15 April, 2015

By VIVA Team

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

A recent report by Spanish national newspaper El Mundo has found that as many as two-thirds of non-Spaniards who bought property in Spain over the past six months did so without requiring a mortgage.

El Mundo reports that cash-rich buyers from the UK and Scandinavia have been taking advantage of the favourable exchange rates and snapping up affordable property in Spain with cash…

Statistics quoted by the newspaper also suggest that 26 per cent of all property transactions in Spain between August 2014 and January this year were made by foreign buyers, which is a higher figure than the 17 per cent that was reported elsewhere.

The newspaper has also pointed to evidence that reveals a rise in the number of mortgages being issued in Spain, but equally a fall in the amount being loaned, which suggests that Spanish banks are more willing to lend than they have been in the past, but only on smaller amounts – usually to buyers that arrive armed with a large deposit.

In fact, despite this increase in lending, cash-only transactions represented one-third of all property sales over the August-January period, says El Mundo, with an increasing number of Spaniards now able to afford to buy a property outright rather than having to rely on a mortgage. Its data reveals that 161,361 properties changed hands during those six months, while only 104,825 mortgages were granted.

In February, data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute revealed that the number of property transactions recorded that month was 15.5 per cent higher than for the same month in 2014, and the average number of property sales per month is now around 30,000 – up from below 25,000 this time last year.

Over the past 12 months there have been 11 monthly increases in the number of property transactions recorded, which suggests that recovery has well and truly taken hold across the country.