New Year - New Statistics

Buying a property in a market you know well, in which you understand the legal system and speak the language, is one thing. Searching in another country you may only know from family holidays, where you are unfamiliar with how the legal system functions and don’t speak the language, is quite another. But that’s the situation in which many buyers from overseas find themselves when planning a purchase in Spain so good research, and an understanding of market evolution over time, particularly with reference to prices and locations, is essential. 

However, getting access to reliable statistics has not always been easy in Spain, even for those working in the property sector. One of the reasons for that is the two principal sources of property market statistics, the Notaries and the Property Registries, produce figures that differ by as much as 25% because they count when a purchase takes place differently. That’s confusing for buyers who want to know if the market is trending up or down, current prices, prime locations, and lots of other issues. 

I’ve long thought the most reliable statistics are produced by Spain’s Notaries, giving regional breakdowns, prices per m², and breakdowns by nationality. The downside was that, in respect of the overseas part of the market, they were only published half-yearly. Similar, and reliable, statistics were also available from Ministry of Transport, Mobility & Urban Agenda (MITMA), published quarterly and even including municipal returns but they treated overseas buyers as just one group, no further analysis. On top of that, the format in which they were presented was not easy to use and, although I did look at them, I mainly stuck with the Notaries’ figures.

I pay no attention to statistics from the Property Registries as they don’t record when a purchase is actually done but when it is entered in the Registry, which may be weeks and even months later. This inevitably muddles quarterly and annual returns and leads to confusion, so I avoid them. Unfortunately, many commentators do refer to them in blogs on websites and social media without mentioning the discrepancies caused by the different counting method. 

Why the Notaries are Best

The good news for the new year is the Notaries are now giving rolling totals of some statistics over a 12-month period, with the option to track back two, five or twelve years.  It is possible to search for new-build versus resale ratios and prices per square metre, for both new-build and resales, and by apartment or house categories at all levels of the market - nationally, by autonomous region, by province and municipalities. Unfortunately, this new format doesn’t give as much nationality data as before; it just lists the top five  nationalities, about 40% of the overseas market, with the remaining 60% lumped together as ‘the rest’. So, I hope they will continue with the half-yearly breakdowns in the format of who’s buying, where they’re buying and how much they’re spending by nationality. This format started in 2007 so gives an interesting overview of international buyer patterns from just prior to the 2008 market meltdown through the subsequent recovery and the Covid years.

Obviously, there’s time lag but it is now possible to determine what happened in 2025 with ten months’ statistics already published, that is January to October inclusive and during February 2026 we will have the full picture for 2025.  We just haven’t had access to such detail previously, all in one place and within a relatively short timeframe. They’re still not up to the standard of those countries which give actual sales prices of individual properties but it’s a real improvement nevertheless. And I’m sure what many buyers planning to invest in a property in Spain during 2026 will find most useful are the figures relating to prices per square metre, price rises over the period, the separation of apartments and houses, and breakdown at national, regional, provincial and municipal levels.

Back to Peak Prices

One important fact we already know about 2025 without waiting for further data - it was the year that the average price of resale properties surpassed the previous highest levels recorded, which were just before the 2008 market crash. (The new-build sector had already reached new high levels in autumn 2022). However, in transaction number terms, the market still lags behind the absolute peak number achieved in 2006, just before the property market, and everything else, headed for the cliff-edge. I think it will be 2027 at the earliest before the 2006 total of 955,186 purchases is overtaken, if then. That’s twenty years of catch up although it’s worth reminding everyone of the madness of Spain’s building frenzy - for several years it built more units annually than France, Germany & the UK combined. And why are prices higher now than at the pre-crash peak when buyer numbers are still well below? It's what happens when 95% of the construction industry collapses and years of rising demand is not matched on the supply side. Spain has now experienced 48 consecutive quarters of rising prices, and this seems likely to continue, at least for the foreseeable future.

^{©Barbara Wood}