Last year in Spain about 2% of residential real estate purchased by foreigners was bought by Russian citizens. They purchased more than 1,280 housing units In total.
However, both indicators began to decline steadily in 2012. They are likely to continue declining even more after the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The Spanish news agency Efe reviewed the information from the Department of Cadastre under the Spanish Ministry of Justice and concluded that Russian citizens bought 3.5 houses on average per day during 2021.
This figure almost halved comparing with 2012, when Russians bought 6.6 houses per day. 3,399 houses were sold in total that year.
This suggests that the share of Russian buyers declines steadily in the Spanish market, while buyers from Britain, Germany, France and Belgium become increasingly important (note: the share of the British was almost 25% of all foreign demand in 2015).
Experts interviewed by Efe are still hesitant to predict how the rate of investments made by Russian citizens will change in the near months. The uncertainty caused by the military actions in Ukraine and then followed by economic sanctions against Russia, is high.
“The Russian client is vaguely unfamiliar with the Spanish market,” admits Ferran Font, the Director of Research Department in real estate portal Pisos.com. Russian buyers purchase mainly property in well-known tourist areas, both on the coast and in large cities.
Vladimir Putin himself often appears in the lists of major Russian buyers of Spanish real estate. Experts, who have consulted with Efe, credit him with several properties in different parts of Spain.
There is a mansion on a hillside in Marbella with its own golf course and shooting range among the properties owned allegedly by the President of the Russian Federation.
The property next door to this mansion was owned by the deceased former mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov for some time. Later various media claimed that the property next to the mansion belonged to the Russian billionaire Valery Ponomarev.
It is known that back in 2006 only 1.24% of the total number of foreign buyers were Russians, while 1.12% of foreign buyers were Ukrainians. Russian citizens preferred to purchase larger properties, from 100 square meters, while Ukrainian citizens preferred smaller ones, up to 80 square meters.