MADRID - Real estate brokerage firms have truly been decimated by the collapse in the construction and real estate buying sectors. Only 25,000 real estate companies have survived the crisis of the 80,000 that were registered in the summer of 2006 when the construction boom was in full swing, amounting to a 70% decrease in real estate brokerage firms, with 180,000 lost jobs according to sector estimates reported by La Vanguardia newspaper.
The haemorrhaging occurring in the sector is far from over since, according to the president of the college of real estate agents of Barcelona, Joan Olle', real estate agencies will continue to close for all 2009, and less than 20,000 will survive at the end of the year. However ''not all bad things are necessarily harmful,'' underlined Olle', who regards the real estate crisis as a phenomenon that ''has allowed purging of the sector that was teeming with makeshift businesses, which were often only equipped with a mobile phone and were not professional''.
