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ARCHIVED - Alicante property sales fell by 24 per cent in 2020 as the pandemic hit hard
The dependence on non-Spanish buyers led to an especially sharp decrease in the Costa Blanca
Data published on Monday by the Spanish government’s central statistics unit report that the number of residential properties bought and sold throughout the country during 2020 fell by 17.7 per cent in comparison with the year before to 415,748, a decrease brought about primarily by the coronavirus pandemic which reached Europe just over a year ago.
In March, April and May of last year the effect of the first wave of coronavirus on Spain’s property market was particularly drastic, and it was not until the autumn that levels of activity similar to those observed in 2019 were apparent again. At the same time, though, in some areas the international travel restrictions led to a sharp fall in the number of homes being bought by non-Spaniards, and in the light of this it is not surprising to see that the sharpest falls in house sales in the 17 regions of the country were those reported in the Balearic Islands (-23.2 per cent), the Comunidad Valenciana (-22.1 per cent) and the Canaries (-21.9 per cent), followed closely by Madrid and Catalunya.
To reinforce this point, it can be seen that the drop in sales was especially notable in the province of Alicante, where foreign buyers, especially UK nationals, can sometimes account for as many as half of all residential property purchases. Here the annual total fell by 24 per cent to 28,286, while at the other end of the scale are the regions of Extremadura (-6.5 per cent) and Asturias (-9 per cent) – among those with fewest international buyers.
In the Costa Blanca the effect of the first wave of coronavirus was so severe that by May the number of property sales being registered had fallen to close to a third of the level recorded a year previously, and even when a semblance of normality returned to the market in the autumn the level of late 2019 was not recovered. The December data reflect this, showing 2,445 sales after a year-on-year fall of 7.4 per cent, and the year ended without the monthly figures for 2019 having been exceeded in any single month.
Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that the market in the whole of the region of Valencia was once again the busiest among Spain’s 17 regions, with an average of 1,469 transactions per 100,000 inhabitants of house-buying age. This is well above the next highest figures reported (1,258 in Murcia and 1,254 in Andalucía).