Least affordable areas in Spain to buy a house Q2 2018
The most expensive coastal areas
Out of the five main islands that comprise the Balearic province, three are listed as the most expensive coastal areas of Spain. Ibiza and Formentera’s coasts ranked as the least affordable coasts in terms of property prices, with their average price per square meter amounting to nearly 3.8 thousand euros. The Basque province of Gipuzkoa was the second most expensive coastal area of Spain, with an average price that reached approximately 2.35 thousand euros per square meter as of the first quarter of 2019.
Spain: the rebirth of a broken property market
After a long period of time in which Spain’s real estate prices increased sharply, the market was hit by the global financial crisis of 2007, making the Spanish property bubble collapse and damaging home value. According to the European Mortgage Federation (EMF), real estate prices in Spain initiated a solid recovery in 2015, reaching 78.7 house price index points in 2018 from a lowest point of 70.8 index points recorded in 2014. The property market has made great progress, but it is still far off the rest of its European counterparts, and it is positioned, in fact, at the bottom of the European list of the EMF’s house price index, which is led by Sweden at 160.6 index points. In 2016, 200 thousand euros could still buy a 119 square-meter home on average in Spain, whereas it would only allow for a 50 square-meter apartment in France.