23/04/2013 00:00
TW
0

THE average price of housing in Spain's coastal areas rose by 16.4 percent over the course of last year.
Details made available yesterday by the real estate organisation, Marbella Meeting Point, can be scrutinised against a backdrop of the 15.8 percent increase registered for the whole of the country's property sector. According to the latest report, housing yielded a 5 percent profit for investors in the Canary Islands and the Costa del Sol. Also in demand are the housing developments centred around Alicante, Costa Brava and Balearics. Marbella Meeting Point purports that until the year 2008, between 175'000 and 180'000 second homes will be sold annually in Spain, a demand which in more than 50 percent of cases is attributable to foreign buyers. Of the total number of foreign investors, 52 percent are British, 22 percent German, 8 percent French, 6 percent Italian, 3 percent Belgian and 6 percent Scandinavian. With respect to the home market, citizens living in the regions of Madrid, Catalonia, Andalucia and Valencia are those who provide the highest demand for a house on the coast. In 2003, a third of the total of houses sold in Spain (some 190'000 of the 580'000 which went on the market) had been built close to the sea.
The quota of tourist homes in Spain grew over the last decade by 3 percent and now represents 18 percent of the total residential property of Spain. Homes owned by foreigners amount to 3.8 million, a significant slice of the total cake of 22 million dwellings throughout the country. Citizens of non-Spanish origin possess a total of 1.7 million homes on the country's coastal areas, 8 percent of the total of housing in Spain, while Spanish proprietors own 10 percent of the homes on the coast, an equivalent of 2.1 million dwellings. The investment generated by the sale of housing on the coast to non-residents was 7'167 million euros, equivalent to an increase of 15.7 percent in respect of 2002. Separately, the real estate organistion pointed out that the growth of the tourist property sector is beneficial for the two leading sectors of the Spanish economy: construction which supports 14 percent of the gross national product and tourism, which accounts for 12 percent.