Overseas Buyers 2024 - The Where

My breakdowns of the 2024 property market statistics in Spain have covered 'the who' and, the ‘how much’ and now I’m dissecting 'the where’.

Overseas buyers have made up approximately 20% of the overall Spanish property market for several years and 2024 was no different at 19.9%. However, the statistics also highlight that the overseas market is much more important in some locations than others, with much higher market share.  It turns out that a key factor in where overseas buyers spend their money is the Mediterranean.

Only five of Spain’s seventeen autonomous regions have Mediterranean coastlines; Cataluña, the Comunidad Valenciana, Murcia, Andalucía and the Balearic Islands and they dominate the overseas sector. The latest figures show that 73.6% of all foreign buyers in 2024 bought in one of these five regions, a total of 104,395. The pull of the Mediterranean is even clearer in the case of those autonomous regions with some coastal provinces and some inland, Four of Andalucía's eight provinces have Mediterranean coastline and four do not. The four Mediterranean coastal provinces, Almería, Granada, Málaga and Cádiz, accounted for 87% of the 25,573 foreign purchasers in the region in 2024.

And it’s the same in Cataluña, with the three provinces with Mediterranean coastline - Barcelona, Tarragona and Girona - dominating the overseas market with 87.9% of foreign buyers, leaving inland Lleida with just 916. In fact, when the statistics for the overseas buyer sector are unpicked we are mainly only looking at six regions, the five with Mediterranean coastlines and the Canary Islands. Between them they accounted for 82% of the overseas market in 2024.

In terms of overseas buyer spending power all the overseas buyer hotspots saw increases in the average amount paid by foreigners per square metre in 2024. And to get a sense of just how much prices have risen recently, I compared 2024 per m2 prices with pre-pandemic 2019. In the case of Andalucía it’s up to €2,515 pm2, a rise of 41% and Cataluña was up 23.5% to €2,556. Meanwhile in the Comunidad Valenciana, the increase to an average of €1,826m2 means prices have risen 34% since 2019.  And in those same three locations the rise since 2023 is 11.7%, 3.3% and 7.9% respectively.

And the most expensive autonomous region in the Mediterranean? That would be the Balearics. After breaking through the €4,000 pm2 barrier in 2023 it has risen further in 2024 to €4,676, up an astonishing 50.2% since pre-pandemic 2019. In contrast, there was just one Mediterranean region where the average price paid by foreign buyers was even below the domestic buyer average and that was Murcia, on €1,318 per m2.

And within the autonomous regions overseas market activity depends on which provinces and municipalities you look at. In Andalucía the overseas market share of 18.5% was below the national average but in Málaga province. which really means the Costa del Sol, foreign market share was 38.4%, more than double to regional level. And looking at the Comunidad Valenciana, 26,118 of the 41,442 foreign buyers in this region bought in just one province: Alicante, representing 63% market share. At the municipal level the same dominance of just a few areas appears. Málaga province has 208 municipalities but just three of them account for 23% of the total property market in the province. We can’t be certain just how many are foreigners as there is no breakdown at this level but as those three municipalities  are Marbella, Benahavís and Estepona I would bet it is at least the same percentage as at the provincial level, and probably higher. Averages hide huge differences between locations - a lot happens in certain locations and not very much elsewhere.

^{©Barbara Wood}

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