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Q2 HPI at 3.9% – Property Sales Down 3.6%

Urban house sales increased 1.1%

Urban house sales increased 1.1%

The annual variation of the Housing Price Index stood at 3.9% at the closing of the second quarter, a decrease of two and a half points.

On new housing the annual rate is 8.4%, more than 2 points higher than in the previous quarter, according to the latest figures from the National Statistics Institute.

For second-hand housing the annual variation is 3.2%, more than three points down from the previous quarter.

Quarterly Evolution

The quarterly variation of the general HPI in the second quarter of 2016 is 1.8%.

By type of housing, new house prices rose by 3.7% between the first and second quarter of 2016. The price of second-hand housing increased by 1.5%.

Results by Autonomous Community. Annual Growth Rates.

All regions reduced their annual rate in the second quarter of 2016, except for the Basque Country which kept it at 2.8%.

The largest decreases were recorded in the Canary Islands (1.9%) and the Balearic Islands (5%), showing declines of 4.0 and 3.8 points, respectively.

The communities with the smallest annual variations were Extremadura (four tenths) and Aragon (six tenths), which sets the rate in both regions to 1.3%.

Property Sales

Despite the falling property prices the number of property transfers in July was 8.9% fewer than in the same month in 2015. July’s transfers total was 132,545.

Those figures include all registered property transactions where a property’s ownership was transferred. These include swaps, sales, repossessions etc.

When looking only at property sales the number of transactions was 64,716, an annual decrease of 3.6%.

85.9% of the purchases and sales registered in July corresponded to urban property, and 14.1% to rustic. In the case of urban properties, 59.5% were house sales.

The number of purchases of rural property declined by 6.1% in July, on the annual rate. Purchases of urban property showed an annual variation of -3.2%.

Within urban property, house sales showed an annual variation of +1.1%.

18.1% of the homes sold in July were new properties while resale property sales accounted for 81.9% of the total. New home sales fell by 6.5% on the annual rate. In contrast, sales of used property increased by 2.9%.

Sales by Autonomous Community

In July 2016 the total number of property transfers per 100,000 population is highest in Aragon (534), La Rioja (523) and Castile and Leon (522).

The Basque Country was the only community to record a positive annual variation rate, at +2.8%. Aragon (-17.2%) and Navarra (-17.0%) recorded the lowest rates of annual variation.

Communities with the highest annual variation in terms of number of sales are Asturias and Extremadura which both saw sales increase by 21.4%. The Balearic Islands are also worth mentioning as they showed an annual increase of 14.7%.