Today in Spain the INE released the December data for the purchase of properties in Spain.
Across all property type’s new sales were up 9.2% on the same month of previous year but when considering residential property only new purchases were up 15.7%.
Transfers related to the sales of homes.
The number of house transfers related to dwellings totaled 25,998 and brought the total year in at a small increase of 2.2% when considering sales against 2013. Given the first half of 2014 was showing a continuing overall drop in demand for the last 6 months of year the performance has been strong allowing for an annual increase.
Another positive sign when looking at property sales for new property owners in Spain was that the difference between numbers of completions in December to the previous month of November this was up this year by 3.2%. Traditionally over when looking over a 5 year period it is normal due to Christmas holidays etc for sales to be less in December than November. In 2011 for instance purchases were down by 15.8% in the month of December when considering the numbers against the November of the same year.
Urban purchases and monthly trends.
55.9% of all urban sales were residential properties with the rest being made up of transfer of property rights for commercial and Rustic properties. Of the dwellings purchased 27.8% were new and 72.2% were resales. This was good news for Private Sellers as the balance of new to resales has swung in favour of used housing in last few years.
Sales of new dwellings were however up by 33.1% when compared to December last year with used or resale housing being up by a whopping 61.1% against the same month of 2013.
In 2014 the highest sale month in the year in terms of actual numbers was 30.700 so it will be interesting to see if January’s sale figures for 2015 continue to show a year on year upward trend which would defiantly indicate recovery is slowly but surely happening.
Region performance
Andalucía remained the region with the highest number of new purchases with 5,415 new houses sold. Cataluña, Madrid and Valencia all reached over 3,000 but Madrid itself was the only significant region who showed a year on year decrease in the month. The Balearics who have been in the doldrums for a couple of months had one of highest percentage increase with new buyers of property being 41.9% up year on year for the month.
Summary for 2014
For the total year whilst overall sales of property were down on 2013 figures by 4.6% when considering all property types for residential homes the numbers increased by 2.2% and total sales were nearly 320,000. This compares with 312,600 new purchases in 2013 which was the slowest year in last 5 years but against 439,600 sales in 2010 which was well into the property crash. This indicates there is still some way to go before normal house level sales are achieved.
The small increases year on year were skewed to certain regions. The Balearics and the Canaries across the total year showed healthy increases. All other areas best known for their high levels of sales to international buyers performed above 2013 except for Murcia who was down 6.3% on the year.
Legal Transfers due to repossessions
Total transfers of dwellings nearly topped 700,000 in 2014 a small increase of 1.9% with 136,908 properties being transferred to new owners by way of inheritance and by far the biggest other sector after sales of houses being other titles which reached 196,151. Within other titles and making up the bulk of this sector is homes taken over by the Banks in the event of a default.