Make Sense of Official Price Data

December 1st, 2007

We’ve been trying to make sense of data from the Ministry of Housing recently. On their web site: www.mviv.es you can download a lot of information in spreadsheet format.

The first hurdle for most foreigners buying in Spain is that it’s all in Spanish (of course) but the Ministry also adds several layers of extra complexity.

They slice and dice the information in a variety of ways to produce almost 40 separate spreadsheets – which are the most interesting and accurate?

They make a distinction between subsidised housing and those available on the open market and also differentiate between new buildings and resales. Finally, they break out how many property transactions are completed by foreigners – both resident and non resident in Spain.

When you remove the less interesting spreadsheets and the ones which (in my opinion) cannot be relied upon, we’re left with just 12 spreadsheets covering three rather interesting subjects: What’s the average price paid?, How many homes were sold? and What’s the total value of all those sales?

Unfortunately, the latest data the Ministry of Housing makes available is for Q1 2007 (and even that’s subject to change) but, as updates become available, we’ll be translating and maintaining these 12 key spreadsheets as a free downloads on Kyero.com.

Click on the links below to understand more about each report or download them all (you’ll need an unzip utility and/or a programme which can read Microsoft Excel spreadsheets).

Average House Prices – (take these with a pinch of salt – but useful for comparison purposes)
Number of Property Sales – (likely to be very accurate, all sales are notarised)
Total Value of Sales – (again, mostly useful for comparison rather than as absolute values)

We’ll be analysing this information ourselves (and comparing it with other sources of data) and we’ll be publishing our insights right here. Find out when there’s new stuff to read in this section by completing the Email Update form on the right-hand-side of this page.