Oh, they do notice. In Spain people have difficult saving money, and when they finally can, they buy property, as the financial markets in Spain are underevelo

Oh, they do notice. In Spain people have difficult saving money, and when they finally can, they buy property, as the financial markets in Spain are undereveloped, the spanish indices perform really bad, and until very recently wasn't easy to put money in other markets. So most property in Spain is owned by regular folks. Squatters come in different types. We could divide them in three groups. 1. Politically motivated. Only a tiny fraction, typically anarchist types that go after abandoned properties and the like. 2. People who "buy from mafias". There are people who look for vacant properties, break in, and "sell" the propertie to someone, for prices around 500€. This typically ends up with poor people living in, as the spanish institutions fail spectacularly providing either a good legislation for the market or provide public housing. 3. Drug selling points / conflictive people. They break in in whatever opportunity they have. In some areas they use the properties to sell drugs. If a Squatter breaks in, the problem is not only for the owner of the property, but for everyone around. You have to take into account that in Spain most people live in flats, and squatters break into flats, because flats are more abundant than detached houses. So if you live in a flat and somene breaks in near you, it may not be much of a problem with the type two, but there's definitely a problem for the other ones, specially when there is a drug selling point. So everyone, not only the owner, pressures to get this situations solved. Also, an empty property may not be possible to rent. It may be in bad shape so you can't rent it legally, because you don't have the money to repair it, and you don't find a buyer (a situation that happened in my family until very recently, that lasted for many, many years), or the financial risks are too high for the benefits you might extract, specially if you already have a low or unstable income (not rare in Spain), making it safer to just leave it empty. So in summary, this is a self-inflicted wound for Spain. The regulation is awful, as the market is basically controlled by municipalities, making land scarce and expensive, leading to only few high profit developments, almost non existing public housing, and high costs of property ownership for large swaths of the population.