Swiss demand for property in Spain is growing slowly, but still lags a long way behind comparably rich northern-European countries like Norway and the Netherlands. Despite the country’s wealth and spending power, the Swiss keep a low profile in the Spanish property market.

The chart above shows Swiss demand for property in Spain every year since 2007 with the dark columns representing sales volumes (left axis) and the year-on-year change plotted by the green area line (right axis). You can see how Swiss demand reached a record high of 1,164 Spanish property purchases last year, bouncing back from a 2020 slump caused by the pandemic, and more than doubling in size in a decade. 

However, if you compare Swiss demand to other rich northern European countries like Norway and the Netherlands, Swiss demand looks low considering their purchasing power and population size. The market share of Swiss buyers was just 1% in 2021, compared to 4.2% for Dutch buyers.

The following table compares a selection of European countries by Spanish property purchase volumes, market share, population size, GDP adjusted for purchasing power, tourist visits to Spain, Spanish property sales by 100k of population, and how much each country would buy if they all bought as much as the Belgians, who buy more homes in Spain relative to their population than any other nationality.

Foreign demand compared to population and GDP (id 91)

Switzerland has the second highest level of GDP per capita in Europe, and one of the lowest levels of purchases in relation to its population size. The Swiss bought just 13 Spanish properties for every 100,000 of population last year. The Belgians bought 51, the Swedes 47, and the Dutch 27.

Small appetite

Why the small appetite for Spanish property? Firstly, perhaps, because the Swiss just aren’t that into household property-investment. At just 42% they have the lowest home ownership rate in all Europe, even lower than the Germans on 50.5%. Why buy a holiday-home abroad when you don’t even own your own home in Switzerland?

Secondly, according to Stefan Bürgi, the Marketing Director of Barcelona-based estate agents Lucas Fox, the Swiss have a tendency to go off the beaten track, and don’t form ghettos abroad like the Germans in Mallorca. But perhaps most importantly, the Swiss tend to buy second-homes in Switzerland, not abroad. “The attractiveness of having a second residence close to home, for example in the mountains, or in the Italian part of Switzerland, has grown a lot since the pandemic,” says Stefan, himself a Swiss from Zürich.

The Swiss have long been one of the richest people in Europe, but since the start of the war in Ukraine their spending power abroad just got a whole lot more powerful with the strength of the Swiss franc, which since the start of July broke through parity with the euro for the first time ever. Spanish property might now look irresistibly cheap to any Swiss who fancy a holiday-home in Spain. So far not many of them do, but perhaps that might change with their surging spending power. It will be interesting to see what happens to Swiss demand in the second half of this year.