Foreigners buy 18.7% of homes sold in Spain (the majority on the coast)

2023-06-24 10:30:41

Home purchases by foreigners in Spain have not stopped rise in recent years. Before the pandemic prevented travel between countries, in 2019, buyers from outside our borders accounted for 16.9% of all operations. After a correction in 2020 and 2021, in 2022, they have exceeded this percentage: 18.7% of the homes that come on the market have been purchased by people of non-Spanish nationalityalmost one in five.

Although last year’s figures are among the highest in the historical series, they were surpassed in 2015, when they reached a 19.3% market share. However,that year only 77,530 homes were sold to foreigners and, in 2022, 133,221 units. This means that, in absolute terms, the number of properties acquired was much higher in 2022.

“The slowdown and uncertainty that the pandemic generated in the international demand for housing in our country is a thing of the past. In 2022 it rebounded by 30% compared to the previous year, while at the national level it did only 2.2%. In other words, foreign demand shot up 14 times more than that of Spanish citizens. In addition, the acquisition of homes by foreigners, one of the key factors in the stability and growth of the Spanish tourist-residential market, is already in number of units above the values ​​prior to the pandemic”, explains the latest Report ‘Real Estate Situation ‘, prepared by the appraisal company Euroval and the Institute for Real Estate Analysis.

In which area do foreigners buy more?

Home purchases by non-residents are concentrated mainly on the coast, with some peculiarities, such as the case of Madrid, which due to its capital factor attracts international interest. In this region almost 10% of transactions were made by foreigners. The same thing happens in Barcelona, ​​where, in addition to tourism, the economic and business component of the city influences.

The figures for the two largest cities in Spain are well below those of the archipelagos, the Valencian coast or the Costa del Sol. The autonomous community with the most foreign investment is baleareswhere two out of five homes are purchased by foreigners (41.3%). However, in absolute terms there are two regions with more weight: of a total of 10 homes purchased by foreigners, 3 are in the Valencian Community and 2 in Andalusia.

“Home sales by foreigners are concentrated in coastal and insular provinces. Five coastal provinces account for almost 75% of the total: Alicante (22.4%), Malaga (13%), Barcelona (7.4%), Madrid (6.1%), Valencia (6.0%), Balearic Islands (5.8%), Murcia (4 9%), Tenerife (4.9%) and Las Palmas (4%)”, added the aforementioned study.

Where do they buy less?

There are numerous areas of the peninsula where foreigners hardly buy a home. Mostly it is the atlantic arc, where they do not reach 5% of the market share. This is the case of Galicia, the Basque Country or Cantabria, where they represent only 4.5%, 4.8% and 5.1%, respectively, in each community. Extremadura is the region where they buy the least: only 3.5% of sales are carried out by people from outside Spain and they represent only 0.3% of those that are closed throughout the country.

What are the nationalities that buy the most?

Within foreign buyers there are two types: those who buy to live because they move from the country and those who use the home for vacation purposes. According to the ‘Survey of Essential Characteristics of the Population and Housing (ECEPOV)’, published by the National Institute of Statistics in February 2023, 56.4% of households with all their members of foreign origin residing in Spain do so in rent, that is to say 43.6% own a property.

According to the ‘Housing and Land Observatory no. 44’, prepared by the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (MITMA), the citizens of The United Kingdom, Germany and France are the ones that buy the most in Spain, representing 10.9%, 9.2% and 6.4%, respectively, of the transactions closed by foreigners. The next nationalities are Romania (5.1%), Belgium (4.9%), Italy (4.9%) and Morocco (4.8%).