 |
| Southern Spain is truly back.. |
2017 Sees Nine-Year High in
Spanish Property Sales
The National Institute of Statistics in Spain (INE) has
published the latest provisional residential property sales figures for 2017
which show last year saw a nine-year high for total property transactions.
This means that 2017 has become the most significant year
for the Spanish property market since 2008, which was when the bubble burst and
the crash began, leaving the real estate industry in a state that it has taken
years to recover from.
Signs have been suggesting that the property market in Spain
has been recovering since 2013, but this latest data marks the first time that
the market has reached pre-crash conditions. Property sales figures increased
across all 17 autonomous regions of Spain, and the 14.6% nationwide increase
over 2016 sales figures left the total figure at 464,423 homes sold in 2017.
This is in stark contrast to the 312,000 homes changing
hands in Spain during 2012, which was when sales started bottoming out at the
height of the recession. 2017 ended on a positive note as well, as the 32,211
transactions recorded for last December was an increase of 9.2% over December
of 2016. It’s also around twice the notary data published recently that
estimated sales would increase 4.5% in December.
The fastest-growing region of Spain last year was
Castilla-La Mancha, which saw an impressive increase in property sales of 24.7%
compared to 2016. This is an area that doesn’t usually bring in foreign buyers,
suggesting that a large part of the uptick in the Spanish real estate sector is
caused by domestic recovery.
Foreign buyers still remain an important part of Spanish real estate though, accounting for around 15% of home buying activity in 2017.
Of this, Brits were responsible for around a fifth of all sales to foreign
investors.
