What happened to rental supply during the debate over the housing decree-laws?

On Tuesday 29 September the Council of Ministers approved two housing decree-laws. The first (RDL 26/2026), published on Wednesday 30 September and in force from Thursday 1 October, included an extraordinary extension of up to two years for contracts whose mandatory renewal period ended before 31 December 2028, a cap on rent updates (none at all if the rent exceeded the reference price index, and up to 2% if it did not), stricter regulation of seasonal and room rentals, and the suspension of evictions of vulnerable households. The second (RDL 27/2026), in force from Friday 2 October, established the renewal of contracts for successive periods of five years, or seven if the landlord is a legal entity, and compensation of at least twelve months’ rent if the landlord did not renew without justified cause. That same Friday, Congress refused to ratify them and they were repealed.

Why supply could react

Many of the measures affected contracts already signed, but they also changed what a landlord could expect from a new one: longer duration, a higher cost to end it and less room to update the price. On top of that, the decrees did not have the votes secured: for three days, anyone with a home on the market did not know under which rules they would sign, or how long those rules would last. With that uncertainty, waiting was cheap: it was enough to pull the listing, or to hold off publishing it. If the effect exists, it should show up in long-term rental listings in the large cities.

Data and controls

What follows are basic descriptives. They draw on our own daily series: for each of the ten most populated cities we take the number of homes listed on idealista for long-term rent and for sale, always using the same search criteria (this is the one for Málaga) and at the same point in the day, so that readings are comparable with one another. We look at relative changes: the cumulative variation between the morning of Tuesday 29 September, before the Council of Ministers, and that of Monday 5 October, after the first weekend without the decrees. The Friday 2 snapshot, taken before the vote, separates the days when the decrees were pending from those after their repeal.

We use two controls. The first is each city’s for-sale listings on those same days: the measures mainly affected rentals, so sales make it possible to net out whatever is common to the market as a whole or to the source itself. The second is each series’ own past: every six-day window starting on a Tuesday between 2 June and 28 September, with the same weekdays and the weekend included, which shows how much listings move in an ordinary week.

What we observe

Rental listings fell in all ten cities. The drop reaches or exceeds 6% in six: Murcia (−12.5%), Madrid (−9.2%), Valencia (−7.5%), Alicante (−7.2%), Las Palmas (−6.3%) and Palma (−6.0%). In all of them it is larger than in any control window, although in Las Palmas and Palma only barely: the largest six-day decline had been between 4% and 6% (1% in Alicante). In Zaragoza (−5.0%), Seville (−2.7%) and Málaga (−2.5%) three or four previous windows had fallen further, and Barcelona (−0.6%) behaves as in any other week. Most of the drop occurs between Wednesday 30 and Friday 2, with the first decree already published in the BOE. After the repeal there is no general rebound: between Friday and Monday, listings move as in any other weekend. The exception is Palma, which recovers part of what it lost (from −8.7% to −6.0%), more than it had risen in any control weekend; Málaga also recovers somewhat (from −4.0% to −2.5%), within the usual range.

For-sale listings do not follow the fall: they vary between −0.7% and +0.7% in seven cities and rise in Barcelona (+1.5%), Málaga (+1.9%) and Murcia (+2.4%). That rise happens on Saturday 3 and also shows up for Spain as a whole, so it cannot simply be read as a shift out of the rental market.

That contrast calls for caution, because rentals are far more volatile than sales: in the control windows, rental listings move by as much as five to nine points in six days, and for-sale listings by one to three. That is why the most informative comparison of magnitude is between rentals and their own past.

A hypothesis about Barcelona

Seville, Málaga, Zaragoza and Barcelona all have their series minima between 28 July and 10 August. But Barcelona is the only one of the ten cities where rentals behave as in an ordinary week (−0.6%). One hypothesis is that the adjustment had already happened there. Catalonia has regulated seasonal and room rentals since January, and Barcelona is a designated stressed area with rent caps: the landlords most sensitive to regulation —the ones we see disappearing in the other cities— may already have left the market in Barcelona.

Caveats

What we measure. We measure listings on one portal, not homes or contracts. A withdrawn listing is not the same as a home leaving the market: it may still be offered on another portal, through an agency, or without a listing at all. idealista’s presence also varies across cities.

One snapshot a day. We see the stock, not the flows: a fall may be due to listings being withdrawn, to listings no longer being published, or to homes being rented out.

Small samples and revisable figures. Except in Madrid (around 6,100 long-term listings) and Valencia (around 1,700), each city has between 400 and 1,100, so one percentage point is between four and eleven listings. The distinction between long-term and seasonal depends on how each listing is classified, so the figures may shift by a few tenths between readings.

A short history. We only have 17 control windows per city and none for these same dates in previous years, so we cannot rule out a seasonal pattern specific to the start of October. The window crosses a change of month and quarter, dates when there tends to be more movement than usual.

Little time since the repeal. The last observation comes only three days after the repeal, with a weekend in between: it is early to tell whether listings return.

Conclusion

With those caveats, the data are consistent with a precautionary withdrawal of rental supply in most large cities during the week of the decrees. The check remains open: after the first weekend without the decrees, listings have not come back, except partly in Palma and Málaga. Uncertainty carries real weight for landlords, but we do not know how much, or how they will respond to the new wave of uncertainty opened by the calling of a general election for 29 November. We will keep watching.