Home sales rise by more than 30% in March with new builds at 2014 highs
More than 47,300 transactions have been recorded in total, the highest figure since July 2019.
Home sales and purchases are gaining traction as the months go by. According to INE data, 47,332 transactions were registered in the Land Registries in March, 9.6% more than in February and 32.4% more year-on-year.
Thanks to this upturn, the annual balance of sales enters positive territory and grows by 1.9%, while the March figure is the highest since July 2019. In other words, registered transactions in the third month of the year are at a 20-month high.
According to Francisco Iñareta, spokesman for idealista, “the data show that the real estate sector, at least as far as home sales and purchases are concerned, has left the pandemic behind. The year-on-year growths mark an expected recovery, when compared to the worst moments of the confinement, but the number of homes sold in this month of March is at pre-pandemic levels, marking a maximum since July 2019”. And he adds that “the data we handle at idealista indicate that the dynamism of the market is not a one-off peak, but rather a trend that will be reinforced in the coming months, as the pace of vaccination progresses and we see the exit from the pandemic getting closer and closer”.
The agency’s statistics once again show that new work is the star of the show. With 10,149 sales in March, it renews its highs since the summer of 2014, which it set last month. In the third month, they have accounted for almost 22% of sales.
In fact, the total number of transactions is growing thanks to the momentum of new construction properties, whose sales have soared in March by 52.6% year-on-year and accumulated in the first three months of the year a rise of 18.5%. In contrast, sales of second-hand homes, although improving, fell by 2% year-on-year between January and March.
This improvement reflected in the INE statistics is in addition to that shown by notaries, who state that in March, sales and mortgage signatures shot up by more than 70% year-on-year in both cases, despite the fact that house prices continue to fall. Specifically, transactions have recorded their second best monthly figure since 2012, while mortgage loans have reached their highest level since 2010.
Data by Autonomous Region
The INE places Comunidad Valenciana (153), La Rioja (152) and Cantabria (145) as the three regions with the highest number of transfers per 100,000 inhabitants, although in absolute terms the most prominent are Andalusia (9,043), Catalonia (8,105) and Madrid (7,496).
The Madrid region, in fact, recorded the highest year-on-year increase in the number of property sales and purchases (59.2%), followed by Cantabria (56.9%) and La Rioja (55.6%). The only region with a negative variation rate is the Balearic Islands (-3%), while the Canary Islands (2.7%) and Murcia (14%) recorded the lowest increases. Catalonia also grew above the national average (with a rise of more than 34%), while Andalusia and Valencia were below the average.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)