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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Question: We are condisering investing in a two bedroom rental property in Gran Canaria shortly. According to your index the prices have remained fairly steady over the past few years but do you see any particular trend and could this be affected by a possible relaxation of the building morartorium in the future?

Answer: I agree with you that the market in the Canary Islands has been pretty flat recently:

One of the problems with this trend is that there's so little reliable data available. Our own trends for the Canaries are the result of just a few hundred properties for sale there (compared to approx 20,000 in Malaga). So you should be aware that a few unrealistically priced properties would skew these trends dramatically.

Having said that - there isn't a more reliable source of data (in my opinion) for these reasons.

In terms of future trends, that's even harder to predict. My gut feel is that prices will be pretty much flat across Spain for the next couple of years. Aside from distressed sales, I don't see prices falling much. Spanish sellers would rather wait then reduce their prices and they form the bulk of the market.

If buying now, I wouldn't count on any capital gains in the short to mid term (although I think actual losses are unlikely). In terms of the potential rental income of a property, again I would be wary of banking on that to meet mortgage repayments. There are a lot of holiday home rentals in Spain - more than there are tourists to fill them.

The long let market will grow, I believe, but outside of the largest cities, that's not a well established market. There's demand, but insufficient supply at the moment. I believe that the long let market will grow over the next couple of years but, again, it's a little too soon to tell how that's going to pan out.

Martin Dell, Kyero.com

Question: Is the property market in decline on Golf del Sur, in San Miguel, Tenerife and if so by how much? What are the rental yeilds for a 3 bed villa on 2nd line?

Answer: Here's our price comparison chart for Golf del Sur, and for Tenerife.

Although we've been recording the asking prices of property in Spain since mid 2005, I suspect that the early fluctuation in both graphs is due to a relatively small sample of properties at that time.

Even today we have fewer than 200 properties in Golf del Sur and a little over 2,500 in the whole of Tenerife.

With such a small sample of properties available, adding or removing the properties from an individual estate agent can have a disproportional effect on price trends too.

The official government figures are of no help here either. Their calculations are suspect for all the reasons I've written about before.

There's another source of commercially available information which you might want to investigate.

Their report takes into account 8,000 properties, which represents about 40% of 2006 property transactions (probably even more because the report focuses on the island of Tenerife and the Ministry of Housing stats are for the group of Islands which include Tenerife, La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro.

Finally, regarding the rental market for properties, I'm afraid there's even less information available.

We're currently listing one off plan development in Golf del Sur and a handful in the whole of Tenerife.

I'm aware that developers are bundling lots of extras into deals at the moment - mortgage holidays, no legal fees and guaranteed rental. It might be worth sending off a few enquiries to see what's available at the moment - that would probably be your best indication of likely rental yields.

Martin Dell, Kyero.com

Click the image to view a concise 3 page summary of the last year in the Spanish property market.

The national average property price is now €246,000. Which areas offer lower prices and which top the scale?

Who wins as the most popular province and coastline?

Find the hottest locations in Spain and the hottest properties. What's happening to inland properties? What about island living?

Where in Spain did property increase in value the most? Where did it decrease, and by how much?

The Kyero.com 2007 Spanish Property Summary answers all this and more in three pages (300KB pdf document)

There's an updated index to asking prices of property in Spain. We've changed the format a little bit so that it's easier to read on-screen which has meant compressing the historical price trends to the last 15 months.

• 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.