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Catalonia will use AI to detect empty homes and try to return them to the market
The Generalitat is preparing, together with local councils, a new artificial-intelligence-based system to determine more precisely where empty homes are concentrated in Catalonia. The intention is to have a much more reliable picture of the vacant housing stock from next year and use it to try to bring some of those flats back onto the market.
The project is being developed by the Centre Internacional de Mètodes Numèrics a l’Enginyeria (CIMNE), which began work in May on behalf of the Generalitat. The centre itself identifies the project as a tool for predicting vacant dwellings through artificial intelligence and the integration of different databases.
The model will combine information that until now was dispersed. Planned data include water and electricity consumption, the municipal register and in-person checks carried out by some town councils. By cross-referencing them, the system will be able to indicate which properties show signs of actually being unoccupied.
The main difference lies in the time needed to obtain this information. Until now, officially determining whether a dwelling was vacant could require in-person inspections and much slower municipal procedures. The new model is intended to help councils identify suspicious situations more quickly before carrying out the corresponding checks.
The Govern's objective is to draw up from 2027 a prevalence map of vacant dwellings that will make it possible to know in which municipalities and areas the phenomenon is concentrated. It has not been announced that this will become a public map with the individual addresses of each flat, but rather a tool to guide the housing policies of the Generalitat and town councils.
The announced strategy does not place sanctions in the foreground either. The Director General of Housing, Jordi Mas, has argued that the data should primarily serve to contact owners and offer incentives that facilitate bringing properties into use, rather than resorting to penalties or measures such as expropriation.
For Barcelona, where finding affordable housing remains especially difficult, having more precise data will make it possible to distinguish better between flats that are genuinely abandoned and homes temporarily unoccupied because of a move, inheritance, renovation or other circumstances. The tool, therefore, does not automatically turn a low-consumption dwelling into an empty flat: it will be the cross-referencing of different indicators that makes it possible to refine identification.
The real impact will come when the map is completed and administrations decide what to do with the information. If the system succeeds in locating homes that have been out of use for long periods, town councils will have a new way to approach their owners and try to bring them back into the housing stock in places where finding a flat is most difficult.