The Catalonia Institute of Construction Technology, ITeC is the Spanish member of Euroconstruct. Within ITeC, the Economic Construction Analysis Area is the responsible for the services relating the quantitative aspects of construction trends, materials and market intelligence. In such a complex market as construction, reality seldom follows an abstract model, so ITeC likes to complement all the economical research undertaken with the Institute's expertise on all things technical in the context of construction.

Here is a sample of one of ITeC's recent researches that might be of interest for those trying to approach the Spanish residential sector:



The results of the Spanish residential building sector are breaking all type of records, not to mention all forecasts. In the last five years ('99-'03) more than 2.7 million dwellings were started in Spain. In comparison with that, the 1.6 million starts of the previous five years ('94-'98) do look unimpressive. But behind all these headlines remains an interesting question that maybe is not receiving too much attention: are building typologies evolving in any way? Is Spain simply building more, or perhaps building differently?

We researchers tend to look to statistics in an attempt to find answers to questions like these. In this case, the answer is quite eloquent: the ratio of single family houses vs. apartments has remained virtually unchanged through the last decade, despite the residential building boom. Roughly speaking, seven out of each ten new dwellings in the country are apartments.

Anyway, if we leave behind statistics for a moment, and we have a look at the building sites and the real estate advertisements in the papers, we discover that the category of "single family house" is not homogeneous at all, for there are significant variations. Let's have a deeper look at the "single" phenomenon in Spain.

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