The sales figures from the notaries are more timely, as they tell us how many transactions are actually completed with exchange of deeds and payment in the month, but they don’t give much detail beyond the number of sales, and they tend to be revised significantly for months afterwards, so you can’t be sure of the numbers when first published.

Sales figures from the INE offer more detail like a breakdown of sales by region, but lag the market by a a period of months because it takes time to go through the bureaucratic process of inscribing a sales deed in the Spanish Land Register. So the sales figures from the INE tell us almost nothing about the number of sales in the month they refer to, and only tell us how many sales previously completed were inscribed that month.

So when the numbers from the notaries go up or down, you can expect a similar change to show up in the INE’s figures a few months later.

Neither source tell us anything about the number of sales agreed between buyers and sellers in private contracts like the arras contract, or about off-plan sales agreements, all of which will take months, or even a year or more in the case of off-plan sales, to show up in the official figures.

Why are the monthly sales figures from the notaries always almost higher than the INE’s, when you would expect them to even out over time? Perhaps some sales are never inscribed in the Land Registry, as it’s an extra cost. It’s a bit of a mystery.