Resale property sales increased 24.2%
March saw an increase in property sales of 8.5% when compared to the same period in 2015, reaching 66,645 transactions.
Of those properties, 83.4% were for urban properties, of which, 57.4% were private homes.
The number of rural properties sold decreased by 5.2% on the annual rate, to stand at 11,058, while sales of urban properties showed gains of 11.7%, to end the month on 55,587 transactions. Within those, sales of residential property increased by 16.8% to 31,925 transactions.
Of the properties sold resale (second hand) properties accounted for the majority with 80.7%, while the remaining 19.3% were for new properties. Sales of new properties registered a slight increase of 6.6%, when compared to March 2015, while resale property sales increased 24.2%.
As construction has been limited in recent years the figures are not surprising as the stock of new property was depleting. However, now the cranes have returned to the horizon I would expect this figure to rise as the year progresses.
By Autonomous Community
The community with the highest number of property sales per 100,000 inhabitants was the Canary Islands with 127 sales in March, with the Balaeric Islands following close behind with 108 sales. The Canary Islands also saw the highest annual increase with a 52.7% gain over the same period in the previous year.
Significant gains were seen across most of the communities with Andalucia seeing 6,299 sales during the month, an increase of 18.6%. Catalonia saw an increase of 17.5% reaching 5,123 sales, while Madrid registered 18.5% more sales than in March 2015, reaching 4,878 sales.
Only Galicia and La Rioja saw a decline in sales. In both regions the annual loss was 3.1% with the number of sales in Galicia falling to 1,033, while in La Rioja sales fell to 186 transactions.
Monthly Variation
When comparing March on the monthly variation, the figures show a slight slowdown since February.
The figure of 66,645 total sales is actually 7.7% lower than in the previous month.
While sales of residential property increased on the annual basis, the monthly variation also showed a slowdown with a decline of 8.2%.
However, the monthly variation this year is higher than in 2015. The variation between February and March in 2015 was -9 points, whereas this year, 2016, the variation is -8.2, an increase of 0.8 points.
