Overseas Buyer Head For The Med

My last blog looked at the who and how much with regard to the latest statistics on the overseas sector of the Spanish property market. These covered just the first half of 2024 and we won’t get the full-year totals until March 2025.  But most years the second half is at least as good as the first half so just doubling up is good enough to get an idea of what the full year will look like. This blog focuses on where the 69,412 foreign buyers in Spain in the first half of 2024 chose to invest their money. The overseas market is an important part of the overall property market in Spain as it typically accounts for around 20% of all transactions and the first half year statistics were right on track at 20.4%. 

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 73.7% of all foreign buyers in 2024 so far bought in one of these five regions, a total of 51,181 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 39.3%, in the Comunidad Valenciana it was 36.8% and 28.7% in Murcia. Meanwhile, Cataluña was marginally lower than the national average at 20.1% with Andalucía being the only one to register overseas market share below the 20.4% national figure, coming in at 17.6%.

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 and 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 86% of the 12,637 overseas buyers in Andalucía so far in 2024 bought their property in one of the four provinces with Mediterranean coastline, a total of 10,876, leaving slim pickings for the remaining four inland provinces, managing just 1,885 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 59.3% of all foreign purchases in Andalucía, totalling 7,157.  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 national average, in fact it is almost double at 38%, just below the 39.3% seen in the Balearics. Another interesting feature of the overseas sector in Málaga province is seen when the 7,157 foreign buyers are separated into resident and non-resident groups. Then we see that 71% of foreign buyers in the province are non-resident second home owners, that’s much higher than the 58.2% share non-residents make up across the country.

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 9,497 foreign buyers in Cataluña in the first half of the year, 95.4% purchased in either Barcelona, Girona or Tarragona provinces, a total of 9,060. And, unsurprisingly, Barcelona province was way ahead of the other two with 40% of the overseas sector.  However, I noticed one big difference when I compared the Barcelona figures with those of Málaga. I’ve already shown that these two provinces dominate their respective regions but there were almost twice as many resident foreign buyers in Barcelona than there were in Málaga, 79.6% against 41.2% and from this I deduce that many more foreigners buying in Barcelona were living and working there.  It’s not possible to analyse how many of Barcelona buyers were city based as there is no breakdown into domestic versus overseas sectors at the municipal level although The Property Finders associate in Barcelona city estimates only about 10% of the market in the city centre can be attributed to foreign buyers.

There’ll be many more overseas property market statistics published in the early part of 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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