The European real estate market has seen several years of strong growth. In fact, since early 2016, house prices in the EU have risen by 4.6% year-on-year on average, outperforming wages and GDP growth. This upward trend has been widespread across countries and also large cities. This article examines the factors underpinning this trend and whether it poses any risks.
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Foreign demand has been one of the factors supporting Spain's real estate sector throughout its recovery. House purchases by foreigners have tripled in just 10 years, reaching the substantial figure of 65,300 homes in 2018, 12.6% of the total. This article looks at the foreign demand for housing in Spain as well as factors that will affect the trend over the coming quarters.
Owning a second home is a widespread practice in Spain. In fact, second homes make up 14.6% of all Spanish housing, this figure exceeding 30% in some provinces. Where are these second homes located? What kind of household owns them? Understanding their distribution throughout Spain in relation to the usual place of residence is of great help in analysing the behaviour of the real estate market at a local level. Once again, we can use big data techniques to process the information and identify more complex dynamics than with traditional methods.
In this article we use a novel approach to analyse the potential of Spanish renters who could afford to buy a property. For Spain as a whole, we estimate that around 49% of renters have a high enough income to purchase a home. However, only 13% have the necessary savings. While there are significant differences between provinces and municipalities, in all regions it is clear that insufficient savings capacity is the main constraint faced by renters to buying their own home.
The Greater Lisbon region accounted for 18% of all home sales in Portugal in 2023. Of these, 23% involved buyers with tax residence outside Portugal and the EU.
The Spanish residential market has suffered from a slump in foreign demand during the pandemic. Restrictions on international travel have hit the most tourist-oriented areas of the Mediterranean coast and islands particularly hard, which have seen a sharp fall in purchases by foreigners. Nevertheless, although house prices in these tourist-oriented municipalities have seen a marked slowdown, the adjustment was very moderate until Q1 2021 and the outlook for the coming quarters is good, thanks to the revival of international tourism, especially in the coming year.
Given the dramatic decline in demand, house prices are likely to undergo some adjustment in the period 2020-2021, although there will be significant differences depending on the property's location and type. Specifically, we expect house prices to fall more sharply in the second-hand market and tourist areas, which have been severely affected by the restrictions on international travel.
Commercial real estate performed very well in the first half of 2022 but this situation is changing rapidly in the wake of the sharp hike in interest rates implemented by the ECB to curb the advance of inflation. All the evidence seems to suggest that office property may see the largest adjustment in valuation terms as this has the narrowest yields. Retail, whose valuations have already suffered several years of intense adjustment, could now become more stable than the rest of the segments. On the other hand, logistics assets, the star product lately due to the boom in e-commerce, may be more sensitive to any deterioration in the macroeconomic environment. Finally, we look at the co-living segment which has been attracting a lot of investor interest recently in Spain, especially in the case of senior living, a segment with very positive prospects considering the demographic outlook that will support demand in the medium and long term and the current limited supply.
The COVID-19 crisis is severely affecting house purchases. Once the slump in transactions during the lockdown has been overcome, the evolution in demand will largely depend on the recovery of the labour market and international tourism over the coming months. Our forecast scenario predicts a gradual recovery in demand, although the more than half a million transactions recorded in 2019 will not be repeated, even in 2021.
More and more people are renting their home. In the past 5 years, the percentage of households renting their main home has increased significantly: from 16.1% in 2013 to 17.8% in 2018. This strong demand for rental property has pushed up prices, especially in large cities and tourist resorts, although in the past few quarters there has been a slight moderation. With a view to the future, the demand for rented accommodation is expected to remain strong and, to avoid more pressure on prices, supply will have to grow in line with this demand.
Foreign purchases in Spain have made a surprisingly strong recovery after the pandemic-induced restrictions were lifted. Indicators related to purchase intent suggest that this positive trend will continue in the short term, especially among the German and Nordic populations. The long-term outlook for foreign demand is also promising considering the demographic trends in Europe: the imminent retirement of a large generation of Europeans points to a significant increase in potential demand, especially between 2026 and 2030. Although Spain has considerable strong points to attract this demand, such as the high competitiveness of its tourism industry and the country’s perceived safety, the importance of creating an attractive regulatory and fiscal environment, whilst also adopting appropriate housing policies to mitigate its impact on the local population, should not be underestimated.
The new Mortgage Act that governs real estate credit agreements has three main objectives: to provide more consumer protection, make mortgage contracts more transparent and improve legal certainty in the financial system. All three are vital to ensure the mortgage market functions appropriately and to improve financial stability.
Luís is an economist for the International Economics & Markets Department. He has a PhD in Economics from Cardiff University and a Master in International Economics and European Studies from Lisbon University. Before joining CaixaBank, he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Economics and the Public Sector at Pompeu Fabra University and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and Centre for Research in Health and Economics (CRES-UPF). His areas of study include public economics and macroeconomics and particularly international fiscal policy, specialising in monitoring China and the European Uninon.
Based on CaixaBank’s internal data regarding rent payments, we have constructed indicators for the recent trend in residential rental prices at a provincial level and for the largest municipalities. The results obtained show that there was already a generalised slowdown in rent growth before the pandemic arrived, and that the outbreak of the health crisis extended corrections to most provinces and municipalities, with decreases being especially pronounced among the lowest rents and in the most tourist-oriented municipalities.
The pandemic has altered the commercial real estate investment landscape, creating different types of assets according to the degree of disruption caused by the travel restrictions imposed to tackle the health crisis. Assets that have benefited include residential property, logistics assets and data centres, as well as a large proportion of retail assets. Among the most disadvantaged are offices and hotel assets, weighed down by the rise in teleworking and slump in international tourism.
The current crisis is triggering changes in many aspects of our lives, a large number of them related to our residential preferences. For example, working from home can transform how and where we live. The pandemic has also boosted the digitisation of the real estate sector and could speed up certain changes in other areas such as house modernisation, supporting the transition to a more sustainable economy.
The economic policies implemented during the pandemic have cushioned the impact of the crisis on families’ financial situation. On the one hand, a further fall in household income has been avoided while, on the other, the ECB’s accommodative monetary policy has led to a reduction in debt interest payments. A detailed analysis of the effort required by households to pay off their mortgages, based on CaixaBank’s own internal data, duly reweighted to be representative of the Spanish population, shows that these measures have managed to reduce the mortgage burden during the pandemic for most households, although pockets of vulnerability still remain among low-income households.