Spain has a curious housing problem. While finding affordable housing in many cities has become a gauntlet, thousands of homes remain shuttered in rural towns. The Bilbao-born entrepreneur Antxón Aizpuru aims to bridge these two extremes. With his project REVIVÍA he seeks empty rural homes, rehabilitate them, and bring them back to the market as affordable rentals. He now needs to find more houses.
There are homes that have had their shutters down for 10, 20 or even 30 years. Homes inherited by several siblings, old family houses whose owners moved to the city, or properties that require a renovation so extensive that their owners don’t even consider using them again.
For Antxón Aizpuru, cofounder of Revivía alongside Íñigo Añaut, those houses are not merely abandoned buildings. They are a business opportunity and, above all, a potential solution to one of the contradictions of rural Spain: there are homes, but there often isn’t a real rental supply.
Data helps to understand the scale of the problem. The latest Population and Housing Census from the National Statistics Institute counted 3,837,328 empty homes in Spain. The concentration increases in smaller municipalities: 45% of empty homes were located in towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, though they housed only 20.3% of the population. In villages with fewer than 1,000 residents, one in three homes was empty. (INE)
It all started with a house they couldn’t buy
As is the case with many entrepreneurial ventures, Revivía began with a very concrete problem. Aizpuru and his partner used an old rented house in Ausejo, La Rioja as a storage space. When its owners decided to sell it, a common rural-market obstacle appeared: buying a cheap property that needs major renovations isn’t always easy to finance.
In the end, Añaut bought the house, rehabilitated it, and rented it out again. That transaction made them think it would be a good idea to repeat the same model with closed houses in rural towns. And this became the seed of their current business.
The idea is to locate empty houses with potential, attract investors who finance their acquisition and rehabilitation, and then convert them into affordable rental homes. Aizpuru explains that they take care of almost everything: “search and analysis of the property, paperwork, renovation, furnishings, finding future tenants, and rental management.”
It isn’t merely about buying cheap in a town hoping the property will appreciate. The objective is to put the home back into use.
We are seeking owners of shuttered houses
Although at first it seemed the hardest part would be finding investors, the reality is that one of the project’s greatest challenges was precisely locating those houses. REVIVÍA needs to find owners who have a vacant home in a village and are willing to sell. In many cases these are properties that have been off the regular market for years because they require substantial renovation or because their owners lack time, money, or interest in reclaiming them.
It’s precisely those houses that appear to be “nobody wants” that can make sense within the model.
The company analyzes both the property and the locality before closing a deal. It isn’t enough for a home to be cheap. There must be potential demand for rental, reasonable possibilities for rehabilitation, and conditions that allow the investment to be viable.
To do this, the founders have developed their own tool for analyzing towns and properties. “Right now we have an AI agent scanning all La Rioja listings on portals, local real estate agencies, and bank websites. It removes duplicates and sorts them according to parameters that cross-reference the town’s potential (population, schools, clinics, distance to the capital or a larger town…). We do a final review and call the interesting ones,” he explains.
It’s a distinctly entrepreneurial approach: apply data and professional management to a market that has long been fragmented and underprofessionalized, like rural housing.
Profitability, but also impact
The other side of the model is the investors. The business aims to attract capital seeking a reasonable return but, at the same time, wanting to generate a measurable social impact. According to the company’s framing, their operations aim for returns around 6%, depending naturally on each property and project.
In a typical early-stage operation described by the company, the investment could be around €60,000 between purchase, renovation and other costs, with a monthly rent of about €500 and an estimated net yield of 6.67%. These are indicative figures and each property has its own conditions, but they illustrate the logic of the business: acquisition prices far lower than in big cities allow offering affordable rentals without sacrificing the landlord’s profitability completely.
“We charge investors a flat management fee of €4,000 + VAT, where we include the search, the red tape, the supervision of the renovation, tenant selection, and rent management. If possible, we also carry out the renovation ourselves, presenting a budget along with the rest so the owner can decide freely.”
It’s, in a sense, taking the concept of a turnkey real estate investment from the big cities to rural Spain.
The home as a lever to revive the towns
Aizpuru also stresses the importance of challenging a fairly widespread idea: that no one wants to live in a village. The problem, he argues, is not always with demand. In some towns there are unfilled jobs, telework possibilities, and adequate services, but finding a rental home is extraordinarily difficult. Buying isn’t easy either when the purchase price must be added to a substantial rehabilitation and financing for both operations must be secured.
That’s why placing a single house back into circulation can have a small but real knock-on effect. A recovered home means work for local professionals and small businesses. It can later mean a new family patronizing local shops, using services, enrolling their children in local schools, or working in the municipality.
For a small town, ten recovered homes aren’t merely ten real estate transactions. They can be ten new families. And that is precisely the philosophy with which Revivía aims to differentiate itself from other real estate investments: not building more, but activating what already exists.
Do you have a shuttered house in a town?
That’s where private homeowners, small business owners, and even municipalities can become a key piece of the project.
It could be your grandparents’ old house. A inherited home that no one uses. A property in need of renovation that has been waiting for a buyer for years. Or those houses that stay closed because owners simply don’t know what to do with them. REVIVÍA is looking for them.
Not every property will fit the model, because the company studies the situation of the asset and the actual rental possibilities in each town. But locating that hidden stock of homes is precisely one of the necessary steps for the project to grow.
The Spanish paradox is on the table: while we talk about a housing shortage, the country holds nearly 3.8 million empty homes, a large share of which are in small municipalities. The venture of Antxón Aizpuru invites looking at the problem from a different angle. Perhaps not every home we need must be built from scratch. Some have waited behind a closed door in a village for decades.
And now someone is looking for them.
