The housing emergency situation is so serious in the Balearic Islands, especially in Majorca and Eivissa, that rooms in Palma are already rented at the same price as flats in other autonomous communities.
Real estate ads reflect it. Badi is an app that falls between Idealista and AirBnb. In principle it is designed for renting rooms, not the entire house, but in exchange there is the option of short-term rental, ideal for those who are going to spend a few months in a city for work reasons. Something that happens on the islands during the tourist season.
In this application, the rooms in Palma are rented at the price of an apartment. In the historic center of the city, where the rental price does not fall below 1,000 euros for a very modest one-bedroom apartment, there is no offer, but, in the area of the city's expansion, the average rooms are in a range which ranges from 450 to 600 euros depending on whether you have a private or shared bathroom.
"For less than 800 or 900 euros, you can't find anything in Palma right now," says Natalia Bueno, vice president of the Association of Real Estate Agents of the Balearic Islands. This price contagion is now spreading like an oil stain to municipalities adjoining the capital, where the demand for housing at that price has shifted due to the impossibility of renting in Palma.
An example that he cites is Binissalem, a municipality about 25 kilometers from Palma. A standard apartment with two or three rooms costs 900 euros there. "There is a lot of demand and that makes prices rise and now the tourist season will start and the problem will get worse," he adds. “In the Balearic Islands they are considering limiting the purchase of housing to non-residents, why not rent them?” He asks himself.
A well-known real estate portal details that in Palma there are 1,037 homes for rent, but only 20 are below 800 euros. They are tiny studios where there is not even a room, located in urbanizations of large blocks of houses built during the real estate boom that occurred in the 60s and 70s in the heat of tourist migration.
In Eivissa the situation is even worse. There it is much easier to rent an apartment for more than 3,000 euros than for less than that amount. It is enough to take a look at one of the real estate portals to verify that the right to housing remains on the island in a declaration of intent, a constitutional chimera. One of the busiest rental portals offers 529 homes throughout the island and only one of them is below 650 euros, the theoretical limit for not exceeding the 30% salary that must be allocated to housing.
There are 11 homes below 1,200 euros and another 45, between 1,200 and 1,800 euros. They are average homes, nothing fancy. There are apartments between 45 and 60 square meters in municipalities by the sea, far from the capital, and there are two- and three-bedroom apartments in the center of the city. Eivissa has become hell for those looking for a rental apartment and people have come to pay up to 800 euros to sleep on a balcony during the tourist season.
