Foreigners stimulate the purchase of housing in Spain

Foreigners stimulate the purchase of housing in Spain

The impact of home purchases by foreigners continued to be significant in Spain during 2020. In the year of the pandemic, 46,303 transactions were registered and this figure, despite the fact that it is far from the historical maximum of 65,416 purchases in 2018, is at a level similar to that reached in 2014. This is one of the main conclusions drawn from the results of a study presented and published by Real Estate Agents (API) and FIABCI of Spain.

The last year's data represents a decrease of 26.3% compared to 2019. Thus, in general, purchases made by foreigners amounted to 11.32% of the total, which means a slight decrease of 1.13 percentage points compared to the previous year, maintaining the trend of recent years. Although this figure is far from the maximum of 13.25% reached in 2016, it still represents "very outstanding figures of foreign demand".

In this regard, it should be noted that more than half of the houses bought by foreigners belong to local residents — 59.5%, which is the highest indicator of the relative weight of this group over the past decade. This shows the importance of these people in the Spanish real estate sector. The share of non-residents, on the other hand, decreased to 40.5%. According to the national basis, the market share is led by Europeans. The British are in the first place with 13.05% of the total, followed by the French (8.16%), Germans (7.75%), Moroccans (6.74%), Belgians (6.39%), Romanians (5.53%), Italians (5.08%), Swedes (4.63%), Dutch (3.32%) and Chinese (3.08%).

On the other hand, Swedes, Germans and Norwegians are the buyers of the most expensive real estate. In their case, the average price is 5,322 euros per square meter, 4,668 and 4,662 euros, respectively. Similarly, more than 30% of foreigners who bought a house in Spain chose an area of more than 100 square meters, while only 14.83% preferred apartments with an area of 40 to 60 meters and 4.32% preferred apartments with an ares of less than 40 meters.

As for the autonomous communities, the largest number of purchases fell on the Valencian Community (13,493), followed by Andalusia (9,443), Catalonia (7,748), the Canary Islands (3,841), the Balearic Islands (3,146), the Madrid Community (2,761) and Murcia (2,617). The remaining territories did not exceed the barrier of 1000 annual purchases. In this sense, looking at the map of Spain, you can see that the Mediterranean coast and archipelagos are attractive for the foreign market.

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