A new statistic from the Ministry of Housing helps to show that the Spanish property boom is definitely over. The number of transactions involving resale properties is back to the pre-boom low, with sales falling 47% to 179,000 in the first 9 months of the year, compared to 339,500 in the same period last year.

The fall is even more pronounced if you just look at transactions in the third quarter, when there were only 45,400 home sales in all of Spain.

Sales of newly-built properties have been holding up much better, down only 16% in the first 9 months of the year. This is little comfort for developers, however, who have seen an almost total collapse in new sales contracts, which will show up in the Ministry’s figures during the course of next year.

Overall, Spanish property sales are down 33% year on year.

Meanwhile, the international ratings agency Standard & Poors has forecasted that Spanish property prices will fall 30% peak to trough, saying that this will be the worst property crash for Spain since the 1970s. According to official figures prices peaked in the last quarter of 2007, and S&P doesn’t expect the market to turn around before 2010.