For a few months now we have, anecdotally, felt that quite a few sellers are calling in and asking for their property price to be increased. This is normally a sign of a seller's market where demand is strong. But as you may have guessed from my last post, I don't do "anecdotal" :-) So I went to examine the real data for the truth (all data below are for Costa del Sol properties).
First of all I went to get totals for the year: how many properties have had their prices increased after a while, compared to how many decreased. The data below is grouped by property type for year 2016, showing the number of properties that have had their price changed, and the percentage change over the original price:
Decreased:
Increased:
It seems that approximately between 25% and 33% of price changes are increases, a respectable number. I personally didn't expect it to be that high. It has certainly been lower in past years, unfortunately I cannot prove it to you on this post as I do not have data from 2015. However, I set out to discover if there's a trend within 2016, so I grouped the data by trimester. For the sake of brevity I will not display the data here, but there is no trend neither increasing or decreasing. It's around a stable 7-9% of properties on the market at any one time.
However, what I found interesting was the time between the day a property went to market and the date it had its price increased: this was steadily reducing. On average, the days between on-market day and price-increase day were:
| Q1 |
Q2 |
Q3 |
Q4 |
| 111 |
108 |
87 |
81 |
Again, I would like to point out that a trend is something that can turn in a second, and also these are not actual notary prices, nevertheless it seems that sellers of properties on the Costa del Sol are more keen to raise their property's price than they were 12 months ago. Welcome news to my ears at least.
I would be curious to hear other people's thoughts, maybe even from other areas of Spain. Thanks for reading!
PS: if you are interested in viewing time variations of property prices, or how many properties were on the market in a given area, perhaps you will find our "different" way of presenting properties interesting: http://hbcostadelsolproperties.com/apartments/ Click on the link of the column "Time series" for your area of interest.