ARCHIVED - Spanish property sales dropped by 3.3 per cent in 2019

The amount of activity in the real estate market held steady in December

This Wednesday saw the publication by the Spanish government’s central statistics unit of the residential property sales data for the month of December 2019, showing that the number of transactions was 1.8 per cent higher than in the last month of 2018 at 34,767.

This provisional result ends a run of four consecutive year-on-year decreases, but the rise is a far from emphatic one and it serves to reiterate the fact that activity in the market appears to have hit a ceiling. Various factors may have contributed to the trend, including the continuing political uncertainty in Spain prior to the formation of a new government in January, indications that unemployment figures have bottomed out and could start to rise and others including the slowdown of general economic growth, but whatever the causes the government figures for the last few months leave little room for doubt.

As ever, though, there was a good deal of disparity among the results reported in Spain’s 17 regions in December. The sharpest year-on-year decrease was one of 14.2 per cent in Cantabria, but at the other end of the scale were increases of 18.3 per cent in Castilla-La Mancha and 18 per cent in Navarra, while the Region of Murcia figures once again bucked the national trend: while the overall figure dropped in recent months it continued to rise in the Costa Cálida, but in December a slight fall of 3.9 per cent is reported.

As is almost always the case, the region with most sales per 100,000 inhabitants of property-buying age during the month was the Comunidad Valenciana, with a figure of 133, due in no small part to the activity of the expat population in the Costa Blanca.

A more balanced view of the situation is always gleaned from the longer-term picture, though, and the results for the whole of last year show an overall decrease in housing sales of 3.3 per cent to 501,085. The sharpest falls are reported in the islands (-14 per cent in the Canaries and -10.9 per cent in the Balearics), and among the most significant upward movements are those in the “unfashionable” areas of Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha, where the bounce-back in the market started far later than in the major cities and tourist destinations of Spain.

So, for the first time in 6 years the property market in Spain slowed down slightly in 2019, and there is some uncertainty over what developments are to be expected in 2020. Major fluctuations seem unlikely, but what appears certain is that the areas in which non-Spaniards purchase most property will continue to be the busiest: the 2019 data show that the five most active regional markets included the Comunidad Valenciana (and the Costa Blanca), Andalucía, the Balearics and Murcia, the only “intruder” into the leading group being La Rioja!

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