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After seven years of stagnation the property market in Spain is experiencing an uptick in sales and prices have reached bottom.

With the Spanish economy improving, unemployment falling, tax revenue growing and a more stable banking system, lending figures are on the rise.

Puerto Banús Marbella 300x225 - Property market in Spain is experiencing an uptick in salesThe typical mortgage lending rate dropped from 4.21% to 3.29% over the course of 2014 and this has fed through to buyer confidence. Andalucía and the Canary Islands have seen some of the strongest surges in mortgage lending, up 25% and 26% respectively month on month, compared to the national average of 14.2%.

This renewed confidence and interest in Spanish real estate is most evident in Madrid and Barcelona where capital flows into both cities’ commercial markets topped €2.7 billion in 2014.

The return of large US investment funds has been notable but not just in Spain’s main cities. Marbella, a popular area with overseas buyers is building on a property market recovery that began in 2013 despite Spanish buyers failing to return in any significant number in 2014 and the Ukraine crisis impacting on the number of Russian buyers.
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The Spanish residential property market is showing further signs of recovery with the latest national figures showing that completed sales in February were higher than 2014 Spanish HOme 300x225 - More signs of recovery in Spanish property marketand 2012.

But the data from the National Institute of Statistics also shows that sales were lower than 2013. However this was when tax breaks for buyers inflated registered sales.

Year on year, the market has increased 14% as a whole, but by 53% in the resale market, a substantial increase by any standards. But sales of new builds are not doing well, down 30% compared to the same month last year.

There is also considerable regional variation. For example, the growth in homes sales in coastal areas that attract foreign buyers has been generally above the national average, as foreign demand is boosting sales in most of those areas.
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This four-bedroom house in rural Valencia was given to its newest owner after winning a raffle.

House raffled in Valencia - Four-bedroom house in Spain 'sold' in €10 raffleWhen the previous owners, the Bolumar family, first wanted to sell the house they had inherited two years ago in Segorbe, a town of 9,300, they tried to do it the traditional way, listing it for €90,000. But the struggling Spanish housing market yielded few potential buyers.

The family began considering other ways to sell. Most ideas were dismissed quickly, save one. “Raffling it off seemed interesting – people would have the chance to acquire a home for a low cost and we would still end up covering the cost,” Bolumar said.

From there began a year-long project, with the family wrestling their way through seemingly endless amounts of red tape to obtain authorisation from the country’s tax authorities to be the first in Spain to raffle off a house.

The €10 tickets, sold from a kiosk in Valencia as well as online, offered the chance to win the 141 sq metre home, no strings attached.
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Foreign demand has continued to boost the Malaga province property market. Last year, it recorded a 28 per cent increase in real estate sales to non-Spaniards, according to home in Torrevieja 300x225 - Russian demand for properties in Spain has gone downfigures released by the Ministry of Public Works.

Of the 23,929 properties that were sold in the province in 2014, 9,190 were bought by foreigners, representing 38 per cent.

The sale of houses to foreign buyers has almost doubled in the past two years: from 5,140 in 2012 to 9,000 last year.

The good news is that last year purchases by Spaniards also rose by 29 per cent. But what is in “bad shape”, according to the president of the Association of Constructors and Developers, José Prados, is the demand for first homes.
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The number of house sales in Spain increased 15.5% in February compared with the same month in 2014 – the largest rise in recent months – according to data released by villa in Mijas 300x200 - Number of property transactions in Spain has risen for six months in a rowthe National Statistics Institute (INE) on Thursday.

Property sales have now increased for six consecutive months as the market gradually begins to recover from the huge crash that hit when Spain’s housing bubble burst at the end of 2007. The rise can be attributed exclusively to a 50.4% increase in sales of existing homes – 21,613 of the 29,714 transactions carried out in February were of this sort.

In contrast sales of new homes dropped 28.6% compared with the same month last year, with just 8,101 operations.
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Currency exchange rates are encouraging even more foreign buyers back to the Spanish property market and this is reflected in increased sales, especially in popular areas.
apartments in Marbella 300x166 - Exchange rates and golden visa benefit the purchase of properties in Spain

New legislation to relax the requirements for Spain’s golden visa which allows non-European Union buyers to gain citizenship if they invest in the real estate market is also set to encourage more buyers from overseas.

The golden visa, which was introduced in September 2013, has seen 530 foreigners granted a visa so far with the majority, some 490 people, doing this through putting at least the minimum of €500,000 into property. Most of the property investors have been Chinese, Russian or Arab with business entrepreneurs coming largely from the United States and it has earned the Spanish economy an estimated €700 million so far.
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The number of investors viewing Spain as the most attractive market for commercial real estate purchases has increased dramatically as investor interest grows for European recovery markets.

Barcelona 300x204 - Spain Property More Attractive for InvestorsInvestor confidence for Western Europe grew compared to last year, with 71 percent of investors choosing the market as the most attractive global region for investment, according to CBRE's European Real Estate Investor Intentions survey.

Of those surveyed, 19 percent viewed Spain as the most attractive for investments in 2014, up from 6 percent in 2013. The city of Madrid is second only to the popular London market, changing dramatically from last year. Barcelona also made the investors' top ten list.
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The campaign by the Spanish tax authorities to find all newly built structures, alterations or changes of use of properties which have not been declared to the Land Registry is starting to show results.

home 300x200 - Tax Authorities Detect 30,000 Undeclared Properties and Building WorksThe first phase of Hacienda’s plan has covered 486,000 properties in 29 municipalities in Malaga province so far, especially Fuengirola, Benalmádena, Mijas, Vélez, Antequera, Alhaurín de la Torre, Cártama and Alhaurín el Grande.

Inspections have revealed 30,113 buildings (6.2 per cent of the total) which had previously been invisible to the authorities for tax purposes because neither their owners nor the respective town halls had declared them, irrespective of whether or not they had works licences and the necessary certificate of occupancy.
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Three years after the Junta de Andalucía’s planning decree 2/2012 came into force, only half of the municipalities in the province of Málaga have actually made any progress in their part of the process. The decree, an attempt to bring some sort of order to the maze of illegal construction in rural areas, required local authorities to draw up an Spain4 300x128 - Half of the town halls in Málaga province have taken no steps to legalise homesinventory of structures on land classified as ‘no urbanizable’ or to hand in a declaration stating that there were none.

Few town halls in the province have done this, an essential step before the properties can be named as Asimilado a Fuera de Ordenación (AFO). This status in any case has been declared as unacceptable by many home owners as it merely allows the properties to remain standing without making them fully legal.
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Buyers from abroad are returning to the Spanish housing market, attracted by economic growth that’s beating most of Europe and signs that prices are bottoming out after years of declines. Britons are the biggest investors as near-zero interest on U.K. savings accounts and rising residential prices make it less attractive to keep money at home.

Granada city 300x202 - Foreing buyers returning to the Spanish housing marketNon-Spaniards spent 6.05 billion euros on Spanish property in the first nine months of last year, up 30 percent from the same period in 2013, according to data from the country’s Ministry of Public Works. The 40,338 dwellings purchased represent a 27 percent increase from the same period a year earlier, led by Comunidad Valenciana, Andalucía and Cataluña, the data showed.

Foreign and domestic homebuying in Spain evaporated when the economy collapsed during the financial crisis, leading to an international ...continue reading "Foreing buyers returning to the Spanish housing market"