House prices in Spain rise 9% while sales fall for the eighth consecutive month

The shortage of supply and increasing demand due to the creation of new homes sent housing prices up almost 9% in June to 2,114 euros per square meter. The cost of accessing a home has not stopped increasing since the minimum it marked during the financial crisis (2013) and this, added to the difficulties of many households in saving for a down payment, is beginning to be reflected in the transactions that are closed.

Home sales have already accumulated eight consecutive months of declines, according to data managed by the General Council of Notaries. In the sixth month of the year they decreased by 4% compared to the same month a year ago to 67,259. It was a more moderate decline than in previous months, given that operations had fallen 11.8% in May alone and 10.2% in April.

In Spain, two sales statistics are published, the results of which do not necessarily coincide month by month. Those of the notaries offer a more immediate photograph of what is happening in the real estate market, since they record the moment in which the public deed of the transaction is signed.

The problem is that an operation signed before a notary can be affected by administrative delays and may not even be registered in the Property Registry. That is where the figures published by the registrars come into play, which, although they may have a delay of weeks or months since the operation was signed before a notary - and take longer to collect -, they certify that it is legally firm and public.

The snapshot shown by the data published by the notaries indicates that in June there was a price increase in fifteen of the seventeen autonomous communities, although housing became more expensive in Cantabria (41.6%), in Murcia (22.1%), in the Valencian Community (21%) and in Madrid (19.5%). Much more moderate were the price increases in Extremadura (4.2%), Castilla y León (3.2%), Catalonia (2.1%) and La Rioja (0.8%), while the average price was reduced in Navarra (0.4%) and in the Balearic Islands, where it fell by 2%.

This sharp rise in prices and the improvement in financing conditions - at least until the rate increase that the European Central Bank applied in June - are what have propelled the signing of mortgages to levels not seen for sixteen years and which, at the same time, have reduced cash purchases to five-year lows.