Spain's Latest Housing Crisis: Criminals Posing as Fake Landlords

Can a big city apartment rented for $275 a month ever really be a bad deal? Across Spain, hard-up tenants are cashing in by renting out a new wave of cheap property that's recently arrived on the market. With water and electricity included in the price, the low rent comes across as a pretty good deal even in a struggling economy. There’s one major problem, though. The apartments are really squatted, and the people tenants pay rent to are not landlords, but gangs.

Grandly titled "mafias" by national media, these by-products of Spain's crisis roam the country's cities – Southern Madrid in particular – looking for real estate left abandoned by the many Spanish who couldn't afford to keep up mortgage repayments. Breaking through security gates, they add new locks, reconnect water and electricity and generally re-tool the flats ready for rental. As El Pais has detailed, some of these operatives are even "selling" apartments on for as little as €1,000, essentially a one-off fee for breaking in and cleaning up.