August home sales 'highest since 2007'

RESIDENTIAL property sales in August this year were at their highest since 2007, the peak year of the housing market 'boom', according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

With nearly 50,000 homes shifted in just one month, the difference between August 2021 and the same month in 2020 was almost 60%.

Back in 2007, when home prices were at their highest in history and the buying and selling market was in constant activity – just before the 'crash' that came between 2008 and 2010 – a record 58,872 residential properties were bought in the month of August, a figure that has never been seen since.

Fast-forward 14 years, the largest volume of August home sales after the high of 2007 totals 49,884 – the most buoyant yet by a wide margin.

Only 2017, with 44,834, and 2010, with 43,610, came anywhere near the bumper August seen in 2021 – which was even more welcome for the residential property industry, as well as for sellers themselves, when taking into account a lean summer in 2020.

Not the worst year by far – these came in 2011, 2013 and 2014, when sales in August barely averaged 25,000, or about half the figure for 2021 – the first full year of the pandemic, with lockdowns and restrictions on movement and face-to-face contact hitting the homebuying market hard, these transactions totalled just 31,592, or more than 4,000 down from 2019.

By August 2020, movement restrictions had been temporarily lifted and life and business were largely back to normal in Spain, albeit with masks and social distancing - but international travel was still difficult, if not impossible, meaning the usual summer interest for holiday homes among dwellers in colder climates was mostly missing.

It was not completely back to normal even by August 2021, since Spain's key overseas holiday home-buying markets, such as the UK, France and Germany, still had limitations in place for most of the summer, including, in some cases, the obligation for residents returning from a trip to Spain to quarantine for between five and 14 days.

So a year-on-year hike of 17,292 extra sales was a huge achievement, and is likely to raise confidence in the industry as to what August 2022 might look like, with practically the whole of the western world vaccinated and Covid cases, or at least severe ones, hopefully being very rare.

Types of homes bought and sold

Pre-owned residential property sales were up by 62.6% in August 2021 compared with the same month in 2020, having been rising for the previous six consecutive months, whilst sales of new builds showed a year-on-year increase of 40.9% in what was the seventh month on the trot of ascending figures.

On average, compared with August 2020, the across-the-board spike in property purchases came to 57.9%, according to the INE.

Over the first eight months of 2021, home sales have risen by 37.2% compared with the same period in 2020; new builds seeing the largest growth, at 43.4%, with pre-owned home purchases up by 35.7% from January to August inclusive.

Whilst practically all regions in Spain reported rises in residential property sales, these were particularly significant in at least three, almost doubling year on year.

La Rioja, in the far north, reported a staggering 84.8% increase in home purchases in August based upon the same month in 2020, whilst the Greater Madrid region saw a rise of 77.3%.

The Comunidad Valenciana, along the east coast of the mainland and encompassing the provinces of Castellón, Valencia and Alicante, recorded a very optimistic 72% hike in August home-buying transactions.

At the other end of the scale, the Basque Country showed the lowest rise in residential property purchases – 8.3% more than last August – a long way behind the second- and third-lowest increases, seen in the northern coastal region of Cantabria (20%) and the land-locked western region of Extremadura (21%).