How to solve the housing problem in Barcelona and not die trying PART I

This is a real terror story, based on thousands of real experiences.

5 min readMar 3, 2019

If you want to go directly to the point, and see the app, go to PART II Design

Hey, we have a problem here…

The word gentrification was ok when we started to have fancy places to have brunch and nice shops to buy design objects, but without limits, it has hit Barcelona to the point of increasing housing prices to the extreme. ¡Surprise! Now we have to move to a cheaper place. But wait, there are no affordable rentals in this fucking (beloved) city, unless you want to live in a 100 years flat renovated partially in 1975 sharing with 4 flatmates or in a 25 square meters jail with a window to nothing.

Add to this situation: Airbnb hosts bad practices (fact: 374 people own half of the city’s tourist apartments in Barcelona), a bunch of state laws that only helps to owners, investment funds that buy entire buildings to build more and more luxury apartments, etc.

What about us? What about working people having a life in a city where we can’t live no more?

The situation has a name in the media: ‘el drama de los alquileres’

What can I do as a user experience designer to improve this situation? Well, I have no idea, but my friend design thinking is here to help. Let’s begin with a deeper research of the problem.

Findings

First step, desk research. The internet is burning with the problem.

City hall is looking for solutions, starting with more affected people, families that is in risk to live literally in the street, but is not able to scale the solution to a broader segment of the population at the moment.
A recent statistic reveals that there are 13.000 empty houses in Barcelona. These houses have been uninhabited for years, are not rented and are not sold. 70% of it are owned by private individuals, and more of 50% are old, and need a total renovation to be habitable.
Doing a benchmark of most important real estate companies working in the market, we can see no one offers an alternative, almost none of the options are focused on one specific target, and there are really bads experiences looking for an apartment on the web and/or app.

A benchmark allows you to find opportunities in the market.

Here come the law. A lessee can negotiate a plan of renovation in the house with the lessor. There can be a reduction or a total compensation of the rental price depending on the price of the renovation. This is regulated by rentals law.
The price of a renovation can oscillate depending on the size of the house and installations, doing some research, you can spend from 30.000 € in minor renovations and up to 50.000 € or more in a regular size apartment.
The average rental price in Barcelona is 950 € per month. This means, I’m going to pay 11.400 € in a year, and… holy shit, 57.000 € in my five years contract (yes, there were five years contract in the past). Well, I can figure one or two ways to spend better that money amount.
Throwing a form in the social media, let me know important facts: 77% of people unknown that there are 13.000 empty houses in Barcelona , 91% of people unknown about the possibility of renovations in exchange for rent by law, and 70% of people in the poll are interested in the idea.
Let’s go deeper: creating personas, user journeys, empathy maps, we can find some pain points. In this case, I focused in two sides of the problem, a person who owns an empty property and want to generate money from it, and a person who experiences all the steps of looking for a rental place to live in Barcelona. Spoiler alert, all the process is a big giant pain point.

Lidia owns an apartment in Barcelona, lucky her.

Andrés is a tenant, and is about to have a hard time.

User journeys are always funny, and sometimes depressing too.

For the lessee, the worst part is checking prices, and once you have resigned to pay more than a half of your income in the rent, visit houses, make appointments, try again… this process can take months.
For the lessor, contracting a constructor to do the renovation and the process can be stressful, and then choose a tenant for the house without any guarantees are the most important pain points.
Finding pain points drives me to formulate HMW questions. How may we improve these experiences.

The whole process of research led me to find some insights about the problem. Next step: ideate solutions to some of it.

Ideation

Time to think about solutions and solve the most important pain points.

5 whys, brainwriting, hybridization, brain drawing, are some of the methods I used. Then with MoSCoW analysis we choose the best.

Big bang technique, it's a mind map with ideas and concepts.

Solution

The solution comes by itself: creation of a housing platform for tenants that pay the renovation of an apartment in exchange for long-term free rental contracts. This company will have some values that make a difference from the existing ones. These value proposals are:

For the lessor: it allows the rehabilitation of empty flats without any expense, to be able to introduce them in the real estate market and generate benefits in the medium term, providing tranquility and security for the future.
For the lessee: it brings access to an affordable rental house to the user. By paying the renovation, the user gets more quality, and will be able to enjoy it more time with a better rental contract, offering stability, welfare and peace.

Now is a good time to set a business model canvas. This template works for me to understand in a visual way how the business can be, the strategy, parts involved and how the business is going to get incomes.

Hard work up here. But there is more! Please continue with the construction of the app, click PART II Design