Mark Stücklin
Fewer than one in ten listings on a major property portal cut their asking price before being withdrawn in 2025. Interesting? Yes. The full story? Not quite.
According to a new analysis by Pisos.com (reported in the Spanish press), in most months of 2025 less than 10% of properties advertised on its platform revised their asking price downwards before being taken off the market. Where reductions did occur, they typically ranged between 5% and 9% of the initial asking price.
On the face of it, this suggests sellers are holding firm in a supply-constrained market with strong demand. Outside an October spike, the share of discounted listings in most regions fluctuated between roughly 4.5% and 10.5% of total adverts. Cataluña and Andalucía, for example, showed relatively stable patterns, generally between 5% and 8% of listings being reduced in any given month.
October stood out. In Galicia, almost 45% of listings were revised downwards that month, while in Murcia, the Balearics and the Comunidad Valenciana roughly one third of sellers cut their asking prices. The explanation appears seasonal: the end of the summer high season and a push to close deals before year-end.
The methodological blind spot
But here’s the catch: this study only tracks changes in advertised asking prices on the portal before a property is withdrawn. It does not measure the final closing price agreed between buyer and seller.
That’s a crucial limitation.
In Spain, it is entirely possible – indeed common – for a property to sell below its asking price without any public revision ever appearing on the portal. The seller and buyer negotiate privately, agree a discount, and the listing simply disappears at the original price.
From the portal’s perspective, that property was never “discounted”. In reality, it may well have sold 5%, 10% or more below the asking price.
In other words, the study tells us how often sellers publicly blink before negotiations conclude, not how often they ultimately concede on price.
As Ferran Font, Director of Research at Pisos.com, notes, price flexibility is a normal part of market dynamics. Sellers often build in a margin to allow room for negotiation. The problem is that this margin – and how much of it is ultimately surrendered – is invisible in portal data.
The takeaway? The findings are a useful snapshot of listing behaviour, especially the October seasonal effect. But they are far from a comprehensive picture of price negotiation in the Spanish housing market. If you want to understand how much discounting is really going on, you need transaction-level data, not just what happened (or didn’t happen) on a property portal.
