Annual property sales spending estimated growth of 20%

In nine months, the residential home market saw €53.9 billion change hands in sales and purchases, with one in 10 of the latter being for new builds.

The same period in 2016 saw transactions totalling €43.9bn, and the year end on a total of €60.8bn.

This is still lower than the record high of €80.8bn in 2010, but at the time, was the highest since then – a sum that has since been beaten.

The nearly €54bn in the first nine months of 2017 translates to 374,027 homes sold – 23.4% more second-hand properties and 19% more new builds.

Madrid was the region that saw the highest amount of cash change hands, at €11.4bn, followed by Catalunya at just under €11bn, Andalucía at €8.7bn and Valencia at €5.9bn.

The Balearic Islands (€3.08bn), the Basque Country (€2.8bn), Canary Islands (€2.4bn) follow, with Castilla y León, Galicia, Castilla-La Mancha, Murcia and Aragón sitting between €1.54bn and €1bn.

At the bottom of the table – not counting the Spanish-owned city-provinces of Ceuta and Melilla on the northern Moroccan coast, representing €132 million between them – is La Rioja, with sales of €251m, followed by Extremadura (€388m), Navarra (€554m), Cantabria (€586m) and Asturias (€650m).

Quantity surveyors Euroval reports a 10% rise in sales transactions between 2014 and 2015, rising to 14% from 2015 to 2016 and predicts that once full calculations are in for 2017, the rise will have been 20% since 2016.

New build sales are falling, which Euroval says is partly due to fewer being built, and prices across the board – according to their figures – have fallen by around 4% in a year, or 5% for those at the bottom end of the market.

This said, the National Institute of Statistics (INE) recently reported price growth in 2017 as being the highest in a decade and home values being almost back to pre-recession levels.

Growth in sales in 2017 was highest in Castilla-La Mancha, according to Euroval, even though the central region is somewhere in the middle in terms of amount of money changing hands, whilst the Basque Country, which registered some of the highest sums, saw the slowest growth in numbers of sales.

Andalucía continues to be home to 18% of property sales, or the largest per-region share in Spain.

Together with Catalunya, Madrid and Valencia, the four regions account for nearly two-thirds of all residential property sales in the country.

Fewer than 1% of sales took place in La Rioja, whilst Cantabria, Extremadura, Asturias and Murcia accounted for fewer than 2% each.

Madrid reported 8.1 sales per 100 inhabitants, whilst Valencia with 7.2 per 100 and Catalunya with 6.9 make up the top three.

Asturias and the Balearic Islands, with 0.2 sales per 100 inhabitants and Navarra with 0.3 are at the bottom of the rankings.

Euroval chairman José Vázquez Seijo says the 'clear leaning towards renting' being seen since the recession has not affected 'stability' in property sales, and Spain remains one of Europe's leaders in home ownership, with an estimated 80% of houses being owned either outright or with a mortgage rather than occupied by tenants.

Average prices per square metre in 2017 sat at a maximum of €2,765 and a minimum of €568, with the former having fallen 4% and the latter 5% on average.

Reductions were seen in prices in 23 provincial capital cities, with Santander (Cantabria), A Coruña (Galicia) and Cádiz (Andalucía) showing the greatest falls in value.

Seven provincial capital cities saw both minimum and maximum prices go up, including San Sebastián (Basque Country), Girona (Catalunya) and Granada (Andalucía), whilst in another 11, prices remained stable or with only very slight reductions and a further eight saw negligible rises.