19 February, 2018

By VIVA Team

2017's sales figures show that Spain registered a nine-year high in property transactions, and could get close to half a million this year.

2017’s sales figures show that Spain registered a nine-year high in property transactions, and could get close to half a million this year.

Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE) has published provisional residential property sales figures for 2017 that reveal a nine-year high in the number of transactions made last year.

This makes 2017 the most positive year for Spain’s property market since 2008, which was the year in which the post-boom crash arrived, sending the real estate industry into a tailspin that has taken years to rectify…

Since 2013, the signs have been strong that the Spanish property market was steadily finding its feet, but this data is the first time that pre-crash conditions have been recorded.

Across all 17 autonomous regions of the country, property sales figures were higher than the year previously, and the nationwide 14.6% increase on 2016 sales pushed the total figure to 464,423 homes sold last year.

This is in positively stark contrast to the 312,000 homes bought and sold in Spain in 2012, which marked the bottoming-out of sales activity during the deepest depth of the recession.

2017 ended on a high, too, with the official number of 32,211 transactions recorded in December last year an encouraging 9.2% increase on the same month in 2016. This is also almost double notary data published this week that estimated a 4.5% increase in sales for December.

By region, the fastest-growing area of Spain last year was Castilla-La Mancha, which posted an impressive 24.7% increase in property sales against 2016. This region is not typically one that attracts foreign buyers, which suggests strongly that much of the upturn in fortunes for the Spanish real estate sector is being driven by domestic recovery.

Nevertheless, foreign buyers are still a vital component of the Spanish property landscape, accounting for around 15% of all homebuying activity last year. Within those foreign figures, Brits account for around one in five sales to non-Spaniards.