Spanish real estate agencies folding
Half of Spain’s real estate agencies have folded in the past year due to a slowdown in the once-booming building sector, an industry association says.
Of 80,000 that operated at the beginning of 2007, only around 40,000 have survived and some 100,000 employees lost their jobs, according to the Superior Council of Real Estate Agents, a nationwide grouping.
However, many of the agencies that collapsed are small — sometimes just a person with a cell phone — that emerged to cash in on the Spanish construction boom over the past five years or so, the council’s president Santiago Baena told the newspaper El Pais.