June saw Spanish property sales hit a three year high with a total 36,856 properties bought during the month. The figure for June this year was 19.4% higher than the same month in 2015 and carries on an extremely positive trend after May saw a huge 24% rise.
Best semester since 2010
The data for June allows us to look at how sales has evolved over the first six months of 2016 and again, the results make for very optimistic reading. The first semester of 2016 saw 207,593 purchases made, the best quarterly result since the second half of 2010 and 16.4% up year-on-year.
New-build vs resale
The statistics, provided by Spain’s INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) also show the performance of the two distinct property types in Spain, new-build and resale. As has been the case recently, resale dominated both growth and number of transactions with 30,270 sales and a year-on-year increase of 24%.
New-build continues to struggle in terms of numbers of sales and in June registered a total of 6,586, 16.9% of all sales. However, the double digit year-on-year decreases are gone and there was in fact slight growth of 2% on the number of new-build sales made in the same month last year.
Province-by-province
Commenting on the June data Fernando Ecinar, Head of Research at the Spanish property portal Idealista, stated that while there is good reason for optimism, the recovery in sales is very uneven and in fact 45% of all sales were made in just 5 provinces.
These five best-performing provinces were Madrid (5,441 sales), Barcelona (4,145), Alicante (2,620), Malaga (2,535) and Valencia (1,795). This shows in a snapshot the state of the market with sales volume being confined to the largest cities and the most popular coastal areas while much of the country’s interior and secondary coastal provinces continue to struggle.
Main image: Artist’s impression of the Loira development on the Costa Blanca ©Patrimi Resorts S.L.
