Spain’s rental market has a gap, and it is not a shortage of tenants. Every tenant pays the legal fianza of one month; what decides who gets the flat is the security a landlord asks for on top of it — a bank aval, or two further months of rent in cash — and that requirement turns away people who can plainly pay the rent but cannot produce the cash, the permanent contract or the Spanish payslips the aval needs. A nurse on a temporary contract, a couple who moved for work last month, a graduate on her first salary: good tenants, lost to a thicker file. We have studied that segment with our associated agency in Spain and the real estate agencies it works with, and we have built a seguro de caución for it.
The product is a caución de alquiler. The tenant is the policyholder, the landlord the insured, and the policy covers the months of additional security the lease provides for; the legal fianza stays exactly where the law puts it. It is priced for a household rather than a company — deliberately favourable, paid once at signature — because the purpose is to widen the pool of people who can sign a lease and the pool of risks we insure, not to earn a commercial rate on a two-month exposure. And it runs for up to 24 months where most of the market stops at twelve: an eviction for non-payment in Spain can take many months, sometimes more than a year, to run its course, and a guarantee that expires in the middle of it protects nobody. Ours is there for the whole lease, and for the whole of a dispute if there is one.
This is a programme for real estate agencies, not a product for brokers. The agency is the one standing in the flat with the applicant, and it is the agency that needs an answer before the applicant walks out and signs somewhere else; so the agency is who we have built it for, and who we are inviting. Brokers are welcome too, on one condition that is really an opportunity: bring an agreement with a chain or a network of agencies, and the programme runs through you for all of them.
What makes it usable is the technology behind it. An agency that has joined signs in to its own secure area on our site. It enters the lease — the rent, the term, the months of security the landlord wants — and the tenant’s details, and the premium is quoted on screen in real time as the figures go in, before anything is submitted. When the agent submits, an automatic scoring model built for residential tenants and assisted by AI reads the tenant’s income, its stability and the payment history the tenant has consented to share, and returns a decision within three hours at most; where the model is unsure an underwriter reads the file inside the same window. The agent pre-approves the policy on screen, the tenant receives it by email and signs it with a one-time code sent to their phone, and the certificate reaches the landlord the same day. No bank appointment, no paper, no lease delayed while a guarantee is found.
The flexibility is deliberate, because no two leases are alike. The cover follows what the lease actually provides for — one month of additional security or two, a single tenant or several co-tenants on one contract, a term of six months or of two years. The policy can be renewed when the lease is extended and is released when the lease ends early, and nothing about a tenant’s nationality, employer or length of residence in Spain is a condition of applying. What the scoring looks at is whether the rent is affordable and has been paid before.
We are inviting real estate agencies directly, and the enquiry form on this site is the door. Tell us the city, the volume of leases you sign in a year and the guarantee your landlords currently require, and we will introduce you to the agency that administers the programme and set up your access. A broker with an agreement with a chain of agencies should write the same way and say so. There is no volume commitment, no fee to join and no exclusivity.
The programme is for Spain only, for residential leases under the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos, in Spanish, and it is distributed and administered through our associated managing general agent for the Spanish market, as all our Spanish business is. Every certificate is issued on FDI Insurance paper, under our entry on the DGSFP register — clave L1617, ramo 15, caución — and against the balance sheet we publish in full in the solvency section of this site. The legal fianza remains a cash deposit lodged with the regional housing body; what this programme replaces is only what the landlord asked for on top of it.
Written by the underwriting team at FDI Insurance d.a.c., Dublin. This piece is general information, not advice on any particular transaction — and it is not an offer of insurance.
