A lobby comprising Spain’s 14 biggest property companies has declared that unless more Spanish land is allocated for the purpose of building houses, property prices are set to rise.

The 14 companies teamed up at the G-14 meeting to discuss the future of the property sector, and deduced that the main issues are lack of land and excessive urban planning paperwork.According to them, unless more land is made available to construction companies and paperwork is simplified, property prices will rocket over the next two years.

The president of the group, Fernando Martín, affirms that it takes an average of six years to have land zoned for building in Spain, while in Mexico or Morocco, it takes no more than a year and a half.

He rejected predictions that property companies plan to drop house prices in the near future, though Rafael Santamaría, president of the Reyal-Urbis company, spoke of his concerns that people who had bought Spanish houses as investment may be encouraged, through fear of falling prices, to put them on the market at the same time, which would lead to a sharp drop in prices.

Martín admitted that sales have slowed down, but denied any crisis in the industry, adding that in the first nine months of the year, the initiation of house building by his group had fallen by 60 per cent, while visits to show houses had fallen by 45 per cent.