SESENA, Spain — The first call came two minutes after estate agent Segis Gomez posted a listing in Sesena, a development near Madrid that gained notoriety as one of the so-called “ghost towns” created when Spain’s property bubble burst in 2008.
Half-built and half-empty for more than a decade, these days the squatters have gone from this development 40 km (24.85 miles) south of the capital and middle-class families, driven out of the city centre by an acute housing crisis, are moving in. Construction, meanwhile, has restarted.
Demand is so strong in Sesena that Gomez has a waiting list of 70 people for each property. Property prices have recovered their original value after plunging to less than half during the crisis, he said.
As anger grows over the cost of housing in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made providing affordable homes one of his main goals – even as he encourages population growth through immigration. The size of the challenge is clear in Madrid, which grew by 140,000 people in 2024, but only registered permits to build 20,000 new homes.
Short supply is being exacerbated by a boom in holiday lets, record migration and onerous planning laws.
“The problem is that we can’t match supply and demand quickly enough. So prices go up, or people have to trade price for distance,” said Carles Vergara, a real estate professor at IESE Business School in Madrid.
Sesena has been adopted as a commuter town as Madrid overflows, even though it is located in the neighboring Castile-La Mancha region and still lacks good transport links to the capital and public services, which caused homebuyers to reject it in the past.
Its founder and original developer, Francisco Hernando, had a vision of 13,000 affordable apartments with gardens and swimming pools on the Spanish plain where author Cervantes set his best-known work Don Quixote, but the project became a byword for speculative greed and corruption. Only 5,000 homes ended up being built.
Hernando, who began his project in 2004, failed to tell homebuyers he hadn’t secured access to water or that the town had no public transport or schools. Hernando died in 2020.
When the market collapsed, initial investors saw the value of their property plummet, while many homes ended up in the hands of banks.
Madrid’s expansion
Today, Sesena teems with life as parents drop children at its three schools, drink coffee in its bars and visit recently-opened gyms and pharmacies.
Impact Homes, a developer, is constructing 156 one-to-four bedroom apartments it expects to complete this year. Next door, another building has already pre-sold 49 percent of its units, it said in an email.
