Sun, sea, sand and paella on tap. That’s what I want in my retirement years. My husband, myself, and our two kids are super-fans of Spain and the Canary Islands.
We go annually and love our holidays there. I adore the culture, the people, the weather – the lot. My daughter is even learning Spanish and tries it out on the friendly locals. Often, as we stroll along the sun-kissed beaches, flip flops in hand, I’ll stop, breathe in the sea air and say wistfully: “I really want to live here one day.”
My husband Cornel feels the same way. In fact, we’ve been planning to make this dream a reality.
The idea was that we would wait for the kids (now age 16 and 11) to leave home and get established in their careers, and then try to buy a little pied-a-terre to escape to a few times a year. We don’t want a villa or a mansion, just a little space we can use as a base and then live out our years in the sun. I had dreams of my own children marrying, having kids of their own and coming out to holiday with us, and of leaving it to them one day so they could carry on that tradition.
Not any more. The Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez is proposing a 100 per cent tax on non-EU citizens buying properties. There’s a housing crisis in Spain, he says, and he believes the tax hike on property purchased could deter non-resident foreign buyers from snapping up properties.
He said: “The West faces a decisive challenge: to not become a society divided into two classes, the rich landlords and poor tenants.”
It made me choke on my Sangria. How is having one property as a holiday home creating a divided society? Places like Spain rely heavily on tourism and expats to boost their economy. Why shoot themselves in the foot like this, especially after Brexit meant even fewer Brits felt they could up sticks and move there?
Sanchez pointed to the 27,000 houses and flats bought by non-EU residents last year: “They didn’t do it to live in them, they didn’t do it for their families to have a place to live, they did it to speculate, to make money from them.” In some cases, perhaps. But the average family who has saved to purchase a holiday home is simply not in the same league as an oligarch or investment company buying up a whole corner of Mayfair, for example. It’s not comparable. Yet my family and I, who want so much to be part of Spanish life, would be treated the same as hedge funds and the super wealthy.
If the Spanish PM does impose these rules, then he will be the person creating two tiers: the average person who will no longer buy property at all versus the wealthy for whom a tax hike won’t even matter. No one else will be able to afford anything like an aspirational holiday home.
Sánchez’s comments have made me rethink my plans and dreams. Such high taxes would definitely make it harder, perhaps impossible, for ordinary people like me to buy a small holiday home abroad. Times that by hundreds, even thousands of people in the same position, and I feel Spain may regret their decision to alienate Brits. This move won’t do anything meaningful to tackle Spain’s housing crisis.
I’m going on holiday to the Canaries in Spain again this year. I wonder if this year I’ll walk on the sands dreaming of buying property there as usual. Or should I – and people with dreams like me – take the Spanish PM’s sledgehammer hint that we Brits are no longer wanted, and look elsewhere?
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