ITeC

Josep R. Fontana
Mail: jrfontana@itec.cat
Web: www.itec.es

The Spanish region of Valencia is without doubt in the spotlight of the current phase of the building boom in Spain. During the last 6 years (2000-2005) Valencia has been able to virtually double the number of building starts of the 1994-1999 period. Impressive as this may sound, this also has been achieved in a handful of other Spanish regions. What is really special about Valencia is the sheer dimension of this output -more than half a million new dwellings since 2000- and the fact that so far it is not showing any signs of market saturation. Quite the contrary.

Let's slow down for a minute and try to grasp the size of this production volume. If we take the whole Euroconstruct area, one of each 25 new dwellings is being constructed in the Valencian region. Not bad for an area hardly the size of Belgium.



As was pointed out in the last Spanish Euroconstruct report, the regions in the SouthEast Mediterranean coast of the market seem to be quite impervious to the signs of a slowdown in the new residential market, that have indeed begun to appear in the Madrid region. The contrast between the two regions in terms of evolution of housing starts is evident, as the graph shows:



At the sight of these statistics about the Valencian construction sector the obvious conclusion is that there are no reasons to worry… unless there are some other facts that the figures do not show.