Despite national and international restrictions on mobility caused by the health crisis, the luxury property market in Marbella area is more active than ever. Over the past year, starting on June 21, 2020, when restrictions were lifted in Spain, there has been an unexpected, even exceptional volume of property sales and purchases. In 2021, the elite segment of the market (i.e. real estate worth more than one million euros) accelerated month after month, reaching an unprecedented level of activity.
This data was compiled in the Marbella Real Estate Market 2021 report by Christopher Clover, Managing Director of Panorama Properties, the oldest real estate agency in Marbella with over 50 years of experience in the city. Clover cites the statistics for the first quarter of 2021 for the municipalities of Marbella, Estepona and Benahavis, which show sales growth of 9.2% compared to the same period in 2020, but especially Marbella, where the growth was 22%.
The increase in the number of requests from potential buyers, recorded by Panorama in the first half of 2021, amounting to 154.4% compared to the first half of 2019, was a direct consequence of the pandemic. Likewise, the number of sales and purchases (registered and under registration) recorded by Panorama during the same period increased by 68%.
Panorama expects that house prices, having corrected during the pandemic and remaining stable at the present time, will gradually begin to rise. An 8.56% increase in construction costs from the end of the first quarter of 2020 to the end of the first quarter of 2021, according to the Valuation Society, confirms the assumptions. It is worth noting that although there are houses in all price categories on the market, houses from 3 million euros to 12 million euros and even more have become a common type of sale, this is real estate of a level that practically did not exist before the last crisis and which, perhaps, even temporarily lacks in number of such properties.