14 April, 2016

By VIVA Team

As property in Spain has become more affordable, more and more foreign buyers are snapping up homes with cash.

Steadily rising property values, like those in Spain last year, are an encouraging sign for any market.

Eurostat, the European Union’s (EU) statistics database, has published figures showing that Spanish property rose in value by an average of 4.3% in 2015, which is some way above the European average.

For the fourth and final quarter of last year, values for Spanish property remained steady, which suggests a slight slowing of the price rises that have characterised the past handful of quarters…

Quarter-over-quarter, homes in Spain were 4.3% more expensive at the end of December than the same period in 2014, with the preceding three quarters also posting rises greater than 4%.

Analysts are confident that this trend will flow into 2016, and first quarter data, due shortly, is hotly anticipated by the industry as it looks to build on a supremely encouraging 2015.

For the whole of the EU, the average annual property price increase for last year was 3.8%, with Sweden leading the way (home values rose 14.2% in 2015), followed by Hungary (10.3%), and the UK (7.1%).

The property markets of Croatia, Italy and Cyprus – each at some point touted as ‘the next big thing’ for overseas investment – saw price contractions of 2.1%, 0.9%, and 0.6% respectively.

For 2016, the CBRE forecasts property prices in Spain to rise by approximately 5%.