The session was organized by the university institution ESADE and celebrated last 17^th November in Barcelona. There, Neinor Homes’ Chief Executive Officer explained that, among the main challenges facing the real estate sector today, emerge the need to offer a new different and quality product to excite the customer.

        “Nowadays, the residential development companies compete with the bank entities that urgently need to sell and with solid rental numbers", notes.

         Besides, he has highlighted the historical inattentiveness that the real estate market has showed to the client, "despite that purchasing a home, is one of the biggest decisions they will make in his life".

       Juan Velayos also consider essential to overcome this situation from a business perspective because, in a context of lower margins, it’s basic to understand the demand and to design a customized product to make the difference between success and failure.

New and interesting opportunities for the sector

      According to him, the Spanish real estate transformation process offers new opportunities.

     Demographic factors contribute to this fact. “Although it's true that demography is falling in our country, the rise of some models as the single parent families, and other issues as the improvement of life expectations or the need to explore the international market, suggest interesting opportunities.

     Another change in the real estate development market is, in his opinion, that these companies can’t no longer only resort to the bank entities to compensate for their capital shortages. This fact requires them to be more prudent by managing they own funds or that of institutional origin and leads them to become regulators preventing new real estate bubbles," he added.

      All that will lead to a progressive concentration in the sector, as Neinor Homes’ CEO predicts, although, in his opinion, it will continue to co-exist with local and national companies.

        It will also trigger a change of paradigm that makes the business stop being based in the soil transformation, something in Spain has always required good connections in order to base their activity on the finalist land purchase, and be scrupulous in margins, costs and projects timings to guarantee their margins".

      Regarding the recent situation of the Spanish real estate market, he explains that it has favored the opening of three consecutive windows of opportunity: that of the SOCIMIs, the servicing companies, and, more recently, that of residential developers.

     The latter is based on four factors, as he explains. On one hand, all that indicates Spain is country very attached to the property, an aspect favored today by the macroeconomic conditions, which are better than those of neighboring countries.

     To this is added that the effort rate of families to access to a mortgage is today at similar levels to those to 2008 previous years, favoring the granting of a large numbers of them.

    In this sense, he anticipates in Spain the same situation occurred in 2002 in the United Kingdom and the United States, “when the real estate companies multiplied per three their valuations”.

“Our true challenge is to applicate an industrial model”

        Finally, and despite the good numbers achieved by the company he manages, with a soil inversion valuated in €1 billion in assets distributed in Madrid, Barcelona, the Basque Country, la Costa del Sol and Balearic Islands, Juan Velayos assures this is only the beginning.  

    “The true challenge is to applicate an industrial model based in three basic pillars: institutionalization, the focus towards the client and the effort by evolving a product that has not changed in decades”, he concludes.