Compulsory purchase: assessing risk near infrastructure projects

Spain's principal compulsory-purchase legislation is the Ley de Expropiación Forzosa of 1954. The administration may acquire private property for a declared public purpose (utilidad pública or interés social), but not arbitrarily. The process includes declaring a specific need, individually identifying affected properties and paying justiprecio: compensation determined through a prescribed administrative or judicial valuation procedure, rather than the owner's asking figure. Owners may challenge the amount, but not the recognised public interest itself where the declaration procedure has been followed correctly from start to finish.

What actually threatens a property near construction

Properties close to metro extensions, roadworks or urban-renewal areas such as the superblock programme carry a background risk of future impact. Expropriation of an entire building is relatively rare, however, because narrower intervention tools generally suffice. Easements and temporary occupation of land during works—for utility routes or temporary material storage, for example—are much more common. Their effects are less dramatic but still matter when assessing a renovation and resale asset, since access to part of the land may be restricted during construction.

How to check a property in five minutes

For DNPI's land and development strategies, it is sensible to check whether a plot lies within a declared or planned public-works corridor. Use the municipal planning portal and the same PIC tool used to check edificabilidad. This requires no specialist skills and takes only minutes: overlay the plot boundaries on current planning layers and look for intersections with proposed works areas. It is a low-effort but meaningful check. For most transactions, expropriation is unlikely and should not be overstated, but there is no reason to skip a five-minute comparison, especially on the city's outskirts, where infrastructure projects more often change development boundaries.

Its place in overall due diligence

Expropriation combines a low probability with a high cost if overlooked and subsequently realised. That combination justifies a standard checklist item even if most transactions clear it quickly without findings. In established central Barcelona residential areas, the check is largely routine; for land and developments at the urban edge, it deserves deliberate attention rather than being skipped by habit. The cost of a single missed issue far exceeds the time needed to close out the check. See the overall process in the investor risk checklist.