The Latest Spanish Property News from Kyero.com

The Spanish Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE), or National Statistics Institute, has published the findings of its research into the Spanish property market and revealed that property transfers across the country fell by 14.1% y-o-y in February and 9.1% on January’s figures. In terms of total transactions, or ‘merchanting’ as the report refers to it, they also fell across February by some 20.6%.

A total of 213,538 property transfers by acquisition title took place in March 2008, which breaks down at 123,757 sales, 50,561 ‘others’, 31,182 properties were inherited, 5,681 were donated to friends or family and 2,357 were exchanged.

Of all the property sales in the month of February, 26,923 were for new property (down 11.1% y-o-y) and 28,539 were for resale – down a massive 33.8% y-o-y. The report’s figures also revealed that the gap between resale and new property transactions was closing fast. In February 2007 there was an approximate bias of 12,000 properties in favour of resales compared to just 1,616 in February 2008.

The exchange of property recorded the biggest decline in February (-27.6%), while donations of properties rose 9.38% m-o-m.

Some 88.7%, or 109,712 of all sales transactions were for properties classed as urban, while 11.3% (14,045) were listed as rustic. The number of sales of rustic properties fell 23.2% y-o-y, while sales of urban property also fell 20.3% y-o-y. Under the category of urban property, sales transactions of dwellings fell by 24.4% y-o-y and 10.2% m-o-m.

INE figures revealed that 92.6% or 51,343 of transfers of property by the way of sales in February were for ‘free’ or private housing – a fall of 23.6% y-o-y. Protected or social housing sales transactions accounted for just 4,119 of total transfers in February this year – a sharp fall of 33.7% y-o-y.

The Andalucian region accounted for the biggest number of property transfers and actual sales of properties at 37,025 and 23,724 respectively. Other regions recording large numbers of property transfers were: Valencia (30,450), Cataluna (25,815), Madrid (22,657), Castilla y Leon (17,106) and Castilla-La Mancha (13,668).

In terms of the number of total property transfers per 100,000 inhabitants, the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha (873) was the most active in February this year, followed by Rioja (La) (859), Castilla y Leon (820), Aragon (794), Valencia (771), Cantabria (731) and Murcia (670). The least active region across the board was Melilla, with only 69 property transfers in total throughout February 2008.

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