Spanish Homes Maintain Demand From Foreign Buyers
27th April 2019
The figures represent an annual increase of 11.3%. The data also shows a stable distribution in relation to recent years, between used housing (82.5%) and new housing (17.5%).
Demand for housing in Spain from foreigners maintained the good performance of recent years, with 12.6% of the total operations. Specifically, sales/purchases by foreigners reached 65,400 transactions in 2018 compared to 61,000 in the previous year. The autonomous communities with the highest foreign purchases coincide with the areas of greater tourist interest. The Balearic Islands saw the most with 30.5% of homes acquired by foreigners. Following were the Canary Islands (28.3%), Valencia (26%) and Murcia (19.6%).
6% of purchases made by foreign buyers were for a property amount equal to or greater than 500,000 euros. This is up from 5.7% in 2017. Of those, 34.9% were to non-EU nationalities, compared to 37.5% in 2017, and far from the 44.9% this demographic represented in 2014.
Looking further into nationalities, the strength of the British market appears undisturbed by Brexit worries, approaching 10,200 purchases which represents 15.54% of the total home purchases by foreigners. “Despite the uncertainty coming from Brexit, the British have one again shown their confidence in the Spanish property market, once again being the largest foreign market for Spain,” said a representative of the registrars.
The Germans recovered their second position reaching almost 4,900 purchases, 7.5% of the total, and overtaking the French who purchased a little over 4,800 homes (7.4% of the total). Other nationalities to feature significantly were the Belgians (6.2%), Swedes (5.8%), Romanians (5.4%) and Italians (5.3%).
Published by David
