Small but in demand: Why 60 m² apartments are booming in Mallorca

Small but in demand: Why 60 m² apartments are booming in Mallorca

Key question: Does this trend solve the housing shortage — or merely shift it aside?

On Passeig Mallorca early in the morning: delivery vans honk, the garbage truck rattles by, and the corner bakery fills its shelves. Between café tables, young people discuss flatshare options, as detailed in When the Shared Flat Room Becomes a Luxury: Palma Under Pressure, while pensioners quietly push their walkers past. The scene shows an island in transition: apartments are getting smaller, and the city is adapting.

A clear market trend is taking hold on the island: more and more units around 60 square meters. People responsible in the development sector, such as the chairman of the Balearic property developers' association (Proinba), attribute this to changing household structures — more people living alone, separated couples, single parents and young people who for now do not want to start a family. Developers are dividing old buildings, a trend documented in When Living Rooms Become Bedrooms: How Mallorca Suffers from a Housing Shortage, permits have been simplified, and new constructions are geared toward the purchasing power of local customers.

In price terms, these smaller apartments move within a range according to industry sources and reporting in Buying and Renting in Mallorca: Why Prices Are Pushing Locals to the Edge — and What Could Help Now: studio apartments start at about €170,000, while larger three-room variants reach just over €300,000. Parking spaces and storage rooms are often additional costs. The main hotspots are Palma, Manacor and Inca — here demand is most evident.

That is the sober description of the situation. The critical question is: Do 60 m² units solve the structural problems in the housing market or merely relocate them? In short: they help individual households, but they are not a blanket solution for the island's housing supply.

First the positives: smaller, efficiently laid-out apartments are realistically affordable for many people. They appear as an alternative to unaffordable 100 m² apartments that used to be the norm. For single people or young professionals they offer independence without decades-long mortgage commitments, a situation noted in Why long-term rentals in Mallorca are dwindling — and what could help.

But the catch lies in the details. When old apartments are split up, this not only changes the housing stock but also the social fabric of neighborhoods. Family-friendly apartments shrink, and the supply of affordable housing for larger households decreases. Moreover, subdivisions do not automatically lead to lower rents or purchase prices in the long term: fewer square meters at a high price per m² means that households with children or low incomes are, in effect, further pushed out.

Public debate and politics rarely address the long-term effects. There is a lack of data showing how many old apartments are being converted into smaller units, who actually moves into these apartments and how this affects the age structure and school needs in municipalities like Inca or Manacor. It is also unclear what impact the additional costs for parking spaces and storage rooms have on low-budget households.

The everyday experience can be observed locally: on some streets in Palma, typical family apartments seem to have been divided into several small units. On the schoolyard at Plaça del Mercado people talk about fewer children in the neighborhood; at the same time new cafés and co-working spaces fill the vacated ground floors. This is not an abstract trend — it is audible and visible.

Concrete proposals so that the restructuring of the housing stock does not have a one-sided effect:

- Strengthen existing social quotas: When conversions create multiple apartments, municipalities should require mandatory shares of socially subsidized housing.

- Promote mixed-housing models: New buildings should combine units of different sizes — from 40 m² studios to family-friendly 80 m² apartments — so that neighborhoods are not made up only of singles.

- Transparency for subdivisions: Recording and publishing how many units result from partitions and who moves in would be necessary to develop governance instruments.

- Consider mobility costs: Mandatory parking increases purchase prices. Alternatives such as shared-mobility concepts or discounted annual public transport passes could help.

Conclusion: The shift toward 60-square-meter apartments is a pragmatic market response to scarce building land and changing lifestyles. But it is not a panacea. Mallorca also needs strategies that consider households of all sizes and incomes. Otherwise the island risks becoming in many neighborhoods an accumulation of small, expensive apartments — practical for some, problematic for a lively, mixed community.