The latest asking price data from the Spanish property portal Idealista.com shows that some local markets are rising, whilst others are still in free-fall.

In some ways it’s meaningless to talk about the Spanish Property Market as if house prices and supply and demand were uniform around the country. Local markets and segments are what count. In booms and busts most segments tend to move in the same direction, for a while at least. But when you reach a turning point in the market cycle, you start to see segments diverging as some start recovering sooner and faster than others.

That’s what we can see in the last asking price data from the Spanish property portal Idealista.com, one of the largest portals in Spain, using house prices in €/sqm in Spain’s provincial capitals (see table below).

At the positive end of the scale, vendor expectations in Barcelona are up 6.4 per cent in a year, and 2.4 per cent in a quarter, as vendors notice more enquiries, more offers, and quicker sales, giving them the confidence to put their asking prices up.

At the other end of the scale we find Guadalajara, in Castile La Mancha, where asking prices dropped another 13 per cent in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period last year. Guadalajara suffers from a large excess inventory of new homes (never previously sold), and does not benefit from foreign demand.

Overall, the number of provincial capitals where vendor price expectations are still falling clearly outnumber those where expectations are rising. And Barcelona’s property market stands out as the hottest local market in Spain for now.