Due to the combination of a 3 year global recession, 20% unemployment and a risky building boom between 2002-2006 there are several estimates of between 700,000 to 1.4 million empty houses in Spain. Spanish banks have slowly started to unload large portfolios of bank repossessions and offer them to overseas and domestic speculators. One current example is Santander, the biggest bank in the eurozone which is rumored to be attempting to sell a portfolio worth 3 Billion Euros made up of houses and plots of land to tidy up its balance sheet. Two rumoured potential buyers are Morgan Stanley and Cerberus who both have large property funds.
