Following on the heels of the full year figures from the notaries, the Spanish Land Registrars’ Association has just released its report on the housing market for the last quarter of 2016.
Their figures show sales and prices rising on an annualised basis in the last quarter of the year, which helped deliver rising sales and prices for the full year.
There were 93,423 home sales inscribed in the Land Register in Q4, up 11.2% year-on-year.
Local demand was up 12.2% to 80,745 purchases in the quarter, and foreign demand up 5.1% to 12,678 purchases.
For the full year there were 53,679 homes purchased by foreign buyers (+16%), and 350,064 purchases by locals (+14%). Overall the market was up 14% by volume last year.
I will delve into more detail on the composition of foreign demand next week. Suffice it so say here that foreign demand helped lift sales last year, and ended up with 13.6% of market share, the third highest level on record. However, I can tell you that foreign demand would have been significantly higher had it not been for Brexit, as I will explain next week.
House prices were up 5.67% in the year based on their repeat-sale methodology, which I will go into in more detail when I review house price data published in February.
