ARCHIVED - Non-Spanish buyers accounted for 1 in 5 Murcia property sales last year

9 homes a day were sold to foreign buyers with UK nationals leading the way

Following the confirmation last week that Murcia was one of the few regions in Spain where the number of residential property sales increased last year, further figures made available on Wednesday by the country’s property registrars confirmed the degree to which the market in the Costa Cálida is reliant on non-Spanish buyers.

Sales rose in Murcia by just 1.2 per cent in 2019 but this is in contrast to the 3.3 per cent decrease in Spain as a whole, and the rise in the Costa Cálida can be attributed at least in part to the popularity of the area among non-Spaniards. The registrars report that almost one in five (19.97 per cent) of all sales was to foreign buyers, the fourth highest proportion in the 17 regions of Spain behind the Balearics (29.4 per cent), the Comunidad Valenciana (26.2 per cent) and the Canaries (25.8 per cent).

Given the annual sales total of 16,640 last year this implies that non-Spaniards purchased over 3,300 homes in Murcia in 2019 at an average of over 9 per day, and it has historically been the case that in the Costa Cálida a very high proportion of foreign buyers are British. In the whole of Spain the number of purchases by all non-Spaniards last year reached close to 63,000, with UK nationals accounting for around 9,000 of them: slightly fewer than in the last few years, but well above the figures of around 5,000 which were the norm between 2009 and 2013.

How Brexit will affect this variable is, like so many other aspects of the departure of the UK from the EU, unclear at present. It is generally expected that the number of Britons acquiring a home in Spain will fall as a result of uncertainty over their future status in EU States, but during 2020 the effect could easily be the opposite, as British people seek to secure their rights in this country prior to the end of the “transition period”.

Only time will tell, but in the Region of Murcia perhaps more than in any other part of Spain the effect of Brexit on the property market statistics could be a very telling one indeed.

To view a wide range of properties for sale across Spain consult the Spanish property page.

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