Buying a home is the largest financial decision most of us will ever make. Yet in Spain, around 75% of buyers go straight to their own bank — one option, no competition, no expert in their corner. The result is often thousands of euros left on the table, and a stressful process navigated almost entirely alone.
Marcelo Siqueira wants to change that. As General Manager of Bayteca — the Spanish trading name of Huspy, the proptech that became the dominant mortgage broker in Dubai before expanding to Spain — he's building what he calls the "one-stop solution" for buying and financing a home. In this episode of the Nova Podcast, he breaks down how the broker model works, why the Spanish housing market is in structural crisis, and what it takes to thrive across radically different markets.
What a Mortgage Broker Actually Does
The broker concept is well-established in the United States (where roughly 70% of mortgages go through a broker) and the UAE (around 60%), but Spain has historically been slow to adopt it. Marcelo's opening pitch is simple: you have one of the most important conversations of your financial life — about a product you'll carry for 20 to 30 years — with a single bank that knows this market far better than you do. That asymmetry is the problem a broker solves.
A good broker, Marcelo explains, starts by understanding your specific situation: how much you want to finance, whether you're optimising for the lowest rate, the least friction, or a higher loan-to-value ratio. They then match your profile against the full market — including smaller regional banks and savings institutions that rarely come up in a Google search but frequently offer the best terms.
"The less well-known the bank's name, the more likely it is that the interest rate on the mortgage is good. I always tell my friends: don't just go to the Santanders and BBVAs."
— Marcelo Siqueira, GM Bayteca / Huspy Spain
Beyond rate-shopping, the broker generates genuine competitive pressure. When several banks know they're being benchmarked against each other, the terms improve. The broker also deciphers the "small print" — the bundled insurance policies, account-opening requirements, and product tie-ins that can make a seemingly excellent headline rate considerably more expensive in practice.
On average, the end-to-end process from initial contact to funds released takes around 45 days. For most buyers, having an expert manage that journey — across document requests, credit assessments, notary appointments, and final sign-off — is as valuable as the financial saving.
The Real Cost of Buying a Home in Spain
- Deposit (standard): 20% of purchase price (banks typically lend up to 80% LTV)
- Transfer tax (ITP): 6–10% depending on the autonomous community (applies to resale properties)
- VAT (IVA): 10% on new-build homes
- Notary, registry & mortgage fees: roughly 1–2%
- Total upfront cost: roughly 28–32% of the purchase price for a resale property
- Example: A €300,000 home requires approximately €85,000–€100,000 in cash before you get the keys.
How Bayteca's Model Works — and Who It's For
Marcelo positions Bayteca deliberately between two existing extremes in the Spanish broker market. At one end are the free comparison platforms — aggregators like HelpMyCash or Idealista's mortgage tool — which collect your data and pass it to banks with limited personalised advice. At the other end are traditional independent brokers who offer comprehensive hand-holding but charge fees that can reach €6,000.
Bayteca's approach: lean internal operations and technology that allows them to handle volume without sacrificing personalisation, enabling a service tier that sits above the comparison platforms at a fraction of the cost of traditional brokers. For straightforward cases, clients can move through the process with minimal friction. For more complex situations — someone trying to finance 90% or 95% of the purchase price, for instance — advisors go deeper, sourcing banks with higher risk appetite and building customised solutions.
The fee model reflects this: Bayteca earns a commission from the lending bank (typically around 1% of the mortgage value, paid by the bank, not the buyer), plus an optional advisory fee for premium services. For a buyer, even the paid tier offers a compelling return-on-investment when measured against decades of potential savings.
"When you look at €100 per month in savings, that's €1,200 a year — and over 30 years, that pays for our service many times over. That's before you factor in the time and stress."
— Marcelo Siqueira
The Second Business: Uberising Spanish Real Estate
Mortgages are only half of Huspy's Spain story. The other half is a real estate agency model that inverts the traditional employment structure: instead of hiring agents on a salary with a small commission, Bayteca recruits self-employed agents and gives them a technology platform, inbound demand, and a commission split that can reach 50–60% of the transaction fee — far above what most agency employees would earn.
The comparison to Uber is deliberate. Spain's real estate agency market is highly fragmented, dominated by small independent offices rather than large consolidated players. Individual agents who are generating significant value for their employers often see very little of it. Bayteca's proposition: become your own boss, keep most of what you earn, and get the tools and leads you'd otherwise have to build yourself.
The platform gives agents a CRM built for their demographic, visibility into their pipeline, tools to manage client relationships, and — critically — access to qualified buyer demand. For the client-side, Bayteca increasingly captures traffic that would otherwise go to Idealista or Fotocasa, routing interested buyers directly to agents in specific markets.
Huspy is now operating across seven Spanish cities with plans to expand to twenty, each with a physical hub where agents can meet clients, receive training, and access in-person support. The company employs around 200 people in Spain — 120 in real estate, 80 in mortgages.
Spain's Housing Crisis: A Structural Problem, Not a Cycle
No conversation about property in Spain in 2025 is complete without addressing the crisis in housing affordability. Prices have risen more than 12% year-on-year according to CaixaBank Research, and Spain has now surpassed its 2008 nominal price peak — this time without the speculative credit bubble that preceded the last crash. The driver today is simpler and more stubborn: there are not enough homes.
UVE Valoraciones estimates a national shortfall of around 800,000 homes, with more than half the deficit concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. Spain needs roughly 250,000 new homes per year to stop prices rising — and is building barely 100,000. The gap widens every year.
Marcelo identifies three interlocking causes: the bureaucratic complexity of getting planning permission (which makes construction slow and expensive), the cost of materials and a shortage of skilled construction workers, and a political climate that produces well-intentioned but ineffective interventions.
"Politicians want to fix a specific problem, so they create patches. But if you don't go to the root — bureaucracy, construction costs, planning — you're not solving anything."
— Marcelo Siqueira
On top of supply constraints, demand keeps growing. Spain recorded the highest net population growth in Europe in recent years, with immigration — including large numbers of Latin American professionals and, increasingly, Italians and other Europeans — adding hundreds of thousands of new residents annually. At the same time, household sizes are shrinking: fewer people per home means more homes needed even without population growth.
The political response — rent controls, first-buyer incentives, incremental tax adjustments — draws Marcelo's polite but clear scepticism. These are patches on a structural problem. The Comunidad de Madrid's programme to guarantee 100% financing for under-35s buying their first home is, he concedes, a genuine step in the right direction: it attacks the most painful barrier (the 30% upfront cash requirement) rather than trying to manipulate prices. But it cannot substitute for building more homes.
Why Dubai? And Why Spain Next?
Huspy's origin story is a useful case study in market selection. Founded in Dubai in 2021, it became the dominant mortgage broker in the UAE within two years — a market where brokers already accounted for 60% of mortgages and where banks actively compete for broker relationships, sometimes placing their own credit teams inside Huspy's offices to accelerate approvals.
Spain was chosen for expansion based on three factors Marcelo outlines with the clarity of someone who's clearly made this pitch many times: low broker penetration (just 20–25% of mortgages), a fragmented market with no dominant players, and a market that is growing structurally — meaning even a company that executes mediocrely will grow, and one that executes well will compound fast.
The cultural and operational distance between Dubai and Spain is significant — not just linguistically, but in terms of banking relationships, regulatory environment, and consumer behaviour. Huspy's Spanish operation has been built largely from scratch, with Marcelo arriving to a company that had just five transactions and was still choosing its brand name. Bayteca (from the Arabic "bayt," meaning home) launched as a distinct identity for the Spanish market.
The strategic rationale for the move also had a personal dimension: Marcelo took a financial step down leaving Dubai's tax-free environment for Spain's income tax, but gained the equity story of building a market from zero — and the lifestyle of raising his daughter in Europe rather than the Gulf.
From Investment Banking to Operations: A Career Built on Proactivity
Marcelo's professional path — from Fortaleza to São Paulo, Banif, 99 (now Didi), Uber Eats, back to 99, then Dubai, then Madrid — reads as a series of bold lateral moves that each compounded on the last. Two themes run through all of them.
The first is knowing when the current environment isn't right for you. His stint in investment banking research was, by his own account, a failure — not because he lacked the ability, but because he realised he wanted to be on the operating side of deals, not commenting on them. He left for a startup nobody had heard of (99, before Didi's acquisition made it famous), for reasons that had nothing to do with money or prestige and everything to do with the quality of the people and the energy in the room.
The second theme is radical proactivity. At 99 and later Didi, Marcelo's growth came from consistently identifying opportunities that no one else was claiming and walking through those doors. He asked to join the expansion team, volunteered for city launches in Mexico, moved between Monterrey and Guadalajara, and kept presenting himself as the person most willing to go where the work was. He describes the strategy simply: "If I see an opportunity and no one else is going after it, I go."
"Nobody is going to hand you responsibility. If I could see an opportunity no one else was chasing, I went for it. That's how you get given more."
— Marcelo Siqueira
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- Spain's broker market is massively underpenetrated. Only 1 in 4 buyers uses a broker — compared to 60–70% in the US and UAE. That gap represents both the market opportunity and the consumer knowledge gap.
- The best mortgage rates often come from banks you've never heard of. Regional savings banks and smaller lenders frequently beat the big names — and a broker knows who they are.
- Always calculate the total cost of a mortgage, not just the rate. Insurance obligations, account fees, and product tie-ins can make a low-rate offer expensive in practice.
- Spain's housing crisis is structural, not cyclical. Without a dramatic acceleration in construction, prices are unlikely to fall meaningfully — and the deficit will continue to widen.
- The upfront cash requirement is the real barrier for first-time buyers. For a €300,000 home, you need roughly €90,000–€100,000 saved before you can buy. Regional programmes targeting this barrier are more effective than rent controls.
- Career proactivity compounds. Marcelo's entire career is a study in raising your hand for things nobody else wants to do yet — and building compounding advantages from doing so.
What He Looks for in a Hire — and What He's Learned About Building Teams
Asked what he looks for when hiring, Marcelo's answer is immediate and unequivocal: desire and ownership. Not the most impressive CV or the highest IQ score, but the person who treats the company's results as their own problem and is willing to do whatever it takes — his phrase is "whatever it takes for Huspy to win."
He's deliberately pairing this with a personal observation about where we are in the AI era: intelligence is commoditising. As reasoning and analytical capabilities become increasingly available through AI tools, the differentiator in most professional environments is shifting toward agency — the willingness and ability to actually act, rather than merely understand. For a scaleup trying to build a market, the person with hunger and ownership who can use AI tools effectively will consistently outperform the brilliant analyst who waits to be told what to do.
On managing the tension between an intense work environment and a full life outside work, Marcelo is candid. He arrives at nine, works with complete focus until seven, and refuses to let inefficiency extend his hours. The motivation is his daughter's bath time — something he describes as non-negotiable. Discipline, he argues, is what makes intensity sustainable rather than destructive.
Nova members get exclusive benefits with Bayteca
If you're buying a home in Spain, Nova has arranged a special deal with Bayteca for members. Get expert mortgage advice and access to the best rates across the full Spanish banking market.
