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Real estate: regulate to limit or regulate to encourage? - Ambito Financiero
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Real estate: ¿regular para limitar o regular para incentivar?
Los cambios impositivos recientes reabren el debate sobre el rol del Estado en el sector: incentivar la construcción para ampliar la oferta o intervenir con controles que, según advierten, pueden desalentar la inversión.
www.ambito.com
March 26, 2026
By Andres Neumann
Recent tax changes have reopened the debate about the role of the State in the sector: incentivizing construction to expand supply or intervening with controls that, they warn, may discourage investment.
The tax reform seeks to revitalize the real estate market and raises the question of what type of regulation favors housing construction. Pexels
The recent labor reform in Argentina introduces tax changes that directly impact the real estate market : the income tax on the occasional sale of properties and also on housing rentals is eliminated.
Beyond the technical details, the relevant factor is the approach. In Argentina, the regulator seems to have adopted a basic premise: if the problem is a lack of supply, then those who produce housing must be incentivized .
The logic is simple. Lower taxes and less friction for homeowners and investors mean more potential supply in the market. And when supply increases, prices tend to stabilize.
In Argentina, the housing access problem has worsened in recent decades. The average salaried worker needs at least 20 years to buy their own home , while access to mortgage financing is still limited to a marginalized segment of the population who qualify. Even then, banks don't finance the entire property value; buyers must have saved between 20% and 30% of the property's value before proceeding.
Faced with this scenario, regulators often face a dilemma: incentivize housing production or intervene in the market to limit prices and shift part of the problem to the developer.
Recent experience in Barcelona shows a very different path. Over the last few years, the Catalan regulator has decided to intervene in the real estate market from the opposite perspective: limiting prices, imposing mandatory quotas for subsidized housing, and shifting part of the social problem directly onto the developer.
In the city, new developments are required to allocate up to 30% of their units to subsidized housing (VPO), often with prices set below the actual cost of construction. This is compounded by rent controls and increasing regulatory pressure on the sector.
The result is familiar to anyone involved in urban development in Barcelona: fewer projects, more uncertainty, and a supply that fails to keep pace with demand.
From our experience developing projects in Barcelona, we clearly see that when regulators turn developers into adversaries of the system, housing production contracts . Conversely, when developers are seen as part of the solution—and are incentivized to build more—the market dynamics change. Argentina seems to be experimenting with this approach. Barcelona, however, continues to rely on a model where regulation attempts to correct the problem by limiting those who build.
The discussion shouldn't be about whether or not to regulate. The real question is what kind of regulation helps to build more housing: who should build it and under what incentives?
Housing is, above all, a problem of scale: more units are needed than are currently being built. Without investment, credit, and adequate incentives to produce them, this gap will continue to widen. Added to this is the challenge of achieving legal certainty within land-use legislation, improving permit processing times, and also the necessary investment in public infrastructure services.
The challenge for Argentina will be to maintain a regulatory framework that allows the market to resume large-scale construction. If that happens, homeownership can cease to be an increasingly distant aspiration and once again become an attainable goal for more families.
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