Property transfers in Spain

Mays property sales

Total property transfers in May despite positive noises coming out of Spain remained level with the same month of last year.

The data taken from Land Registry is not the most up to date reflection of what is happening at ground level as it takes 3 to 12 weeks for the registry office to process the file. This means the data can relate to property transfers from some months ago. This said it is relevant against its own reports which have always reflected actual sales but with a time lag.

Dwellings

Sales of actual homes performed a little better than the total transfer market which includes, commercial sales, donations, Inheritance and reposessions.

Sales of homes increased year on year, month on month and remains up for the whole of 2015 when assessed against 2014.

Mays sales are normally higher than Aprils so whilst the trend of increased sales continues the actual increase of May over April was actually the smallest seen for at least 5 years.

Types of property sales

Part of the potential slow down of growth seems to be linked to the dramatic fall off of the buying of new builds. This drop in new build sales may be because developers believing possibly too soon the crsis was over started to increase the prices they were asking for even on developmets  that had been built for sometime and sat empty often for years. A missjudgement of market conditions has had an impact on volume.

Tied into developers loans and with Spanish banks requiring the developer maintains mortgage payments until sale of the unit to a third party it might well be the case that we see discounts on new builds again as the year progresses.   

Regional sales

Regionally, of those areas most attractive to International buyers, Andalucia performed strongly up in all areas in terms of year on year, month on month and for the whole of 2015.

The Balearics which has seen high level of interest for mortgage applicants from overseas buyers in the last 12 months fell back in May and has had a couple of quiet months. The same is true of the Canaries but this has also been reflected in the number of people looking to secure a financial approval for a mortgage in Spain.

The rest of 2015

The Notaries have been reporting miuch higher buying activity along wityh higher activity on Spanish Bank loans so we should see this start to be reflected more significantly in the INE data over the next couple of months.

Read the full article : The transfer of property rights for Spain in May