ARCHIVED - Brexit and Covid lead to fall in Spanish property sales to UK nationals

British buyers accounted for under 10 per cent of sales to non-Spaniards in the second quarter of 2021

Figures published this week by the property registrars of Spain show that during the second quarter of 2021 the degree to which the real estate market attracted British buyers to numerous parts of the country fell to record low levels, due no doubt to the combined effects of Brexit and the pandemic travel restrictions which were in place until earlier in the summer.

In various of Spain’s 17 regions the proportion of housing purchases made by non-Spaniards is negligible or practically non-existent: between April and June, for instance they accounted for under 1 per cent of all sales in Galicia and Extremadura. But in Mediterranean coastal regions and the islands the figures are far higher, reaching 29.8 per cent in the Balearics, 23.85 per cent in the Canaries, 19.5 per cent in the Comunidad Valenciana and 14.7 per cent in the Region of Murcia (where the figure reached almost 30 per cent shortly before coronavirus reached Europe).

It is in these latter regions that the importance of British buyers is greatest, particularly in Murcia and the province of Alicante, and it is therefore of great significance that during the second quarter UK nationals accounted for only 9.5 per cent of non-Spanish buyers, according to the registrars’ data. This is significantly fewer than in the previous quarter (12.1 per cent), and for the first time since comparable statistics were produced the place of the UK at the top of the table seems to be under threat (from Germany with 9 per cent, Morocco with 8.3 per cent and France with 7 per cent).

Back in 2009, as many as 30 per cent of residential properties sold to non-Spaniards were snapped up by British buyers, and as recently as 2015 the figure was around 22 per cent.

While the proportion of British buyers dropped, the overall number of property sales made to non-Spaniards actually rose slightly to just over 13,600, accounting to just under 10 per cent of all transactions in Spain during the three-month period. This would seem to indicate that the effects of pandemic travel restrictions had little effect on German buyers, and it is therefore only logical to reach the conclusion that the departure of the UK from the EU has also contributed to the decline in the British market.

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