Increased foreign demand for Spanish property, led by British buyers, has driven home sales figures in the first three months of this year to reach the highest they have been since the property market first started showing signs of recovery.
Contemporary villas for sale in east Marbella
According to the latest figures released by the Association of Spanish Property Registrars, during the first quarter of 2018 the number of home sales grew 13.4% with a total of 128,990 recorded property transactions, the highest volume of quarterly sales since 2008.
The figures also show that Spanish property is clearly still a desirable investment within the global market place with overseas buyers responsible for 16,833 home purchases in Q1, an increase of 13.2% compared to the same three months of the previous year. Despite this, a healthy growth in demand with local Spanish buyers meant that the market share of overseas buyers remained at around 13%.
Of all Spanish properties sold to overseas buyers, the British took up 14% of the market purchasing 2,451 homes, followed by the Germans and the French each recording 1,316 and 1,290 purchases respectively. With France and Germany each responsible for around 8% of the overseas market this means that, despite Brexit, the UK is almost twice that of the next largest source of foreign buyers and is also greater than Russia (516), China (645) and Italy (967) combined.
Also worthy of note are the 44% of buyers from the “rest of the world” category which delivered the largest amount of growth in real terms with an additional 600 buyers, signalling the Spanish property markets increased diversification on worldwide demand.