In this guest post, Dr Ana Santamarina describes the ideas behind PRIVATEVICTIONS: The rise of para-police antisquatting companies and the privatisation of eviction practices in Spain’s financialised housing market, an Urban Urgencies project funded by the Urban Studies Foundation.
PRIVATEVICTIONS is a new 18-month research project funded by the Urban Studies Foundation, beginning in October 2026. Developed through a partnership between the Critical Urban Studies Research Group (GECU) and the Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid, it will investigate the rise of private “antisquatting” companies and the growing privatisation of eviction practices in Spain. Combining academic research with tenant organising, PRIVATEVICTIONS will document how these companies operate and develop practical tools to support housing movements confronting them.
Over the past decade, dozens of companies offering so-called “antisquatting services” have emerged across Spain. They present themselves as a response to the alleged inefficiency of judicial procedures and advertise extrajudicial “express eviction” solutions, intervening in a plurality of conflicts involving rent arrears, mortgage defaults, informal tenancies, and other forms of residential precarity.
Their expansion points to an important shift in the governance of housing dispossession, where eviction practices are increasingly outsourced to private para-police actors operating at the intersection of real-estate speculation, private security and housing governance.
A new mechanism of housing dispossession
Spain has become a key laboratory of the contemporary housing crisis. Successive waves of dispossession, the financialisation of rental markets and the growing power of investment funds and corporate landlords have transformed access to housing. At the same time, tenant unions and housing movements have built powerful forms of collective organisation against eviction, rent increases, and displacement.
Within this landscape, antisquatting companies have emerged as a still largely unexplored mechanism of housing dispossession. Hired by property owners, property managers, real-estate investors and, in some cases, large investment funds, they are used to empty buildings, recover possession outside or at the margins of formal judicial procedures and accelerate the revalorisation of housing assets.
Their interventions often unfold in legal grey zones and may involve sustained pressure, surveillance, intimidation, harassment, or the physical occupation of entrances and communal spaces. In this sense, these companies increasingly operate as the coercive arm of contemporary rentier urbanism.
For tenant unions and housing movements, their growth has opened a new front in struggles for the right to housing. Organisations have developed responses including neighbourhood monitoring, rapid-response networks, collective presence at threatened homes, legal support, and strategies to document and contest potentially unlawful practices.
Housing, security, and the far right
The defence of private property and the construction of “squatting” as a major social threat have become central to right-wing and far-right discourse in Spain. Antisquatting companies and their most visible figures operate within broader networks connecting private-security actors, real-estate interests, political organisations, and digital influencers. Through social media, public appearances, and highly mediatised operations, they play an active role in a wider cultural battle over property, authority, and social order.
At the centre of this narrative is the figure of the “squatter”: a racialised political construction that collapses different forms of housing insecurity into the image of a foreign, criminal, violent, and undeserving subject. A conflict over access to housing and the distribution of urban wealth is thereby reframed as a security conflict between legitimate citizens and threatening outsiders.
In practice, these companies often intervene in conflicts involving migrant and racialised residents, people in irregular administrative situations, and working-class households. Confronting their expansion therefore requires stronger alliances between housing, migrant, and antifascist movements.
Research grounded in collective action
PRIVATEVICTIONS has two main objectives. The first is to generate systematic evidence on the antisquatting industry: the companies involved, the actors that hire them, the conflicts in which they intervene, the tactics they use and their connections with financialised real-estate markets and political networks. The second is to translate this research into practical knowledge that can strengthen housing movements.
The collaboration with the Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid will be embedded in its everyday organising work. Since 2017, the union has led major struggles against rent increases, evictions, and corporate landlords. The project will support the tenants’ union in consolidating a dedicated line of organising and research around resistance to antisquatting companies’ practices. A research officer and organiser will work across its local branches to document reported interventions, build a database of cases and map the companies, conflicts and tactics involved.
The academic research will be coordinated by members of the Critical Urban Studies Research Group (GECU), bringing together researchers with established expertise in housing struggles, urban dispossession, and the political economy of real estate, including Dr Ana Santamarina, Dr Juan Roch, Mr Lucas Vaquero, Mr Pablo Pérez, Dr Javier Gil, and Dr Marta Il-Raga. The academic team will work alongside the Sindicato throughout the project, conceived as a process of knowledge production grounded in and oriented towards collective action. An international advisory group, including Dr SJ Cooper-Knock and Dr Alexander Baker, will help place the Spanish case in a broader comparative perspective.
From research to movement strategy
A central part of PRIVATEVICTIONS will be a two-day national meeting bringing together tenant unions and housing organisations from across Spain. It will allow organisations to compare cases, identify recurring patterns, and assess the responses developed in different territories.
This process will feed into Building Tenant Power Against Private Eviction Companies, an open-access toolkit bringing together legal resources, monitoring protocols, rapid-response mechanisms, and organising strategies. Its aim is to turn dispersed experience into a shared tactical repertoire that helps organisations and affected residents identify risks, document abuses, and activate collective support.
The project will also organise a two-day international webinar, “Housing Struggles Challenging the Securitisation and Privatisation of Eviction Practices”. Combining an open Call for Papers with a workshop involving researchers, tenant unions, and housing organisations, the event will connect the Spanish case to wider international debates on the privatisation of eviction enforcement.
Finally, PRIVATEVICTIONS will produce evidence to challenge these practices legally and politically. By documenting patterns of coercion, intimidation, and extrajudicial pressure, the project will make visible practices often concealed behind the language of mediation, security, and property defence. Its findings will contribute to multilevel policy reports aimed at local, national, and European institutions, while also helping to contest far-right narratives that present the housing crisis as a problem of “squatting” rather than financialisation, rent extraction, and unequal access to housing.