Date Published: 23/10/2019
ARCHIVED - Property sales and prices still climbing in Murcia
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
The recovery begins to falter in other parts of the country as fewer sales are made and at lower prices
Statistics published last week by Spain’s notaries appear to confirm that the recovery in the country’s property market is slowing down in areas where it began earliest, while in others which took longer to see the end of the slump which began in 2008 the upward trend in sales figures and market value increases.
During the second quarter of 2019 the notaries report that in Spain as a whole sales figures fell by 7.9 per cent in comparison with the same period last year, reaching 149,938, with the sharpest decreases including those of 20.8 per cent in the Balearics, 17.6 per cent in Madrid, 9.4 per cent in the Comunidad Valenciana and 8.9 per cent in Andalucía. The figure also dropped by 5.9 per cent in Catalunya, but at the other end of the scale were increases of 10.3 per cent in Extremadura and 2 per cent in the Region of Murcia, as well as even slighter rises in Galicia, Castilla-La Mancha and the Basque Country.
In terms of the average price paid per square metre, the national figure rose by 1 per cent to 1,430 euros per square metre, but this statistic on its own cannot be interpreted without taking into account the sales figures in different regions due to the wide disparity in the market value of housing across the country. Closer analysis shows that the Region of Murcia again performed well, with an increase of 3.4 per cent, although sharper rises are reported in regions including Galicia (8 per cent), the Balearics (6.2 per cent), and Madrid and Catalunya (4.4 and 4.2 per cent respectively).
In contrast, there were significant falls in the average price paid in 7 of the 17 regions including Navarra (-16.7 per cent), Castilla-La Mancha (-11.9 per cent) and the Canaries (-5.5 per cent).
Taking a slightly longer-term view in the Region of Murcia, the quarterly sales figures reported by the notaries have now been higher than the year before in each of the last ten quarters, but an increase of just 2 per cent in the second three months of 2019 appears to indicate that the period of expansion in the market may be coming to an end – for 7 consecutive quarters the rise was in double figures.
The appreciation in property value, though, shows fewer signs of coming to an end, with the rise of 3.4 per cent broadly in line with the rate at which prices have been rising for the last year and a half in the Costa Cálida.
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