If the deadlines are met, the Ibiza City Council will conduct a census of all homes within a year, which will make it possible to know, among other things, how many of the 23,715 residential dwellings that are registered in Vila are unoccupied and, therefore, would be susceptible to be put on the real estate rental market. What the municipal administration is already aware of is that “ there are about 25%, that is almost 6,000 homes, that have no one registered as a resident” and that most of these properties are located in the tourist areas of the municipality such as “the promenade, the avenida Vuit d’Agost, the Marina, Dalt Vila, ses Figueretes or Platja d’en Bossa”. What remains to be found, through the completion of this census, is whether these homes are second homes, are unoccupied, are intended for illegal tourist rental or if unregistered people are living in them. This and other tasks will be carried out by the Fundació Universitat i Empresa de les Illes Balears (Fueib). The Councillor for Housing Vila, Aitor Morrás, announced today that this entity has been awarded by public tender and will provide “the technical assistance and consulting service for the update of the municipal census and the development of a housing census“. “What is sought with the execution of this census is the collection of data at the micro level, home by home, to gain an understanding of the real situation of each one and thus mobilize those that are unoccupied to assign them to the annual rental market, which will be one of the functions of the Integral Office of Housing, which will soon be launched,” explained Morrás.
The development of this study, the mayor specified, “will have a cost of 479,613 euros and a duration of one year“. The doctor in Geography of the University of the Balearic Islands, Sònia Vives, who attended the presentation, will be in charge of directing the project, which is already underway. “In order to review the municipal resident registrations and conduct the census, the first thing is to develop a georeferenced database with a geographic information system on the situation of each of the houses and the people who live in them,” she explained.
The field work will be carried out by thirteen surveyors from Fueib, who from tomorrow will visit the 23,715 dwellings in Vila. They will be accredited by the Ibiza City Council and coordinated by four technicians who are geographers and sociologists.
Door to door surveys of every home
Each of the surveyors will have an assigned area and will carry out, door to door, a questionnaire with six questions designed to determine, among other things, the use given to the dwelling, the tenancy status and the price of the rent or mortgage. They will also collect other data: the number of people living at the address, the relationship between them and whether or not the people who are registered coincide with those who live there. As Vives explained, the surveyors will use a tablet and an application that “allows the information already available from secondary databases to synchronize in the cloud with that which is collected in situ”. The Ibiza City Council today asked for “citizen collaboration to collect all this information”. Morrás pointed out that the pollsters will carry an identification signed and stamped by the municipal administration.
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