Yeah, but my brother lives in Barcelona - and there it's even worse, on lower salaries.
We ended up paying the same price for relatively similar flats, but in BCN that's much harder to achieve, and they are older and need renovation - and there are thousands of AirBnB slumlords buying up everything.
So yeah, the price increases have been a problem (and hit me badly combined with the interest rate increases) but it's still better than most of Western Europe.
Not trying to be too skeptical, but that doesn't exactly sound like it's working too well. I remember charts by the ECB as showing Sweden with the most overpriced real estate in the EU. It might look ok in comparison to Barcelona, but that one's probably only second to Venice as the world's tourism hot spot and has an extreme concentration of AirBnBs, not exactly representative of Western Europe in general.
Heavy taxation on NPD (non-primary domicile) housing solves this by itself. It's just that convincing people this is in their best interest will take a lot of effort - not to mention that there's a fairly ubiquitous problem of local politicians being in the pockets of property developers in the areas where these problems are at their worst.
People still believe that their home is a good investment, without any thought given to who's going to buy it from them later or where that person will be getting the financing.
We ended up paying the same price for relatively similar flats, but in BCN that's much harder to achieve, and they are older and need renovation - and there are thousands of AirBnB slumlords buying up everything.
So yeah, the price increases have been a problem (and hit me badly combined with the interest rate increases) but it's still better than most of Western Europe.