Overseas Buyers Head For The Med

A recent blog looked at the who and how much with regard to the latest statistics on the overseas sector of the Spanish property market. The full-year total for 2024 was 139,102 overseas buyers, up 5.9% year-on year and representing 20.4% of the total property market in Spain. This blog focuses on where the 139,102 foreign buyers in Spain in 2024 chose to invest their money. 

But this overseas market share is far from evenly distributed around the country. Spain is divided into seventeen autonomous regions but only five 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 purchases. However, in three of the autonomous regions, overseas buyers made up a much greater proportion of the market than the national average of 20.4%. In the Balearics it was more than double the national average at 44.3%, in the Comunidad Valenciana it was 35.7% and 28% in Murcia. Meanwhile, Cataluña and Andalucía both registered overseas market share lower than the national average at 20.4%, 18.1% and 17.6% respectively.

Regional Differences

However, just as overseas buyers are concentrated in only five of Spain’s seventeen autonomous regions a similar imbalance can be seen within regions when statistics are broken down into provinces of which there are fifty in total. Of the five regions with Mediterranean coasts three have more than one province; Cataluña has four, the Comunidad Valenciana has three while Andalucía, Spain’s largest autonomous region, has eight. And while four of Andalucía’s provinces have Mediterranean coastline four don’t. It’s easy to see big differences between them and it makes a strong case for the overseas sector of the property market being all about the Mediterranean.

The statistics show that 82% of the 25,573 overseas buyers in Andalucía in 2024 bought their property in one of the four provinces with Mediterranean coastline, a total of 20,983, leaving slim pickings for the remaining four inland provinces, managing just 4,590 foreign buyers between them. However, things are far from evenly spread between the provinces blessed with Mediterranean coasts as it turns out that Málaga province accounted for 55.9% of all foreign purchases in Andalucía, totalling 13,559. And digging into the total figures for just Málaga province changes the market share picture a bit. Whereas Andalucía as a whole had overseas market share running below the national average, 17.6% against 20.4%, when Málaga province is taken alone, foreign market share rises to well above the 20.4% national average on 36%. Another interesting feature of the overseas sector in Málaga province is seen when the 13,559 foreign buyers are separated into resident and non-resident groups. Then we see that 38% of foreign buyers in the province are resident home owners, either retired or coming to work, a big change from twenty years ago when the market was split roughly 80/20 in favour of second home owners.  

And it’s no different in the autonomous region of Cataluña, which has three provinces with Mediterranean coastline and one, Lleida, without. When the statistics are broken down, of the 19,616 foreign buyers in Cataluña in 2024, 96% purchased in either Barcelona, Girona or Tarragona provinces, a total of 18,766. And, unsurprisingly, Barcelona province was way ahead of the other two with 40% of the overseas sector.  

There’ll be many more overseas property market statistics published during 2025. What I think we can be certain of is that the Mediterranean coasts will continue to be the biggest draw when overseas purchasers are making their buying choices, whether they’re planning to live permanently in Spain or making a second home purchase.

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