Date Published: 23/02/2021
ARCHIVED - Pandemic reduces property sales figures in Andalucía by 17 per cent
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
The absence of international purchasers may have caused sharper falls in Málaga and Cádiz
Data published last week by the Spanish government’s central statistics unit report that the number of residential properties bought and sold throughout the country during 2020 fell by 17.7 per cent in comparison with the year before to 415,748, a decrease brought about primarily by the coronavirus pandemic which reached Europe just over a year ago, and in the region of Andalucía the overall totals mirror this trend with a drop of 17 per cent.
In March, April and May of last year the effect of the first wave of coronavirus on Spain’s property market was particularly drastic, and it was not until the autumn that levels of activity similar to those observed in 2019 were apparent again. At the same time, though, in some areas the international travel restrictions led to a sharp fall in the number of homes being bought by non-Spaniards, and in the light of this it is perhaps not surprising to see that the sharpest falls in house sales in the 17 regions of the country were those reported in the Balearic Islands (-23.2 per cent), the Comunidad Valenciana (-22.1 per cent) and the Canaries (-21.9 per cent), followed closely by Madrid and Catalunya.
In addition, it can be seen that the drop in sales was especially notable in the province of Alicante, where foreign buyers, especially UK nationals, can sometimes account for as many as half of all residential property purchases. Here the annual total fell by 24 per cent, while at the other end of the scale are the regions of Extremadura (-6.5 per cent) and Asturias (-9 per cent).
However, although it contains the Costa del Sol in the province of Málaga, the Costa de la Luz in Cádiz and Huelva and a significant international property market in Almería, Andalucía is a very large region and appears not to have been so badly affected by the decrease in sales to non-Spaniards, recording a 17 per cent drop in overall sales last year with a total of 83,760, according to the provisional figures.
In fact, the breakdown of the data appears to show that the figures were worst affected by the drop in international purchases in the provinces of Málaga and Cádiz, with year-on-year decreases in overall transactions of 22.7 per cent and 20.2 per cent respectively, while Almería remained largely immune to the general downturn with a fall of just 10.1 per cent.
In this context it is worth pointing out that the market in Andalucía was the third busiest among Spain’s 17 regions last year, with an average of 1,254 transactions per 100,000 inhabitants of house-buying age, a figure exceeded only in the Comunidad Valenciana (1,469) and Murcia (1,258).