to increase housing availability in Spain," as the percentage of operations is "tiny."

The API guild shares this view, as it considers that the decision will not help solve the housing crisis. 

"It just has a headline impact," Carles Sala told Catalan News.

He considers that the "gap between available houses and the ones being created is causing a short, mid, and long term housing problem, and the Golden Visa will not be the magic wand that will solve it."

Sala said that the scheme was created to tackle a specific issue and was proposed as a "timely solution" at a time that should have had a limited period. However, in Spain, "many timely approaches are transformed into structural proposals" without a proper budget to finance them.

Increasing threshold to €1 million

According to Toelle, many people who invest in housing to obtain a residency permit do so because they "would like to spend more time in Spain."

He said, "if they stay more than three months here, they have more time to spend and invest in services, construction, restaurants, theaters, shopping, and so on. So they create value for the Spanish economy," he said.

Instead of abolishing the program altogether, "it would probably have been better" to increase the threshold to €1 million instead of the current €500,000. This way, there would not be that much competitiveness in the mid-level range housing market from international buyers.

It would allow those who spend more to stay longer in Spain "without a lot of paperwork," the managing partner at Sotheby's International Realty Barcelona and Costa Brava told Catalan News.