Empty Tenders: When Building Means Paying, No One Raises Their Hand
Why are the works for the Seville Metro or the AVE being left deserted? We analyze the paradox of 2026: there is NextGen money, but no one to lay the bricks at that price.
Good afternoon.
There is an image repeating itself in Administration offices: the envelope of a million-euro tender is opened... and there is nothing inside. Deserted.
In Castellón, public tendering has fallen by 37%. In Andalusia, key works for the Seville Metro and the AVE are in danger. And the question floating in the air is: Why are construction companies rejecting work when there are 5 billion euros at stake?
The answer is simple, even if it hurts: — Because no one works to lose money.
The Trap of "Vintage" Prices
The problem is not technical. It is temporal. The Administration is tendering works today with budgets calculated in 2024.
Let me give you an example: You are a construction company. You see an 8 million tender for a highway. You crunch the numbers with today's prices (Steel +21%, Diesel +20%). The real execution cost comes out to 9.5 million.
What do you do?
- Option A: You bid, you win, and you lose 1.5 million euros.
- Option B: You don't bid.
Obviously, you choose B. — It's not a boycott. It's survival.
"Ghost" Works in Andalusia (and across Spain)
We are not talking about renovating the town square. We are talking about critical infrastructures that backbone the country:
- The Seville Metro.
- The AVE to Almería.
- The SE-40.
All these works share a common denominator: base prices disconnected from the post-Hormuz reality. And while Next Generation funds have an expiration date... the cranes remain still.
The "Reckless Low Bid" is now the "Suicidal Bid"
In the old days, companies fought to lower the price. Today, bidding at the base price is already a risk. Bidding lower... is corporate suicide.
The Public Sector Contracts Law expels "abnormally low" offers. But in 2026, the offer the law considers "normal" is, in reality, a loss-making offer. The system is designed to avoid cost overruns, but it has ended up avoiding... the works themselves.
And that is the knife's edge: bid with yesterday's costs and you lose money. Bid with today's costs without real data and you are guessing. The only way out is knowing, with precision, what it actually costs you to build right now — not on your last project, not according to an industry index, but on your current sites, with your suppliers and your crew.
Don't bid blindly
Before pricing a public offer, you need to know how much it really costs you to build today. Don't use 2024 price bases.
Use OBRATEC to analyze your real costs on current sites and project with data, not intuition.
The Solution? — Update or Die
The Administration has the solution in its hand, even if its hand shakes when signing it: 1. Update base prices before tendering (using MITMA indices, that's what they are for). 2. Automatic indexation in the specifications (as they do in Germany or France).
As long as we pretend that steel costs the same as in 2021... we will keep opening empty envelopes.
That's how things are... and that's how we've told you.
Already awarded a project and losing money? The Government has launched a lifesaver (with holes, but a lifesaver): See how to request price revision with RDL 7/2026.