Independent and accurate property prices in Spain

Download the latest Spanish House Price Index
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The Kyero.com Spanish House Price Index is free to download.

It's updated and published quarterly to evaluate the advertised prices of 100,000 Spanish properties.

Kyero.com Spanish House Price Index
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According to official statistics from the Spanish Ministry of Housing, during the first quarter of 2007, in Malaga province, foreign buyers spent €265,508 on the average new build property - 21.5% more than Spanish buyers. Turning to resale property, foreign buyers spent an average of €236,238 - 16.8% more than Spanish buyers.

However, looking at the most popular province for foreign purchases, Alicante, we see virtually no difference in the average price paid by foreign and Spanish buyers.

Comparing both of these numbers to Murcia province, we observe foreigners outspending Spanish buyers by 36.2% for resales and a whopping 42.5% for new builds.

What's happening in Murcia and Malaga and why isn't it happening in Alicante?

Frustratingly, the official information which is made publicly available is in summary form, we can't dive into the data to try and make sense of it but here are a few possibilities:

1. Foreigners are being fleeced in Malaga and Murcia. Property sellers rely on them being less savvy than their Spanish counterparts and hike the price up a notch or two. In Alicante, where foreigners buy more property than anywhere else, it's harder to pull the wool over their eyes.

2. Foreigners are outspending Spanish buyers in Malaga and Murcia. They're spending more money because they're genuinely buying more expensive properties on average. In Alicante, prices are cheaper than either Malaga or Murcia and attracts the foreign buyer in search of a bargain - hence the parity in average price paid between foreign and Spanish buyers.

3. Foreign and Spanish buyers are actually paying a similar price for similar properties in all three provinces. In Malaga and Murcia, however, Spanish buyers are completing the transaction with a higher proportion of 'black money' - hence the appearance of paying a lower recorded value. In Alicante, either foreign and Spanish buyers 'cheat' by the same proportion or don't cheat at all.

I think No.2 is the most likely overall explanation - perhaps with hints of 1 and 3 thrown in too but it's any one's guess. And that's the problem - it's down to speculation and guesswork. The fact is that the official statistics from the Ministry of Housing are obscure and flawed. Most sets of figures have their problems but mostly, we are granted access to the source data so we can poke and prod for ourselves and decide which numbers we trust and which we don't.

Is the behaviour in Alicante province typical and that of Malaga and Murcia misleading or the other way around? I'd be willing to lay odds on the theory that more people spend more money in a property market which provides transparent and reliable data.

Spain could lead the way (outside of the UK) in Europe in making that level of information available - I hope that the Ministry of Housing seizes the opportunity as a way of boosting the property market.

Martin Dell, Kyero.com

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).

1. Average House Prices - (take these with a pinch of salt - but useful for comparison purposes)
2. Number of Property Sales - (likely to be very accurate, all sales are notarised)
3. 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.

• Original data is freely available to download from the web site of the Ministerio de Vivienda. No changes have been made to the source information other than for clarity of presentation and translation into English.
• New construction is defined as properties less than 2 years old. These figures *might* include property purchased off plan and 'flipped' or resold in the same period and while the property is still technically 'new'
• Resales are defined as any property older than two years - again, this may not strictly correlate to a property having been sold a number of times
• Except where specifically mentioned, all figures exclude sales of subsidised or social housing.
• Sales of urban and rural land are excluded.
• Sales to 'foreigners' are categorised as resident, non-resident and 'other'. For the sake of clarity, only figures for foreign residents in Spain are presented here as they account for the vast majority of cases.
• Actual prices are likely to be unreliable due to the fact that some of the sales price passes from buyer to seller 'under the table'. This amount is never notarised and therefore cannot feature in the MVIV figures.
• As the Spanish government increases their efforts to stamp-out these 'black money' practices, house prices might 'appear' to be increasing when, in fact, a proportion of that increase must be attributed to a larger propeortion of the actual sales value being notarised.