After 2020, when the real estate market saw lows for more than a decade in property sales and purchases, and prices continued to rise, in 2021 the tone changed in terms of the number of transactions, with a recovery in demand, while prices continued to resist falling.
This is, in general terms, the “diagnosis” of the main experts and real estate portals, which Business Insider Spain consulted to find out their opinion on the behavior of property buying and selling in the first half of the year and their predictions for the second half, although there are important nuances between them regarding market recovery and price evolution.
As for the beginning of 2021, several sector indices indicate that prices, despite differences between areas, slowed their upward trend in the first half of the year. As such, Fotocasa calculated that the second quarter ended 4 years of continuous growth in property prices, recording a 0.7% drop from the previous quarter, while highlighting that they were still 0.5% higher than 12 months ago.
Meanwhile, quarterly statistics for the April-June period on finished property by appraisal Tinsa showed an increase of 2% compared to the second quarter of 2020, noting that the market is keeping a positive trend like at the beginning of the year and that the largest growth is seen in both archipelagos, Galicia and the Basque Country.
However, property market report prepared by Tecnocasa and the University of Pompeu Fabra reflects that property prices, secondary property prices in this case, in Spain decreased by 1.43% in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year, accumulating 4 negative months in a row, albeit softening the 4.4% decline recorded in the second half of 2020, thanks to the recovery in demand.
“Since 2017, Spain has never been able to stabilize property prices, these are the usual ups and downs from one quarter to the next,” assures Business Insider Spain, Guillermo Llibre, CEO at Housell, stressing that the trend of incresing prices has been in the period since 2018 before the beginning of the pandemic, when the market accumulated the sixth year of price increases.