Detached houses with their land plots are inferior to the demand for flats and apartments. As the situation with the pandemic stabilizes, buyers are returning to the traditionally demanded segment of real estate - objects in residential complexes.
Registrar data show that apartments in the urban environment have begun to restore their surrendered positions, but not all. Industry experts believe they may never be back on track and point to a new market reality: townhouses and villas.
“There has been a change in the taste preferences of potential owners, which is common in crises,” says Lola Alcover, general secretary of the real estate agents’ association. This fluctuation is reflected in the data provided to EL PAÍS by the organization Registradores de España. The professional association collects all the information about house sales and purchases into their offices and notes that 80% of transactions were related to apartments in multi-family buildings in the third quarter of this year, compared with 20% of single-family homes. It is the same percentage as between April and June, which means homes are gaining weight from pre-pandemic conditions (18% in Q1 2020) but losing momentum from sales seen at the end of 2020 (23% in the fourth quarter).
Jose Miguel Tabarés, vice dean of the College of Registrars of Spain, believes the reason is twofold. On the one hand, single-family houses have a “supply problem”, making it “difficult to continue selling due to a shortage of properties.” The second reason has more to do with the pandemic and the perception of those looking for housing. “Perhaps having a terrace or a garden is no longer as crucial as it was in the mid-2020s, and that is also having an impact,” he notes.
Alcover adds that “the psychological factor is decisive in any decision. At the beginning of the pandemic, many people were afraid and did not want to live near densely populated areas, now this has eased a little, and we seem to be returning to a normal way of life. But he explains that, in addition to fears, the virus has also caused many shoppers to rethink their lifestyle and imagine themselves living elsewhere. Will there be more buyers of private houses than before the pandemic? “All the colleagues I spoke with agree with this,” he says.
Basque Country (95%), La Rioja (86%) and Madrid (86%) were the three regions where multi-family apartments accounted for the largest share of sales in the third quarter. On the opposite side were Castilla-La Mancha (62%), Extremadura (69%) and Castilla y León (76%). However, these percentages more reflect the specificity of the market in each region than changes in consumer habits. Compared to last year, the most significant increase in single-family houses was observed in Aragon, and the most significant decline was in Cantabria.