Property Purchases Increase Almost 10% in April

Property purchases in Spain rose 9.4% annually in April according to the latest statistics published by the National Statistics Institute last Friday.

This further points to a recovery in the sector that has been hit by crisis for more than six years.

During the fourth month of this year, a total of 27,241 transactions were registered – 77% of which involved second-hand or re-sale properties.

These figures are still a long way off the 100,000 operations we were used to seeing on a monthly basis prior to 2008, although that’s probably a good thing as we don’t want a repeat of what happened before when a property bubble was created and then eventually burst and collapsed the whole sector.

The report also revealed that the steady increase in house prices slowed down slightly during the first quarter of this year after putting an end to years of declining house prices for the past six years.

Property prices did rise 1.5% annually between January and March 2015, which is slightly less than the 1.8% during the last three months of 2014.

House prices actually began to increase again during the second quarter of 2014, when they went up by 0.8%.

The average price of a new property registered an increase of 4% annually during the first quarter of this year, which is more than 2% from the previous quarter. Similarly, the average price for re-sale property also went up, but by 1.1% from a year ago, which is 0.6% less than in the last quarter of 2014.

Source: www.reuteurs.com