Brits bought 15% of all Spanish homes sold to foreign buyers last year

In the Costa del Sol, foreign buyers made one-third of all property purchases in 2017, the data shows.

Homebuyers from the UK snapped up more than 9,000 Spanish properties in 2017 according to the latest Registrars data…

This places British buyers as by far the largest group of foreign investors in Spanish residential real estate, cementing a position long held for decades.

Britons bought almost twice as many homes as any other foreign nationality in Spain last year, with German buyers a distant second on 5,234 purchases, closely followed by French buyers (5,233) and investors from Belgium and Switzerland (both just under 4,000 purchases each).

The data was drawn from a Registrars report that shows a total of 464,223 home sales in Spain last year, which is a 14.98% increase on 2016. The share of foreign buyers for 2017 stood at 13.1%, which is broadly similar to previous years and a 4% increase on 2009, the last year in which there was a decline in foreign interest.

Regionally, foreign buyers’ activity is centred on just a few locations of course, with sales to non-Spaniards highest in the provinces of Málaga, Alicante, Tenerife, Las Palmas and Murcia.

For Málaga province, which incorporates the Costa del Sol, foreigners bought 29.6% of all homes in the region in 2017, meaning almost one-third of sales were conducted by non-Spaniards. The highest foreigner-to-national ratio, however, was found in Alicante, where a massive 40.8% of homes sold in the region were bought by foreigners.

British interest in Spanish property has dipped ever-so-slightly in the past couple of years, with the 9,111 sales recorded in 2017 slightly below the 10,000 properties bought in 2016. Equally, Britons no longer account for 20% of the foreign market like they used to (a figure that rose to 35% in 2008), but are nonetheless, still the most important single nationality for the Spanish home market.