Between January and June 2022, 328,208 home sales and purchases were recorded in Spain, levels not seen since 2008. In fact, the 163,909 sales recorded in the second quarter of this year alone are the second best result since the beginning of 2008, behind only the 164,299 recorded in the first quarter of 2022, according to the Real Estate Registry Statistics of the Association of Property Registrars, which collects quarterly data. As well as this, foreigners are buying more houses than ever in Spain. We have the details of what they are buying and where they are choosing to live.
Increases in foreign demand in Spain
One of the reasons why more homes are being transacted than at any time since the last property boom is the marked interest of foreign buyers in buying property in Spain. Since registrars have been collecting data on the nationality of home buyers, the maximum levels had been above 13%, without reaching the levels reached in the last quarter. “This represents a significant increase in foreign demand in a market that has been particularly intense since the end of the pandemic,” state registrars in Spain. Only at the end of 2015 it reached 14.38%, but in another economic context in which barely 84,000 homes were sold between October and December of that year.
And the fact is that, from the third quarter of 2021, when the entry of foreign citizens to Spain was more widely permitted after the end of the strict measures to control access to the country due to the pandemic, the purchase of homes by foreigners once again reached pre-pandemic figures. From July 2021 onwards, transactions have not fallen below 16,000 in the following four quarters.
Where the British, Germans and French buy property in Spain
The data on home purchases in Spain by foreigners confirm a trend, since the return to normality after the pandemic, towards a much more equitable proportion in the distribution of the total number of transactions.
The nationalities that bought the most houses in Spain between April and June were the British (9.8%, 2,310), the second lowest figure since data has been available, followed by Germans (9.1%, 2,140), French (6.6%, 1,560), Moroccans (4.9%, 1,160), Belgians (4.9%, 1,155), Romanians (4.8%, 1,150), Dutch (4.8%, 1,130) and Italians (4.6%, 1,080). This situation is particularly noticeable in the British, who have always been the main buyers of homes in our country, reaching levels above 20% in 2015, although on average they have exceeded 12.5%. But since the end of 2020, there have already been three quarters where they have not exceeded 10% of the total number of transactions among foreign buyers.
Source: Idealista.
