Rental contracts signed as of May 2023 that have to be updated may increase by 2.2%, according to the housing rental reference index corresponding to the month of November and published this Thursday by the National Institute of Statistics. It is the first time that this rate has been published, which will be known month by month and with which the Government wants to decouple CPI increases and “avoid disproportionate increases” in income.
This index, which will be updated month by month, only affects contracts signed as of May 25, 2023, when the new State Housing Law came into force. And it only applies to updates and not to new contracts. For its calculation, the INE takes into account the lowest value between the CPI and the underlying and a long-term estimate from Economy and a coefficient established by Housing.
The “correction mechanisms for moderation” of rent updates will be activated when the CPI or the underlying experience “increases greater than 2%,” the INE noted in the presentation of the index. In November, both were 2.4%, two tenths above the new rate. For a rent of 1,000 euros per month, the rent will increase by 22 euros per month, 264 euros per year. The Ministry has published a simulator to calculate the maximum increase, according to the contract, available on its website.
The rents signed before the state law will be updated again in 2025 in accordance with the CPI or the Competitiveness Guarantee Index, if indicated in the contract, after an extraordinary limitation of 3% in 2024 and 2% for 2022 and 2023, for alleviate the inflationary consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This index is one of the mechanisms that the Government designed in state law to try to contain rental prices. In this case, the rise limitations will be circumstantial, only when the CPI exceeds 2%. Other tools, however, aimed to mobilize available housing and put an end to temporary or tourist rental fraud.
This same Thursday, the single registry of short-term rentals comes into force, which will force tenants to have a code to advertise their properties on platforms. In this way, the ministry headed by Isabel Rodríguez wants to prevent residential housing from being used for unauthorized uses, such as vacation, and to justify the need for the temporary nature of leases of this type, which after the entry into force of state law had been used in many cases to circumvent it.
Source: www.eldiario.es
