One in five Spanish homes may be vacant, experts say

There could be between five and six million empty homes in Spain, or over 20 percent of the total, some experts believe. To get a better picture of the state of Spain's property sector following the crash, over 5,000 agents from the National Statistics Institute (INE) have taken to the streets to try to draw a precise map of the houses and apartments that are lived in and those that stand empty.

Ten years ago, a similar exercise yielded 3.1 million empty homes, or 15 percent of the total, but the figure is likely to be much higher now, experts warn. Between 1998 and 2007, the housing stock grew by 5.7 million, or nearly 30 percent.

"Knowing whether a dwelling is occupied or not is relatively easy, but knowing whether it is empty on a temporary basis is much harder. How do you know if it is a holiday home, if there is nobody there to tell you?" asks Antonio J. Argüeso, deputy director general of sociodemographic statistics at INE. The field work aims to count only those homes that are permanently shuttered, not second homes or those that are rented out to third parties.

When the work is done a few months from now, it should also confirm that 4.6 million housing units were built during the property bubble, while fewer than three million were sold.

At the same time, the INE will survey nearly six million homeowners to get a sense of what Spanish homes - and their dwellers - are like.